Nathan Blades looks at the polarising RPG for PS3 & 360.
Jason Rose brings us a buyers' guide to smartphones available this Christmas.
Nathan Blades covers some console and industry-defining titles for the Sony PlayStation
Nathan Blades burns rubber in Mario kart 7.
Monday:
Valve has officially confirmed that Steam is coming to Mac. The popular digital distribution platform, along with many of Valve's games including the Half-Life series, Counter-Strike, Portal, Team Fortress 2 and Left 4 Dead, will be arriving for Apple fans in April. Steam development director John Cook said "all of our future games will release simultaneously on Windows, Mac, and the Xbox 360. Updates for the Mac will be available simultaneously with the Windows updates." Gamers will be able to buy a game once and play it on both PC and Mac with the new Steam Play feature. This, in conjunction with the Steam Cloud feature (which stores save files with a user's Steam account rather than locally) will enable "a gamer playing on their [Windows] work PC to go home and pick up playing the same game at the same point on their home Mac," said business development director Jason Holtman. Finally, all multiplayer games will be cross-platform, with Windows and Mac users playing together.
Tuesday:
The full line-up of games for Project Natal will be shown at this year's E3 in June, Microsoft has announced. This includes a number of games from both first- and third-party developers. The whole concept of Project Natal is impressive and exciting, and was definitely the highlight of E3 2009. The technology has recently been demonstrated to celebrities and unfortunately the general opinion seemed to be that the technology was, as Jonathan Ross put it, "not quite there yet". However, Peter Molyneux, boss of Microsoft Game Studios Europe, insisted the demo units were many months old and that there have since been "countless revisions of cameras and countless revisions of software".
ELSPA has invited representatives from each of the three major political parties to a discussion about what each party will do for the games industry if elected in the general election later this year. The event will take place on 29th March. Full details can be found here. Let's hope the industry gets more support in future than it does at the moment.
Wednesday:
The first Modern Warfare 2 DLC has been announced today as coming on 30th March to Xbox 360, and at a later date to PS3 and PC. It was revealed later in the week that the "Stimulus Package" will contain five maps, three of which are completely new, the other two returning from Call of Duty 4. The pack will cost 1200MSP.
EA has stated that there is an "extensive paid digital content plan" in place for the recently released Battlefield: Bad Company 2. Apparently there will be a number of expansions to the game within the next six months. This comes on the same day as revelations that developer DICE is "investigating the possibility of making BFBC2 available on Mac".
Thursday:
After months of speculation, Sony has finally revealed the official name for their motion controller as the PlayStation Move. The Move will be bundled with the PlayStation Eye camera (which it requires to function) and a starter disc packed with game demos for under $100 this Autumn. It's likely there will also be other bundles available for people who already have the Eye, and a full console package among others. There is also a sub-controller with an analogue stick and directional buttons, which can be used alongside the Move. It will be possible to use up to four controllers with the PlayStation 3 at once - either four Moves or two Moves with two sub-controllers. You can read more details on the device here. Personally I think it looks like little more than Sony's version of the Wii remotes, with the sub-controller being like the Wii Nunchuks. It's nice to see Sony exploring motion controllers, but it certainly doesn't seem as innovative as Microsoft's Natal.
Friday:
Upcoming GTA-style MMO APB (All Points Bulletin) may not be coming to consoles for a while, if at all. Originally planned to be a multi-platform game, developer Realtime Worlds has so far only confirmed it for a PC release. Even if it does end up being developed for consoles, Sony and Microsoft's strict rules on how multiplayer servers are run may cause problems.
As there wasn't much other news today, take a look at the awesome new Brink trailer:
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