GameGuide

John Riccitiello’s “Project Ten Dollar” endeavor – in which EA looks to combat used-game sales by offering free DLC goodies with new purchases – has another game marching under its banner: Battlefield: Bad Company 2. Just like Mass Effect 2, the game will ship with a code that enables access to free DLC. The first batch of add-on content for DICE’s shooter will be a set of new multiplayer maps, MTV Multiplayer reports.

“In the future you will get more content, for free, if you have this VIP code,” noted producer Patrick Bach, describing a free content delivery mechanism similar to BioWare’s Cerberus Network. [joystiq]

Criterion Games is better known for Burnout these days, but at one point they also developed a very good first-person shooter in Black. Senior designer Stuart Black has since moved on, and is now teaming up with Codemasters to work on another FPS.

No details yet, but Computer and Video Games is reporting that the team will be 80 people strong, and will include Split/Second senior producer Andrew Wilson. It will utilize the Codemasters Ego Engine, which last powered Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising.

“Codemasters’ Guildford Studio is key to our overall development strategy and this year has opened further positions across its design, programming and art teams,” Codemasters vice president of development Gavin Cheshire said. [1up]

Las Vegas survived Crime Scene Investigation and Wayne Newton, but it will never look the same after it gets the Fallout treatment.

In the alternate-history video game Fallout: New Vegas, coming to Xbox 360, PS3 and Windows PCs this fall (no price and not yet rated), the Las Vegas Strip and surrounding area in 2280 bear the effects of a nuclear holocaust more than 200 years earlier during a great war between the United States and China.

The mystery is, who are you in this nuclear wasteland?

At the outset of the game, your character is shot and left in a shallow grave in the desert, lifted of the package you were entrusted with delivering. A robot digs you out and takes you to a local caregiver, Doc Mitchell, who nurses you back to health.   Read the rest of this entry »

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Available for 400 MSP from XBox Live Arcade, Chime is the first game released by the OneBigGame charity group, and more than half of the cost of the game goes to various children’s charities around the world.

That’s a noble idea, but is the game any good? At it’s core Chime is a simple single player puzzle game, clearly inspired by Tetris and played to some catchy electronic music from various artists like Moby and Philip Glass. You get to place the familiar Tetris pentominoe shapes on a flat board, trying to fill in rectangular areas which Chime calls ‘quads’. Once you create at least a 3 x 3 quad it starts to fill in. Until it fills in entirely you can expand the quad by adding more pieces, then you get scored for it. The catch is that filled quads remain in place, blocking placement of new pieces, until the sweeping ‘beat bar’ passes over them. The aim of the game is to try and paint the entire board with completed quads.   Read the rest of this entry »

There it was.. MAG.. The game that was going to host 256 concurrent players. The skepticism was high, Very High, and with a slight hint of Modern Warfare 2 burnout i approached the game carefully.

Sony’s Latest release was packed full of promise for those seeking the ultimate MMO first person shooter. And clearly from the outset this is a game that’s all about Massive Multi player Online. The only offline game you could play is the training sessions and there is no single player or story mode.

Based on some new server architecture MAG can allow up to 256 players online. The players are split up into squads of 8 each with a single team member assigned as the leader. There are then 4 squads formed together as a platoon, and then 4 platoons are formed to make a company. So that forms up to 128 players per side.   Read the rest of this entry »

The original Bioshock was one of those rare games that was universally acclaimed as a masterpiece. It’s success wasn’t so much in its gameplay (which was solid but not amazing), but instead in its originality, its narrative, and its dripping sense of atmosphere. As pretentious as this risks sounding, Bioshock was a game that truly deserved to be called art.

Sadly, news of Bioshock 2 has not been greeted warmly, right from its first announcement. Things just seemed to be stacked against it. For a start, it was handled by a different developer (2K Marin). And then it was announced that multiplayer was being tacked on, a stupid decision for a game which isn’t really about the shooting mechanics (which aren’t nearly as crisp as some games in the genre).   Read the rest of this entry »

Playstation have just released a list of new content for their PSN Store, and it’s a big list. For all the PS3 fans out there, you’ll find details after the jump.   Read the rest of this entry »