On February 12th, the annual awards event known as the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences Interactive Awards took place. All the choices were pretty standard, though Heavy Rain won a lot more than expected. Here’s the full list of categories and winners.-Action Game of the Year:
According to the developers blog, “The Beta will be geographically rolled out, with three different regions planned; US-West, US-East and Europe turned up at slightly different times. Tentatively we are aiming to turn up the first Closed Beta during the week of February 28.” The blog also mentions that applications for the beta have exceeded well over a hundred thousand, so expect typical chances coming out the door for beta invites.
Rift is a new MMORPG developed by Trion Worlds Network that takes players across the fantasy world of Telara, in which a variety of parallel worlds called “planes” converge and often don’t get along. In fact, the core purpose of the game is to defeat invading forces that come through the gates that pop up on the convergence that link the physical lands together. These gates are known as rifts, and it falls to the player to join forces with other heroes to push back the enemies and ultimately close the rift. To do this, a player takes control of an archetypal class (Warrior, Cleric, Rogue, and Mage) and customizes it to match the particular role they wish to play, be it damage-dealer, tank or healer. Players need not join groups when participating in the world PvE against the gates but are rewarded for action depending on involvement, be it through attacking, healing or with buffs.
According to a UK gaming site called MCV, Activision, the publisher behind Call of Duty, may acquire Take-Two. In case you don’t know, Take-Two have published hits like Bioshock, Grand Theft Auto, and Red Dead Redemption. This would definitely change the playing field for the gaming industry, but it’s not entirely unexpected. Activision merged with Vivendi games back in 2007 in an $18.9 billion deal. This brought both Call of Duty and World of Warcraft under the same publishing house, a powerful combination to be sure.
The Penny Arcade Expo East is less than a month away, and they’ve finally announced the schedule for the many panels that will be running during this weekend of nerdly pursuits. There’s far too much stuff for any person to do over the course of the three-day geekfest, so take a good hard look at the lengthy list of events at the link below; you’ll need to think long and hard about whether you love Call of Duty more than you love Dungeons & Dragons because you can’t attend both panels at once!
There’s a wide variety of unusual game deals going aroun this weekend, so let’s jump in and take a look. Steampowered.com has Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X. 2 on sale for half off which means that it is $24.99. The DLC pack Open Skies is also on sale for five dollars. Not a bad deal if you like arial combat games.
