While some gamers are saving up for Black Friday sales, the more noble amongst us are donating to gaming-related charities. Right now a pack of nerds are in the final hours of a Mega Man marathon to raise money for charity. The nice lads at Team Mountain Gaming have spent the last 40 hours playing their way through Mega Man 1-6, to raise money for the Child’s Play Charity. You can watch the whole thing live on their website.
Direct2Drive has been holding Daily Deals of late, with just one item on sale for a limited time, rather than the usual “Weekend Sale” approach that has been used by most other online game digital distributors. Today you can grab a copy of Guild Wars Trilogy at half off, for $19.99. The deal only applies for today, Saturday.
No need to be jealous of your Xbox-owning pals. The Kinect motion-sensing peripheral for Microsoft’s console has already been hacked to work with a PC. The Kinect is basically an infrared webcam with a set of special software that lets Kinect-enabled Xbox games interpret the images. It’s not such a big stretch to make it work with a Windows PC, and as you can see in the video below, it just needs the right drivers to be able to sense your body then relay that information to a PC.
Spellforce was an interesting blend of RPG avatar character development while also allowing the player to control large armies in an RTS framework. Since 2003, two expansions for the original title have been released, as well as a sequel in 2006 and one expansion for that in 2007. Spellforce 2: Faith in Destiny is the second such expansion to the sequel and continues the story from where it left off. In the gap between this release and the last, publisher JoWooD Entertainment and developer DreamCatcher Games have improved on a variety of features, including new units, buildings, spells, missions and maps. The actual graphics are based on the Spellforce 2 engine that the others are based on, but have been updated with contemporary Shaders to reflect the better hardware available.
Yesterday we listed most of the weekend sales early, but there are a few latecomers today, including a Daily Deal from Direct 2 Drive, a sale news from Good Old Games, and a special in-game bonus item if you grab Dead Space 2 from Gamestop today. Act fast because Direct2Drive is holding a one day sale on Aion: Assault on Balaurea. They’re cutting 50% off the price, which makes it $19.99, and this edition includes the original Aion game and all content updates, in addition to the Assault on Balaurea Expansion pack.
Eve Online is a massively multiplayer online RPG, in which player controlled corporations and businesses fight and trade for dominance in a universe and economy driven entirely by players. As the latest expansion, the 14th, Eve Online: Incursion includes an attack on EVE space by a rogue nation called the Sansha, in which players and join extra-corporate fleets to fight these NPC forces. Incursion changes include hardware and software upgrades and updates intended to improve performance, new implementations of the proprietary Carbon graphics engine, new ships and changed mechanics for older ships (Sansha Mothership, Fighter-bomber performance changes, Noctis Salvager), new loot, events, visuals and more streamlining for Planetary Interaction (the interface corporations can use to administrate captured planets). The in-game web interface, EVE Gate, has also been improved through the implementation of forums and other social media tools. All of these changes were suggested though the Council of Stellar Management, an elected body of players that focuses on improvements and representation to their counterparts in Crowd Control Productions (CCP: the developer).
The trend at all the online game stores is to start their weekend sales a bit early, which is why we posted our Weekend Sales report at 4:00 on a Thursday. Steam is getting the weekend off to an early (And lackluster) start with a 33% sale on F1 2010, a racing game which normally goes for $39.99, but you can now get it for $26.79. Steam is also cutting 50% off the price of Risen, and RPG by developer Piranha Bytes. Because all of these new sales are coming so early, Steam is still honoring their Midweek sale on Day of Defeat Source at the time of this writing.
