Gaming Tidbits for June 27, 2007
- Carcassonne makes its appearance on the XBox 360 via the Xbox Live Marketplace today. This is another board game conversion much like Catan, and is quite a fun game. The download will set folks back 800 MS points which equates to about $10 (now I won't get started on how you cannot buy 800 points but instead must purchase a minimum of 1000 - are you listening Microsoft???)
- Continuing news about the XBox 360, Gamasutra has an interview with Chris Early on the growth of the Xbox Live Arcade. In the interview, they discuss how success is measured and many other aspects of the service. I will admit that as a gateway to demos and other content for the Xbox360 that it works pretty well. It is a great opportunity to learn a bit more about the service.
- Hackers have managed to get the Vista-only PC game Shadowrun cracked to run on Windows XP. Admittedly, players can only engage in single player engagements against bots or LAN based multiplayer games, but it does demonstrate that the DirectX 10 requirement is probably not as stringent as Microsoft claims. It was announced earlier that Falling Leaf Systems was creating a set of compatibility libraries (called Alky) to allow Shadowrun and Halo 2 to run on Windows XP machines.
- Anarchy Online enables the purchase of virtual items using real currency. The kicker is that these items are more vanity type of things and are proposed to not affect play balance. It should be interesting to all parties involved how this will be recieved by current subscribers to this title, and to see if other games follow suit.
- Petroglyph's new real-time strategy game to be published by Sega, Universe at War will join Shadowrun in allowing PC gamers and XBox360 owners to play against/with each other. Petroglyph is the developer behind the Star Wars: Empires at War strategy game. It should be interesting to see how well the control schemes are mapped to enable console players keep up with PC players with this type of game. I will admit that this area is going to be much harder than even first person shooters, but time will tell..
- The Penny Arcade Expo (PAX) has announced the list of exhibitors for the show. With the loss of E3, it appears that game studios have found a worthy alternative. Now, if I can figure out a way to actually attend the show - time to start plotting...
