Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Hrm. I’m a pretty wary of pre-ordering games personally – I like to hear at least some reception before I invest in a game – but if you were in the market for Dungeon Siege III anyway, you’ll be very pleased to hear that future-buying it via Steam means you’ll be gifted a free copy of both Dungeon Siege 1 and 2. Which is a pretty good deal – although I rather suspect that the kind of person who would pre-order Dungeon Siege III probably already owns the other games anyway. Still, this would appear to be their first appearance on Steam (if indeed that it how they’re being distributed), so that’s good news. Gradually transforming one’s games library to a purely digital form is forever appealing – I know I’ve a whole bunch of disc-locked games that I wish could instead be summoned from the crowd.

Also, DS3 is confirmed as Steamworks title. More details on that below, like.
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Ever get the feeling you’re being played? The latest crudity salvo from the Duke Nukem Forever marketing cannon is this ‘babes’ trailer. If anyone was expecting a chauvinism climb-down following the controversy around the optional bottom-slapping in the ‘capture the babe’ multiplayer mode, they’re certainly not getting it. The following video is just about safe for work, but it is entirely, consciously puerile.
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Spoilers! Get yer spoilers ‘ere! Only three quid a dozen! Howzabout that then ma’am, a punnet full of Mass Effect 3 details, yours for just a paaaaarnd.

Actually, I’m guessing these are not especially meaty ME3 spoilers, as rather than spoiling late-game plot stuff they document the status quo for Shepard and chums at the start of Bioware’s next galactic opus – but if you really do want to go in totally blind you should look away now.
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11 Bit Studios’ clever (and budget-priced) tower-defence-in-reverse game, Anomaly – Warzone Earth, is out today! The concept and presentation look neat, but is it a towering inferno, or a creepy cinder? What does that mean? I just don’t know. I’ve been up all night playing videogames. But that won’t let stop me telling you wot I think…

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Afraid of what? Afraid of everything. The latest vid-o-flick for Funcom’s upcoming conspiracy MMO tackles pretty much every crazy theory going, and plenty of brand new ones too. THE TOWER OF BABEL NEVER FELL. THE OLD GODS ARE AWAKENING. ATLANTIS RISES. MINI BABYBELS ARE MADE FROM UNICORN HOOVES.
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A report over on the BBC website highlights research done by the World Bank on virtual economies. The report, which can be found here (PDF link, and full of other stuff about the virtual economy), suggests that gold and item farming in MMOs was worth $3bn in 2009, and employs up to 100,000 people in China and Vietnam. That’s a lot of virtual shoulder pads, eh?

It’s interesting that this stuff actually generally supports Western players’ predelictions to spend on virtual items (the report claiming that a quarter of MMO players spend money on virtual goods, although it’s not clear whether than includes free-to-play stuff as well as farmed stuff, I assumed it does) and whether the move to free-to-play will cause Chinese gold-farming to disappear again, as their activities become less profitable.

Late last year I posted about Confetti Carnival, an indie game in development that looked to supercede World of Goo as the gooiest game in existence. This week developers Spiky Snail sent me a preview build out of the kindness of their sticky, explosive hearts, and I can now confirm that Confetti Carnival plays something like a cross between Peggle and World of Goo, and that it’s every bit as awesome as that sounds.
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Anna Anthropy / Auntie Pixelante (of Mighty Jill Off and Redder fame) takes a big old swing at a proper mainstream audience, with this playful b-movieesque, 8-bitesque web game for the Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim. Are you all titillated by the title? Are you? You’re a very silly boy/girl/spider-queen, aren’t you?
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Hello, it’s me again with your (almost) daily free stuff delivery. Digital download service Green Man Gaming has relaunched, and to celebrate they’ve giving us 1c’s medieval strategy, Reign: Conflict of Nations, for free. For details on how to claim a copy, click onwards, and below.
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Something’s going on in Valveland. Well, something’s always going on in Valveland: these are clever, playful people. However, this time we (and other sites) appear to be a part of it. We’ve been sent the below two, super-cryptic images from one Mr G. Newell himself. What do they mean? They’re presumably related to the ongoing potato-related ARG, so hopefully by sharing them here we can help the smart cookies who are busy deciphering that along.

Take a look, see what you think. Even the filenames are dripping with bewildering and sinister mystery.

Update: aha! We appear to have one of the final pieces of an existing puzzle… Stick with this story, it’s going to be evolving throughout the day.
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I’m regularly taken aback by how quietly enormous Mass Effect is. While common conception is that EA’s getting its mega-corp bottom kicked by Activision, it’s got a breadth of franchises that it’s CoD’n'WoW-dependent rival does not – and Bioware’s sweeping space opera universe is one of the foremost of those. It’s really doing the Star Wars thing, I guess, as there was perhaps a vast sci-fi fandom void waiting to be filled in the wake of Lucas’ long-running exploitation/ruination of its galaxy far, far away.

So it makes perfect sense that Mass Effect would turn to other mediums – specifically, movies. Well, anime movies.
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