This Week...Steam's got a sale! A new Star Trek game coming,
THQ hits the skids and oh yeah it's the 21st and we're still here.
So it appears the world didn't end and you will indeed have
to pay the credit card bill for all those games you bought on Steam this week
during the Holiday Sale. Speaking of
that, the holiday sale is going on right now and ends January 5th. The requisite daily and instant deals are all
there as well as the special holiday sale badges you can earn for discount
coupons and free games.
If you're a fan of the new Star Trek "reboot" movies
then developer Digital Extremes (Bioshock 2, The Darkness 2)and Namco have a
special treat for you. Described as an "unprecedented co-op
experience" "Star Trek" will be available on April 23rd with
pre-orders open now. The game will be
available for PC, PS3 and Xbox 360. At
this point they're asking $59.99 for the pre-order at Best Buy, Amazon and
GameStop for the Xbox and PS3 platforms.
PC versions don't appear to be available for pre-order yet.
The world may still be here but troubled publisher THQ
isn't. They've filed for bankruptcy
protection and sold 60 million dollars worth of assets including all 4 of its
game studios and intellectual property including games currently in
development. Clearlake Capital Group is
the buyer and reports thus far say nothing is going to change except the
ownership with all talent and contracts being retained by the new owners. THQ's assets essentially remain the same but
the debts are left behind with the old company filing bankruptcy. The move is called a stalking horse bid which
is a way to better position a company for sale after it jettisons its debts via
bankruptcy.
If you've been wondering what Steven Sinfofsky's been up to
since being jettisoned from Microsoft
weeks after the Windows 8 launch ponder no more. He's going to be teaching "product
development" at Harvard business school this spring. I wonder if part of his curriculum will
include dissertations on collaboration and teamwork...hmm. His title, by the way, will be
"Executive in Residence"
No ego there...
In case you found yourself bumped off your favorite Battlefield 3 server Early Wednesday morning the reason was a server update to fix "3 bugs". Apparently there was an immortality bug for certain player classes, broken spawn points on the "Strike at Karkand" map and a crash that occurs when playing in Gun Master mode which is only available to owners of Close Quarters and Aftermath DLC as well as Premium players. Downtime was supposed to be 15 minutes but ended up being twice that. The immortality bug is bad enough, worse it isn't map specific which should have been picked up sooner. Will you be readjusting stats or continue to screw players unfairly affected by it? The biggest bug in BF3 is EA's profit motive
We're at the end of a slow news cycle being so close to
Christmas so the news is a bit light this week.
That gives me an opportunity to remind you that many of your favorite
games like Team Fortress 2, Killing Floor and Lord of Ultima have holiday
themes to keep you in the spirit of the season while your boost your
stats.
Finally,
I'd like to direct you to an article I recently published on
Technorati concerning a new push to blame video games for the tragedy at Sandy
Hook. Democratic Senator Jay Rockefeller
from West Virginia is pushing a bill to get congress to look at violence in
video games again. He uses Starcraft as
one of the examples of a violent video game which you and I both know are about
as violent as Farmville with explosions.
Gamers usually aren't very political but it may be a good time to make
your voice heard. Games don't make
people kill, sick minds do and we need to stop the hysteria and deal with the
real problem. Besides, you'd think with
the country teetering on the brink of the fiscal cliff there'd be more
important things for congress to worry about!
That's it for the last Midagedgamer report for 2012. Yup, I'm going to give you the greatest gift
of all and not do a video next week.
Mostly because I probably won't have Internet access anymore but we
won't get into that... Anyway, Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, Happy Kwanza
and whatever else you people celebrate when it's cold outside. Oh yeah, sorry, belated Happy Chanukah too..
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