Games Releasing Soon - Preorder Now: The Sims 3

06-02-2009 - The Sims 3 - $49.99
06-02-2009 - The Sims 3 Collector's Edition $69.99
The Sims 3: Prima Official Game Guide (Prima Official Game Guides)- $13.59

Product Features

* New Seamless, Open Neighborhood- Explore the neighborhood freely.
* New Create A Sim- Create any Sim you can imagine.
* New Realistic Personalities- Every Sim is a unique person, with a distinct personality.
* New Unlimited Customization- Everyone can customize everything!
* The freedom of The Sims 3 will inspire you with endless possibilities and amuse you with unexpected moments of surprise and mischief.

Product Description

The freedom of The Sims 3 will inspire you with endless creative possibilities and amuse you with
unexpected moments of surprise and mischief. Create millions of unique Sims and control their lives. Customize their appearances and personalities. Build their homes - design everything from exquisitely furnished dream homes to quaint cottages. Then, send your Sims out to explore their ever-changing neighborhood and to meet other Sims in the town center. With all-new quick challenges and rewarding game play, The Sims 3 gives you the freedom to choose whether (or not) to fulfill your Sims' destinies and make their wishes come true.

Key Game Features:

* New Seamless, Living Neighborhood

Explore the ever-changing neighborhood—and take your Sims to meet friends in the park, go on a date at the bistro, visit neighbors’ homes, converse with less-than-savory characters in the graveyard and more. Who knows what might happen?

Admire the natural beauty of the beach, the mountains, and more.

* New Create a Sim Functionality

Create any Sim you can imagine with easy-to-use design tools that allow for unlimited customization of facial features, hair color, eye color, and more.

Fine tune your Sims’ body shape from thin to curvy to muscular.

* New Personality Traits

Create over a million different personalities with traits such as evil, insane, kleptomaniac,
romantic, and more.

Influence the behaviors of your Sims with the traits you’ve chosen. Will you create a neurotic
romantic with a heart of gold, or a geeky super-genius with an evil streak?

* New Unlimited Customization

Everyone can customize everything—design and build your dream house and decorate it to fit your
Sims’ personalities.

Customize everything from floors to décor, shirts to sofas, wallpaper to window shades.

* New Gameplay That’s Rewarding and Quick

Face short and long-term challenges and reap the rewards.

Your Sims can pursue random opportunities to get fast cash, get ahead, get even, and more.

Choose whether, or not, to fulfill your Sims’ destinies by making their wishes come true. Will your Sims be thieves, rock stars, world leaders? The choice is yours.

* Get Connected and Share Your

Creations with The Sims 3 Online Community

Get free bonus content—download Sims, outfits, furnishings, houses and more.

Create and Share Sims, houses, movies and more with anyone.

Join The Sims 3 community to share ideas with fans of The Sims from around the world.

Product Description

The Sims 3 lets you immerse truly unique Sims in an open, living neighborhood just outside their door! The freedom of The Sims 3 will inspire you with endless possibilities and amuse you with unexpected moments of surprise and mischief. Your Sims can roam throughout their neighborhood,
visit neighbors’ homes, and explore the surroundings. They can stroll downtown to hang out with friends, meet someone new at the park, or run into colleagues on the street. If your Sims are in the right place at the right time, who knows what might happen?! New easy-to-use design tools allow for unlimited customization to make truly individual Sims. Determine your Sims’ shape and size, from thin to full-figured to muscular—and everything in between! Choose your Sims’ facial features, their exact skin tone, hair eye shape and color and select their clothing and accessories. Create realistic Sims with distinctive personalities. Select from dozens of personality traits and combine them in fun ways. The combination of traits you choose—brave, artistic, loner, perfectionist, klepto, romantic, clumsy, paranoid, and much, much more—help shape the behavior of your Sims and how they interact with other Sims. Your Sims can now rise above their basic set of every day needs.
They are complex individuals with unique personalities. Build your dream house or design the ultimate home. Customize everything from floors to flowers, shirts to sofas, wallpaper to window shades. It’s fun and easy to change colors and patterns giving you endless personalization options. Or you can populate your Sims’ neighborhood with pre-designed buildings and furnishings. Which of your Sims will live in high-end mansions, cool bachelor pads, ultimate dream homes or low-cost cottages?

Pre-order Bonus

Pre-order The Sims 3 (standard edition) and receive The Sims 3 music track "True Stories" by Datarock. Instructions will be e-mailed within 10 days of the game's release. Offer good while supplies last. Promotion valid only when sold and shipped by Amazon.com.

- Amazon.com

Games Releasing Soon - Preorder Now: The Sims 3

Games Releasing Soon - Preorder Now

05-25-2009 - Necrovision - $29.99
05-26-2009 - Damnation - PC ($36.99) - Xbox 360 - PS3 (both $56.99)
06-02-2009 - Delta Force: Xtreme 2 - $27.99

Games Releasing Soon - Preorder Now

Fallout 3 GOTY: The Best Deal Since The Orange Box?

Think about this: The Orange Box includes Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2: Episode 1, Episode 2, Team Fortress 2, and Portal. That's five games available in one pack.

Bethesda's Fallout 3 seems to be planning possibly something just as big.

It's been said by Bethesda that in October this year, a retail version of Fallout 3 called Fallout 3 Game of the Year edition will be released. This will include Fallout 3, and all five DLC packs- Operation Anchorage, The Pitt, Broken Steel, Point Lookout, and Mothership Zeta. The Fallout 3 GOTY edition will be available for PC, Xbox 360, and PS3.

This might even be better than the Fallout Trilogy Pack that's out at the moment, which contains Fallout 1, Fallout 2, Fallout Tactics.

Fallout 3 Game Add-on Pack #1 includes The Pitt and Operation: Anchorage on a disc and will be available for Xbox 360 and PC on May 26.

The Fallout 3 Game Add-on Pack #2 includes Broken Steel and Point Lookout on a disc and will be available for Xbox 360 and PC in August.

Sources:

http://fallout.bethsoft.com/eng/home/pr-051909.php

Fallout 3 GOTY: The Best Deal Since The Orange Box?

Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six on GOG.com

Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six is now available on GOG.com.

If you haven't played it, it is the progenitor of one of the best tactical shooter games ever. The game relies on strategy, planning, and most of the time, luck, with inconsistent AI and poor controls.

http://www.gog.com/en/news/date/all#g_1207317366

Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six on GOG.com

New All-Time Low Prices for PC Games

BattleForge - $29.99 - Save $12.50
44 Years of the Fantastic Four - $20.00 - Save $7.99
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare Game of the Year Edition - $32.99 - Save $6.00

New All-Time Low Prices for PC Games

Is The Sims Really a Girl Thing?

I’ve always got a list of the latest games that I want to get, and this year, among all the action games, and FPSs, there’s one name that doesn’t quite fit with the overall theme- The Sims 3.

I played the original Sims back in 2000, and for hours I was lost in that game, as my friend and I would compete with each other to see who could build the biggest and best house on an unlimited budget.

In the end, I deleted his house and claimed myself the winner.

In fact, he was just as fanatical over the Sims if not more. He had a friend who collected all of the expansion packs, and he would “borrow” them and play them all in one big super-Sims game.

The Sims 2 was just as good if not better, and better looking to boot. The animation was far better than the original, and I found that the themes of the furniture and other stuff was more varied and grouped to suit the architectural personality. I liked building castles with stone walls and creating moats and walls. Overall, I enjoyed it more than the original.

Then, I met a guy who had a cupboard filled with all of the Sims games, gathering dust on the top shelf. I got excited as I hadn’t played most of the expansions for the original (and still haven’t), until I asked the question, “Do you play them at all?”

“Nah, they’re my sister’s. That’s kind of a girl thing.” He responded.

True, there were times while I was playing, and as I selected different shades of blue for the walls, and got a smile on my face as I saw the Sims interact positively with each other, that I thought, “Have I gone too far?”

It’s funny how we still have these gender roles and such, and stereotypes, even today. You’ve got the aggressive, assertive male (ooh, scary), and the caring, nurturing female. What about the loathsome metrosexual, everybody? The one who is only one facial or mud bath away from batting for the other side? Wasn’t that supposed to be the end, the tearing down of these walls that have stood for so long that dictate what is masculine and what is feminine? It’s just like the old saying, “What boys can do, girls can do better”. Well, I think in this day in age of gender equity, “What girls can do, guys can do just as good” is appropriate.

Some argue that it’s all down to how we see and play the game. Some people have a god complex, and like to have the lives of people in their hands, for better or worse. Then some are control freaks who like people to do things just so, or not at all. There are the tyrants, who like to cause mayhem and destruction, and the architects and engineers who rebuild after the dust has settled. Others like to escape into another world for a few hours to escape their real lives, and look on it as virtual wish fulfillment.

It’s all really down to an individual play style. Some like to load a game, while sobbing silently, if the oven catches fire and the house burns down, while others laugh maniacally while shouting “Burn you little trolls, burn!”

Now, The Sims 3 is nearly ready for release, set for June.

Recently I read an interview conducted by SACM with Mike McCabe, the Regional Head of Publishing for Electronic Arts Mobile. Right at the end, the last question asked was, “What titles can we look forward to in the near future?”

“The most exciting game coming out in the beginning of June will be The Sims 3. It’s appealing to a very broad demographic, as it’s skewed to a more casual, more female audience.”

But look at what’s happened recently. The Sims 3 has been leaked onto the net just weeks before its scheduled release, and is available on all number of sites like Rapidshare and other torrent portals.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t piracy more of a guy thing?

Is The Sims Really a Girl Thing?

Apocalypse Then: Unreal

Developers: Epic Games, Digital Extremes
Publisher: GT Interactive (now owned by Atari)
Engine: Unreal Engine
Platforms: Mac OS, Microsoft Windows
Release date: May 22, 1998

On this day in gaming, in 1998, Unreal was released.

It was hailed as revolutionary due to its advanced graphics, competent enemy AI, and for its use of music modules rather than MIDI or CD audio. It was also hailed as a “Quake killer”, due to being released in the same six months as Quake II, and people claiming it was technically superior engine wise to id Tech 2 (Quake II).

The game has had one expansion pack, Unreal Mission Pack I: Return to Na Pali, which would be bundled together with Unreal later as Unreal Gold, an official map pack called the Fusion Map Pack which can be downloaded from the internet for free, a sequel in Unreal 2: The Awakening, and spawned a series of games in another series, starting with Unreal Tournament.

In addition to this, Unreal ended up spawning a series of Unreal engines by Epic Games, now at Unreal Engine 3. Many games have ended up using these engines, notably the Brothers in Arms series, Rainbow Six series, and Duke Nukem Forever.

Companies such as Unreal FX took their name from the game.

Not bad for a game developed in a garage for over three years.

Games also released on this day:

Red Faction- May 22, 2001 (PS2)

Apocalypse Then: Unreal