General gaming

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• Weekly Deals: Child of Eden, R.U.S.E., and Freedom Force
• Steam Improves its Content Delivery System
• Star Wars, Videogames, and a 20-Foot Screen Equal This Amazing Student Project
• Kojima Doesn't Have Time for a New Snatcher, But Would Love if Someone Else Made it
• Minecraft is Now (Unofficially) on DS
• Neither Child of Eden Nor Shadows of the Damned Had a Big June
• This Week in the 1UP Community 7/11/11
• Black Ops Annihilation Map Pack Out July 28 on PS3 and PC
• Ubisoft Adopts the $10 Online Pass Model, Restricting Online Multiplayer
• Five Games We'd Like to See from Telltale

Weekly Deals: Child of Eden, R.U.S.E., and Freedom Force Posted: 15 Jul 2011 06:20 PM PDT Although Steam's summer camp sale wrapped up at the beginning of the week, Direct2Drive and Impulse (and, by extension, GameStop) have summer sales going on right now, as does Good Old Games. GOG is offering up an older title from BioShock maker Irrational Games, Freedom Force vs. The Third Reich, for just $2.39 right now. That deal will be expiring tomorrow, so you'll want to jump on it quickly if interested. GameStop is offering up a $25 gift card with purchases of Kinect, and to go with it, several Kinect games have been discounted to $29.99. Among them is Child of Eden, a game that -- despite its poor sales in June -- is most definitely worth your money at full price, let alone for $30. Also of note is GamersGate, which is home to discounts on a number of Tom Clancy, Assassin's Creed, and Prince of Persia titles right now. If you're looking to dive into any of those franchises, that's the place to visit this week.

Steam Improves its Content Delivery System Posted: 15 Jul 2011 04:50 PM PDT If you've ever struggled to download a new game on launch day from Steam, you'll be pleased to hear that Valve has upgraded its content delivery system. This should make it easier and quicker to download new titles that are in high demand, improve download speeds worldwide, and allow for more games to be shipped through Steam. For those who are stuck with an ISP that has a monthly bandwidth cap (you poor thing), Steam will no longer force you to download unnecessary amounts of data when a game is updated. Instead, you'll simply download whatever has been changed, rather than the entirety of the files that have been updated. Updates can now also make their way onto Steam more quickly in the first place, thanks to a simpler process for developers. Valve's announcement revealed some upcoming features Steam will be getting through client updates, including download scheduling, bandwidth throttling, and the ability to both prioritize the order that games are downloaded in and download updates for a game while playing it (the update won't be applied until after you're done playing).

Star Wars, Videogames, and a 20-Foot Screen Equal This Amazing Student Project Posted: 15 Jul 2011 03:03 PM PDT A Star Wars themed game made by a graduate student attending the University of Illinois at Chicago might be the coolest game the franchise has ever seen. What was originally an attempt to adapt a real-time strategy game to a tabletop, multi-touch interface has become a Star Wars themed RTS played on a 20-foot wide multi-touch LCD screen. After originally starting out as something called Planetary Defender in 2009, creator Arthur Nishimoto has since decided to drop certain elements in favor of focusing on "the fleet battle aspects," which amounts to combat featuring Star Wars ships, music, and sound effects. Many of the bigger things, like Star Destroyers, were taken from Star Wars: Empire at War, while smaller units (fighters, bombers) were drawn in Paint.

Kojima Doesn't Have Time for a New Snatcher, But Would Love if Someone Else Made it Posted: 15 Jul 2011 01:48 PM PDT Snatcher hasn't really been touched in quite a long time. One of Hideo Kojima's earliest games, it didn't sell particularly well in North America, where it was only ever available on Sega CD. Kojima, who is better known for his work on the Metal Gear series, recently announced that he would be moving forward with his Suda 51 collaboration, a radio drama based on Snatcher called Sdatcher. Inevitably, people wondered why Kojima didn't instead decide to make a Snatcher sequel. According to him, it's a matter of time. Just because he can't work on it himself, though, doesn't mean he wouldn't like to see it made. Asked recently by the PlayStation Blog if games like L.A. Noire and Deus Ex: Human Revolution showed that there is a market for a new Snatcher, Kojima said, "L.A. Noire is a game that I really like, but unfortunately I have not played it. I think it is coming out in Japan today, so when I return, I intend to play it.

Minecraft is Now (Unofficially) on DS Posted: 15 Jul 2011 01:00 PM PDT PC sandbox title Minecraft is on its way to both Xperia Play and Xbox Live Arcade, but it won't stop there. We've seen modders make the game playable with a Wii Remote, and now modder smealum has taken the entire game and moved it to a Nintendo platform. As the video above demonstrates, a working, but very basic version of Minecraft is up and running on DS. Games can't be saved, and it's the Classic version, meaning you're free to build without having to worry about running into enemies. The basic functionality of adding and removing blocks is there, as is basic terrain generation. According to smealum, maps stream from the file, "meaning really big maps can be used (1024x1024 maps are fully playable)." The 161kb file can be downloaded here. You'll need a way to get your file onto your DS; not just anyone will be able to play it. The inability to save is a real downer, as the beauty of Minecraft is building your world over time -- it's not necessarily the sort of thing you'd want to play from scratch every time. This is, of course, a modder's project and not an official release, so its omission is excusable. The fact that it works at all is very impressive.

Neither Child of Eden Nor Shadows of the Damned Had a Big June Posted: 15 Jul 2011 12:17 PM PDT Yesterday's release of the NPD figures for June featured a distinct lack of two of the month's most original titles, Child of Eden and Shadows of the Damned. Rockstar's L.A. Noire was unsurprisingly still at the top of the charts, followed by Duke Nukem Forever -- by many accounts a bad game that perhaps benefited from all of the negative coverage. But where were Ubisoft and EA's original titles? As it turns out, neither was anywhere close to ranking inside the top ten. Child of Eden, the spiritual successor to Rez, managed to sell 34,000 copies, good enough to rank it as the 83rd best seller in June, the NPD Group revealed to Joystiq. To be fair, it was available only on Xbox 360 and came out halfway through the month. Hopefully the PS3 release and positive word of mouth will help it to sell well as time goes on as it is, in my estimation, a terrific game. Shadows of the Damned, the collaboration between Goichi "Suda51" Suda and Shinji Mikami, faired even more poorly, selling 24,000 copies total on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. It had even less time on store shelves than Child of Eden, although its problem may have been a lack of marketing -- its release was met with more than a few, "Wait, that's out?" comments, which is never a good sign.

This Week in the 1UP Community 7/11/11 Posted: 15 Jul 2011 11:51 AM PDT Let's not let Google+ take over all the limelight here! There's plenty of stuff provided by the 1UP Community to distract you from sifting through which friends belong in which circles and wrapping your heads around that buggy little hangout thing. Forget what all the other kids are talking about because all the cool ones are hanging out here!

Black Ops Annihilation Map Pack Out July 28 on PS3 and PC Posted: 15 Jul 2011 11:45 AM PDT The Annihilation map pack is slated to be released on PC and PlayStation 3 later this month, exactly one month after it came out on Xbox 360. While PS3 owners have to wait a bit longer before being allowed into the Elite beta (PC players don't get in at all), the new map pack will provide Call of Duty players with something new to do on July 28. This is the third map pack release for Black Ops. Like the others, it contains four competitive multiplayer maps (in this case, Hangar 18, Drive-In, Silo, and Hazard) and a new Zombies level (Shangri-La) for $15. If World at War, Treyarch's last CoD game, is any indication, this will be the final map pack for Black Ops. That hasn't been announced officially, but with less than four months to go before Modern Warfare 3 is out, that doesn't leave time for much more. As it stands, those who have picked up the game at full price and every map pack have spent $105 before tax on Black Ops thus far.

Ubisoft Adopts the $10 Online Pass Model, Restricting Online Multiplayer Posted: 15 Jul 2011 11:06 AM PDT Just as Sony recently did, Ubisoft today announced its intentions to begin shipping games with an online pass similar to what's used by Electronic Arts, Codemasters, THQ, and Warner Bros. Known as Uplay Passport, the plan is to include a one-time use code with "many of Ubisoft's popular core games" that will grant users access to certain content that will otherwise remain locked. Among that content is online multiplayer, which has been the most frequently restricted component with these online passes. The first game to include Uplay Passport will be Driver: San Francisco, which ships on August 30. Ubisoft's other big core release this year will be Assassin's Creed: Revelations. That seems like as good a target as any for Passport, as it'll likely be Ubisoft's best selling core game of the year. At this point, however, that isn't confirmed.

Five Games We'd Like to See from Telltale Posted: 15 Jul 2011 08:48 AM PDT Feature Share it: Tweet Five Games We'd Like to See from Telltale Franchises Telltale Games should tackle now that they've made the adventure genre their own. By: Bob Mackey July 15, 2011 Telltale Games knows what they're doing; over the course of seven years, they've transformed from a low-budget virtual Texas Hold 'Em developer to the company responsible for the newest video game adaptations of blockbuster franchises like Jurassic Park and Back to the Future. And with titles based on both The Walking Dead and Fables coming in the near future, we're all wondering what popular property Telltale will get their hooks into next. Lucky for Telltale, we have a few ideas of our own they should definitely think about picking up on -- though 1UP is in no way responsible if any of the following brainstorms drive Telltale into intractable bankruptcy. Just covering our bases, here. The Goonies

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