Carrandas corner

My favourite PC magazine was happy to see that Direct2Drive now offers their games in euros! My first thought was "right, now they can ask double the price to us Europeans".  I wish it was true, we pay four times the price (in the bargain bucket for €20 vs £5): Great way to advertise your new website!

Rockpapershotgun asked an interesting question last week: do you play RTS games online? The online part of RTS games is often the most important part from a developers side. Quite a few games only offer multiplayer, they can often be played singleplayer but it's really just multiplayer with bots. Demigod is a nice example. Yet only 23% of all gamers even tried to play online. A lot of people seemed to be surprised by these numbers but it didn't really surprised me. Personally, I only played a game or three of Demigod online and then went back to playing against bots. Once upon a time things were different. Ten years ago I played nothing but Age of Empires 2 online for a year. It was great fun to match your own strategies with your opponents. I never got to be a good player but I did get better. Since then I haven't played that many online games. A game of shooty fun like Team Fortress 2 or Return to Castle Wolfenstein comes along now and then and keeps me playing online...

It's only been a month since I finished Dragon Age. I've still got some DLC left to play but currently I'm first playing through Mass Effect 2. What a luxury problem! Two instant classic games were released by Bioware less than two months apart. And now Bioware announces that they will release Dragon Age 2 by march next year. All this while developing the Dragon Age expansion planned for march this year and creating more DLC for Dragon Age and Mass Effect 2. They're doing all this while creating the next big mmorpg, SW:TOR! The quick expansion pack release for Dragon Age already had me worried. How can they create all this in such a short time frame?  We know that the EA programmers all work 72 hours a week but even then, how do they pull this off? Let's take a look at Biowares archive: Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn (2000) Baldur's Gate II: Throne of Bhaal (2001) Neverwinter Nights (2002) Neverwinter Nights: Shadows of Undrentide (2003) Never...