Let's suppose for a minute that "The Man" is north American.  He would have you believe that PC gaming is dying, and were I to take a walk through my local EB I'd be inclined to agree.  So why is this once powerful platform withering away - at least in the mind of "the man"?  

They'd have us believe that piracy is to blame. Clearly, people who are willing to spend thousands of dollars bulding their dream PCs are nothing more than digital thieves. 

I have a different theory for why the likes of Ubisoft are seeing a decline in their PC sales.  It's no accident that I've singled out Ubisoft as a company that just doesn't "get it", their latest announcement of draconian DRM coupled with an inflated price for Assassin's Creed 2 points to an overall lack of understanding of the industry.  

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If you haven't played this yet, or even if you have, its up for $2 on Steam for a couple of days. It's pretty much one of the most recommended games ever.

Get Psychonauts for $2

Piracy is discussed often on the internet, and news sites, but it seems like the only way it's ever approached is with a stern look and a black mark on pirates. If the numbers for piracy are to be believed why aren't more people admitting to it? Certainly some of these game journalists must have snatched a piece of code at some point in their lives, before they had all their games just handed to them as review copies.


Well I'm coming out of the captain's quarters as it were; I was once a software pirate. Once, but not anymore.

So what changed? Why did I give up the life of illegally downloading software for free? Read on to find out.

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I just found this browsing the Penny Arcade forums, and man it's a gem. I love me some indie games anyway, and this one really takes the cake. It's worth the 10 minute "2 level demo", you can find it below. It feels like I wanna be the guy! but not nearly as hard, and this feels more polished. Try it out!

This weekend DiRT 2 is on sale for $19.99.

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Wow, so this mod isn't dead. Tribes is probably my favorite game of all time, so the news that this ETQW mod is still in development is good news for me.

TWars wrote: Hey everyone. With the holidays behind us, we've been working hard getting the artwork for the project ready. Right now, I can gladly say that the art assets for first release phase of the project have been completed. There still is a bit of work to be done though, particularly in areas like scripting, level design, and gameplay balancing.

You can see their older video after the break.

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MCV, a UK publication is reporting a story that 1C Company believes retail is to blame for the loss of sales in PC games and that PC distribution will be completely digital by 2011.

MCVUK wrote: 1C’s international publishing director Darryl Still has accused retail of failing to support boxed PC games.

The industry veteran says that by refusing to stock certain games and moving PC titles to the back of the store, retail is forcing publishers to head towards digital distribution. And that PC games software will be sold entirely through digital channels by next year.
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“You just have to head into a games store and look for their PC titles, and you’ll see there is no focus, listings or promotions for them.

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One of the biggest comments around the Calculator that I see goes something like this:

Quote:Wow, $2000, but I didn't spend nearly that much, I bought mostly everything on sale.

With that in mind I'll soon be including sale prices and tallying those up as well. The calculator will make two assumptions; that you bought everything on sale and that you bought nothing on sale. It will give you a low and high value with the idea that what you actually spent is somewhere in between.

Thanks to omnilynx at Steam Deals I have historic sale pricing from the Christmas Sale which will give a good baseline to start from. Thanks omnilynx!

So the most I knew about Interstellar Marines was that it was an indie title, and that according to the weird trailer, it involved marines of the interstellar variety, probably mechs, and sharks that move on land. An intriguing premise but not that much to go on.

Not satisfied with the usual pre release trailers and footage though, they've recently released an online beta demo of what appears to be an in-game shooting gallery. When I say in-game, I MEAN in game, this is extremely well done and when put in full screen you wouldn't be able to tell it's actually running in a browser (you need to download a unity plugin first, but after that the rest is fairly fast to get)

So now this game is officially "on the radar", at least for me. Despite what you might think about training levels, this was fairly engrossing and very well implemented, even tension inducing at times. It shows much promise for the game itself.

So, how high can you score?

Be warned, the beta ends on the 15th, so get your shooting in whilst you can. I may post more later.

I had an awesome time with ShackTac on Saturday. Here are some videos from the session.

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