Changing culture, one gamerscore at a time.

StarCraft 2, Part One, Millwall three. Yeah, it's still funny.

I’m beginning to think that beta announcements are simply a developer’s way of delaying a title while keeping the fanbase from rupturing and approaching the studios with torches and pitchforks. In an Activision-Blizzard conference call, it was confirmed that StarCraft II, well, the first third of it, anyway, won’t be out for a fair while yet. But before I could get my ranting hat on, it appears they are intending to release a beta, assumably of multiplayer.

Sadly, it’s not going to heal the wound that easily, as fans should really be getting more than this. Blizzard’s first potential fan-losing move was to split the game’s campaign up into three seperate releases, presumably so they could make each one as long as possible. I’d rather wait and get all three, to be honest, but as the review situation goes, that’s not really a possibility. I think they were aiming for extended publicity on the title more than anything else, but we’ll see when this beta comes out; expect a lot of coverage, I’m a big StarCraft person.

Eidos Gets its Tomb Raided

It seems that Eidos, publishers of such wonderfully chauvanist-pleasing titles such as Tomb Raider, have recieved a rather interesting offer for their entire company from Square, to the tune of £84 million. This is a rather princely sum, and is apparently 91% more than the company is actually currently worth, causing the board of directors to strongly recommend this to Eidos’ current shareholders.

The offer comes through from Square on the recognition that Eidos holds a sizeable area of the overseas market, something that Square seemingly doesn’t understand it already has, with the Final Fantasy titles still raking in excuberant amounts of cash every year. It’ll be interesting to see how this goes, and I think some creative control from Square on Eidos products would be hilarious. It’d never happen, but it might be nice to see Lara Croft go Japanese and, for once, actually wear some clothes.

Left 4 Free

Left 4 Dead, the zombie-shooting, friend-making, Smoker-yanking online experience, is recieving its first bit of downloadable content soon, and shockingly, it’s free. It doesn’t cost anything whatsoever. I could go on and on about how if Valve can manage this, they can get their damn fingers out and update Team Fortress 2 on the Xbox 360, but right now I’m too pleasantly surprised by the fact that their key product right now is having Survival Mode and two new maps gifted to its fanbase. Not to mention the Software Development Kit coming out with it, which will finally let level and mod making nuts like myself have a bash at populating our Source levels with zombies thanks to the inbuilt AI Director. Fun times await.

Brazil > “The Old Country, eh Niko?”

It seems that The Lost and Damned, GTA IV’s downloadable expansion is getting some new radio-based updates to go along with its release. Amongst new hip hop channels jockeyed on by the likes of Funkmaster Flex, the hardcore station (my channel of choice) will be recieving a ton of death metal songs, along with – and I grin inwardly as I type this – Max Cavalera of Soulfly fame presiding as the voice to accompany the noise.

Liberty Rock and Radio Broker, the station jockeyed on by Juliette Lewis of Natural Born Killers and Juliette and the Licks fame, are also getting updates, not to mention interviews of artists like Busta Rhymes floating around the hip-hop realm of GTA IV’s audio experience. New story, new tunes. This couldn’t have come at a better time, and if I can slot in some death metal between shooting bikers and plowing through crowds in a dump-truck, I’ll be one happy man.