Crispy Gamer News

Tor Books has launched Halo: The Cole Protocol by Tobias S. Buckell, just in time for the holidays. The new novel is the latest in the New York Times bestselling series based on Microsoft and Bungie Studios’ Halo video games. The Halo novels, Halo: Ghosts of Onyx (Tor 2006) and Halo: Contact Harvest (Tor 2007) became instant bestsellers, along with the three previous novels.

In Halo: The Cole Protocol, Buckell take us through the first desperate days of the Human-Covenant War, when the UNSC has enacted the Cole Protocol to safeguard Earth and its Inner Colonies from discovery by a merciless alien foe.

The 368 page paperback is available now for $14.95 at most major book sellers nationwide.

Bethesda Softworks announced that the editor and the first batch of downloadable content available for Fallout 3 in the coming weeks. The official editor for Fallout 3, called the G.E.C.K. (Garden of Eden Creation Kit), will be available for free download in December and will allow Games for Windows users to create and add their own content to the game. In addition, the first official downloadable content, Operation: Anchorage, will be available exclusively for the Xbox 360 and Games for Windows in January, with more downloadable content coming in February and March.

The release of the G.E.C.K. will allow players to create, modify, and edit any data for use with Fallout 3, from building landscapes, towns, and locations to writing dialogue, creating characters, weapons, creatures, and more.

Three downloadable content packs will be coming to Xbox 360 and Games for Windows Live starting in January that will add new quests, items, and content to Fallout 3. Details on those after the jump.

(more…)

The Games For windows version of Ascaron’s action-RPG, Sacred 2: Fallen Angel, has gone gold and will be in stores in November. Sadly, those waiting for the game to come to consoles will have to wait a very long time: those games won’t hit retail until February 2009!

Developed by Ascaron, Sacred 2: Fallen Angel is a hack-and-slash action-RPG promising a rich story that takes place in a giant, open-ended and seamless world. This world is apparently packed with massive dungeons, hundreds of bad guys and hundreds of challenging quests. Ascaron says that its game will also feature intelligent enemies, and multiplayer battles for up to 16 players.

Ascaron’s previous game and its expansions proved to be capable fun RPG endeavors, so this new game is not without a fair share of public interest.

In an interview with VideoGamer, PC Gaming Alliance showed other advocacy groups how to alienate potential partners by “calling out” LucasArts for not porting Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. Forget the fact that the game got mixed reviews, and that LucasArts could have been finessed into returning to the PC space in once served well; Randy Stude wants to call them out on semantics.

According to that interview, Stude took exception with LucasArts’ technology related excuse for not bringing Star Wars: The Force Unleashed to PC. Stude went on to say that LucasArts doesn’t have a solid internal studio that handles its intellectual property and farms most of its work out anyway. Whether that’s true or not, it just doesn’t make a lot of sense to target LucasArts for doing exactly what every other game publisher is doing when it comes to the PC: skipping it.

Instead of wasting his time bitching about the negatives in the industry, perhaps LucasArts’ technology related excuse for not bringing Star Wars: The Force Unleashed to PC. should highlight the success of games like World of Warcraft, Spore, The Sims 2 and Warhammer Online - just to name a few - and encourage more developers to create games that cater to the PC market. To get its groove back, the industry needs less ports and more original content.
At the end of the day, public comments like these are best left as secret, unspoken thoughts. In other words, more diplomacy and less public outrage.

Source: GameDaily

Turbine has released 3 brand new trailers that give you a glimpse at two new classes and one of the new areas that will make their debut with the release on the Lord of the Rings Online expansion, Mines of Moria. The new classes are The Rune-keeper and The Warden, while the third video gives a brief fly through of the new are: The Foundations of Stone. You can check out all three movies below by following the links below, or by checking out the brand new Crispy Gamer Community.

The Warden

The Rune-keeper

The Foundations of Stone

Microsoft is celebrating the second anniversary of the Games for Windows initiative this month with the news that Grand Theft Auto IV will debut on the PC this November exclusively as a Games for Windows-branded title. Microsoft promises a revitalized Games for Windows – LIVE experience, including expanded online matches, DirectX 10 graphics, and new LIVE features such as a redesigned game interface, out-of-game client and marketplace.

In addition to Grand Theft Auto IV, several titles will take advantage of Games for Windows – LIVE, including Fallout 3, Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II and James Bond: Quantum of Solace.

While it is certainly good news that PC gamers will get Games For windows enabled game titles later this year, it still feels like Microsoft is not whole-heartedly behind the PC platform. When we attended E3 in July this fact was painfully apparent at the Games For Windows party that no one attended and where barely any games were on display.

File this one under DUH. Microsoft’s GamerScore Blog offers an assurance from the company that they still own the Age of Empires franchise and it is not going anywhere. What it does not tell us is who will be at the helm of this franchise when the next game in the series is revealed. We suspect it will be Big Huge Games or whatever new entity the artist formerly known as Ensemble create. Anyway, here is the post, verbatim:

As many of you have heard, Ensemble Studios will be closing after Halo Wars is complete. If you’re a PC gamer, you’ve likely played some version of Age of Empires somewhere along the line. I want to reassure you that Microsoft will still own the Age of Empires intellectual property. As a company, we’re very excited about the future potential for Age of Empires, and as a PC gamer I’m looking forward to what that future holds. Stay tuned.

Source: GamerScore Blog