If you’re not living in Germany, you might have completely missed this: The EULA for Origin (EA’s competitor to Steam which is required to play Battlefield 3, will be required to play Mass Effect 3 and is likely to be required to play Star Wars: The Old Republic) contains extensive liberties for EA to collect […]

So you get Diablo III for free when you subscribe to World of Warcraft for a full year. Not a big deal really. Few people will take it and of those, at least half (probably more) will regret it because they won’t be playing WoW for remotely that long. A minority will save a little […]

“[…] eventually you end up with a game that’s designed more like a slot machine than half-life 2.” – Notch, on F2P games

I’ve picked up two (more or less turn-based) strategy games recently – Heroes of Might and Magic VI and Europa Universalis III. Alright, I have owned EU forever but never managed to get past the hurdle of “oh my god, so many numbers”. Now that I’ve had someone to explain the game to me (which […]

I can’t possibly count how many video game characters I’ve played (and story protagonists I’ve read about) that had amnesia of some form or another. As Azuriel pointedly puts it “Amnesia is so cliche a plot element that merely saying it is cliche is itself a cliche.” It’s an easy way for game designers to […]

I’m long done with Fable III (or done-ish, since I still mean to do a couple of post game things, such as marrying some random villager. The same way I still mean to finish Fallout: New Vegas, Portal 2, and other games that I simply fail to pick up again after a break of some […]

Nils posted last night about a post on Mind Bending Puzzles discussing the payment model of Memoir:44, a game labeled as free-to-play on Steam.  As it turns out the game isn’t actually free to play (surprise!), as you have to pay for each game you play after a certain amount of free games – a […]

“Gold farming is one of those things that make you want to quit writing science fiction because you could never think up something that weird.” – Neal Stephenson in his GDC Online 2011 keynote, according to Kotaku

My interest in Fable III was really low when it came out. I didn’t really enjoy the first game in the series and this one had quite low review scores all across the board. So I decided to skip it and kept that decision up until the last weekend when the game was on sale […]

You’ve probably heard about Glitch, the new bloodless MMO by tiny speck. It features a complex crafting system, all kinds of skill specializations and, most importantly, some very weird humor. I’ll admit, I had a laugh when I was first tasked with milking a butterfly, a task that required me to massage (with lotion!) said […]