Pirates!

A couple of news items showed up this week that may be more related than you’d think.  First up we’ve got developers Stardock complaining that their PC strategy RPG has had only 18,000 legitimate online connections and over 100,000 filthy piratey ones.  One of their number bleated ‘we spent a lot of time today trying to isolate out the warez users from the legitimate users (it would require a lot of surgery to actually break them and even if we did, there’d be no friendly ‘ha ha pirate’ message which would result in people just saying the game is buggy).’

Not arsed obviously.  PC strategy RPGs belong in the Austrian cellars that home most of their players but the rather natty GTA: Chinatown Wars has also threw up some evidence of pirate shenanigans.  You see, it only sold about 90,000 in the States despite being good, being on the DS and being a GTA game.  Of course once you get past the DS’ main userbase a GTA game would only appeal to the kind of user that might happen to know about the wide range of no fuss, but highly illegal, flashcards widely available for the machine.

Amazon.

Amazon (in America) have started selling XBLA games on their website.  Why should we care?  Well, refreshingly it means that you’ll now see a real monetary value when considering purchases and it’ll mean no left over points to waste on jungle tables for Texas Hold ‘Em or costumes for Bomberman.

This is a fairly welcome move as you’d hope that Amazon will take a nice chunk out of Microsoft’s profits which would serve them right for utterly spacking up the XBLA service with shit games or good games at shit prices.

XBLA is dead to us*.

*Until Wednesday when MOTHERFUCKING OUTRUN IS OUT FOR 800 M$P!  We love you, Microsoft**!

**Until next week, you Bastards.

Ooer!

That’s the facts apparently.  Okay so they (dunno, can’t be bothered checking) only polled a thousand blokes but two out of three prefer gaming over a bit of sauciness because they their partners were “too hard to please” or “not as much fun”.

More anti-gamer propaganda?  Yeah probably, I mean it’s ridiculous.  After all I know what I was doing late last night eh.. eh.. say no more… wink wink…*

*playing Peggle.

Giving Onechanbara a run for its money.

Well this wasn’t too unexpected.  Microsoft have banned an XNA game that was basically Arkanoid with soft porn in the background.  Homebrew games with porn in them is a tradition that has so far only been enjoyed by sweaty PC gamers and Microsoft are keeping it that way.

Either that or they are saving it for a proper Xbox Live Arcade release.  Which would be ace, if only for the potential achievements.  Oh well, you’ll have to search the seedy world of PC homebrew if you want anything similar but for now let’s all share a chuckle at the cancelled game’s name.  Break One Out.  Phenomenal.

Shitknot more like.

Brace yourselves.  Microsoft have decided to get Xbox Live rocking with their latest Deal of the Week.  You remember the dark days when the Iowa Mission pack for Battlestations: Midway used to cost 400M$P?  Well, get ready for save-o-time because, for one week only, Microsoft are literally slashing the price to a recession-busting 320M$P.

That’s right!  It was £3.40 and now it’s a ludicrously low £2.72.  I don’t own Battlestations: Midway but I’m still buying that DLC because I know a fucking bargain when I see one and I see one right now!  Expect customer confidence to surge and for all the global markets to start getting better.  That 68p saving is getting spent today.  I might even put it towards some gamerpics or a nice theme.  Anyone who says that Microsoft are laughably tight cunts are not welcome here at PEOWW – “officially owned by Microsoft” since 2007.

Ewww...

Resident Evil 5’s producer Jun Takeuchi (one of our favourite Tekken characters also) has reacted to the near-universal criticism that Resi 5 is basically just Resi 4 but not quite as good by stating that “Resident Evil 6 will have to reinvent the series with another full model change or else it won’t be able to keep on going.”

That’s pretty positive news, especially as Capcom have never been afraid to milk a series for loads of similar installments.  As much as we love Resi 4, and rather like Resi 5, it’s surely time for Resident Evil to go back to it’s roots and show the likes of Left 4 Dead exactly how you’re meant to do a zombie game.

Perhaps they’d like to include some horror next time also.