Peoww News

The Driver series has been dead to us, and all other right-minded gamers, ever since the reviews scandal around Driv3r but, for whatever reason, they’ve released a new one, Driver:  San Francisco, to universal apathy. 

The ridiculous drive-and-possess-’em-up’s soon-to-be-entirely-vacant multiplayer component was due to get one of those money-grabbing ‘online pass’ things but thanks to a printing error in the manual, they accidentally gave it away free to everyone in America, leading to Ubisoft having to do the same for the rest of the world.  Not that anyone will be playing it for long.

Some free DLC is also on the way although they have also announced plans to drop extra DLC (not for free) weekly for ten weeks.  Whatever.  Rich

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id Software (via Bethesda’s blog) have unveiled the PC system specs for forthcoming apocalypse-em-up Rage.

Minimum spec is a Core2 Duo processor or equivalent with 2Gb memory & 25Gb of hard drive space. Yes. 25Gb. As is the case with most PC games, the more bang you can throw at the game the better, with recommended spec being a GeForce 9800 instead of the minimum 8800.

We  miss the days when you could get away with a Geforce and a Celeron 300A overclocked to 450MHz.

Rage is due to be released on PC, Mac, PS3 and Xbox 360 on October 4th.  Ian

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GAME have unveiled their pricing for the forthcoming Modern Blahfare 3 special edition Xbox 360 320Gb model.  A penny shy of £270 gets you the customised console and two controllers (how long will they last when Timmy loses his temper?) plus the game and usual ephemera you’d expect when buying a 360.

An unconfirmed bonus extra are nanobots that come out at night injecting you with additional stupid and making you swear blind loyalty to Activision and GAME (you get reward points, so it doesn’t matter if you pay full price!).  Ian

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Fans of the pretty-but-punishing off-roader Pure and the straight-to-bargain-bin Split/Second will be dismayed to learn that Black Rock Studio, the Brighton-based developers of arcadey racing games is being shut by Disney Interactive.

We’re sure they’ll resurface with yet another racing game somewhere else but, for now, we mourn yet another UK dev team.  Even if we never really liked their games.  Rich

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Call us cynical but something’s making us uneasy about Square Enix’s new undead-’em-up Dead Island.  The review embargo ends on the release date, retailers are already slashing the price of it for pre-orders and the one review to come out, courtesy of IGN, gives it an apologetic 8 out of 10 write-up whilst the entire site carries adverts for the game in the background.

Also, a quick bit of research on the devs, Quick Silver, reveals a less than stellar softography that includes Risen and the annoying-as-fuck Sacred 2.  Amusingly Quick Silver is the UK arm of parent company Koch Media.  Chortle! 

We’ll be reviewing the game soon and you can be sure we won’t be swayed by the pressures of Koch.  Rich

Peoww News

Seasoned gamers will be no strangers to the effective high-street monopoly of Game and the like, those not living in a large town being subject to their extortionate prices for both new and pre-owned games. Case in point, Winchester where I work has an HMV, Game & Lacklustre Video.

Madden NFL 12 was released today, so it wouldn’t be entirely unreasonable to expect maybe a slight reduction in the cost of the 2011 edition. Definitely not the case. They had no new copies (natch), so pre-owned it was. £17.99. Given they probably paid the poor sap that traded it in about £7, that’s £11 clear profit into their coffers. The same £17.99 was the price last week, prior to the release of the sequel.

It’s currently no better when it comes to the FIFA series, FIFA 10 pre-owned is a fiver. Fair enough, but FIFA 11 is still £25 new in their stores, with pre-owned a only a little less. I’ll bet even money that it drops a lot when FIFA 12 comes out later this month.

The sales droid said “FIFA pre-owned drops quickly ’cause loads of people trade it in! We don’t get that many copies of Madden traded in, that’s why the price is high”. No, the price is high ’cause you’re money grabbing profiteering bastards.

Shopto are doing Madden 11 brand new for £14.86 so if a canny ebay bid doesn’t pan out, they have my business.

I’ll stick to Game for the (very) occasional pre-owned bargain, ta.  Ian

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Oh dear. After such lofty expectations, Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s spiritual Rez sequel tanked horribly at retail, garnering only 34,000 US sales in the first month.

Ubisoft have clearly cut their losses as from hereon in, CoE will be a bundled downloadable game packed in with Kinect in addition to Kinect Adventures. Except if you live in Japan, as somewhat oddly the game hasn’t been released there yet. Que?  Ian

Peoww News

As mentioned in our previous news story, Hogrocket’s first release is out today for iThings. It’s called Tiny Invaders and is available now on the App Store.

£2.49 ($3.99) may seem a little steep but that’s less than a pint or your sandwich at lunchtime (hold the onions!). 

Don’t procrastinate and hold off buying it until it shows up for free on Free App Hero or somesuch, small devs like Hogrocket need our support!  Ian