Whet Your Appetite with ME2 Videos

We’re less than four weeks from the release of Mass Effect 2, and I know that several O514 regulars – myself, Dak, PH and Rusty – are looking forward to January 26th. How to pass the time? By watching neat videos: Here’s the trailer, featuring Illusive Man, Miranda, Grunt, Thane and Commander Shepherd: And here’s [...]

Dead Space Review

  I dislike having nothing new and exciting to play. We seem to be in the middle of a bit of a slump in terms of exciting new 360 content, particularly if – like me – your living arrangements prohibit getting onto Xbox Live.  The lack of anything highly anticipated has caused me to skew [...]

Metal+Games = Guitar Hero: Metallica, Brutal Legend

It seems that Guitar Hero: Metallica is coming together and should be ready for release in Q1 2009. According to Internet rumours and Game Informer magazine, the expansion pack is nearing completion. GI‘s preview stated that GH:M will feature 45 songs, including 28 by the headline band. Assuming this expansion follows the model set by Guitar Hero: Aerosmith, players can expect the [...]

Mirror mirror, on the wall…

… who will catch you if you fall?

Inside EA

I’ve just talked with the PR Manager for EA Games, Johnathan Goddard. (He was in my office for a presentation and I nabbed him after.) Remember that cheeky reference to the Pirate Bay in that trailer? I was wondering about that, so I asked him how much piracy affected the movement towards free-to-play. “Massively,” he [...]

Battlefield Heroes: Trailer, Evil?

There’s a trailer, folks: The trailer is a bit lame, if you ask me, but it does explain the game concept fairly well. I laughed at the reference to these guys. And there’s an article in Gamasutra where the designer talks all about it. Turns out there’s more to it than just buying customizable character [...]

EA Microtransactions display worrying signs of Evil

We’ve posted about microtransactions before on Objective 514. That post spawned quite a bit of discussion. Most of you seemed cool with paying for stuff – snazzy hats, for instance – as long as the stuff you bought didn’t actually affect game performance. Well, guess what – the barely-established taboo has already been broken. By [...]

Hold X to Purchase Snazzy Hat

Electronic Arts is planning to make the newest game in its Battlefield franchise available for download free of charge. So how will the game be paid for? Through in-game advertisements and micro-payments. The advertisments will appear between game levels on loading screens, but not during the actual gameplay. Joystiq quotes Ben Cousins, senoir producer at Heroes creator Digital Illusions [...]

EA: Creativity in Games at Risk

  Electronic Arts CEO John Riccitiello told the DICE Summit that increasing development costs, growing teams and industry consolidation pose a threat to creativity in the industry by dulling the creative voices of developers.  However Riccitiello feels that this problem can be countered by adopting “quasi-autonomous label models” like the one pioneered by Take 2 Games. EA [...]

BioWare should fight its own battles: Level Up

Level Up recently interviewed BioWare co-founder and CEO Greg Muzyka and asked why the developer didn’t step up to defend it’s new title, Mass Effect, when it became the target of wildly inaccurate allegations. Spike TV’s Geoff Keighley did his best to defend the title on TV, and EA (which owns BioWare) demanded a retraction, but [...]