The Round-up: Valve give away free shit, Karma catches up with Team Bondi.

It's a few days later than expected but non the less here's the weekly edition of the Round-up for all you gamers out there.

Don't you just love getting things for free? I know i do, which is why Valve continue to be in my good books after they released the third volume of "Music To Test By" the official soundtrack for their smash hit game Portal 2. Along with a free download of all three volumes, the official site also has promotional videos, posters and ringtones available for fans of the game. You can follow this link to the free goodness that our masters at Valve have provided for us, just click on the Download link at the top of the Portal 2 home page...



While on the subject of Valve's portal based puzzle game the new DLC pack entitled "Peer Review" featuring a new test track and everyone's favourite homicidal AI, GLaDOS, is now available on PSN, XBL and Steam for free. Once again Valve show that they know how to keep the fans happy. And if by any chance you haven't picked the game up yet i have more happy news for you, as Valve have made Portal 2 available on Steam for half price, get them while they're hot!



Any gamer who wants more graphically impressive games on Facebook or Google + may have lucked out after Epic and Adobe announced at the ADOBE MAX conference that Unreal Engine 3 will support Flash Player 11, even going as far as to demonstrate a version of Unreal Tournament 3 running on flash. impressive, but it's still not going to get me playing Mafia Wars...



Regular readers of this Blog may recall i had a go on Resident Evil: Revelations a while ago, and while i wasn't all that happy with the controls it was a graphically impressive title that showed just what 3DS is capable of. Obviously that build was some way from complete since Capcom recently announced that North America will see the game released on February 7th, that's still a way off so hopefully the controls can be tweaked between now and then.



From one Zombie game to another now, as it was announced by SEGA that Yakuza: Of the End will be seeing a release in the West under the new name Yakuza: Dead Souls. Gamers familiar with the Yakuza series will see a different side to the franchise in this instalment as they try to survive the Zombie hoard rather than beating up rival gangsters. It's an interesting spin on the standard Yakuza stories of the past so here's hoping it does well.

Ah the dead...that reminds me.


Team Bondi are officially no more after documents were filed with the Australian Securities and Investments Commission and the company entered administration. Production company Kennedy Miller Mitchell has reportedly bought the studios assets, but fear not LA Noire fans, Take-Two still hold some rights to the game that should have heralded a bright future for the now defunct Australian developer, and given the number of copies it sold will be giving a sequel the green light at some point.

Seven years huh? way to fuck it up Mr McNamara...



It is a truth, universally recognised, that code based validation of video games is a stinking turd of an idea that leaves little good will between gamers and games makers. There's no arguing that developers need to protect their investment, and that the people that spend hundreds of hours honing the games that we play deserve recompense for all the hard work and effort they put into the game, but Sony's Online Pass and EA's Project $10 as i have heard it referred to by some people are the worst way to do it.

Why am i writing about this? Well it turns out that Resistance 3 was only the first game in Sony's first party catalogue that will have an Online Pass included with it. Uncharted 3 will also include one of these wonderful little codes which SCEE/SCEA claimed to be "an important initiative as it allows us to accelerate our commitment to enhancing premium online services across our first party game portfolio."

Bull shit.

Sony's online infrastructure is, has been and will be for some time yet, a pile of Crap. Just admit to what this really is, a way of making more money from people that buy their games second hand because new ones are too expensive. I'll get back to that particular point later on... The implication here is that any first party game with online functions from now on will have a code included with it.

Gentlemen, start your keyboards.



Microsoft's Major Nelson has released a list of Xbox 360's TV partners, essentially listing which TV channels we can expect to have access to when the Fall update hits "This Holiday 2011" with regard to the release date, vague doesn't really cover it does it?

Click here to see the full list for your region.




Last but not least here's the new UK Top 10 best sellers on all platforms

1. FIFA 12
2. Gears of War 3
3. F1 2011
4. Zumba Fitness
5. Dead Island
6. Deus Ex: Human Revolution
7. Ico & Shadow of the Colossus Collection
8. Driver: San Francisco
9. Lego Pirates of the Caribbean
10. Call of Duty: Black Ops

People of the UK, you disgust me. How on earth are you still buying Zumba Fitness!?

On the other hand the rest of the top ten looks rather respectable, FIFA 12 is somewhat inevitably at number 1, more on that in a moment, while GoW3 and F1 2011 round out the top 3. Driver is still hanging around the top ten dropping two places from 6 to 8 and it's great to see the Team Ico Collection getting some love. The continued sales of Lego Pirates of the Caribbean are confusing while it was no surprise that with CoD and Battlefield around the corner CoD:Black Ops has seen a rise in sales.

So FIFA 12 is number 1? It didn't exactly take a crystal ball to figure that one out, but the rate at which it's sold is startling. On the list of all time début weeks It's third behind CoD: BlOps and Modern Warfare 2, beating GTA4 down into fourth. Given that last year EA claimed that FIFA 11 was their fastest seller ever it seems clear that FIFA 12 will not only dwarf that record but most likely it's on target to become the quickest selling sports game of all time. EA estimates put week 1 sales of FIFA 12 at some 3.2 million copies meaning that it's up on last years release at the same point by roughly 20-25%

As i said, Startling.

Even more surprising though is the fact that in almost every shop that sells the game it's retail price is £42.99. Now I'm no cheapskate, but it seams to be a cynical move on either EA's part or on the part of the retailers. Knowing that the game would sell out on day one, they put prices up by an extra £3 on the normal retail price for a current generation game, which for the longest time has stood at £39.99. HMV actually made a big deal of the fact that they were selling the game at £39.99, the price the game should have been to start with.

This isn't the first time that the Market has been manipulated by EA and the retailers though. Back in 2010 during the world cup in South Africa you couldn't find a copy of FIFA 10, used or new, in any store. Instead you could only buy FIFA World Cup 2010, the same game as FIFA 10 but with World Cup branding etc. I'm sick of being treated like cattle by these big companies, but unfortunately the majority just go along with it.

I've tried the Demo for FIFA 12 and I'm not buying, admittedly I'm a bit of a PES fan boy, but this year EA have taken defending and turned it into an impossible challenge, aiming more at people who can already play the previous instalments of the game rather than trying to be inclusionary to the rest of us. The rest of the game is fine, but they made learning the game too hard for me to jump ship, plus PES is easy as hell to patch with real Kits, and that's really the only thing FIFA has over Konami's game most years, in my book anyway...