Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Well? Would you? (Expanded below.)
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There’s new Dragon Age DLC on the way. Which so far hasn’t really been much of a cause for celebration, but this one, Darkspawn Chronicles, sounds interesting. Very interesting. It’s an alternative history, where your character is killed during the Grey Warden’s Joining ceremony. This leaves the lovely Alistair in charge of the elite group, but oh no, you don’t play as him. You play as a darkspawn.

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See this axe? Yes, the imaginary one I’m holding, made from laserbeams and impossible fury. Well, I’m going to grind it.

I quite like Transformers. Ergo, I am quite looking forward to Transformers: War For Cybertron. One of the Transformers I most quite like is Shockwave. Shockwave is a playable character in War For Cybertron – but only if the game is pre-ordered from Gamestop. Or, if you’re all goody two-shoes and want famed Autobot Jazz, you can only play as him if you pre-order the game from Best Buy. There’s also Demolisher if you get it from Amazon, but whatever.

Basically: aaaaaaaargh. Angrytank, roll out.
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The next content patch for zero-G pew-pew game Shattered Horizon should arrive next week (May 5th). It’s called “Firepower” because it focuses on expanding the range of weapons available to the killer astronauts. The armaments in question should gradually appear on this page.

Trailer below. It’s a bit space-porny, and dudes get shot.
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This should be one long piece, but I’ve been distracted by going to France and arguing with Kieron about routing in fascinating but incredibly complicated boardgames. Figured I should deal with the spoileriffic stuff while it’s fresh, though. Conclusion tomorrow, chums.

The Passing: the long-awaited conflluence between Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2. There’s only one way to describe it.

Uh-oh.
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Free L4D2 expansion The Passing is out right now on Steam. Free for you guys, anyway. Xbox 360 gamers actually have to shell out 145,500 Microsoft Points for it (about £5), probably because they smell. Exciting new features include a new uncommon ‘Fallen Survivor’ infected and a brand new three level campaign featuring the survivors from the original Left 4 Dead. Less exciting new features include a new gun, footlockers, and an achievement for decapitating 15 zombies with the new golf club melee weapon.

Weird new features include the new Mutations gameplay mode, which will offer a different new game mode every week. This week it’s Realism Versus, which offers (wait for it) Versus mode, with the punishing twists of Realism mode enabled. Next week it’ll be something entirely different. Fabulous! Lucky we’ve got the mod community to provide fan-made replacements when good Mutations vanish after their week in the spotlight. Unlike 360 owners.

Poor 360 owners. Poor smelly, smelly 360 owners.

BioWare do seem to be having trouble keeping a leash on their DLC. The 6th April was supposed to be the day we were given a new character to join our team in Mass Effect 2, Kasumi Goto. The Kasumi DLC is out now! The tech-specialist enigmatic thief can be seen in her trailer below.

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Creative Assembly seem pretty determined to court back all the guys who got a bit antsy with them about the state Empire was released in. Napoleon scrubbed up well, which seems to have upped the good will quotient, and now as an extra thank-you-please-thank-you, they’ve chucked out a free DLC pack for it.
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Fashionably late again… We managed to miss posting about this when the scandal hit last week, in one of those “oh, one of the others will surely cover it. Today I want to write about a happy thing!” confusions that sometimes afflicts the oft-scattered hivemind. It’s a major talking point, however, so you really should talk about it here. Y’know that Bioshock 2 DLC, the one with the new maps and characters and whatnot in? Apparently it was a whopping great 24 kilobyes big. Goodness, aren’t level designers economical these days?

Edit – I’m informed I’m wrong in believing the DLC in question contains maps. The 24k file unlocks character models, masks and achievements/trials to reflect the raised level cap you can pay for. The idea being that the people without the DLC can see the visual stuff that people who have bought the DLC have unlocked, without having to install a patch. I’ll leave it to you to decide if that’s any better.
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That was supposed to sound like a nice little rhyme. Alas, it just comes across as a really boring, proasic headline – they should have sent a poet. Anyway, the point is that the promised widescreen patch for Bioshock 2 is due tomorrow (at 2AM PST), and will address the returning BS1 oversight/disagreement/confusion that the field of view remained at 4:3 settings even when played in 16:10. Just writing that turns my brain to mush, as it makes me feel as though I’ve been stuck in a temporal loop since 2007, forcing me to continually write something about Bioshock and field of view into a Wordpress page again and again. It’s good news for people with nice monitors, however – and as well as that there’s both a larger patch and some DLC in the offing.
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