What is a PRPG, you ask?  It's a puzzle role playing game.  Square Enix and PopCap Games are having a baby together that is due on November 18.  The baby's name is Gyromancer. Their goal was to bring together the crazy addictive casual games and shake it up with RPG elements. 

Watching the video below makes me think that they may have a winner on their hands.  With beautiful graphics (for this type of game), 12 stages, more than 50 monsters to battle and more, expect Gyromancer to demand a lot of your time. 

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Matrix Games has released the latest update for Close Combat: The Longest Day, and is now available for download. The patch fixes a large number of bugs, and adds data file changes to increase the historical accuracy of equipment performance, etc. To download the patch, just click here, as always. [READ MORE]

The official toolset for the recently released Dragon Age: Origins is finally available for download.

Fans of the game who want to tinker and build new scenarios, items, weapons and characters can now head over to the Dragon Age Social Network website and grab the program that will allow you to fashion your own dark fantasy adventures.

Along with the ability to create your own content, the toolset also offers interested designers the ability to "look under the hood" of the game to figure out how the game pulled off some of its more interesting scripted moments. The tools also include everyone's favorite machinima in the making feature - a cutscene editor!

A fair warning, these tools are not your typical click and play scripting tools, so the learning curve may be a bit high.

Digital distribution is widely hailed as the future of gaming and while it's been relatively smooth sailing for a while the system hit a few major snags on the PC this week.  We've seen bumps in the past with Steam's early days (the Half Life 2 launch wasn't exactly painless for a lot of people) and Games For Windows has been one cluster after another but this is the first time we've seen problems that aren't specific to one service.

The first was all of the hurdles users had to jump through to get Dragon Age:Origins working correctly.  Of course a lot of these issues were created because each entity along the way had their own pass mechanism which needed to be navigated to get the game working correctly.  This is one of those nasty things that will eventually go away as companies figure out how to get their services working together better.

The second big bump was Impulse, Direct2Drive, and Gamersgate refusing to sell Call of Duty:Modern Warfare 2 on their services because it includes a mandatory install of Steam for things like DRM and saved game management. This grants Steam a de facto monopoly on selling Modern Warfare 2 digitally on the PC.  This will be a bit trickier to navigate as Valve has so tightly woven their Steamworks tools set with their online service and there's no way anyone is going to help their competitor sell more of their product.  I don't see this really hurting sales of the game that much but it has to be a bit scary for those who don't want Steam to have a monopoly on the digital distribution market and will further the calls for Valve to start decoupling their various components.

It's not unexpected to see these kind of problems as a technology matures but it is a somewhat painful reminder that we are still in the early days of this new distribution mechanism.  These won't be the last bumps we have but they do represent a small inflection point in the system.

What do you think?  Are these big issues for you or should we just got ahead and welcome our new Steam overlords?  Let us know in the comments.

• No dedicated servers for Rage either
• Experience Nintendo Tour: The Legend of Zelda Spirit Tracks
• Valcon Games gives the DS a keyboard [musical that is-ed.]
• Deal or No Deal invades your SMS plan
• Another win for the US with previously Japan exclusive Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey
• Play Spore on Facebook
• Get fancy with Mass Effect 2 Collectors’ Edition and check out the new footage
• Try cleverness next week with Encleverment Experiment
• PS3 instant streaming disk for Netflix on the way
• Gran Turismo 5 cost $60 million to make?
• Explore Fragile Dreams coming exclusively to Wii next year
• Psychonauts, Bloodrayne series, and Advent Rising now available on GOG
• PS3 owners will be able to try the multiplayer of Battlefield: Bad Company 2 on November 19
• Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 gets a launch trailer, shows space level?
• Do some unreal development with UDK3
• Five new characters and other goodies coming to Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 2
• Low level dungeon available for purchase in Dungeons and Dragons Online Store

Hey, we knew there were going to be patches so here's the first one for Dragon Age: Origins on the PC. This is via Steam so if you got it through that then it will auto-update. 

Updates to Dragon Age - Origins have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The major changes include:

Dragon Age - Origins

• Fixed potential corruption of character statistics
• Fixed portrait appearance sliders when importing a character from the downloadable Character Creator
• Fixed import for preset face settings from the downloadable Character Creator
• Made Easy difficulty easier
• Slightly increased attack, defense, and damage scores for all party members at Normal difficulty
• Fixed video issues when running on a very wide screen display, including ATI Eyefinity displays

As if Facebook needed another way to slowly suck away your precious life hours.

Now it's got Spore Islands, from EA/Maxis. Facebook users can experience the series in a new way by competing against each other in a survival of the fittest.

“In Spore Islands, players get to invite friends in their social web to play on their island, so creating this game exclusively for Facebook was a natural choice for us since they are the largest and most popular social platform for games,” stated Caryl Shaw, Senior Producer of Spore Islands. “What sets Spore Islands apart from other social games is that it offers a different kind of social interactivity where a player’s gameplay experience is directly affected by the choices and decisions their friends make. It’s an ongoing game, so player’s [sic] creatures and islands will be active at all times, whether the player is logged into Facebook or not.”
 
"Games are one of the most popular activities on Facebook, with more than 100 million unique active users in the top 10 games alone. We are excited to see Spore Islands as one of the latest games on Facebook for our 300 million users to connect, share and play with friends,” said Facebook Platform Manager Gareth Davis.
 

Users will be able to choose their own islands and create creatures to live on them and evolve.  Inviting friends to your island as well as sending your creatures to your friends' islands will help you dominate the most islands possible. You'll be able to earn and purchase DNA points that can be used to modify creature stats and appearances, with accessories like hats, animations, holiday-themed items, and more. Track your progress on both Global and Friends-only leaderboards.

I don't yet have the self-discipline to rejoin Facebook, but this is tempting.

If you need a Tim Schafer fix and don't want to deal with the RTS elements of Brutal Legend then head over to GoG.com as they've got Psychonauts wrapped up in a nice DRM free bow for you for the low price of $9.99.

Also available today isAdvent Rising ($9.99)  with Bloodrayne and Bloodrayne 2 soon to follow.  Don't let the horrible movie lull you into thinking these are terrible games though as they aren't nearly as bad as the movie. [READ MORE]

Here's the launch trailer for Modern Warfare 2 that shows off more good looking footage from the game including what looks to be a level set in space (skip to the 1:00 mark to see what I'm talking about).  It's a short bit but does seem to have kind of a weird Moonraker aesthetic to it (that's not a compliment).


I'm still torn on the game as the game defines the word hubris and I still think there's a lot of damage the game could do to the market.  We'll see when the game hits next week.

Recommended for players level 3-5 the Shan-to-Kor expansion is now available for purchase in the Dungeons and Dragons Online: Eberon Unlimited store. The expansion contains 4 "hand crafted" dungeons, a new combat arena, and two additional optional quests. Also announced was a new server named Orion which should help to even out the crowded servers that have swelled since DDOb became free-to-play. Check out the trailer for the new expansion below. It looks like it beats the heck out of killing rats in the basement to me.

If you own Darkest of Days on the PC and have been itching for the chance to create your own content, this is your day. I might even go so far as to call it your darkest of days. Modders, whip out your typing and clicking fingers because you’ll be exposed to Habitat, the level editing software used by 8monkey on Darkest of Days. You can create your own levels, and even make some graphical mods as the update will also expose you to shader code.

Another intriguing update is the ability to revisit levels and missions wielding a weapon set of your heart’s desire. Phantom EFX calls this update to their gameplay “Instant Action” and is available for download on their site. [READ MORE]

And here's another bad thing coming out of the whole no dedicated server setup that Infinity Ward's got. A chat on a Best Buy forum with a developer and an artist from Infinity Ward let loose that the maximum number of players for a multiplayer game on the PC is 18. Yes, the first Modern Warfare had 32 player support as most PC games in that genre do these days but Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is stuck at 18.

Let me say that this really does feel like a step back for the series. One of the things I really enjoy when playing online on a PC is the fact that I can have a large group of people playing. Now some folks might think that it's not that big of a deal to go from 32 to 18 but for me it does feel like a let down. Infinity Ward said they wanted to do it for balancing reasons but I have a feeling that a big reason is also since one person has to be a listen server, the limited bandwidth in most residential connections went into this decision.

We see folks like DICE delaying Battlefield 1943 a bit to craft a better PC version and to up the player limit on the PC from 16 to 32 players yet Infinity Ward's going the opposite direction. My excitement for the game becomes less and less with each passing day though and for me it's disheartening to see how the company and series has changed. Maybe I'll get it in and forget all the things they changed. I certainly hope so but I am guessing a part of me is going to have these little thoughts in the back of my head when playing on what it's become on the PC side and what it could have been.

Thanks 1Up.

Nexon has announced their famous free-to-play first-person shooter Combat Arms has officially hit the 1.5 BILLION kill mark by its players. But that's not by gunfire, but by explosives. Since it's release in 2008, Combat Arms has served over 1.5 billion explosive kills. I absolutely love the way CA producer Graham Kays put it: “Sometimes, it’s the perfect throw, other times it is magnificent timing and for some of us, it’s just dumb luck. Regardless, fragging with grenades is always a good time.” I've gotta tell you, for me, I don't know what I get more, good timing, or just dumb luck. But anyway, congratulations Combat Arms, and may your 1.5 explosive kills grow evermore. [READ MORE]