See my Bearly Commentary article for my thoughts on this news.

It took some time to get all three items, but I’ve gone to more trouble to get worse free stuff. It helps that you don’t have to input valid info. Worth it.

This skin is amazing. Opera should really make it an official option when version 10.5 is final.

Good or not, 3D Sonic has never made sense to me, so I haven’t played a new Sonic game since Sonic & Knuckles. I’m ready for this new game to be good; I love 2.5D. I only wish Sega had mentioned a PC version in their announcement.

Best headline of the week. Also, California is coming.

I love Black Box’s developer diaries, especially since they’ve affected a more casual, less scripted tone.

I found this amusing at first, but Joystiq had a follow-up interview with Greg Zeschuk who revealed not all DLC will be restricted to the Cerberus Network. Anything that’s non-free will be sold through the Xbox Marketplace. For a moment I thought someone had finally taken a serious stab at GameStop, but it now seems to be a minor poke at best.

Also, Joystiq missed a headline opportunity: Cerberus Network’s Bark Worse Than Its Bite.

Not only is the game’s premise appealing, but it looks as though spells are cast using mouse gestures, as in Black & White.

All right; done.

It really does look rough. See as Ryan Davis struggles with the controls in Giant Bomb’s Quick Look:

Ben offers some advice that I can agree with: vote with your dollar, and don’t be a hypocrite. I also agree that piracy is not a valid way to protest. But it’s not enough for gamers alone to take a more effective stance against game makers, and joining an advocacy group won’t solve anything. To really spur change, the press needs to come around as well, as Ben has attempted to here.

I rather liked that Torchlight didn’t have skill trees. It made me a lot less stressed out about picking skills during the early levels.

Were it not for this news, I would have bought Resident Evil 5 during Impulse’s Thanksgiving sale. I’m thankful for Shacknews for saving me money.

Adding Tropico 3 only a month after its release is a quick turnaround for GameTap. More publishers should follow Kalypso’s lead.

It’s good that not everyone at Pandemic lost their job last week, and that their projects will continue at EALA. It’s also good to see that some of those who did lose their jobs have been able to find closure.

Good luck, guys. I mean it; I grew up using third-party memory cards in my consoles. They’re cheaper, they work just as well, and they come in wacky colors and capacities.

So cool:

I don’t understand how EA can shut down a studio mere weeks before they ship a game. The Saboteur looks interesting, but its release is irreparably tainted by this news.

Hooray for that.

Stardock estimates that Impulse has 10% marketshare against Steam’s 70%, while Direct 2 Drive, GamersGate, and other services split the remaining 20%. 10% for Impulse feels generous, but assuming it’s accurate, I wonder how their marketshare will be fairing now that the Steam-exclusive Modern Warfare 2 has shipped. With MW2, Counter-Strike, Left 4 Dead, Team Fortress, and Day of Defeat, Valve controls most of the PC’s multiplayer FPS market. Consider supporting the competition, people.

Speak of the devil…

…and his pal Judas.

Such as first-party dedicated servers?

I’ve spent over 50 hours playing Dragon Age, and frankly, I can’t wait to throw more money at more content.

This sounded really cool until I read that one of the cases from the DS version will be excluded. What gives?

I feel silly for discussing box art, but people have been pretty down on this new Mass Effect 2 cover. Although they still have a planet/moon in the background that seems inappropriately close, I prefer this new cover to the old one. It reminds me of the covers of cheesy Sci-Fi paperbacks — in a good way.

I’m not ashamed to say that I enjoyed Kane & Lynch. They’re on the right track with the movie by casting Bruce Willis as Kane, and I’m digging the style they’re establishing for Kane & Lynch 2 with these teasers.

Although the main quest was a load of fun, the most fun I had was with the optional content. Messing up raider camps, spelunking in irradiated animal dens, and meeting wasteland eccentrics are great pastimes. Moira’s Wasteland Survival Guide quest alone took me a few days to complete because I kept getting sidetracked. My favorite bit of side content, though, is Dogmeat. If you follow me on Twitter, you may be aware that my dog of six years, Saya, died over the summer. This happened not long after I started playing Fallout 3, and just a few days before I found Dogmeat; I’d completely forgotten he was hiding somewhere in the game. Entering a random junkyard and seeing him run up to me so suddenly was, to say the least, difficult to deal with. Matters were made worse when I realized that Dogmeat can die. This was unacceptable. I turned to the mod community to see if there was anything I could get to protect my dog, and what I found at Planet Fallout was a mod called Dogmeat Leather Armor. Besides giving him a custom leather armor graphic, this mod flags Dogmeat as an essential NPC so that if he runs out of health in combat, he doesn’t die, he merely falls unconscious until the danger is gone. It’s technically a cheat mod, but not much of one. I feel no shame about it either way; it’s better than sending him back to Vault 101.

As I said, I haven’t touched any of the five add-ons, so I may not be out of things to say about Fallout 3 just yet, but there you have it. I’ll leave you with a video of The Nuka-Cola Tour that I recorded a few weeks ago in Girdershade.

Publishers, when they even make a PC version of their game, don’t treat it as well as they do the console versions. Development of the PC version of multi-platform games is often outsourced to a third party, and the quality of the product suffers as a result. But it isn’t always a problem of outsourcing; sometimes developers are simply told to focus their foremost efforts on the console versions. Marketing of the PC version also takes a hit; it is not uncommon for the PC version of a game to be released weeks to months after the console versions. Rarely will the PC version even be mentioned in magazine and comic book ads, much less television adverts; it will just be tossed out and left up to word of mouth and the virtually non-existent retail spaces to sell it to people.

Microsoft doesn’t help matters, either. You wouldn’t know it by watching their E3 press conferences, but they’re the same company that makes Windows, the largest PC game platform there is. Why don’t they let people know? Splinter Cell: Conviction made a splash this year at E3 2009, but on the big stage it was touted as an “Xbox 360 exclusive” to the press and to retailers; it was not until after the press conference that it was learned the game would be coming to PC as well.

Another effect of publishers’ mistreatment of PC games is apparent in the way the games press covers them. Like it or not, much of what the most popular sources for game news, reviews, previews and other information chooses to cover and care about is largely driven by marketing. Members of the games press have said as much; if a game doesn’t have marketing behind it, they will not bother reviewing it, if they even know about it to begin with. As a result, games press has become increasingly console-focused. Only the most high profile PC games news is reported on, and even then, there’s rarely any editorial input as there is in posts about console games. Follow-ups are scarce. The press just does not care as much. Unless it’s an outlet that precludes console game coverage, of course, but they are few, and they are small. Being virtually unheard, they are not in a position to serve as consumer advocates as bigger sites can be.

Publishers need to be taken to task by the press for things like staggering the PC versions of their games, for not optimizing properly, not marketing them properly and for not making certain features and DLC available that are present in the console versions. Some examples of games that have had these issues in recent years include:

• Saints Row 2 – staggered release, poor optimization, no DLC.
• Grand Theft Auto IV – staggered release, poor optimization, no DLC.
• Ghostbusters – no multiplayer.
• Tomb Raider: Underworld – no DLC, needed for true ending.
• Prince of Persia – no DLC, needed for true ending.
• Mass Effect – staggered release.
• Dead Space – staggered release.
• Mirror’s Edge – staggered release.
• Assassin’s Creed – staggered release.
• Bionic Commando – staggered release.
• Red Faction: Guerilla – staggered release.
• Street Fighter IV – staggered release.
• The Last Remnant – staggered release.
• Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X. – no DLC.

Granted, in certain cases, a staggered release for PC games means a more polished game with a few extra features or some extra content; this was the case with games such as Assassin’s Creed and Mass effect, but they are the exception, not the rule. And in the case of Mass Effect, I would expect that a developer create a user interface that is appropriate for the platform the game is on, though I still appreciate it. The point is that there would be a much bigger stink made about the issues surrounding the games listed above if the affected version had been the Xbox 360’s or Playstation 3’s.

I won’t purport to have all the answers to these problems, but I have an idea. Above all else: care. If you’re a gamer, whether you play PC games or not, if you care about video games at all, care about what happens to the PC platform. Care about how the games are treated, how they’re marketed, how they’re supported and how they’re covered. If you’re a publisher, care about your game and make it right, or don’t make it at all. Your poorly optimized, poorly marketed and under-supported game reflects negatively on the platform. If you’re press, care about the state of PC games. You’re opinion leaders; if you care, gamers will care. If gamers care, that will force publishers to care, and we’ll all be better off for it.