Coming Soon - PC Games of 2009
With the E3 expo less than a week away, many upcoming games scheduled to arrive in 2009 on the PC have already been announced. To prepare for the pile of E3-related announcements, here is a look at what is already known. A peek at the PC games of the future, all the way to the end of 2009 (and beyond!) Summer Releases The biggest PC title of this summer is... The Sims 3! No, really. First up are the summer releases - games that are done or almost done by now and will be seen in stores in June or July. The obvious big PC title of the summer is, like it or not, The Sims 3. It will sell a bazillion copies and most of those are not going to be bought by people like me or most of you who are reading this. Instead, bulk of the copies are going to be snatched up by the "MSN Messenger generation". They are teenagers and often girls - oh, the humanity! What is known so far is that The Sims 3 is a very polished evolution of The Sims 2 with numerous features from previous expansion packs rolled into the base game. The "game" will also expand from being based in a single virtual dollhouse into a seamless town-wide collection of virtual dollhouses where all the inhabitants live and do their own thing at the same time as you fiddle around with your Sim and his house. EA continues the trend you saw in Spore and there will be many online features, including the obvious microtransaction-based online store for additional items and the ability to edit your Sims-videos online and then link or embed them. Alternatively you can just upload them to YouTube or Facebook. Funnily the online movie tool comes with a built-in library of music (and prevents you from using your own) to avoid such nagging issues like complaints from the RIAA. EA is obviously thinking about everything! Assuming you don't care about The Sims 3 (huh, how can that be?), then the summer looks pretty dry for the PC. There is Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood, which acts as a prequel to the first Call of Juarez. Like so many other games these days, this time it is a multiplatform title as well and personally I'm not expecting too much from it - canned storyline-led action through mostly linear levels. I guess we'll find out soon enough. Then there is Blood Bowl which tries to be a faithful digital version of the venerable Games Workshop board game, complete with both turn-based and real time game modes. Developed by Cyanide Studios and originally scheduled for Q2 2009, the release date for the game seems to be in limbo. The closed beta ended last month and advertising campaigns seems to be building up with no official word when the game would hit the stores. One possibility is that the PC version will be initially available only as digital download, with the box version pushed to autumn.
The rest of the PC release list for July is full of PC versions of multiplatform games like FUEL, Prototype, Ghostbusters: The Video Game (at least in the US) and Overlord 2. The rest of the list is rounded up by a pile of licensed movie-based trash like Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. The only other potentially notable PC game in June is Street Fighter IV - it will be interesting to see how it turns out on the PC. As Cryptic's next MMO, Champions Online was pushed to August and rumors are making rounds that it may turn out be just a consolified version of City of Heroes, July is almost entirely devoid of game releases. We should see Wolfenstein from Raven Software, based on a heavily modified version of the Doom 3 engine and with a multiplayer is developed separately by Endrant Studios and supposedly built on top of code used for Enemy Territory: Quake Wars multiplayer. One thing is sure, once again there will be a lot of dead Nazis.
To complete the list of MMO delays of this summer, Jumpgate Evolution was also pushed to an undetermined future date for additional tweaks and polish, the only other notable summer release is the PC version of the new Bionic Commando and even that isn't exactly confirmed yet - it could be pushed into autumn.
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