As we reported yesterday, EA boss John Schappert has promised something “far-reaching from Mass Effect” early next year.

It’s no secret that BioWare have set out Mass Effect as a trilogy, and this quick turn-around would corroborate the studio’s promise to that end.

 

The release of the hugely anticipated BioShock 2 is upon us, so Gameplanet and 2K Games have teamed up to give away awesome BioShock 2 merchandise, plus copies of the game, to six lucky winners!

Each prize pack will include the game, as well as:

• Rapture Failed T-Shirt
• Plasmid Badges and BioShock 2 Keyring
• BioShock 2 Artbook
• BioShock 2 Soundtrack CD

We have two packs for each of the three platforms (Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC).

 

Fable III lead Peter Molyneux has said that he’ll be revealing many details regarding Fable III at this week’s X10 event in San Francisco and that we should be prepared to be “really upset.”

"We're making some announcements about Fable III and there's some... Wow, there's some very, very big things happening in Fable. Bigger than you think. And it's going to really upset people," he told Gamereactor (via Eurogamer and VG247).

 

PC Gamer magazine has taken an exclusive look into Obsidian’s Fallout 3 sequel, titled New Vegas, and has returned with some fresh details.

Players assume the role not of a vault dweller, but instead a courier who is dug up by a robot in the Mojave Desert. (Presumably that’s your hand we see in the game’s teaser trailer.) You are nursed back to health by a doctor was a former vault dweller, however, and it’s he who provides you with a Pip-Boy.

 

Sequels are very difficult things. Whenever we hear the word, all of us can conjure images of those watered down elaborations, of those franchises that have seen some modicum of success only to be redrafted, reheated and reserved to us like last night’s casserole. We sceptically poke it about the plate, looking for some of the original’s flavour and novelty, before daring to take a mouthful only to get burnt.

And why should BioShock 2 be any different? 2K has fewer cards in their hand now. The mystery must surely be diminished: We know the failed social experiment that is Rapture – some of us now know it better than we know Christchurch – we know what a splicer is, we know what Little Sister does.

And the problem will be exacerbated by how fondly we recall the original. BioShock was rightly acclaimed. It is one of the definitive titles of this console generation – a much-loved copy still lingers on our office’s coffee table, partly obscured by a raft of new releases, but still calling to us like the deep and mournful drones of a Big Daddy somewhere down a long and dark passageway.

 

BioWare has said that Mass Effect 2’s small-text issue on standard definition televisions cannot be addressed through an update to the game and have promised to try and address the issue in future releases in the Mass Effect series.

Posting on the game’s official forum, BioWare’s Michael Gamble writes, "After investigating potential solutions, we have determined that while this issue does affect a small portion of SDTV owners, we are unable to resolve it for Mass Effect 2 through a title update.

 

Rebellion has apologised to players of Aliens vs. Predator’s new multiplayer demo over the weekend, which suffered from matchmaking issues.

While the 360 demo was unaffected, the PC version, running via Steam, saw users having issues joining games until a Steam patch was released.

 

Gameplanet is by no means an ivory tower occupied by tweed-coated academics, prone to choking on their figs and prosciutto upon learning of the debasement of a prized cultural heirloom, but it must be said that we picked up Dante’s Inferno with some trepidation.

After all, Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy is a poem of particular significance to Western literary history. It has been admired and disdained – but always treated with a certain kind of respect – for more than seven hundred years.

And it could probably go without saying that the idea of any review is to put aside any preconceived notions of what a game might be like and instead focus on what it delivers. But Visceral Games’ modern adaptation of Dante’s epic poem has had a marketing budget large enough to start rebuilding Port-au-Prince. Unfortunately, the inescapable campaigns that followed have ranged from the ludicrous to the cringe-worthy, from hiring “religious protesters” in a botched publicity stunt to promoting the “molestation” of “booth babes.”