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'Operation Exorcist' is this weekend's Mass Effect 3 multiplayer event
Listen up soldiers, the System Alliance Military has a special mission for you this weekend. Top brass is aiming to eradicate 1,000,000 Cerberus Phantoms from the face of the galaxy between 6 p.m. Pacific on Friday, April 27 and 5 a.m. Pacific on Monday, April 30. While attempting to surmount this incredible feat, your unit will also be tasked with surviving until extraction from any map set to Gold Difficulty.Upon successful completion of your squad's personal mission, each of you will be awarded a Commendation Pack for your service to your galaxy. Should the Alliance's overall goal be reached, every member of the System Alliance Military will be granted a Victory Pack. Now suit up, we've got a long weekend ahead of us.Oh, except for you, PS3 Division. We still need you guys on KP duty, so this mission only applies to Xbox Squadron and the PC Armada.
Mass Effect 3 half-off on Amazon today, gaming lightning deals
Amazon has a few gaming deals going on today, but the highlight is Mass Effect 3 for $30, 50 percent off the regular price. The offer is available on the PC, Xbox 360 and PS3 standard editions of the game. Feel free to put that other $30 aside to buy a better ending when the time comes.Amazon is also holding lightning deals today on a variety of gaming hardware and software. The crew at Thrifty Nerd has taken a crack at deducing the devilish clues of what will be discounted. The lightning deals will begin at 9AM Pacific, Noon JST (Joystiq Standard Time).
Sony working to bring Mass Effect 3 multiplayer events to PS3
Previously exclusive to the Xbox 360 and PC, BioWare's weekend promotions for Mass Effect 3 multiplayer could be coming to PS3. Sony, EA and BioWare are currently working toward a resolution."We are currently working together with EA and BioWare on an implementation to bring Mass Effect 3 multiplayer weekends to PS3," a Sony spokesperson told Shacknews. When the free Resurgence Pack DLC launched last week, BioWare held a weekend promotion, but said arrangements to bring it to PS3 had not been completed with Sony. It sounds like that may change soon enough, though exactly how the PS3 will make up for its lost promotions isn't known.
EA games return to GAME
Mass Effect 3, along with other EA titles, are now being stocked at UK retailer GAME. This resolves the key moment several months back when EA cut support and the financial troubles of the retailer became very public.As Eurogamer reports, EA's decision with Mass Effect 3 came at the moment when the cracks in GAME's bad news dam couldn't be patched anymore. At the time, it was estimated that GAME would miss out on $3.2 million due to EA's move."We said two weeks ago that our first priority was to help our customers by putting more new releases and products in our stores and on our websites," GAME CEO Martyn Gibbs told Eurogamer. "Today we've launched a fantastic deal on Mass Effect 3, £29.99 in stores and £24.99 online, and The Witcher 2, with an exclusive t-shirt, is launched tomorrow. Pandora's Tower Limited Edition, which was released on our website last week, will arrive in our stores this week. There will also be numerous new hardware and software deals."The company is slowly returning back to normal, having closed 277 stores, cut over 2000 jobs, and sold off some international operations.
Mass Effect 3 down to $40 at Best Buy
Is your Mass Effect 3 Purchase Readiness Rating at $40? Good news: thanks to Best Buy, that's enough for you to be able to complete the operation (by buying the game). The retailer has marked last month's sci-fi epic down to $39.99 on PC, PS3, and Xbox 360.We're wondering now about the wisdom of opening our post about buying Mass Effect 3 with a joke that will basically only make sense to people who have already played it. Oh, well, bookmark this, and you can chuckle after you've started.
FIFA Street fights back to top of UK charts
FIFA Street returned to the top of the charts when sales were tallied in the UK last week, scoring its fourth number-one finish. Chart-Track notes the title has now matched the rank history of the original FIFA Street, which also owned the hard charting streets for four weeks back in 2005.It was a pretty quiet week in the battle for rankings otherwise, with the entirety of the top ten playing musical chairs. Last week's chart-topper, Kinect Star Wars, was not the game more people were looking for, and slipped down to fourth.The only new release last week to break the top 40 was Pandora's Tower from Nintendo, which debuted in spot 38. Check out the UK top ten after the break.
Mass Effect 3 'Resurgence Pack' DLC strategies documented
With the release of Mass Effect 3's Resurgence Pack DLC, and this weekend's subsequent Operation Resurgence multiplayer mission, BioWare has deployed this strategy video showing you how to use your new companions.
NPD: Binary Domain sold 20K in March
Following its launch on February 28, it seems Binary Domain didn't have a very good March. According to data Joystiq received from the NPD, Sega's sci-fi shooter only sold 20,000 copies during the month. Compare that to the 1.3 million physical copies sold of the other big sci-fi game of March, Mass Effect 3.Of course, Binary Domain had a lot going against it. For one, it's called Binary Domain. There was little-to-no marketing, whereas Mass Effect 3 ads were everywhere and everything you bought came with DLC. In the sci-fi wars of March, 2012, Mass Effect 3 emerged victorious.As the last big boxed product from Sega, this disappointing performance likely contributed to Sega's decision to drastically alter its publishing strategy and issue substantial layoffs worldwide at the end of March.
Mass Effect 3 sales in US hit 1.3 million during launch month
Total Mass Effect 3 sales for its launch month of March were 1.3 million units across Xbox 360, PS3 and PC, the NPD informed Joystiq. The number covers purely new physical retail sales, so no digitally distributed product on PC or PS3 is tallied.Although the NPD doesn't publicly share sales breakdowns by platform, Microsoft executive Aaron Greenberg did share that Xbox 360 sales for the space opera were 943K units for the month.Mass Effect 2 had over a half-million sales on Xbox 360 during its debut month, with another quarter million the following month. We've contacted Electronic Arts for further clarification on Mass Effect 3 sales data.Update: "We think the monthly NPD reports are a very poor indicator of the industry's performance given the proportion of digital sales – including digital downloads via Origin, DLC, mobile and social games and much more – that are not captured in their reports," John Reseburg of EA's corporate communications told Joystiq. "Taking these reports as an accurate snapshot of the industry today is a dangerous assumption."
'Retake Mass Effect 3' donations remained largely with Child's Play, 'a handful' requested refunds
When thousands of people took to a Facebook group rallying Mass Effect 3 players to "demand a better ending," their efforts were represented by a "donation protest." The protest raised just over $80,000 in donations to Penny Arcade's "Child's Play" charity, and arguably contributed to BioWare's decision to respond with an upcoming addition to Mass Effect 3: "Extended Cut."Regardless of the group's success, Penny Arcade co-founder Jerry "Tycho" Holkins halted the fundraiser. "Child's Play cannot be a tool to draw attention to a cause. Child's Play must be the Cause," Holkins said of hypothetical future efforts. He also cited Child's Play project manager Jamie Dillion as "buried under mail" from donors who didn't clearly understand exactly what they were giving money to."Apparently some of the people giving to the cause seemed to think that they were paying for a new ending to Mass Effect. She's been asked what the goal is, and how much they need to raise in order to get the ending produced," Holkins wrote. "We've also been contacted by PayPal due to a high number of people asking for their donations back. This is in addition to readers who simply couldn't understand how this was connected to Child's Play's mission. We were dealing with a lot of very confused people, more every day, and that told us we had a problem."That doesn't mean, however, that all of those folks were demanding refunds. "Essentially, there were a handful of people who requested their donation returned, which we did. The large majority of the funds were not returned and will be distributed to the hospitals as normal. If anyone feels that they would like their donation back, we are happy to do so," Dillion told us in a recent email.
Report: Mass Effect 3 face patch causing crashes for some folks
For those of you excited about dusting off the ol' ME1 Shepard and giving those Reapers what for, know that there may be one more hurdle between you and Mass Effect 3's intergalactic glory. Apparently, the patch that fixed the face import bug has broken things elsewhere – specifically, some players are experiencing crashes when connecting to EA's servers.Shepards encountering this issue are encouraged to post about it in this BioWare thread, where development is currently farming user data in order to better understand the problem and find a solution. The good news is that the error appears to be periodic rather than consistent, with some affected players able to connect via persistence and willpower. There are also reports that re-patching can resolve the issue, but for heaven's sake please be careful when deleting ME3's system cache from your Xbox's hard drive. Save files are precious, fragile things.
Mass Effect 3 'Operation Resurgence' weekend event incentivizes Resurgence Pack
If you pick up the Mass Effect 3 "Resurgence Pack" – it's free! – you'll be able to take part in a multiplayer event this weekend. Of course it's called "Operation Resurgence!"Operation Resurgence surges from April 13 at 5PM PST through Monday, April 16 at 5AM PST, on Xbox 360 and PC. All participating players (basically everyone with the DLC) will get 10 percent extra experience when playing on the new maps, and will get a "Reserves Pack" that will unlock one of the random alien classes.Resurgence.
Ghostcrawler talks college, game design, and his path to Blizzard
In a two-part interview with The Baltimore Sun's entertainment blog, Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street (lead systems designer) sits down to talk about his days at McDaniel College, how he got started in the game design business, and what it's like being Ghostcrawler. Of particular interest to those here is that Ghostcrawler says Blizzard is a little paranoid about changing things too much, and that it doesn't want to alienate the old players in favor of the new players. Of course, some change is necessary to keep things fresh, but Ghostcrawler makes good points on how there is a balance. He also weighs in on Mass Effect 3 and all the fun players are having at the end of the game. Ghostcrawler sums up the situation nicely: When you make a two-hour movie, and people like it, but they don't like the ending, they'll say "that was disappointing." But when you make three video games where players have invested 30-plus hours each, and the ending isn't good, they're mortified. That's been an investment in their life that now feel wasted, specifically because of what they did with it really rubbed a lot of players the wrong way. Read the full interview over at The Baltimore Sun.
PSA: Your Shepard rides again, Mass Effect 3 patched
As promised, Mass Effect 3's face import bug has finally been patched. Among other things, the patch fixes a bug that prevented some Shepards from importing properly, specifically those that were previously imported from Mass Effect into Mass Effect 2. While Shepard's choices across the first two games would carry over, face data was lost. No more!Of course, not everyone made good choices when creating their Shepards, but that's another discussion entirely. Decide for yourself in the gallery below.%Gallery-152928%
PSA: Mass Effect 3 'Resurgence Pack' DLC now available
As promised, EA has unleashed some free DLC for Mass Effect 3 today. The Resurgence Pack DLC provides more multiplayer tools for lifeforms looking to improve their galactic readiness level. Resurgence includes two new maps in Hydra and Condor, six new operatives including the rat pack of Asari, Batarian, Krogan and Geth seen above, and a slew of new weapons.The Resurgence Pack is free to all Mass Effect 3 players with a valid online pass code on Xbox 360, PS3 and PC. You can download it on your preferred platform right now.Note: There is a "Resurgence Pack" download on the Xbox Live Marketplace for 320 MS Points. This was uploaded in error, and BioWare is working to remove it. Don't spend money on this!%Gallery-152548%
Seen@PAX East: The Mass Effect crew plays Rock Band
Who knew Dr. Chakwas was such an accomplished guitarist? Or that Mordin had such a pretty singing voice?
Mass Effect 3 patch coming next week to consoles, PC
Shepard will look like his/her old self next week when BioWare flips the switch on the Mass Effect 3 patch, which is expected to resolve many of the most requested problems with the space opera. No, the ending is not one of them.The patch will go live on April 9 for PC and April 10 for Xbox 360 and PS3. The big fix for Mass Effect veterans will be to Shepard's facial features coming from Mass Effect 1 and 2, which should now import properly into the trilogy's conclusion. Several game-crashing bugs and online issues have also been addressed.
Mass Effect 3's 'Resurgence Pack' DLC free on April 10
Mass Effect 3's first bundle of multiplayer DLC, the "Resurgence Pack," is set to hit on April 10 in North America and April 11 in Europe, for the low price of zero dollars. The pack includes two new maps: Hydra, an abandoned Quarian facility converted by humans into a hydroelectric generator, and Condor, an outpost crucial to the defense of the Turian home planet.The pack also includes six new characters, a Batarian Soldier and Sentinel, a Geth Engineer and Infiltrator, a Krogan Battlemaster Vanguard and an Asari Justicar Adept, as well as new weapons, all of which can be seen in the trailer above and gallery below. %Gallery-152548%
Stream a Mass Effect 3 demo through Gaikai
Want to see what this Mass Effect 3 stuff is all about? Do you have a web browser? Gaikai has negotiated exclusive streaming rights to BioWare's latest, and is using those rights to provide a web-based demo.
The MMO Report: Shut up about Mass Effect edition
This week on The MMO Report, Casey tells everyone to stop whining about Mass Effect 3's ending, laments the loss of the "online" part of Warhammer 40K: Dark Millennium Online, touches on the World of Darkness keynote, and outlines The Secret World's preorder plans. He also reveals the identity of one of TERA's key voice actors: Michael Hogan (of Battlestar Galactica fame), who will play Samael in the final game. Finally, he pulls one measly letter from the mailbag and debates which class he represents in TERA. Enjoy the full MMO Report after the cut!
