The Big Round-up

Posted May 31st 2008 12:00PM by Dan O'Halloran
Filed under: Demos, Features, Hands-on, Trailers, Meta BD, World in Conflict: Soviet Assault

	SimCity Societies demo coming June 12 A demo for SimCity Societies has been announced. We'll have it for you here at Big Download on June 12th!
	In-Depth - On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness: Episode One Did you know that in this game you'll get to battle robotic juicing machines that copulate with fruits, men, women and sometimes small animals? Oh, you did. Well fine, but don't say we didn't warn you when their little metal protrusions puncture your tibia.
	World in Conflict: Soviet Assault First Wave trailer Publisher Sierra Entertainment has released a new trailer for the upcoming World in Conflict: Soviet Assault expansion pack for PC. Developed by Massive Entertainment, the expansion will feature a new campaign, new units, and the ability to call in reinforcements.

	Valve: Steam will overtake retail, overcome piracy Following the announcement of their free Steam Cloud service yesterday, Valve head honcho Gabe Newell spoke about the confidence he had in the Steam service overtaking retail in sales. According to Newell, Steam has grown by a smashing 200 percent, compared to the retail's traditional spurt of ten percent.
	Beyond Good & Evil 2 has casual appeal While the original Beyond Good & Evil was made with the hardcore crowd in mind, Ubisoft president Yves Guillemot believes that BG&E 2 will be more accessible to casual gamers. Guillemot said that in the era of the original BG&E, the game's audience was quite different. Now, though, the casual market is much more dominant.
	Freeware Friday: Clean Asia Well, we've covered side-scrollers for the past three weeks, so it's time to return to the topic of the very first Freeware Friday: shoot-'em-ups. A genre of fast fingers and faster minds, it's probably the most prolific of all the freeware genres, having countless games in its ranks. One such game, which is also one of the best, is the incomparable Clean Asia by cactus.
	New info on Hellgate: London patch 2.0 The folks over at Flagship Studios have laid the details on us regarding their new 2.0 and 2.1 patches for Hellgate: London. On top of the new Overworld addition to Mythos, they sure seem busy over there cranking out some excellent content.
	Mark Rein on Epic Games, Unreal Engine 3 Gamasutra recently caught up with Epic Games vice president Mark Rein to discuss a number of topics, including the sate of the company and its popular Unreal Engine 3 technology.