Prey posts

Outed by a French magazine cover that made its way to the internets last week, Bethesda Softworks has officially announced that it will indeed be publishing Prey 2, the sequel to the 2006 sci-fi shooter. Like the original, the sequel will be developed by Human Head Studios and is due out for the PC and other platforms in 2012. It will use the latest graphics engine from Rage developer id Software.

The original game, which was under development at 3D Realms before Human Head took over, had a Native American trying to fight off an alien invasion. Bethesda Softwork's parent Zenimax Media bought the rights to the Prey franchise in 2009. Details about Prey 2 are still scarce but the press release quotes Human Head's Chris Rhinehart as saying the sequel will, "explore a new facet of the Prey universe, one that offers fast-paced action in an open, alien world."

[Via email press release]

Prey 2, the long discussed sequel to 2006's sci-fi first person shooter, has apparently been revealed via the cover to the new print issue of France-based gaming magazine Joystick. The cover image was posted by French-based web site NoFrag.com

Aside from the cover image there's no other details yet on this sequel. The original game was first developed, and then canceled, by 3D Realms in the late 1990s. It was later revived and then released in 2006 by publisher 2K Games. It used id Software's Doom 3 engine with Human Head Studios handing most of the development duties with 3D Realms as a "producer". Human Head has yet to release a game since Prey came out nearly five years ago. In 2009 it was revealed that the IP rights to Prey to Zenimax Media, the parent company of Bethesda Softworks.

[Via Blue's News]

Yep, it's time for yet another Steam sales post. Their ongoing holiday sale still has six days to go but today their one-day sale has some super low prices on five games. In fact all but one of them are priced below $10 each. The one exception is The Orange Box. Valve's collection of all the current Half-Life 2 games plus Team Fortress 2 and Portal is now just $14.99.

The other games on sale for the next 23 hours are Burnout Paradise: The Ultimate Box for $7.49, Killing Floor and Space Siege for $4.99 each and Prey for a mere $2.25.

It's been a crappy 2009 for 3D Realms. The Dallas-based game developer let go of its internal development team and got into a still ongoing lawsuit against Take Two Interactive over the 12 years (and counting) development of their first person shooter Duke Nukem Forever. Yet the company's CEO Scott Miller claims that their main Duke Nukem franchise is still very much alive.

Shacknews has posted up some new info from Miller (taken from the first print issue of a new game magazine called Gamesauce) where he says, "There are numerous other Duke games in various stages of development, several due out this year." Miller still insists that Duke Nukem Forever is not dead saying, " . . . yes, we released the internal team, but that doesn't correlate to the demise of the project." Even a long-in-development Duke Nukem movie is still in play with Miller saying, " the Duke film is making steady progress."

The article goes into specifics on how 3D Realms was able to stay in operation for so long without releasing Duke Nukem Forever. For example, Miller claims that they made $30 million with sales of Max Payne (which they worked on with Remedy) and made another $48 million selling the franchise to Take Two.

It's looking like the Prey first person shooter franchise is making yet another transition. After starting as a 3D Realms internal project that got canceledin the 1990s and then revived with developer Human Head (with 3D Realms supervising) in 2006 it now looks like Bethesda Softworks' parent company ZeniMax Media has claimed the rights to the franchise.

Newly discovered trademark documents via trademark super-site superannuation show that the Prey franchise was purchased by ZeniMax from The Radar Group earlier this year. The Radar Group was created by 3D Realms' CEO Scott Miller as a separate company and had Prey 2 as one of their listed games in development. We've contacted both Miller and Zenimax's PR head Pete Hines to get comments on this new development.

Update: Hines responded back to our inquires, saying simply, "We don't have any comment."

Fallout 3 isn't the only game on sale on Steam this weekend, In fact there's a ton of games that have just been collected into a new game bundle via the download service. 20 titles from 2K Games are now available to purchase as one big game pack for just $59.99. If you bought each game individually it would cost $229.80. Oh, and did we mention that from now until July 7 you can get 10 percent off that already low price, making the bundle $53.99?

Here's the full list of games in the bundle:

Sid Meier's Civilization IV,
Sid Meier's Civilization III Complete
Sid Meier's Pirates!
Shattered Union
Prey
CivCity: Rome
Civilization IV Warlords
Sid Meier's Railroads!
Railroad Tycoon 3
Railroad Tycoon II Platinum
X-COM: Terror From the Deep
X-COM: Apocalypse
BioShock
X-COM: Interceptor
X-COM: UFO Defense
X-COM: Enforcer
Civilization IV: Beyond the Sword
Freedom Force
Freedom Force vs. the Third Reich
Sid Meier's Civilization IV: Colonization.

IGN's Direct2Drive game download site is going nuts (nuts, we say) with their newest sales deal. From now until May 31 a large number of their tiles from the 2K Games library have had their prices cut 50 percent off their normal amounts. There's quite a few cool deals here if you have a few extra dollars.

There's quite a few titles on sale for just $9.95 including BioShock, Civilization IV, Prey, Serious Sam Gold and more. And if you have always wanted to try out the classic X-Com game series, this sale has a bundle of all five X-Com game titles for just $7.50. That's a steal in of itself.

The super-cheap PC game deals at GoGamer.com are back in force this weekend. Their 48 hour madness sales include a number of older PC titles that you can get from the online retail at rock bottom prices for a limited time only.

Just some of the deals you can get this weekend include Prey for just $2.90, Call of Juarez for $4.90 (just in time for the sequel due out later this summer), and The Settlers IV: Rise of an Empire for $4.90 as well. They are also selling the more recent title Warhammer 40,000 Dawn of War II for just $35.90 (although that price is not part of the weekend sale).

Even in this time of PC games that have huge budgets and massive amounts of team members working on them, the road to completion can be filled with obstacles. While the normal development time for a game from its conception to completion is now running close to three years for a big AAA title there have been some games that have taken even longer to make.

Waiting for a game can be especially hard for fans who are sometimes subject to tons of hands-on previews, screenshots, dev diaries and videos. Fans occasionally have to deal with this sort of thing for years between the announcement of a game and its final shipment to stores. Today Big Download takes a look at 10 games that took quite a while to finish and examines whether the wait was worth it. As a rule we decided to gauge the history of a game's development from the date of its original public announcement to its shipment date (some games on this list were in development before the official announcement).

Click on the image above to continue reading PC games that took the slow boat to completion

Valve's Steam digital delivery service has the occasional sale on one or two titles in its ever growing library, usually with modest reductions of 10 percent off their regular price. This weekend's sale, however, is a little more interesting than most. Steam users can purchase the full version of Prey this weekend only for the price of just $4.95. That's a whopping 75 percent cut from its normal price of $19.95.

The 2006 released sci-fi first person shooter from developers Human Head Studios and 3D Realms is still quite an entertaining game; solid graphics, a compelling storyline, and the use of in-game dimensional portals that, while not quite as sophisticated as Valve's own title Portal, still creates gameplay that's different from the normal FPS. With this low of a price, there's no reason not to buy it and check it out for yourself (hey, we know that a sequel is in the early stages of development so this is a good way to get prepared for that prospect, too)