RUSE posts

R.U.S.E., the WWII themed RTS game that was first released last fall, is getting yet another paid DLC mini-expansion pack. The DLC is called (no joking) The Pack of the Rising Sun and adds a new Japanese playable faction to both single and multiplayer modes.

The DLC is now available to purchase and download via Steam for $9.99. The new Japanese faction adds 28 new units (including flame thrower units) and structures to the game. It also comes with three new missions: Gold for the Brave where you protect the US Gold Federal Reserve from attack; Ostfriesland where you have to fight off a UK invasion of Germany; and For Honour where you have to fight off a renegade Japanese faction on the island of Java.

Publisher Ubisoft hinted at this bit of news last week via its official Twitter page and now its official. A new mini-expansion pack for 2010's WWII "deception and trickery" RTS game R.U.S.E. is now available to purchase and download via Steam.

The new DLC pack is called The Chimera Pack and contains three new multiplayer maps for players of the Eugen Systems-developed game. In addition to the new maps, (Nuclear Winter, Blood and Sand and Djebel), there are also three new single player challenges (Bir Hakeim, Medjez, and Opération Zapa). While the previous DLC pack for the game was free, this one will set you back $6.99.

You thought that since the holidays were over that the sales event for PC game sales were also over, didn't you? Well think again, buster. A couple of PC game download sites have some special deals that await your pleasure. One of them is the Direct2Drive service. For the rest of the week it has cut the prices on all of its games from publisher Kalypso Media by as much as 75 percent off. In addition the Impulse service has continued its daily sales deal into the new year. For today only it has put Cities XL on sale for just $7.99.

In addition to today's sales, there are some permanent price cuts on a number of major games that are now in effect on Direct2Drive, Steam and other sites. These include Medal of Honor ($39.99), Mafia 2 ($29.99) R.U.S.E. ($29.99) Borderlands Game of the Year Edition, ($29.95) and Splinter Cell Conviction ($19.95).

Sales of R.U.S.E didn't exactly make its publisher Ubisoft very happy but the recent WWII "deception and trickery" based RTS game did have one thing that made it unique among the rest of the PC game crowd. It was made to natively support the multi-touch features of Microsoft's Windows 7 OS. If you had a compatible monitor you could play the game by touching the units on the screen instead of the mouse and keyboard set up.

Now someone has posted up a new YouTube video showing off a new third party hack for the Xbox 360's Kinect motion sensing camera controller that seems to show R.U.S.E. as playable via not multi-touch but no touch at all. There's no word on when or even if this program will be released to the public but it should be interesting to see if playing the game this way would really compete with the normal keyboard-mouse combo.

Last week Ubisoft blamed Valve's "Christmas overload" for not being able to release the free Manhattan Project DLC pack for its WWII "deception and trickery" RTS game R.U.S.E. for its PC owners. Now it appears that the pack has indeed been released via Steam if the game's official Steam message board posts are to be believed. However some posts are reporting some issues with launching the game after adding the free update. A workaround has been found where you can run the game under Windows Vista Service Pack 2 compatibility mode.

Two reminders: The free DLC adds three multiplayer maps and two gameplay modes to the Eugen Systems-developed game. And the game itself is currently on sale on Steam from now until 1 pm Eastern time on Friday for $33.49.

It looks like yesterday's plans to release the free Manhattan Project DLC for the recent RTS game R.U.S.E. has run into some issues. The pack, which was supposed to add three multiplayer maps and two gameplay modes to the Eugen Systems-developed game, wasn't released after all on the Steam service.

The game's official web site states, " ... due to a Christmas overload, the guys at Steam weren't able to add The Manhattan Project Pack to the Steam store yesterday as promised." The site claims to be working on this issue and hope to have the DLC available to download "ASAP". In the meantime the game itself is still on sale for 25 percent off its normal Steam price.

As promised last month, a new and free downloadable content pack, The Manhattan Project, is now available for players of R.U.S.E, the recent WWII "trickery and deception" RTS game from developer Eugen Systems and publisher Ubisoft. The update is available via automatic download via Steam.

The Manhattan Project Pack adds three new multiplayer maps to the game. Twilight of the Gods and Vesuvio are 2v2 maps while the Guns and Tulips map supports 3v3 matches. Two new gameplay modes are also added. Total War starts the player with all of the units available in 1939 in the game and then unlocks more units per year. The other is Nuclear War which unlocks the game's prototypes factories, researches and upgrades right from the start.

As 2010 draws to a close, we look back and marvel at how far PC gaming has come over the past decade. The start of the new millennium brought technology and trends that will resonate for years to come. So we take this opportunity to examine some of those technology trends and see how they might grow over or fizzle out over the next ten years. Here are our predictions of what PC gaming might look like in 2020.

Earlier this year we were the first to report that Direct2Drive had decided to start offering PC game download that required that Valve's Steam client be installed after previously banning games that required such a feature. At the time Direct2Drive's head told Big Download that it gave in to customer demands for such games to be offered on the service. Now another PC game download outlet, GamersGate, has also started to offer PC game download that require the third party Steam client and registration.

The games, added earlier this month, include R.U.S.E. and Lead and Gold Gangs of the Wild West. Both listings state, Note: This product requires a 3rd party download and account." Back in July, GamersGate CEO Theodore Bergquist sent us a statement, "At this time, we have no plans to offer games that use Steamworks." He added, "We listen to our customer base very closely and they clearly prefer to not use a client."

So why the about face? Big Download contacted GamersGate and got a new statement from Bergquist. He states, "The original plan was to not offer anything that requires a third party download, but we had a few users request those titles. We want to provide the best service possible and we listen to our customers regularly. If a gamer would rather spend his/her hard-earned money with us and then go and play the game with someone else's software, that's alright with us. It's also good to see that Steam finally has to give-in a bit. In these retail versions, many of the more intrusive features have been turned off and are not shown to the customers. They require only a registration like any other multi-player service. We're trying this on just a few games and hopefully our customers will accept this. If not, we will know quite fast."

It's currently unknown exactly what Steam and Steamworks features are "turned off" for the GamersGate versions of the games and we will follow up with GamersGates to get more info.

The Steam PC game download service is the latest such site to launch a pre-Christmas sales promotion. This time the site is making its customers go on a virtual "treasure hunt" that will make them solve new objectives every 48 hours. Each objective completed will automatically give a person a new entry to win his or her top five games on their Steam wish list. The drawing will be held every two days for 20 people. On December 20 three grand prize drawings will be held for those folks who have completed 10 of the promotions' objectives. The three winners will get 100 Steam games of their choice.

The first four objectives are:
- Self Portrait: Setup an avatar on your Steam Community profile.
- Got Tanked?: Earn the Desert Fox Steam Achievement in R.U.S.E.
- Up the Ante: Win The Iron Curtain in Poker Night at the Inventory
- More Cowbell: Set a leaderboard score of at least 1,124,400 in easy mode for the 'Paul Hartnoll' level in Chime

As part of the Treasure Hunt promotion a series of games will be put on sale every two days. From now until Wednesday the games will be R.U.S.E. for $33.49, Poker Night at the Inventory for $2.99 and Chime for just $1.25.