free-weekend posts

City of Heroes has had many free weekends, include ones where players get derelict accounts reactivated. The latest one, which is going on right now, commemorates the successful launch of Going Rogue and gives players a chance to try out all the new power sets, zones, and costumes available. This includes all accounts, including ones that are currently active, so if you haven't bought the expansion yet, here's your teaser! There's nothing else to say. The free minion-bashing gameplay stops at 11:59 PM PST on Sunday, and started this morning, so you can get to your cape-covered flying and brawling as soon as you want to. After this weekend, City of Heroes will once again require a purchase and subscription as usual. So go get your hero on!

Check out this trailer for the free to play Crysis Wars weekend coming up October 10-12, then download the client for hot multiplayer action. The trial client will allow you to play Crysis Wars over a LAN to practice for the weekend. Register an account at www.mycrysis.com.

Download HD Crysis Wars Free Weekend Trailer (104 MB)
Download Crysis Wars Trial [Complete Single File] (5.5 GB)
or
Download Crysis Wars Trial [Self-Exctracting Multipart] 1 of 3 (2 GB)
Download Crysis Wars Trial [Self-Exctracting Multipart] 2 of 3 (2 GB)
Download Crysis Wars Trial [Self-Exctracting Multipart] 3 of 3 (1.5 GB)

Valve Software's Doug Lombardi revealed in the second half of a two part interview with Shacknews (in part one he declared PC gaming alive and well) that the studio hopes to ship its co-op, zombie-themed, survival horror FPS Left 4 Dead sometime in November of this year.

Left 4 Dead is Valve's big release this year, and the company hopes that it will do the same thing for co-op multi-player gaming that Counter Strike did for competitive play. The audience is clearly there; zombie-themed, user-created Half-Life 2 mods like Zombie Master and Zombie Panic are among the most popular on Steam.

Lombardi also suggested that gamers will get to play the full version of Left 4 Dead free for a whole weekend, and that a demo is probably coming as well. He wasn't able to confirm a time-frame for either of those, though.

In this the year of the Beijing Olympics, Valve is offering gamers a chance to go for the gold. Starting Friday, May 2 and going Sunday the 4th, everyone can play Team Fortress 2 for free! Free is good no matter how you slice, but they're tossing in three brand new features to boot!

Gold Rush is a brand spanking new map complete with a new mode called "Payload." Teams are split on offense (Blu) and defense (Red) just like in Dustbowl, but the object of the Blu team is to literally push a payload full of bombs from one capture point to the next until all three of Red's bases are blown to smithereens.

Over the next year Valve will be rolling out the biggest change to the game. Starting with the Medic class players will be able to earn three unique items by first earning some or all of the new achievements (for Medics there are 36 in all). These items will give players new choices as to how they play the class as well as offering new benefits for the team they're playing on. The other eight classes will be rolled out soon after the initial release.