mass-effect-2 posts

Mass Effect 2 was the winner of the Game of the Year award at the 2011 edition of the Interactive Achievement Awards, held last night at the DICE Summit in Las Vegas. BioWare's sci-fi RPG sequel also won in the catagories of Outstanding Achievement in Story and RPG/MMO Game of the Year.

Blizzard's RTS sequel StarCraft II also picked up a couple of awards last night for Outstanding Achievement in Online Gameplay and Strategy/Simulation Game of the Year. FIFA 2011 also won for Sports Game of the Year. All of the other awards, sadly, were won by console exclusive game titles. The ceremonies will be shown on the G4 cable TV network this Saturday at 4 pm Eastern Time.

While all of us wait for more info to be released about Mass Effect 3, developer BioWare isn't quite done yet with the last game in the sci-fi RPG series. Today the developer announced plans to release a second Alternate Appearance DLC Pack for Mass Effect 2.

The pack give players a way to put in some different armor styles for three of the game's main characters, Tali, Grunt and our personal favorite Miranda (yes we do enjoy looking at even a virtual version of Yvonne Strahovski). The second Alternate Appearance Pack will be made available to download on February 8 for 160 BioWare points (about $2).

The 2011 edition of the Game Developers Choice Awards has just announced the finalists for the award's various categories and as usual a number of PC games found their way to being nominated. The PC game with the most nominations was BioWare's RPG Mass Effect 2 which received five nods, including Game of the Year. The indie game hit Minecraft got three nominations in the Innovation, Best Debut Game and Best Downoadable game categories.

Call of Duty Black Ops also got a Game of the Year nomination as did Assassin's Creed Brotherhood (due out for the PC later this year). StarCraft II also got a nod for Best Technology. You can check out the entire list of nominees at Gamasutra's web site. The winner's will be announced on March 2 during the Game Developers Conference.

It's our first Bits and Bytes column of 2011. Awww ... the news posts are so cute at this age.

• The countdown to 1 million paid copies of Minecraft continues ... the game's sales are now at about 930,000 copies according to the stats page.
• If you still have your save game file from the original Dead Space game, you can use it to unlock the game's original plasma gun for use in Dead Space 2 later this month.
• The regular news update from Mass Effect 2's Cerebus Network will shut down after January 24 although the network will come back to announce one last DLC and for the launch of Mass Effect 3.

Even though PC games have gotten a new surge in popularity lately, piracy of PC game software remains a huge concern. This week the web site Torrentfreak.com reports that the single most pirated PC game of the past year is developer Treyarch's first person shooter Call of Duty Black Ops. The site claims that even though the game was released in November, the site claims that it was downloade 4,270,000 times. The report claims the data comes "from several sources, including reports from all public BitTorrent trackers."

In second place was Battlefield Bad Company 2 which the report claims was downloaded 3,960,000 times in 2010. Mafia 2, Mass Effect 2 and StarCraft II make up the rest of the top five.

Some countries call December 26 Boxing Day; others simply call it, "A day to rest up after eating all that Christmas dinner." Whatever you call it the Steam PC game download site has a new batch of price cuts that will last until 1 pm Eastern time on Monday. Today's deals are all repeats of one day price cuts from Steam in the past week.

Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light - $5.10
Wings of Prey - $5.99
Dead Rising 2 - $19.99
F.E.A.R. 1/2 - $9.99
Super Meat Boy - $3.75
Borderlands - Save 50 percent off original game and DLC
Assassin's Creed II - $14.99
The Witcher - $4.99
Mass Effect 1/2 - Save 50 percent off both games
Darksiders - $9.99
Battlefield Bad Company 2 - $6.80
Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 - $29.99

2010 was a solid year if for PC gaming. A game that some have been waiting 12 years to play finally was released and some other titles surprised us from left field. All in all there was no shortage of titles that were worth your time paying for and playing.

But what games were the absolute best of the past 12 months? Ultimately there will always be lots of debate over which games were chosen and why. But after much deliberation among the Big Download staff, we our settled on our picks 2010 Best PC Game Awards. These are the games that impacted us throughout the year and will probably keep gamers going well into 2011.

So which categories do we have this year and which games are worthy of our humble attention? Check after the jump to find out:

Editor's Note - Steven Wong and James Murff contributed to this feature

Are you ready for the airing of grievances? Before you have your Festivus celebration with the silver pole and the feats of strength, check out the latest one day sales deals over at the Steam web site.

Operation Flashpoint Dragon Rising - $3
Dead Rising 2 - $19.99 or $15.99 if you own Resident Evil 5
Alpha Protocol - $7.50
Risen - $14.99
Darksiders - $10
Blur - $14.99
Wings of Prey - $6
Silent Hunter - Save 66 percent of all games in the series
Deathspank -$7.49
Blood Bowl Legendary Edition - $19.99
Patrician IV - $7.50
Mass Effect 1/2 - 50 percent off both games

StarCraft II managed to win two awards in the 2010 Video Game Awards on Spike TV earlier tonight. Blizzard's hit RTS game won for Best PC Game as well as for Best Performance By A Human Female for actress Tricia Helfer's voice work as Sarah Kerrigan. Other notable winners for games that came out for the PC include Call of Duty Black Ops for Best Shooter, Mass Effect 2 for Best RPG and Need For Speed Hot Pursuit for Best Driving Game.

The award ceremony itself was better produced than most of the previous ceremonies. The show featured a number of clever virtual stage and prop elements that could be seen by the TV viewers but not the live audience. Host Neil Patrick Harris did a solid and entertaining job as the show's overall host (although he hinted at the very end that this would be the last awards show he would do which would be a shame). Once again the actual giving out of the awards took up only a small fraction of the broadcast in favor of all of the world premiere trailers for various upcoming games.

It looks like online gremlins, or maybe supporters of WikiLeaks, are on the prowl at Electronic Arts' online store. As our sister site Joystiq reports, a listing and even a description for Mass Effect 3 showed up briefly on EA's store site before disappearing very quickly.

This would seem to all but confirm that the official announcement for BioWare's third game in the sci-fi RPG series is about to happen, most likely on Saturday night during Spike TV's Video Game Awards broadcast. There was no release date mentioned on the site before it was yanked but we imagine that info is coming soon. You can check out the description from the now deleted page after the jump: