playfirst posts

Diner Dash, one of the most popular casual games franchises of all time, is celebrating its fifth anniversary with the release of the fifth game in the series next month. Publisher Playfirst announced that Diner Dash 5: Boom! is the title of the game. It's also the first all new game in the series since late 2007.

The new game's title also describes what happens in the game as Flo's Diner explodes and players must rebuild it using thousands of combinations to make their own unique diner. PlayFirst will release a special edition of the game on their web site for $19.99 on February 16 that will have five exclusive levels, a strategy guide, a digital art book and more. The standard edition of the game will be released two weeks later for $6.99.

We've already had a lot of downloadable PC game sales this week so what's a few more between friends?

Steam has announced that it will be offering titles from casual game publisher PlayFirst on its service. From now until August 19 all 10 PlayFirst games via Steam will have a price cut of 10 percent. Also the recent platform action game Trine has a 25 percent price cut until August 19 Direct2Drive has the same price cut offer for Trine.

Meanwhile, GamersGate has announced that the 2008 released first person shooter S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Clear Sky gets a big 50 percent price cut from now until Sunday.

Finally the retail site GoGamer.com has a number of PC games on sale from now until 3 am ET Saturday, including the original Operation Flashpoint for just $5.90, Vietcong 2 for $4.90 and a number of upcoming PC games for smaller discounts. Enjoy the savings.

You may remember that Alex St. John, the founder and head of the downloadable games company Wild Tangent, believes that game consoles are on their way out and that PCs will become the dominate game platform eventually. Now the Venture Beat web site reports that another head of a downloadable game publisher, Playfirst CEO John Welch, has some thoughts along the same line as as St. John, saying " I think the console is going to be over as we knew it previously. They're expensive to make, there is no real need for them."

Part of Welch's reasoning is due to the success of Nintendo's Wii console, saying, "The most successful, most difficult to acquire console in this generation is at least a generation old in hardware." He added, "How much would it cost to integrate Wii-like technology into a set top box, if anything even needs to be specialized? What we really need are more standards around the input devices." So does that mean the PC is going to be coming back as a major gaming platform. Not so far, according to Welch. " I think there will be components that will make it look like a PC. But I don't think it will be the PC from the perspective of what you put on your desktop or use to access your spreadsheets."