star-wars-galaxies posts

While we wait for BioWare to finish their work on Star Wars: The Old Republic, there is another Star Wars MMO that you can check out in the meantime. Steam just made it easier to get into Sony Online's Star Wars Galaxies with a 50 percent off sale. From now until Friday the game is now just $9.99 to purchase and download.

And that's not all. The game now comes with a Premimum Plus pack that adds five new vehicles that all come from the prequel movies. Yes, you can own an in-game version of Queen Amidala's Transport Ship (pictured above). Or maybe you would like to drive General Grievous' Wheel Bike or a AT-RT vehicle. In addition to the five vehicles there's also a new Mustafarian Underground Bunker available that can be used as a player house.

While Star Wars: The Old Republic is still at least a year or more away from launch, LucasArts and Sony Online's MMO Star Wars Galaxies is still giving its players new content. This week the game has added a large new content update called Galactic Civil War: Forces Under Siege. The update has three major cities in the game under attack. Imperial forces can attack with the huge AT-AT walkers while the Rebels can defend by manning turrets and putting up barricades.

In addition to all the new content in the update, Sony Online is giving former players of the game a chance to sign onto Star Wars Galaxies for free starting February 1. The free play will last the entire month and those former players re-sign with the game they get an in-game house painting for their trouble. Current subscribers will get their own in-game house painting.

Last Friday, we gave our picks for the best PC games of the last decade. But where there's a ying, there's also a yang. While there were plenty of PC game titles that met or even surpassed expectations, there were also games that, while not necessarily all bad, simply didn't live up to the hype.

Big Download has picked 10 PC games that were released in the last decade that, for a variety of reasons, ended up being massive disappointments. They serve as lessons that even the most talented game developers can sometimes create flawed games.

Editor's Note: Steven Wong contributed greatly to this article

Click on the image above to continue reading The Top 10 Most Disappointing PC Games of The Decade (2000-2009).

Time for some early Halloween-themed MMO action as Sony Online's MMO game Star Wars Galaxies has just launched their latest content update. As we previously reported this update is a bit different than normal as it launches a horror-themed quest called Death Troopers.

While players can check out the update and then get themselves ravaged by the Star Wars' version of zombies, you might also want to check out the Star Wars Death Troopers novel by Joe Schreiber which just happens to be in book stores today as well. It served as the inspiration for the Star Wars Galaxies update and is the first time that one of the Star Wars books ties into events in the game.

[Via Massively]

Sony Online's long running MMO Star Wars Galaxies was launched over six years ago but despite a major attempt to revamp the game in 2005 the game has been losing players steadily over the past few years. Now Sony Online has announced that they will be shutting down 12 of the game's remaining 25 servers on Oct. 15.

Character creation has been disabled on the affected servers and all characters still remaining n those shards can be moved over for free to the 13 remaining Star Wars Galaxies servers. The game itself is still generating new content for its players including the upcoming Halloween themed event Death Troopers.

[Via Massively]

You apparently can't keep those zombies down, even in the Star Wars universe. The long running MMO Star Wars Galaxies is about to experience some undead action via Sony Online and LucasArts in an upcoming content update due out, naturally, in October. The update will be called (wait for it) Death Troopers.

In addition to having flesh-eating beasties in the game universe, this also marks the first time Star Wars Galaxies will have a tie-in to an official Star Wars novel. Del Rey was already planning to release the horror-themed novel Death Troopers by Joe Schreiber on October 13 but Sony Online and LucasArts got wind of the book and decided to do a new quest that related to the events in the novel. Now all we need is zombie Jar Jar somewhere and we are in.

Our sister site Massively already scores a lot of major coups in the MMO game world. This week the site begins not one but two new series of developers diaries. One is for Star Wars Galaxies, the long running sci-fi title from LucasArts and Sony Online. In this first installment, designer Stephen Wyckoff talks about creating the recently added Echo Base adventure to the game (the Hoth battle from the film The Empire Strikes Back). There's even a video to check out

The other new dev diary is for Cryptic Studios' long awaited super hero MMO Champions Online. In this first installment, Cryptic's co-founder Jack Emmert talks about why they wanted to make a second super hero themed game when they had already created City of Heroes. Check them both out, won't you?

The folks who write about games for a living can be very guilty at times for hyping a game before its release. Sometimes theymake it sound like it's a done deal that it will be the greatest game ever made when it come out.. Heck, some folks even give out awards at E3 for games that are not even completed or just shown in trailer form. So you have to expect that on occasion a game comes out that, for whatever reason, doesn't quite live up to all of its promise, previews and PR.

In the past decade there have been many such PC games like we have described. These are titles that are not bad per se (that would be Daikatana) but just didn't have what it took to live up to the expecations that gamers and especially game journalists had for it. Big Download decided to pick 10 such games from the past 10 years that, for one reason or another, had high hopes but just couldn't cut it.

Click on the image above to continue reading 10 games that didn't rise above the hype

Last summer Sony Online and LucasArts unveiled the Star Wars Galaxies Online Trading Card game as an extra for current and former subscribers to their Star Wars Galaxies MMO. Today the companies announced the first major expansion to the trading card game, Squadrons over Corellia. The expansion, due out in December, adds over 250 new cards and 22 new loot cards to the game.

The expansion adds starship cards for the first time along with two new species and new character cards including Han Solo himself alongside Jabba the Hut, Emperor Palpatine and others. Current subscribers to Star Wars Galaxies will get five free booster card packs each month.

Sony Online's long running sci-fi MMO Star Wars Galaxies has always been set in between the films Episode 4: A New Hope and Episode 5: The Empire Strikes Back. Today the publisher and LucasArts announced that the game has finally given its players a long awaited encounter; Empire's famed Battle of Hoth sequence.

Our sister site Massively has the info on the new addition to Star Wars Galaxies which allows players to join either the Imperial landing force to destroy Echo Base or as the Rebels who are simply trying to get out with as many people and stuff as possible. There are some other new additions in this latest free content update and Massively even has a dev diary from Sony Online on the new features.