the-chronicles-of-riddick-assault-on-dark-athena posts

The Direct2Drive PC game download site is holding a new daily sales event this week. For the next five days it will drastically cut the price of one Atari-published game per day. The first game under this event is Star Trek Online which for the next day will be sold for just $9.95, a 50 percent savings.

The other games that will be participating in the sales are:

Tuesday - The original Test Drive Unlimited game for 50 percent off
Wednesday - The recent downloadable game Haunted House for 75 percent off
Thursday - The fantasy strategy game King's Bounty: The Legend for 75 percent off
Friday - The shooter The Chronicles of Riddick Assault on Dark Athena for 75 percent off.

It's "earnings season" for publically traded companies and the first game publisher out of the gates to report their official financial numbers is Atari. Today the publisher formerly known as Infogrames announced that they had generated 54.5 million euros in revenues for the quarter that ended on June 30. That's a 30.1 percent raise compared to the same time period a year ago.

Most of that revenue came from the US thanks to sales of the recent Ghostbusters game and also The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena. Atari's next major new release will be Champions Online, their super hero MMO from developer Cryptic Studios that's due out on September 1. Atari is still saying that Cryptic's other announced MMO, Star Trek Online, is due for release in early 2010.

Even though some publishers are showing signs that they are no longer using draconian DRM set-ups for PC games, some PC titles are still using things like activation limits for their titles. The latest such game to have such a set-up is the just released Starbreeze-Atari FPS The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena.

Both the Starbreeze and Atari forums have messages from people complaining about the set up which they claim does not allow for any further installations of the game once its three install limit is reached. The Amazon.com retail listing for the game has also become yet another way for those folks concerned about such DRM practices to express their feelings.

But what is the truth behind all of this? Blue's News was contacted by an Atari rep who states that the game does require online activation to play the game. According to the statement, "The activation code lets you install the game on up to 3 machines, with an unlimited number of installs on each assuming that you don't change any major hardware in your PC or re-install your operating system. If you reach the maximum number of installations you can contact the Atari hotline and if it's a legitimate request you can get a new activation code."

It's been in development for a long time but today publisher Atari has announced that The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena has finally gone gold. As previously announced the movie-based sci-fi first person action game "starring" actor Vin Diesel will ship to stores for the PC and other platforms on April 7 in the US and April 24 worldwide.

Here's a refresher on the rather convoluted development of this game. Dark Athena is a (sort of) sequel to the 2004 released Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay but also includes the original game with enhanced graphics and also a new multiplayer mode. Developed by Starbreeze Studios for its original publisher Vivendi Games the title got stuck in limbo thanks to Vivendi's merge with Activision to form Activision Blizzard. When that company's management decided to dump the game Atari picked it up for release. And yes it is a tad confusing . . . .

Earlier today Atari announced the release dates for the upcoming Starbreeze Studios remake-sequel The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena. Their press release announced that demos for the game would be released this March for the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions but there was no word on a PC demo.

Today we have officially confirmed with an Atari PR rep that that there will indeed be a PC demo of Assault on Dark Athena released as well. It's not yet known if the PC demo will be released alongside the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions nor what content will be contained. The full version is due for release in the US on April 7 and for Europe on April 24.

Atari picked up the rights to publish The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena last year and now developer Starbreeze has been working hard to finish the remake-sequel to the the acclaimed 2004 first person action game. Today Atari announced that the title would be released on April 7 in the US with April 24 the target release date for Europe. Atari also announced demos would be released in March for the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions but there's no word on a PC demo yet.

As we have mentioned before, the game contains a graphical remake of the 2004 movie game Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay along with a separate 10-11 hour single player campaign, Assault on Dark Athena. The game will also add multiplayer modes for the first time. For more info make sure to check out our hands-on preview of the single player portion.

The 2004 Universal Studios sci-fi movie The Chronicles of Riddick was, well, not good. Not good at all. The film, starring Vin Diesel, was a sequel to a much smaller scale (and much better) sci-fi film called Pitch Black. The sequel, however, was a failed attempt to turn the franchise, and Diesel's character of Riddick, into a huge Star Wars-like epic. The end result was a movie that took itself far too seriously and fell apart.

However developer Starbreeze Studios and publisher Vivendi Games crafted a sold first person action game based on the Riddick character. The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay (which actually takes place prior to the events of Pitch Black) was one of the best looking games for its day and its combo of first person shooter combat with some melee gameplay was very satisfying. It remains one of the best movie-to-game translations ever made.
A couple of years later, Vivendi Games revealed that Starbreeze was working on a remake of Escape from Butcher Bay with revamped graphics, a new single player campaign and the addition of multiplayer for the first time. However very little was revealed about this remake from the publisher after its announcement. With Vivendi Games' merge with Activision to form Activision Blizzard last year it seemed like the game had been forgotten.

Thankfully that turned out not to be true as Atari announced late in 2008 that it had picked up the publishing rights to the remake, now titled The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena. Atari recently sent over a partial PC build of the game's single player portion to Big Download so we could put it through its paces.

Christmas is now over and we are now just a few days away from the start of 2009. As with the beginning of any new year there is a feeling of excitement of what the next 365 days will bring. For the PC game industry the new year is already looking very bright with a ton of highly anticipated game titles due to be released in the next 12 months.

Big Download has looked into our crystal ball (ok, it's actually a Bioshock bobble head doll) for all of the games we hope to be playing in 2009. The result is a multi-part preview we will be running in the last days before 2008 is over with that will give you some idea of what to expect. Keep in mind that our preview is not meant to be totally comphensive as there are a number of games our there that have yet to be announced. Also, release dates for games can and do change so many of the titles in our feature might not make 2009 (in fact we have put in some games that we know won't be released this year)

We even have some exclusive new screenshots to some of the games we are featuring in our preview article. One such shot is above from the upcoming Raven Software-id Software-Activision shooter Wolfenstein. For our first part of our 2009 PC game preview we take a look at a number of upcoming action and first person shooter titles. Stay tuned on Saturday as we will preview even more action games in the works.

Update: The second part of our action-FPS preview is now live

Click on the image above to continue reading our 2009 PC game preview on action and FPS titles

While Atari has picked up the rights to the upcoming first person shooter remake-expansion The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena, Eurogamer reports that a true sequel to the first Riddick is in the works. The news comes from Ian Stevens, the head of production at Tigon Studios who first came up with the concept of the game that was later developed by Starbreeze Studios.

Stevens states, ""[The full sequel] is ambitious and that is definitely going to follow the precedent that we set with the first." In the mean time Assault on Dark Athena will have a new single player campaign and multiplayer features in addition to a graphical remake of the first Riddick game, Escape from Butcher Bay. Atari plans to release the game sometime in 2009.