world-of-warcraft posts

We have seen gamer-themed food products before (Gamer Grub, for just one example). Now a new company called Gamer Food has announced its presence and is selling health bars with names that are inspired by StarCraft (Protoss Delight) and World of Warcraft (Mana Bar).

The makers of these new products claim these health bars are all natural, organic and hand made to give gamers a quick pick-me-up in between online matches. The Mana Bar, for example, has ingrediants such as organic clover honey, rice cereal and more. Each bar costs $9.99 each for a three bar pack or you can get all six bars shown above in a 12 bar bundle for $32.99.

The launch of two PC games from Blizzard helped boost sales of the overall PC game software industry in 2010. A new report from the NPD Group said sales of PC games in retail stores in the US were 3 percent bigger in 2010 compared to 2009. The biggest reason were because of sales of Blizzard's sci-fi RTS sequel StarCraft II and the MMO expansion pack World of Warcraft Cataclysm. According to Gamasutra, NPD stated that those two games generated 14 percent of all PC game sales in 2010.

World of Warcraft Cataclysm was the third best selling game, console or PC, in December according to NPD's numbers. Call of Duty Black Ops was the number one selling game in the US for the month of December and for 2010 overall.

World of Warcraft Cataclysm continues to break PC game sales records. The third commercial expansion pack for Blizzard's hit MMO has now sold a whopping 4.7 million copies worldwide since the expansion went on sale on December 7. Those sales numbers include copies sold in retail store boxes and via digital download. Blizzard says the numbers are a new record for sales of a PC game in just one month.

Blizzard sold the vast majority of those copies on the game's first day as it registered 3.3 million units sold in the game's first 24 hours. It also proves that despite a recent slowdown in new game subscribers there are still a ton of World of Warcraft players out there.

The end of 2010 was a good one for gaming retailer GameStop. The company announced today that for the nine-week holiday sales period that ended on January 1, 2011 the company had $3.02 billion in total sales. That's a 5.4 percent increase in sales compared to the 2009 holiday sales period. Same store sales went up 3.4 percent for the time period.

Part of the reason for the higher sales came from Blizzard's launch of its third MMO expansion pack World of Warcraft Cataclysm. Overall sales of PC games (which is combined with GameStop's sales of video game accessories) went up 15.9 percent for the time period.

It's "lawsuit day" today in gaming news as word has gotten out on a new lawsuit filed against Activision Blizzard and the social networking game publisher Zynga. TechCrunch reports that the lawsuit was filed by Walker Digital, a so-called "invention company." In its lawsuit Walker Digital claims both publisher have infringed on one of Walker Digital's US patents, 6,425,828, that was first filed in 2002.

Walker Digital claims that Activision Blizzard and Zynga are infringing on the patent which is for "a method and a system for a distributed electronic tournament system ..." Walker Digital says that a number of games released by both publishers, including Call of Duty Modern Warfare 1 and 2, World of Warcraft and others infringe on its patent. The company is seeking an unspecified amount for compensation and damages. So far Activision Blizzard and Zynga have yet to respond to the lawsuit.

Wow. We thought that the PR folks were taking the week off along with game developers but we actually got a few press releases in our email inbox today. It's like people are actually working this week.

• Steam has new automatic updates for the beta versions of Apox and Counter-Strike Source along with a new update for Beat Hazard.
• Some folks from the University of Southern California have created the latest Kinect PC mod that works with World of Warcraft.
• Here's the latest Quake Done Quick video. It's cool
• The fourth season of the hit MMO-themed internet sitcom the Guild is now available on DVD and iTunes.

Duncan Jones is a UK movie director who got a lot of attention in 2009 with his feature film debut, a low budget sci-fi film called Moon. His next film, yet another sci-fi themed movie called Source Code, is generating a ton of pre-release buzz. But in a new interview with Badassdigest.com, Jones talks about his love of PC gaming.

He states that in his opinion other movie directors who have claimed to be gamers are not really gamers because the fact that they are movie directors means they are mostly working on movies and can't find the time to really play games. But not Jones. He says, "I'm just slightly insane and I stay up all night playing games. In the day I'm working and at night I play games."

He says he's jealous that Sam Raimi is the planned director of the upcoming World of Warcraft movie, saying, "I really believe World of Warcraft could be the launch of computer games as good films." And what about his own gaming habits? Jones says, "I can't wait for Diablo 3. I played through StarCraft 2. I've been playing a lot of Call of Duty: Black Ops lately." Sounds pretty hardcore to us.

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

So say you are a World of Warcraft player but for some reason you have not been convinced that buying and installing the recently released (and selling by the millions) expansion pack World of WarCraft Cataclysm is for you. First we have to wonder if you are really into World of Warcraft. Second, Blizzard has a solution for all those procrastinators.

Blizzard is allowing WoW players to download and play a free version of Cataclysm that will last you for 10 days. That will give you a chance to play as one of the two new playable classes in the game (the worgen or goblins). If you have a character in the game that's level 78 or higher you can also check out the new high-level zones in the expansion. After the 10 day trial is over you will be asked to fork over $39.99 to pay for the full thing.

The popularity of Blizzard's MMO World of Warcraft continues unabetted. Today the developer announced that the third commercial expansion pack for the game, World of Warcraft Cataclysm, sold over 3.3 million copies worldwide in just its first day on December 7. Blizzard claims that makes its the fastest selling PC game of all time, surpassing the previous record of over 2.8 million copies sold of the last expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, in the same time period.

Blizzard took digital pre-orders for the expansion but the press release doesn't state how many copies of Cataclysm were sold by that method versus the traditional box retail copies. Last July, Blizzard sold over 1.5 million copies of its RTS game StarCraft II in the game's first 48 hours on sale and later said it sold over 3 million copies in its first month.