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Today's first Penny-Arcade post featured a relieved Tycho who pre-purchased Mass Effect 2 for PC solely because he would be able to create a new character and shape their background by making choices from Mass Effect's important plot points. He was quoting a Bioware Community Coordinator Chris Priestly. Read more »

Not scared enough at Mythos' return from the dead? Try Flagship headliner Hellgate on for size. HanbitSoft reports that they'll be publishing Hellgate again and bringing servers for it online in the US and EU. Read more »

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Valve's Steam keeps up its reputation as the all singing, all dancing digital distribution system of the world with today's kickoff of a free weekend of play for Unreal Tournament III Black. It may be Thursday but to Epic and Valve at 4pm EDT (that would be before your eyeballs see this), your weekend of beautiful slaughter has just started. At least on the PC. Read more »

EA might've hit some slow sales with newer IP's in the past year but they're reaching for great things with The Sims 3. Will Wright's signature franchise has earned them oodles and you'd think that getting the best possible boxed version in everyone's hands to re-energize another wave of expansion sales would be priority one. After all, it worked wonders for The Sims 2.

Building a great PC game doesn't seem to be enough for them. You'd think it would. I mean really, what PC game doesn't show up broken in some nontrivial way? Busted online, crippled authentication, schizophrenic DRM that decides one day you're the owner that deserves to install it and the next you're persona non grata that can't install the game any longer -- all of these things give PC gaming a black eye day in, day out. So EA is not just building a game, but they're building an online store to sell chunks of additional content.

The game will ship with 1000 points to spend in a store, and additional bunches of 1000 are available for USD$10 plus whatever taxes might be involved. Never mind that it's trying to pull one over on the consumer by hiding the actual price of content, forcing them to buy points, and it's reaching towards a nickel-and-diming, microtransaction model, which means we'll see the tiniest things going for small bits of points. It's also going to cut retail out of the add-on pack situation and will probably also make it less likely you'll be able to buy bigger expansions at retail.

Could this also take a bite out of piracy? Perhaps, but I don't expect tighter DRM restrictions to be taken lying down by the kids of the mom and pop gamers that made The Sims such a big hit over the years.

Seen on Shacknews.