Titles in October

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars (Oct 2):

id Software's Quake universe gets expanded by developer Splash Damage in this multiplayer oriented first person shooter from publisher Activision. Playing as the humans or as the invading alien Strogg race, the game is designed not as Battlefield clone but a title that has a single player structure even in multiplayer as each team has objectives and goals to accomplish in each maps to win a round. Splash Damage created the free (and still popular) Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory so we have high hopes this full retail game will be even better.

The Orange Box (Oct 9):

Valve Software releases this collection of five games; two of them (Half-Life 2 and HL2: Episode 1) are older games that Valve is allowing owners to give the Steam keys to people who don't own the games. The other three are all new: Half-Life 2: Episode 2 continues Gordon Freeman's storyline outside of City 17 as he contines to battle the aliens. Portal is a short but unique first person action-puzzle game that has you controlling a portal gun to create rips in space-time to go through levels. The big new game is Team Fortress 2, a game that was first announced back when Half-Life 1 was released in 1998. Based on the classic Quake mod that then morphed into the HL1 mod Team Fortress Classic, TF 2 has an all new art style (think CGI Incredibles animation) and a new sense of humor while still retaining the class based gameplay of the original.

Fury (Oct 9):

Developer Auran wants Fury to be more than the normal fantasy MMO game. The title (the first from new game publisher Gamecock Media) wants to combine the character leveling of an MMO with the action of a first person shooter in intense player vs player combat). The game, which uses the Unreal Engine 3, is launching with a unique beta event competition that will let folks win prizes while beta testing the game. Will this game's different take on the MMO genre work? We will soon see.

Tabula Rasa (Oct 19):

Or as it's officially called "Richard Garriott's Tabula Rasa" since the creator of the Ultima RPG series and the first popular PC MMO Ultima Online finally gets a new game onto store shelves in several years. This NCSoft title is an action-oriented sci-fi game as you play a human who is trying to fight off hordes of alien baddies who are out to exterminate humanity. One cool thing about the game is that you can stop and create a new character in the middle of the game's quest storyline without having to start over. Neat.

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Hellgate London: (Oct 31):

The folks at Flagship Studios used to be the guys who created the massive selling Diablo series for Blizzard. Now the team is making their own first person action-RPG with this unique mix of sci-fi and fantasy as human try to stave off an interdimentional invasion of creatures in London. You can buy the game and play it in single player and in multiplayer out of the box but Flagship (along with co-publishers Electronic Arts and Namco) is also creating an optional $9.95 monthly fee that gives players even more content and the promise of regular content updates. Oh, and did we mention its support for DirectX10 graphics?