About this time last year I wrote a small piece on adding a bit of entertainment to the install process for PC games, citing in particular Blizzard’s World of Warcraft expansion, Wrath of the Litch King, as a good example. I have a feeling that Blizzard is going this direction will all their games, because the same thing happens when you install StarCraft 2. It was a good idea before and it’s a good idea now. The install process is sadly still necessary for PC games and giving the player something to do while waiting for that little progress bar to tick forward is always a nice addition.

Kotaku has the full series telling the entire story if you are interested, check it out here.

I’m a huge fan of the German board game Carcassonne. It’s easy to figure out and a lot of fun to play. The Xbox Live version of Carcassonne has been out since 2007, and I have spent many an hour challenging my family and friends as we seek to build castles and control land.

According to Kotaku the iPhone version will be released later next month for $5, with the iPad version following shortly there after for a meager $10. Color me excited. I think it’ll be great to see another classic board game ported to the iPad. In my mind, there really isn’t a better platform for board games out there (minus the real life experience of course.) As with other games before, being able to place, rotate and swap tiles the way you would in life using nothing more than touch gestures will really demonstrate the strengths of the multi-touch surfaces for future games.

It won’t get much more real, unless of course you go out and buy the actual Carcassonne. Then after your done, you’ll have to clean it all up and who really wants to spend their time doing that?

I’ve always been a fan of games which choose to reduce visual imagery to it’s barest form. When I saw Playdead‘s LIMBO I knew it’d be a game I’d want to checkout. It’s been popping up everywhere. But I have to admit after checking out the video on it’s site, and seeing many screenshots, I am very excited for Playdead‘s LIMBO. Via this article from Kotaku the story is described as thus:

Limbo is the story of a young boy braving a bleak and mysterious world in order to determine the fate of his sister. The art is purely black and white, with the main character and platforming elements silhouetted against beautiful greyscale backdrops.

It’s coming to Xbox Live, and I am going to play it. There’s a few more screen shots after the jump if you haven’t left inglorio.us and gotten lost in the website for LIMBO.

Yeah, that’s as awful as I expected it too be.

I saw this group of tweets from @taleoftales stream on Twitter and I want to say I’m astounded at the absurdity of the installation process for Bioshock 2 on Steam. We speculate why people don’t play games on their PC as much anymore. This is why.