The reboot of Microsoft’s Games for Windows Marketplace has proven once more that Microsoft is seemingly incapable of doing anything right for PC gamers. It should have marked a grand new beginning with its regular discounts on games in the store, new game offerings outside of the Games for Windows catalogue and even direct payments instead of those awful Microsoft points. Instead it has proven to be a confusing mess with ridiculous pricing outside of those few discount offers.

An excellent weekend deal offering Age of Empires 3 for just 10 cents had many gamers attempt a purchase on the new GfW Marketplace only to run into its main flaw: it only works in 7 countries. The website provides helpful “unsupported territory” messages to anyone outside Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, the United Kingdom or the United States. And that’s only when using Internet Explorer, because any decent internet browser generates logout errors instead of the appropriate unsupported territory message.

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Call of Duty: Black Ops’ menu screen is an annoying affair where you’re strapped into the interrogation chair featured in the singleplayer campaign. This results in a cumbersome menu system that can only be controlled with the keyboard, but Treyarch have compensated for this by including some nice easter eggs: it’s actually possible to get out of the chair and do some digging on a nearby computer.

This computer can be used to unlock an additional playable map for the popular zombie co-op mode as well as an arcade style top-down zombie shooter mini game. And it’s even possible to play that good old text based adventure game Zork. Read on for the required commands to get these things unlocked and playable.

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Digital distribution platforms feature regular special offers to lure in new customers. These exceptional deals can be used to your advantage as a means to quickly assemble a vast collection of great PC games at very low cost. But that requires regularly checking in on each and every digital download service for their latest deals, which can be a tiresome affair.

That’s where this weekly Discount Drone feature comes in. Within I take a weekly look at everything that is on offer and extract the best deals for your perusal. These are formatted by genre and accompanied by short and accurate descriptions, so that you can decide whether a game might be worth having. This includes special offers on: Direct2Drive, EA Store, GamersGate, Get Games, Good Old Games, Green Man Gaming, Impulse and Steam.

There are some great games to be had this week even though the total offering isn’t quite as expansive as last week. This includes the action-adventure game classic Beyond Good and Evil which on sale for practically nothing over at Get Games, while the atmospheric indie platformer Trine sees an even better deal than last week over at Green Man Gaming. GamersGate packs out with a Dragon Week and crushes the other services with a bundle pack that offers more value-for-money than anything else this week in the excellent Spellforce 2 Gold real-time strategy/role-playing game bundle. And lastly there is some great free-roaming shooter gameplay to be enjoyed over at EA Store with its sale for simultaneously awesome and flawed World War 2 shooter The Saboteur.

Read on for more incredible deals and subscribe to GameDrone for weekly coverage of the best digital download offerings!

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CD Projekt just unveiled their launch plans for The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings in a live presentation that finished about an hour ago. The highly anticipated fantasy role-playing game will not only see two expansive retail packages when it comes out on May 17th 2011, but is now also available for pre-order on various digital distribution platforms at a 10% discount. But the most surprising revelation has to be the fact that The Witcher 2 can now be pre-ordered from CD Projekt’s own popular digital distribution site Good Old Games – and that version is packed with additional goodies, some of which are available immediately after pre-ordering!

These various editions of the game are all covered in detail below. Some gameplay footage was also shown, but this unfortunately turned out to be a re-airing of the “prison scene” gameplay footage that was revealed a few months ago. This still looks very impressive, with a detailed examination of how non-linear the storytelling is in this sequel and a massive battle scene at the end that demonstrates a truly state-of-the-art graphics engine, but it would’ve been nice to see something new.

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The next few years are looking to be filled with big budget role-playing games, many of them sequels of franchise reboots. Doubtlessly many of you are looking forward to one or two of these games, so now it’s time to let your voice be heard and decide which RPG makes the cut as the most anticipated upcoming RPG. Vote for your RPG in the new poll that can be found in the sidebar!

I’ve included a lot of upcoming role-playing games, but one or two interesting titles may have slipped my attention. If your most anticipated RPG is not listed then let me know and I’ll add the game to the poll. My personal favorite has to be The Witcher 2, although Dragon Age 2 cuts it close. It’s a good thing that there should be a few months margin between the two, so I won’t have to pick and choose when they come out.

The new poll should last for two weeks. My apologies for letting the previous poll run on so long, but the results are in and can be found below.

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I’ve made it abundantly clear that Call of Duty: Black Ops has been released in a bug-riddled state during these past few days, but while I’ve already written up a troubleshooting guide for the more serious bugs, there are also a lot of people suffering from general performance issues! These people will get the attention they deserve today with a couple of helpful tips to improve the general performance of this game. A game that’s not much of a looker, but still manages to rank amongst the most demanding PC games of all time.

After some digging I’ve uncovered some of the more obvious and general tweaks, but also a few obscure and unexpected performance boosters for this game in particular. And when it runs smoothly Black Ops offers some of the best multiplayer first person shooter gameplay in recent years, so be sure to read on and get ready to join in on the fun.

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Treyarch recently released a small patch for Call of Duty: Black Ops that greatly improved its playability. So I’ve gotten quite a few hours in with the game over the weekend and now that I’m halfway into the first prestige I think it’s time to share my thoughts on the state of the game’s multiplayer mode.

It’s a first person shooter that follows in the footsteps of Modern Warfare 2. Players create their own character classes by selecting their desired equipment, perks and weapons to use in numerous team based game modes. And as players gain points and overcome challenges (such as 15 kills with a specific weapon) they gain levels and unlock even more equipment, perks and weapons to improve their classes with.

Blacks Ops introduces a number of important changes to this formula, some of which are very good news for PC gamers. The reintroduction of dedicated servers and a server browser have already resulted in a significant reduction of lag, cheaters and poor map pools in contrast to the previous iteration in the CoD franchise. However, not every change has been a positive one and Treyarch may have done well to postpone release by another month or two …

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Digital distribution platforms feature regular special offers to lure in new customers. These exceptional deals can be used to your advantage as a means to quickly assemble a vast collection of great PC games at very low cost. But that requires regularly checking in on each and every digital download service for their latest deals, which can be a tiresome affair.

That’s where this weekly Discount Drone feature comes in. Within I take a weekly look at everything that is on offer and extract the best deals for your perusal. These are formatted by genre and accompanied by short and accurate descriptions, so that you can decide whether a game might be worth having. This includes special offers on: Direct2Drive, GamersGate, Get Games, Good Old Games, Green Man Gaming, Impulse and Steam.

This weeks sees a number of interesting sales spread across the various platforms as opposed to Steam’s complete domination last week. The most interesting of these offerings have to be the real-time strategy classic Company of Heroes (and it’s expansion packs) and the excellent stealth action game Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell. But Space Rangers 2 Complete also offers great value with it’s ridiculous conglomeration of genres in a space setting and the great indie platforming bundle of VVVVVV & Trine on Get Games is certainly also a worthy contender. Meanwhile, hands-off fantasy real-time strategy game Majesty 2 also sees a massive discount on several sites in celebration of the launch of its new expansion pack. And these are just the tip of the iceberg.

Read on for more exciting deals and subscribe to GameDrone for weekly coverage of the best digital download offers!

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