Welcome to Beyond Co-Op, a weekly piece that talks about industry stories that may or may not be related to co-op gaming.
The stories for this week:
- Team Fortress 2 Raises over 400K for Japan
- Valve Has Somethign up their Sleeve with an ARG
- New Alice: Madness Returns Screens
- SSX Deadly Descent Renamed, Trailered
- Bioware Gives Mass Effect 2 to Dragon Age 2 Customers
Team Fortress 2 Raises over 400K for Japan
If you haven't played Team Fortress 2 in a while, you might not know the game has a thriving micro-economy selling little trinkets for your characters. To help out the earthquake victims of Japan, Valve released a special pack of hats and goodies for a price and the community answer to the tune of $430,000. That's a lot of virtual hats!
Source: TF2 Blog
Valve Has Something Up their Sleeve with an ARG
It started with an Indie Bundle released last week, where soon users found secret codes embedded with it. Later a select few sites started receiving emails from Valve with pieces of a puzzle and clues of something else. Rock Paper Shotgun has a nice wrap up and it appears the final picture is a diving ball. Which in the end it seems to just be an elaborate ad for Portal 2.
Source: RPS
Bioware Offers Free Copies of Mass Effect 2 for Dragon Age 2 Purchases
Did you purchase Dragon Age 2 on PC? If so you are eligible for a free copy of Mass Effect 2 from EA's digital download store. To gain access all you need to do is register your game with your EA online account and you are good to go!
New Alice Madness Returns Screens
SSX Deadly Descent now just SSX, First Trailer
It seems the new SSX game is going closer to its roots, dropping the Deadly Descent part and just being called SSX. Along with this news is the first developer diary - which actually still refers to the game by its old name.