This month has probably been one of the best for gaming in, well, ever, what with Call Of Duty: World At War, Fallout 3 and Gears Of War 2 all wearing out reviewers’ 5-star stamps. But if you haven’t got the cash to splash, or post-apocalyptic shooters aren’t your thing, there’s plenty of extra mileage to be gained from the games already on your shelves. Bonus and downloadable content is the way forward, and these are the games you need to hold on to a little longer before popping them up on eBay.
Grand Theft Auto IV DLC
Yes, we’ve been waiting for this much longer than expected, but if you have Rockstar’s roam-around-being-a-gangster’up on Xbox 360, it really will be worth holding on a little bit more. Yes, February 2009 is ten months after release, but the promise of extra character, missions, weapons and vehicles combined with the long wait will make “Lost And Damned”, as the DLC will be called, seem as fresh as a hot Krispy Kreme straight off the conveyor belt.
Metal Gear Online MEME expansion
Everyone’s favourite massively multiplayer stealth-em up has just been expanded some more, with MEME offering extra playable characters (Liquid Ocelot no less), three new maps and new rules for matches for PS3 owners, and it’s a bargain too at just £6.99.
Spore Creepy And Cute Parts Pack
If you’re no good at constructing your own critters to evolve, or simply can’t resist the urge to just make the most phallic blighters possible, you can always outsource and have somebody else come up with something for you. EA, creator of the Sims and its inifinite number of add ons, knows about exploiting extra content for all it’s worth, but they seem to be offering good value for money here, with more than 100 new body parts to mould your mutant out of, for just £7.99.
LittleBigPlanet
There’s no commercial add ons for Sackboy’s platformer, but that’s the beauty of it: you make the extra content. This does of course mean yet more genitalia-related graphics, but you’re still spoiled for choice: Sony recently announced that players have already posted 84,000 levels, of which only 0.5 per cent have had to be “moderated”. PC gamers are used to this sort of level of extra content through mods, but on a console, those stats are unprecedented.
Fallout 3
Alright, it’s yet another game to go out and buy, but Bethesda’s haunting nuclear wasteland world has more longevity than Bruce Forsyth. And that’s just the stand-alone game. Rockstar could probably take a leaf out of Bethesda’s book, as while the action RPG has only been out for three weeks, there’s already plans to release three sets of downloadable content from January for PC and Xbox 360, as well as a community level editor. That’s fast work – now all you have to do is manage to complete the original by then.
