Today's news round-up includes news of a new patch for Blizzard's
World of Warcraft, the ability to manage your Xbox Live friends list from your PC, and the release of the sequel to popular casual game
Dinner Dash with
Diner Dash 2: Restaurant Rescue, as well as the latest posts from GameSetWatch, fresh product news and Gamasutra job postings.
- Blizzard Entertainment has released
World of Warcraft Client Patch 1.10.0, which adds a number of significant changes to the popular MMORPG. The 368.3MB patch includes new weather effects across many of the game's areas, with promises of more weather changes to be added soon. The patch also adds new class and interface tweaks too numerous to name. In addition, with this patch, quest completion experience past level 60 is changed into gold, thus adding value to quests for players with characters sitting at the level 60 cap.
- With Microsoft's Free Xbox Live Gold Weekend taking place from March 31-April 2, the company has made changes to the 'My Xbox' portion of the Xbox homepage. These changes allow visitors to make changes to their Xbox 360 friends list online from the website, as well the ability to send, receive, and decline friend requests, following feedback from Xbox 360 players that they wanted easier ways to affect their Xbox Live account away from the PC.
- Play First's worldwide casual game sensation
Diner Dash received a sequel today with the release of
Diner Dash 2: Restaurant Rescue. The game sees heroine Flo return from restaurant Nirvana to save four friends from Mr. Big Corp. "PlayFirst has received emails from casual game players all over the world who love
Diner Dash and can't wait to see the next chapter in Flo's story," said Kenny Dinkin, vice president and executive producer, PlayFirst. "New art, characters, powerups and a surprise fifth restaurant are sure to keep players on their tip-seeking toes."
- The latest updates on Gamasutra sister weblog GameSetWatch include
a question posed to readers regarding the non-gamer appeal of Nintendo's upcoming
Brian Age DS title,
a video lampooning Gizmondo's Stefan Eriksson's recent controversial car crash, a look at
the new 5th issue of The Gamer's Quarter, as well as
the XYZZY Award winners for 2005, and
Matthew Williamson's nostalgic look back at Squaresoft’s seminal action RPG, Secret of Mana.
- Also updated today: product news, featuring
Emergent and Crytek signing to use the Scaleform GFx SDK and
the release of Turtle 3 for Maya, as well as
the latest Gamasutra job postings, featuring positions from Concrete Games, Cranky Pants Games, K2Network, National University, Radical Entertainment, Spark Unlimited, Inc., The Art Institute of California, The Bohle Company, and Wideload Games.
