Epic Games' Unreal Engine has been the backbone for a ridiculous number of titles. At Apple's music event Wednesday, they announced an upcoming action-RPG titled Project Sword that would finally put Vice President Mark Rein's comments that devices like the iPad had the same graphics capabilities as consoles to the test. Epic has certainly had a lot of nice things to say for the iPad, calling it the "console of the future," but until now it's been hard to see them quantify that comment with concrete examples.

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This past week I began looking through the iTunes sales charts and review websites to check in on what iPad games were popular and how well they ran on my device. The same staples of the iPhone are still in place on the iPad: tower defence games and turn-based strategy titles really excel on the iPad where pin-point precision and accuracy aren't needed for a great experience. What I found most surprising, however, was the level of depth on the iPad versions of titles. It has nothing to do with screen real estate, either: iPhone games give you a sense that you're really playing a short, mobile experience, while iPad games are generally much longer, more polished and have a far more epic "feel" to them.

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BioWare's Mass Effect franchise was one of the studio's more successful ventures, selling an ungodly number of copies for both the original game and its sequel across a number of systems. Stunningly, Dragon Age managed to outsell not just that franchise, but according to BioWare's Rob Bartel the game has apparently beaten sales records of all their other titles as well. That makes it all the more confusing as to why they've apparently decided to heavily emulate Mass Effect while creating Dragon Age 2, out next year.

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Last week, Yahoo!'s Plugged In site ran an interview with Epic Games' president Mike Capps detailing why his company has decided to leave the PC platform and switch focus to console games. Inevitably, his claim of rampant piracy has been picked up on a number of news sites and thrown up as validation that PC gaming is somehow "dying."

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Steam announced yesterday that they had partnered up with Prima, long the purveyor of official "strategy guides" for games like Mass Effect 2 and Prince of Persia, to offer downloadable versions of their guides through Valve's platform. At first glance I liked this idea a lot, but after buying one of them it seemed like a waste of money.

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As you may have heard, yesterday Valve (mostly) met one of their rare scheduled dates and released the OS X version of their popular digital distribution client, Steam. While the move to OS X is certainly a welcome one, as it gives access to a subset of computer users often left out when it comes to games, Steam's arrival hasn't been completely graceful.

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Last week Wolfire Games announced the "Humble Indie Bundle," a collection of five popular indie games packaged together under one price. The enticing factor was that you could choose to pay whatever you wanted for the package. One might think the lack of DRM coupled with the ability to get a number of stellar games for as little as a penny would mitigate the need to pirate the collection. But on a blog post to their site, one of the co-founders of Wolfire Games posted numbers indicating that he believes around 25% of direct downloads of the bundle are pirated.

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