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Our verdict on 4A's gorgeous post-apocalyptic shooter
Top teams fight for glory in the grand finale
Featuring Skyrim, GTA 4, Portal 2 and more
Bigger, bloodier battles from World War 2's frozen front
CD Projekt RED’s icy open world RPG
An incredible new trailer has been released for SIGGRAPH 2013, a long-running technical papers program focused on computer graphics and interactive technology. While most of the voiceover narration went completely over my head, I did enjoy looking at the pretty pictures.
Battlefield 3 loves a good multiplayer event, but the whopping 96-hour double XP event planed for the beginning of May had to be postponed when the game’s servers were hit by a DDOS attack. Everyone loves a good multiplayer shindig, it seems, except the hackers.
Just as we were warming up for Intel’s Haswell CPU, Nvidia go and drop a whole new generation of graphics cards on our laps, with the Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 at the vanguard.
Well, when I say “whole new” that needs to be qualified just a touch. Nvidia haven’t suddenly forgotten all those roadmaps they’ve been showing off. This isn’t one of the new Maxwell GPUs. The GTX 700 generation is essentially a refresh with the same basic graphical technology that we saw in the GTX 600 series, though the GTX 780 is itself a bit of an exception to that. It’s actually taking the Titan’s GK 110 GPU and shaving a little power off the top, giving us a card that performs slightly below Nvidia’s state-of-the-art monster at a lower price point, ostensibly making the GTX 780 the oft-rumoured GTX Titan LE.
An Nvidia spokesperson pitched it as being “for everyone who loved Titan but couldn’t stump up to an £800 graphics card.” Does that claim stand up?
There is a dead body in the cockpit of my MH-9. In my haste to get into the cerulean sky above Arma 3’s Stratis island I accidentally spawned a chopper with a pilot in it and he wasn’t budging. I could have hopped back into the editor and fixed it, but I was keen to see the island. And I had a rifle.
So I shot the pilot and then the co-pilot to save him from having to explain to the pilot’s widow, and hopped in. The co-pilot remained, dead, slumped in his seat, his hand still gripping the joystick, as I flew around the rugged little Greek island cooing at the sights.
My girlfriend, who started to watch after hearing me giggle at the hunched dead figure, found this distasteful. To placate her, I popped back into the editor and switched a few things around. Like Craig the Magnificent, I produced a bunny. I began hopping around the island, showing her how the game allowed me to control the body of a rabbit. Arma 3, the newest version of the world’s most famous milsim, is still ridiculous and I love it for that.
As any good conspiracy nut will tell you, flags contain shocking secrets. And the one planted on the supposedly “Munar” surface of this Kerbal Space Program update video is clearly flapping around. FAKERS! This was clearly a staged performance to highlight the new flag-planting feature! Normally, I’d be furious, but those newly expanded rovers are just too damn adorable.
Is it still a weekly sale if there hasn’t been one for over a month? Does it matter when the upshot is a bunch of cheap games? Probably not. So instead of questioning their time-keeping, let’s celebrate the fact that the Humble Weekly Sale has returned, and is providing a pay-what-you-want offer for Remedy’s Alan Wake games.
Firaxis are breaking every rule in the trailer-making guidebook with this Policies & Ideologies featurette for Civilization 5′s Brave New World expansion. For starter’s it’s called Policies & Ideologies. That’s not what you call a trailer. You call a trailer “HYPER-BALLS ACTION SHINDIG,” or something equally preposterous. At the very least, you add in a bombastic dubstep drop over blood-spattered bold text.
The latest major update to PlanetSide 2 has landed, bringing some sweeping changes to the balance and design of the game. The most significant overhaul for “GU09″ is the trialling of a new map system, that replaces the previous Hex-based conquest path with a “Lattice Link” of criss-crossing attack avenues. So rather than expanding out in any direction, now your invasion is going to rely on somebody in your squad being able to read a map.
Valve are beta testing a community-run self-regulation system for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. It will allow certain experienced players to review reports of “disruptive behaviour”, watch replays, and issue temporary bans where necessary. Naturally, Valve have called this program “Overwatch”, which was also the title of the transhuman Combine soldiers of Half-Life 2. Not that there are any parallels. This is just an enforcement squad, working under a larger body that has ultimate power over… Oh…
You can’t see my face right now, but it’s contorted into an expression of bemused bewilderment. That’s because of an interview by ShackNews with the excellently named Matt Booty, Microsoft’s “general manager of Redmond Game Studios and Platforms”. In it, he distances the company’s Windows game strategy away from the perception of the “more traditional desktop PC game,” heavily suggesting that the majority of the Xbox One’s “15 exclusives” won’t be arriving on Microsoft’s other platform.
