Portal 2 E3 Demo – Parts 4 and 5
Don’t be discouraged in the face of great adversity! Make thermal beams and pneumatic vents your allies, not your enemies.
Final Fantasy XIV PC release date: Sep 30th
The new Final Fantasy MMO is coming to PC before it arrives on PS3, and it’s going to be out in three months time. Square Enix have confirmed the release date as 30th September. They’ve also confirmed what will be in the special edition, including early access from the 22nd September. Contents below.
Blizzard discuss making World of Warcraft free
The rise of the free-to-play western MMO hasn’t gone unnoticed at Blizzard, developers of World of Warcraft, the dominant western subscription MMO. Speaking to PC Gamer at their studios in Irvine, California, World of Warcraft’s lead designer, Tom Chilton, explained that “at some point, it may not make sense for us to have a subscription fee.”
Crysis 2 trailer: re-taking Grand Central station
We’ve just put up a video of Crysis 2 that’s pretending to be a shaky live video feed from New York. The new aliens are designed to act more like troops than monsters, to help combat the traditional dilemma Crytek find themselves in when they introduce the mutants or the squid aliens who can only be destroyed if you hose them down with bullets and abandon your super-cool tactics. Hang on, what’s that bursting into Grand Central Station half way through?
PC Gamer UK August issue – Cataclysm
The newest and most cataclysmic issue of PC Gamer UK has just burst from our printing press, and it’ll soon be sundering the very land itself, wracking your supermarkets with gaping geothermal fissures. As you rapidly burst into flames in the magazine aisle, you may only have time to read three things.
You should start with Tim’s six-page World of Warcraft: Cataclysm preview on page 44. He’s seen the new old world, and explains exactly how Deathwing’s emergence has reinvented Azeroth – as only a WoW veteran can.
As your kneecaps melt, you can flip to page 72 and read Martin Davies’ feature on the making of Torchlight, and the first details of their upcoming Torchlight MMO.
Finally, as your grasping hand sinks into the molten copies of Nuts and Men’s Health, your last regret will be never reading Tom’s report on the updated AI for Supreme Commander 2 on page 116. Hint: they made it scary.
Remember to flip to the competition on page 87 to find out how you could win a Cyberpower Ultra Scylla worth £900 – sometimes it’s as simple as making us laugh the most by wearing a silly hat.
Of course, if you want to avoid turning into a puddle of dedicated reader in the molten supermarket, you can buy an issue online here when it goes on sale on the 1st of July, or subscribe here.
The damnation game: Go To Hell
Go To Hell is a flash game where you have to dig 666 miles underground. It does a couple of interesting things with water. The first is that it flows down into caverns below as you tunnel furiously downwards. The second thing is that it then drowns you, and anything else that can’t swim out of there. Say what you will against water, though, it’s nowhere near as bad as the lava. Guess what that does?
Why I play ArmA 2
ArmA 2: Operation Arrowhead released today. It’s the most realistic military sim ever made. It’s the proper successor to Operation Flashpoint. It lets you missile terrorist camps from eight kilometers away with remotely-controlled aerial drones. And you should absolutely play it–but not for any of those reasons.
Maximum PC review: EVGA GTX 470 SC
Our compatriots over at MaximumPC.com have given outstanding marks to Nvidia’s newest mid-range graphics card, which trounces the Radeon HD 5850 in most tests.
“Built on a cut-down version of Nvidia’s high-end, DirectX 11 GPU, this card posted eyebrow-raising benchmarks, pretty much putting it into a class of its own.”
Click here to read the full review and benchmark tests.
Breaking news from Singularity: “hhhthhhfhhj”
I’ve been playing Raven Software’s sci-fi shooter Singularity the last few days, their first original game in ten years. It has some, er, rough edges. Like this, one of several newspapers that fill the screen for long sections of a pivotal cut-scene. Whether the artist typed in some dummy text assuming a writer would fill it in later, or they were simply told the body wouldn’t be readable at the final viewing size, something’s gone wrong here. History is written by the victors. Alternate history is written by the sovnoob uhreoi.
How the Xbox sucked the life out of Dragon Age
Around the time Dragon Age came out, I bought an Xbox. It came with two games, and Dragon Age was one of them. I started it up and played through a few of the origins, and then I read John Walker’s review in PCG 207. I couldn’t believe it. 94 percent? For this? Sure, there’s great talky bits (I’m a fan of talky bits) but the combat is just dull, and there’s so much of it that I couldn’t stand marching through any more of it just to get to five minutes of dialogue. I couldn’t understand his review. I started to think he might have Bioware bedsheets. Of course, John Walker is one of our mightiest writers, and he wasn’t wrong about Dragon Age – it just didn’t match up to what I was playing. On Xbox, it’s like eating your favourite meal on an economy class flight – it suffers from being crammed into a little plastic box.
Battlefield: Bad Company 2 patch notes
DICE have clarified that the new patch for Battlefield: Bad Company 2 will hit at 11AM tomorrow (Weds) morning, UK time – 5AM Eastern Daylight Time. Here are the patch notes, including classics like “Knifing people in the back works again”.
Torchlight MMO details in the new PC Gamer
The team behind the fantastic action-RPG Torchlight are making an MMO, an MMO that will be free-to-play, but supported by microtransactions. Although little’s known about the MMO, the Torchlight team talk about their plans in the new issue of PC Gamer, on-sale in the UK on Thursday. In the mag, they reveal that they’re aiming for an MMO that feels like a single player game, and it’ll retain the same fast action. Their president Travis Baldree also shows he has a traditional PC gamer attitude towards microtransactions.
Leaked Windows 8 app store shots show games focus
Just when you thought Microsoft had all but forgotten that PCs were anything more than a tool for designing Xbox games, some design sketches for Windows 8 are leaked and they’re full of pictures of the PC with love hearts on. More importantly, a casual gaming store.
Ask the expert: should I turn off UAC?
If cross platform gaming were a horse race, the PC would be a thoroughbred. Faster, more powerful and with a penchant for expensive oats. Like any infinitely rarified animal or highly tuned machine, though, it doesn’t take much to cause it damage. Our resident tech vet Adam Oxford is here to put it out of your misery.
