Archive for June, 2010

NSFW: Getting the lay of the land in Bonetown

What struck me as my character ran around the streets of BoneTown starting fist-fights with hippies while wearing no pants and sporting a superhuman erection is that the PC is the only place a game like BoneTown can exist. Say what you will about the quality of the game—and I’m about to say plenty on that topic—there is no other gaming system on the planet that allows you to buy and play an interactive smut playground.

Not to be confused with Out From Boneville, the E-rated premiere episode of Telltale’s first episodic game series Bone, BoneTown is a raunchy, ridiculous and pornographic game that attempts to marry Grand Theft Auto’s open world to a little Leisure Suit Larry humor and a lot of hard-core sex. The most I can say for the resulting game is that it’d make a pretty good gag gift at a gamer’s bachelor party.

Ask the expert: cooling your PC

The hot weather has provided a theme for this week’s PC gaming helpdesk. Cooling concerns have cropped up over and over again, so how much do you need to worry about what your CPU’s temperature?

Every Tuesday, our hardware expert Adam Oxford is on hand to answer your hardware and software gripes. If you’ve got a question, ask below in the comments, or in the tech folder in our forum.

Browser game: Transformice

I’ve no idea why this is called Transformice. It should be called “A bunch of mice who are assholes.” It goes like this: you’re a mouse, and so is everyone else who’s playing. You’ve all got to navigate to the cheese and take a piece back to the mouse hole, and the quicker you do that, the better your final score is. Your chief obstacle is physics – when fifteen mice are standing on a pivoting board, it’s going to start tipping. When they’re all laden with cheese and climbing over one another to avoid falling, it tips even farther. Soon, it’s too steep to escape, and you’re plummeting down into the pit. Luckily, at least one mouse has the power to summon objects and tether them to the world (or not). This ‘Shaman’ mouse is, in theory, your best bet for communal survival and overall cheese-maximisation for the entire mousey tribe.

In theory.

Call of Duty subscriptions on the Activision menu

When the Wall Street Journal asked Bobby Kotick, CEO of Activision, what he’d do for his company if he had a magical genie-type wish, he said, “I would have Call of Duty be an online subscription service tomorrow.”

Interesting choice of words! Kotick clearly has the best interests of the board of investors at heart. He didn’t say ‘I’d make a Call of Duty MMO,’ which would probably be great, but essentially ‘I’d like infinity dollars please.’ He turns it around pretty quickly, jumping right into how he thinks it would please consumers: “I think our audiences are clamoring for it. If you look at what they’re playing on Xbox Live today, we’ve had 1.7 billion hours of multiplayer play on Live. I think we could do a lot more to really satisfy the interests of the customers.” Yeah, like charging them for each of those hours. Think of the money! Uh, customer satisfaction!

[Wall Street Journal via The Escapist]

Engineering victory in Supreme Commander 2

In a game made famous by its colossal, stompy super units, it’s easy to forget the humble engineers. Do so at your peril. They are the unsung heroes of Supreme Commander 2, and you can wipe Hard AI off the map using nothing else. It’s one of my favourite tactics – here’s how it works.

Microsoft’s shameful E3 PC showing

Here’s a fun fact: if you tried searching for PC games at E3, you’d do a better job looking at Sony’s portfolio than Microsoft’s. For the sum total of Microsoft’s commitment to PC gaming at E3 was utterly embarrassing. Four Xbox 360s running Fable 3. It’s now absolutely clear that Microsoft have zero interest in developing or supporting PC gaming’s incredible future. Their PC E3 showing was an embarrassment to the platform.

Trine 2 screenshots: activate your frog exaggerator

Trine was a too-often overlooked gem: an ingenious, inventive physics platformer with some stunning vistas and neat tri-player puzzles.  Sadly, it also had a difficulty level that erratically jolted between pleasant and torturous. Thankfully, they’re taking another stab at it: as the trailer and screens below show. Trine 2 will bring back the first game’s three classes – Warrior, Thief and Wizard – but you can now play with your friends online. The first game only allowed you to play on the same PC, which was cosy but rather inconvenient. If they can also make the Warrior more useful, and the Thief less dominant, it should be a lovely jaunt.

OnLive is out, and it works – for some

The futuristic game streaming service OnLive is now a reality, so a massive question is about to be answered: does it work? OnLive claims to let you play any game on its service, however demanding, on your lowly laptop – even a Mac. The games run on servers their end, and the audio and video data is just streamed to you over the net.

Our US team have only just got back from E3, and OnLive isn’t available here in the UK, but our indie developer friends Wolfire have been using the service. Jeff’s put together a great analysis of how practical the service really is, and the most surprising part is that – for him at least – it works. Low latency, hi-fidelity gaming on a MacBook Pro, via Comcast’s cheapest possible broadband package. Check out a video of him playing UT3 through the service, below the fold:

EVE Alliance Tournament VIII: space-killery

EVE Online alliances are vast, sprawling entities, at their peak crewed by thousands of players from every corner of the world. Over the last two weeks, their top players have been clashing for money and glory in the EVE Alliance Tournament VIII – an epic, 64 team competition broadcast live over the internet, commented on live by expert commentators, and with prizes including limited edition ships, and 50 billion ISK. For those of you unfamiliar with ethereal fake space-money, that’s about $2500 in straight up, real-life cash. Internet spaceships are serious business.

The Deus Ex decision: which ending did you pick?

Meaningful decisions were one of the trademarks of Deus Ex, and it ended on a tough one. By the climax, you’ve got the Illuminati, the Luminous Path triad, and a mysterious AI all barking in your ear. You’ve come to stop power-mad billionaire Bob Page from taking over the world, and they’re all in favour of that. But all three have different ideas about who should be in charge instead, and all three need you to execute them. The decision is yours, and it’s fitting that the last one you make in the game is also one of the hardest. Discussing it in the office, we found we completely disagreed on which was the best. This is an article from our print edition about what those choices were, who picked them, and what the consequences were in the sequel, Invisible War.

Risk meets MMO in Heroes of Three Kingdoms

Perfect World was showing off quite a few new games at E3 this year, but it was Heroes of Three Kingdoms that had some of the most interesting features. Controlling territories will be a major part of the end-game focus, as a Risk-like map tracks factions’ influence over the game world. Aspiring world-conquerors will need to rely on allies to help defend their faction’s territories with NPC armies, forts, and, of course, their own characters, while working to sabotage and take over enemy territories. Here’s a shot I took on the show floor:

Aika Online expansion released

The developers of Aika Online released the game’s first expansion today. Titled “Ashes of Betrayal”, the patch adds new class evolutions, quests, areas, and more–all for free of course. You can download the full client here.

Aika Online is a free-to-play MMO that boasts 1000 vs. 1000 PvP with little to no lag, and features Castle Siege, Relic War, and Battlegrounds modes–not a bad deal for the price of none dollars.