Gaming’s best cereal-based shooter
If you reached your hand into a box of Chex cereal in 1996, you may have grasped one of the most beloved DOOM mods ever made—Chex Quest, a free advergame, often bundled with a trial for America Online internet, commissioned by General Mills to associate its unsugared cereal with high-tempo intergalactic combat. To a breakfasting youth not tall enough to board the demon-ventilating Doom rollercoaster, donning the wheat-checkered armor of the Chex Warrior was a mom-friendly substitute—you weren’t buckshotting Mars demons, just “zorching” anthropomorphic boogers back to their own dimension.
APB expansions to be ‘new game types’
David Jones, Creative Director at Realtime Worlds, has said that he expects his latest game, the cops-and-robbers MMO APB will not follow the expansion pack model that traditional massively multiplayer games take. Instead, he says, the game will expand ‘horizontally’.
Blizzard prep Cataclysm battleground changes
Posting on World of Warcraft’s official forums, Blizzard’s Tom Chilton, lead designer for World of Warcraft, has teased significant changes to the functionality of the in-game battlegrounds and player versus player mechanics.
XCOM E3 trailer: oily in-game footage
The first trailer for the new XCOM game has arrived, giving us a slightly terrifying first look at 2K Marin’s modern re-imagining of the classic strategy series. Both the hazy ’50s style and the explosive gunplay are on show, but the real stars of the trailer are the genuinely disturbing new aliens, with their frenzied, unpredictable movements and horrifying tendency to leap at the faces of their attackers. We’re looking forward to obliterating the alien menace when the game is released, sometime in 2011.
Welcome to PC Gamer
PC Gamer launched back in 1993. It was an incredible time for the PC; games like Doom, Ultima VII, and Syndicate were showing the power and flexibility of an open gaming platform. PC Gamer’s rise reflected that. The magazine rapidly became the global authority on PC games – with the best writers, the most extraordinary scoops and fair, honest reviews. We’ve sold millions of copies all over the world, and we’ve been online in one form or another for over a decade. Now, we’re starting a new era…
Team Fortress 2 adds training mode, Mac support
Valve have released Team Fortress 2 for the Mac. If you don’t own a Mac, there are four reasons why you should still care, and one of them rhymes with Spraining Node.
Starcraft II TV ad: renderlicious
Starcraft II is mere weeks away, and that means the media blitz starts now. You can watch the HD TV ad for the game below. It shows again just how good Blizzard’s cinematics team are getting at this. Hnnng! Vibrating with anticipation of clicking on tiny little cartoon men!
Our E3 predictions
E3 starts next Tuesday, the 15th, and we’re going to be all over it. Five of us will be there to tell you everything there is to know about the biggest and most exciting games at the show, pretty much the minute we see it. But why wait for old-fashioned methods like ‘seeing things’ and ‘talking to people’ to yield results, when we could make a bunch of informed guesses at what’s going to happen ahead of time?
Ask the expert: your questions answered
We know PC Gaming can be hard. We know stuff breaks, and we know how painful and brutal it can feel when your PC fails. We think we can help. Every week, Adam Oxford, PC Gamer’s resident hardware expert will be answering your PC game hardware and software questions. If you want to submit your own questions, let us know in the Tech Folder on the forum, in the comments below, or via email. Let’s get on with the show.
Scary Girl
Your eye-patched adventurer isn’t as scary as the title suggests, but the bizarre world she inhabits is as disturbing as it is beautiful. Scary Girl is a simple platformer that sees you collecting followers to please the weird characters you meet on your travels, but what it lacks in complexity it makes up for in sheer strangeness. Scary girl’s world is a fun place to be a tourist.
FEAR 3 trailer
A look at the two characters you’ll be playing in Fthreear – or F3AR as the developers insist on spelling it. This one’s not by Monolith, who made the brilliant original, but it’s still rather intriguing for having co-op. One of you plays as the hairy, shooty one known by the lamest super-hero name ever, Point Man, and the other is the ghost of his dead brother. Yes. Ghost-Fettel can possess people and cause trouble with his psychic abilities. The trailer shows off some of the slow-mo gunplay the series is famous for, as well as some of the more unusual abilities at Fettel’s disposal.
GeForce GTX 480 review
Nvidia’s DirectX 11-capable graphics processors, codenamed Fermi, have finally arrived. The Fermi core, also known as GF100, at last pushes Nvidia beyond the first unified shader design it used with the 8800 series almost four years ago.
Lord of the Rings Online is free to play
Lord of the Rings Online will soon cost you nothing to play. The new Middle Earth will have a cash shop to monetize “expansions, quest packs, items, and account services,” and they’re offering a subscription service that’ll hook you up to everything for “one low price”. They’re also testing it in an open beta that you can sign up for here.
Double Wires
PC Gamer loves grappling hooks. If we had things out way we would grapple our way to work every morning and grapple our way home at night. Until that becomes a reality, we can hone our skills with Double Wires. Simply click to fire a grapple wire and watch as your floppy stick man bounces incompetently off the scenery. Keep an eye on the top right hand of the screen to see how far you’ve travelled. When you can, grapple an object at the very last second and fling yourself off the top of the screen to cover great distances very quickly.
Get one of 20,000 APB beta keys just by signing up
Welcome to the PC Gamer community: your first task is to click that Register button on the top right. Do it soon enough, and registering with us will not only let you add your voice to the smartest, wittiest, gaming-est PC games site on the internet, but also access to the APB beta.
20,000 community members will each receive a key for the APB beta, granting free access to the online car-crunching cops and robbers game until June 19. Download the client from APB.com and create your character; we’ll start sending keys out daily on June 14 until our supply is exhausted.
Update! The beta has now ended.
