Not never: Duke Nukem Forever rides again
Duke Nukem Forever is back on track for a 2011 release. 2K have got Gearbox working on it, and folks at PAX were even playing the thing. There’s nothing in the way of a trailer yet (grrr), but here’s some hand held footage that gets pretty close to the screen.
5 lessons SupCom 2 could learn from StarCraft 2
Yesterday, I listed five things I thought StarCraft 2 could learn from Supreme Commander 2. It was like leading an army of SupCom 2 fans against an outraged throng of competitive e-sports fans. Today, I’m going to betray my allies and side with the Blizz folks. What can SupCom 2 learn from StarCraft 2?
Shogun 2: Total War battle footage
Now this is what I wanted to see: footage of Shogun 2 in action. Creative Assembly’s communications manager Kieran Brigden fights the AI while land battle AI programmer Ingimar Gudmunsson explains what it’s doing.
Company of Heroes Online is the best deal in PC gaming
I’ve just been tinkering with Company of Heroes Online, the awesome World War 2 strategy game from Relic. And it’s unbelievable. Absolutely, mind blowing. I know we’ve been banging on about this for months now, but you really, honestly, absolutely have to try it out. If you sign up at the Company of Heroes site, you can download the full, original, Company of Heroes campaign, for free. There’s absolutely zero catch. It’s worth it just to play the Carentan mission – which I still think is the best RTS level ever created. We’ll have much more shortly, but just go and have a play, and report back what you think.
Bloody Good Time announced
Bloody Good Time is a multiplayer shooter from Outerlight Studios (they made The Ship) that’ll be trundling onto Steam later on in the year. You’re an actor competing for a part in a horror film. You compete by murdering other actors for the part. While that’s nothing like how real actors audition, it’s a lot like games journalism.
Broken Sword: The Director’s Cut released
Well this is a little bit cool. The the remastered Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars has come to the PC – it dropped onto Steam this morning. It’s £9.99/$9.99.
Poker Night at the Inventory
Telltale games have just unveiled a poker game at PAX. It’ll be a comedy poker game starring four characters from games you know and love, or that you meant to play but couldn’t get into because of the obtuse puzzles. It’ll cost you $5/£3, and it’ll be out “this fall.”
PC Gamer US Podcast 238 – Dynamic Duo
PAX is just around the corner and most of the PC Gamer crew is mid-flight to the convention center. There they’ll be meeting readers, hosting a panel on PC gaming, and of course playing the best games and reporting on the latest news in the industry. Our ground team, Andy Bauman and Josh Augustine, talk about what they expect to see at PAX, the latest news–including Elemental’s review and ATI disappearing off the face of the earth forever–and answer some reader questions. Enjoy and be sure to tune in for PAX coverage over the weekend!
Elemental launch was “catastrophic poor judgment”
Speaking on the official Stardock forums, Brad Wardell, the CEO of Stardock has revealed that the problems associated with Elemental’s disastrous launch were nothing to do with the game being pushed out the door early. In fact, Wardell says that releasing a game early is “an easy thing for a company to ‘fix’… If the game had come out in February, it would still have been a disastrous launch because lack of time wasn’t the issue.” Wardell says he had his “head in the sand.”
The full post, below, makes for extraordinary reading.
Aerial faith plates: a Portal 2 puzzle solution
Valve just posted this video. It’s the puzzle you saw little clips of during the E3 videos – with Chell sailing through the air after a weighted storage cube for it to land on a button and open a door for her. This is the video of the entire puzzle culminating in that solution.
Elemental multiplayer delayed to next week
As I mentioned last week, Elemental: War of Magic is now stable. But the advertised multiplayer, which is listed as a feature on the game’s box, still isn’t working. At launch, Stardock said it would be ‘switched on’ this week. Now, staffer Neil Banfield says on their forums that it’s been delayed again, to next week. He says their priority is to resolve performance problems and other issues with the game at large first, and they’ve posted a 5,000 word list of bugs, problems and improvements they plan to work on. Multiplayer is not mentioned.
PC Gamer has an Eve corp and we’re recruiting
In Space, no-one can hear you scream. Unless you scream over Teamspeak. That’s the good news. The better news is that PC Gamer is now active in Eve Online, and we have a small, but growing corps. We’re recruiting new and experienced players, via the PC Gamer forum. The corp is called PCG Enterprises, and we’re mostly about building up a small force and learning the ropes. If you’d like to get in on the ground floor, now is the time to join.
5 lessons StarCraft 2 could learn from SupCom 2
Before StarCraft came along, we all played Supreme Commander 2 at lunch. It’s a great game with a dedicated development team who are committed to firing out updates and improvements months after release, even as their company at large is working on a new title. I returned to it yesterday after the recent patch, and I got to thinking – StarCraft 2 and Supreme Commander 2 are hugely entertaining RTS experiences with wildly different approaches to the genre. As you know, I hate diversity almost as much as I hate joy, so I started compiling a list of things that each game could learn from the other. Here are five things I reckon StarCraft 2 could learn from Supreme Commander 2.
Update: Servo at Gas Powered Games offered some insights into how feasible these would be. Here’s what he said:
Gamble for guns in Call of Duty: Black Ops
It can’t be an easy job, building on what could happily be called the biggest gaming franchise currently in existence. But the team at Treyarch do have one big idea they’re adding to the Call of Duty formula. It’s simple, it’s time-tested, and it’s so obvious that you’ve got to wonder why it wasn’t in the last one. It’s gambling.
Shogun 2 screens: men politely killing each other
“The control of a large force is the same principle as the control of a few men: it is merely a question of click-and-dragging a box around them to select them all.” Sun Tzu said that. If only we’d known his views on the proper use of Attack-move, we’d all be better real time strategy gamers. He also said, “To know Shogun 2, one must become Shogun 2.” If you’re not sure how to do that, though, you can just look at this gallery of new Shogun 2: Total War screens.
