How Games for Windows Live ate half of my lunch hour
For lunch today, I had a sandwich. Games for Windows Live had about thirty minutes of satisfaction at my expense. My mission was to quickly boot up the original Dawn of War II and get some pictures of some orks for an article. I thought it would take five minutes to get a picture of Force Commander Herfderficus carefully inserting his chainsword into a greenskin.
I was wrong.
Black Ops dedicated servers aren’t moddable
Call of Duty: Black Ops will have dedicated servers, but you don’t get to poke around in them. You can play on the free ones that’ll come online at release, or you can rent some hermetically-sealed ones from GameServers for you friends, but you can’t host your own. You can’t mess with the gravity. You can’t ban that overpowered weapon. You can’t get rid of spawn times. You can’t put the Unreal sound effects in. You can’t have it track your regulars and display kill-to-death ratios after each match in a makeshift league. Until – or unless – the mod tools are released, we’re not sure you’ll be able to mod it at all.
Update: I was partly wrong. Partly! See below for details.
Interview: Valve want to see you sweat, and make a game of it
I was at Valve last month to interview pretty much everyone I could find, and play one of the most exciting PC games on the horizon: Portal 2. The preview I wrote, and the profile on Valve themselves, is in the new issue of PC Gamer in the UK. But we’re also putting up the interviews here on the site, one a day for a week. Today’s is my conversation with Gabe Newell, Erik Johnson and Doug Lombardi on how they test their games, how they can see your pulse race, measure your stress and sense your sweat. And how they’d like to use that in a game.
Steam Wallet lets you buy money?
Valve are in the process of rolling out a Steam Wallet thing for Steam. You can use it to add money to your Steam account in weird £4/$5 increments. Why? Because Valve are mad scientists, and they felt like it.
Stab aliens in Section 8: Prejudice
If you missed Section 8 last year, it was one of the more satisfying team-based shooters around. You dropped in from orbit, choosing your spawn location by steering yourself away from anti-air guns, then jetpacked around the battlefield completing dynamic objectives that cropped up. Now it’s getting a sequel, with aliens, and Prejudice. They’re focusing more on the story campaign, and on very transparently mocking Halo in their trailer. See for yourself.
Red Faction: Armageddon delayed to next May
THQ’s next hammers-on-Mars game, Red Faction: Armageddon, has been delayed to May 2011. It was originally scheduled for a March release next year. The only possible explanation is that they’re injecting another 2 months of pure fun into it.
It’s LucasArts Week on Steam
Fire up Steam today and you’ll see an offer for Star Wars: The Force Unleashed – Ultimate Sith Edition for $7.50. That sounds about right for that game – while you do get to run around as a lightsaber-wielding, Force Lightning-throwing C-3PO, you also have to endure a bajillion quicktime events and loading screens just to get to the pause menu. (And then there’s the matter of the gargantuan 25GB install – have fun with that download.) There’s a promise of a new deal every day this week, and most of the Star Wars back catalog can be had for a mere $50.
I’d love to see the Monkey Island Special Edition remakes go on sale sometime this week. That’s not to say that $20 is too much to pay for the best of Guybrush Threepwood, but a knocking a few bucks off that price would make me feel like a mighty pirate pillaging booty.
10 copies of Global Agenda up for grabs
Global Agenda got its very own UK boxed release on Friday. To celebrate, we’re giving away ten copies on Steam, which, now that I think about it, is really weird. We should be giving away boxed copies, right? Still, that’s how the big bad world works. To probably have a chance of potentially getting one, read on:
Gabe Newell: next-gen game engines will be ten times harder
I was at Valve last month to interview pretty much everyone I could find, and play one of the most exciting PC games on the horizon: Portal 2. The preview I wrote, and the profile on Valve themselves, is in the new issue of PC Gamer in the UK. But we’re also putting up the interviews here on the site, one a day for a week. Today’s is my conversation with Gabe Newell, Erik Johnson and Doug Lombardi about the difficult but exciting future of game engines, and why they hire who they hire.
Try out the new World of Warcraft talent trees
Just a quick note: if you didn’t get into the Cataclysm beta, you can now download the regular public test realm client and try out the new talent builds and class changes. I’ve put a short summary of the choicest tweaks below, but here’s one: ammo is gone.
The 10 best apps for PC gaming
The most important program on your PC at any given moment is the game you’re playing, but what about the helper apps that surround it? Some of them, like Steam, are so essential we’re not even going to name them here. But what about the ones that surround your games like little oxpeckers around their favourite hippo, keeping things running just a little better than they otherwise might? Here’s PC Gamer’s list of the 10 best.
Grab high scores and dodge neon death in NeonPlat
Today’s free game is a fast and flourescent platforming game in which you have to dodge dozens of enemies in an epic quest to paint the white rails blue. Hordes of enemies will try to stop you, and they keep on coming until the whole screen is a yellow sheet of blazing neon.
Interview: Valve on why Alien Swarm is free
I was at Valve last month to interview pretty much everyone I could find, and play one of the most exciting PC games on the horizon: Portal 2. The preview I wrote, and the profile on Valve themselves, is in the new issue of PC Gamer in the UK. But we’re also putting up the interviews here on the site, one a day for a week. Today’s is my conversation with the creator of Alien Swarm, about how the game turned from mod to polished Valve product, and why it’s free.
Crap Shoot: Darkened Skye
Richard Cobbett heads down to the sweet shop to dig up an infamous story of revolution, rebellion and sticking it to the man. Oh, not this rubbish little fantasy game. We’re talking about its developers…
Advertising in games is nothing particularly new, whether it’s a dedicated license like Cool Spot or M.C. Kids, or simple product placement, like Space Quest V’s callouts to US Sprint, Robocod’s levels made of Penguin bars or Zool’s obsession with Chupa-Chups. Darkened Skye wasn’t the first. It won’t be the last. It is however unquestionably the sneakiest. There isn’t so much as an extra logo on the box to warn you, nor anything in the blurb that hints at the truth behind this forgotten action adventure. Even when you start up the game, while the clues are there if you know what you’re looking for, it’s about ten minutes into the story before the game finally admits that the mysterious ‘orange artifact’ that gives less-than-humble shephard girl Skye her first magic powers and looks amusingly like a Skittle… actually is a Skittle. Or rather, a Skittles™.
Congratulations, you’ve bought an advert! THERE WILL BE NO REFUNDS!
Ask the expert: messing with your mouse
What do you do if your mouse goes wrong? That innocuous looking piece of plastic that sits beside your keyboard has proven to be somewhat problematic for a few followers this week. Which is a strange co-incidence because I’ve just written a column about troubleshooting mice for next month’s mag.
