Interview: Valve on why they’d make the Half-Life movie
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 their plans to expand their games into other mediums, and why they think it’s important to do it themselves.
The best songs in PC gaming: Volume 1
Ever since soundcards gave our PCs the ability to sing, a good song in the right place has been a great way to catch our attention. Usually funny, but occasionally creepy or poignant, they’re a chance for a game to cut loose and play. Here’s our first selection of the good, the bad and the just plain confusing. Oh – and we’ve discounted Still Alive. Why? Because that’s the one everyone already knows.
RUSE launched
RUSE is out now. Here is our RUSE review, and I’ve stuck a trailer below.
Interview: Valve on their insane Portal 2 ideas
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.
Yesterday Gabe and co told us about Valve’s failures, and Wednesday’s interview was about Valve’s big surprises. For today’s, I had the brain taxing pleasure of playing Portal 2 in co-op with its project lead Josh Weier, while interviewing both him and writer Erik Wolpaw. I’ll explain what’s going on in the game any time it’s relevant to what they tell me, and I have of course cut out a lot of, “Put one there. No there. No, don’t jump in the slime. WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU?”
Four Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood classes
Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood is all the stabbing of the original games but with the additional stabbing of multiplayer. What kind of stabber will you be? Will you be sneaky and stealthy? Sultry and waving a pointless fan around? Angry priest with a knife? Massive guy with an axe? Why do only half of these sound like proper assassins? Have the official class card thingies below. I’ve also wrote them up into words, which you can read by pressing your eyes onto the screen.
Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood PC release delayed
The PC date for Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood has been delayed until some mysterious time interval known as “Q1 2011″, which might be crazy banker talk for “early next year”. The console release date is fine. There’s this stomach flu going around, see, and it only affects PC code.
Minecraft’s world-stretching water slide
Minecraft’s world is made entirely of cubes, which it lets you very quickly place and delete. But while a single block takes a second, building something as sprawling and enormous as jonnyabc’s waterslide would have taken hours, even with the help of four other people. Video below.
PC Gamer US Podcast 239 – The Ocular Debate
What size is the human eyeball? Why aren’t scientific measurements listed in American so we can understand them? What animal should always wear goggles? These questions, along with everything you wanted to know about PAX can be answered in the next 76 minutes of your life if you listen to this podcast. Don’t tell me that you’re not curious why a man was giving out diamonds to playtesters; what we thought of the great Houdini of PC gaming (Duke Nukem Forever), Red Orchestra: Heroes of Stalingrad and Torchlight 2 after playing them on the floor; what the most popular game was; and everything else that we saw, experienced, and even hope to forget about this year’s fanfest in Seattle. You want to know; we want to tell you. So stop reading this and crank up the podcast.
Portal 2 co-op trailer shows some new moves
Valve just released a mostly cinematic trailer showing off Portal 2′s new co-op play, where you and a buddy play as robot partners running through GLADOS’ sadistic obstacle courses – and as usual, it’s looking fantastic. Click the image to watch!
Supreme Commander 2 DLC screenshots
The Supreme Commander 2 DLC reveal trailer sneakily reveals more than we first realised. Designer Chris Taylor jumps in on the end of a pedestrian strategy video to announce that the first game’s Monkeylord unit will return. But before he even does that, another experimental has been shown. Lo, is that not the Aegis Experimental Shield Generator in the background, as mentioned in the leaked Supreme Commander 2 DLC details? It looks so… protective.
Burning Tide: New official map for StarCraft 2
Blizzard have released a new custom 3v3 map for StarCraft 2 called Burning Tide. It’s got a new, resource-hoarding objective, collectible resource caches, and rising lava tides. The best part is that it’s already in your map list.
Interview: Valve on 13 things they’ve failed at
Last month I was at Valve HQ in Bellevue to play Portal 2 and interview seven of their key staff. You can read the resulting preview and feature in the current issue of PC Gamer in the UK, and we’re also putting an interview up every day for a week here on the blog. Yesterday MD Gabe Newell, project manager Erik Johnson and marketing director Doug Lombardi explained their history of surprising decisions, and teased three more major surprises in the next year. Today, I innocently ask them if there’s anything in their history they see as a failure, and get thirteen different responses.
You can now romance your car in The Sims 3
A patch is out now for The Sims 3 that, among other things, adds the ability to develop a relationship with your car. Can you insult it, cheat on it, or murder it? Well, no, because that would be a bit mad. You can name it though, once you’ve become firm friends with it.
Neptune’s Pride team to deliver zombie orcs
Blight of the Immortals is a new multiplayer strategy from Iron Helmet, the guys behind Neptune’s Pride. It’s set in a fantasy universe where everyone is turning into zombies – not just humans, but the orcs, the elves, and the trolls too. It’ll be a similar affair – great big slow movements on a giant map, a handful of your friends competing for resources, working together, and stabbing eachother in the back. There’s one difference this time: you have a common enemy. The undead.
Civilization V exclusive review – PCG US 206
This month’s PC Gamer has the world-exclusive first review of Sid Meier’s Civilization V! Plus our definitive review of StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, an exclusive reveal of the big changes coming to League of Legends, hands-on with Dragon Age 2, a first look at BioShock Infinite, and much more!
Plus, is that cover art awesome or what?
