Mass Effect 3: Death to Blonde Shepard
I am a girl. I come equipped with girly parts, like fallopian tubes and a smug sense of always being right. But don’t let this fact make you think that I don’t like looking at other girls. I like it. I like it a lot. There’s something about the pleasing curves of the fairer sex that made my teenage years at an all-girls Catholic school a very exciting time indeed.
However, I have my standards. I like my ladies to have character, originality and a bit of attitude. All earnest qualities that Female Shepard Number 5 completely lacks. Frankly, if I saw her in a locker room, I’d glaze over and move on, in search of more interesting entries for my Filofax of Filth. She’s just so utterly bland.
Deus Ex: Human Revolution has gone gold
But it’s already gold! I hear you cry. It’s true that the highly anticipated sequel to one of the greatest games of all time is also one of the most golden games of all time, but the important thing is that it’s finished. Now it’ll begin its long journey to store shelves ready for release on August 23 in the US and August 25 internationally. For more on the game, check out our three Deus Ex: Human Revolution diaries, The Thinker, The Hacker and The Psychopath, or red our impressions of the first ten hours of the game.
To celebrate the game going gold Square Enix have released a new screenshot, which look as though it’s been taken from the perspective of someone being discovered on the toilet by Adam Jensen. See it below.
Driver: San Francisco “requires permanent internet connection” on PC
A Tweet from Ubisoft community developer Mathieu Willem, spotted by Eurogamer, confirms that Driver: San Francisco will require player’s PCs to be constantly online to work.
This marks the return of one of the most controversial DRM systems of recent years. Ubisoft started using always-online DRM with Settlers 7, and included it in a few other titles including Silent Hunter V and Assassin’s Creed 2. Players with flaky internet connections struggled to play, and at were at one point locked out of their games for days when Ubisoft’s servers suffered problems.
League of Legends patch 1.0.0.122 to nerf Corki, Gangplank and Pantheon
Riot Games have covered a few of the biggest changes arriving with the next League of Legends patch. It looks as though there are some quite unpopular balance changes incoming. Player favourites Gangplank, Pantheon and Corki will be weakened in the new update. That sound you hear in the background is Owen dropping to his knees and screaming “Corki, nooooo!” at the heavens.
There are a few winners, too. Barbarian Tryndamere will be reworked to make use of the Fury system and a few other characters like Galio will receive buffs. The patch is set to arrive next Tuesday along with new Hero, Wukong The Monkey King. League of Legends is free to play, and can be downloaded from the League of Legends site. You won’t be alone. Riot Games recently revealed that 1.4 million people log in every day.
From Dust trailer saves tribe using deadly lava, griefing potential enormous
The new trailer for god game, From Dust, is supposed to celebrate the game’s launch. Sadly, the PC version has been delayed for a few weeks, but we can still gawp at the lovely terrain morphing powers on show. From Dust lets you pick up a ball of lava and blob it around the landscape like a child wielding a very dangerous paintbrush.
The objective is to help a loyal tribe to safety, but the griefing potential is enormous. We know it’s possible to raise a sand bridge to let your tribe cross some water, but is it possible to create a world-sized deathtrap full of sinkholes and deadly lava pits? It’s probably the first thing we’ll try to make when From Dust comes out on August 17.
The Humble Indie Bundle 3 is go, pay what you want for five indie games
The third Humble Indie Bundle is now available. It’s your chance to pay whatever you like for Crayon Physics Deluxe, Cogs, VVVVVV, Hammerfight and And Yet it Moves. A portion of each payment is allocated to the developers, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Child’s Play. You can use sliders on the purchase page to decide the percentage that each party gets, and there’s also an option to tip the Humble Bundle organisers. Each game works on PC, Macs and Linux systems, and comes DRM free.
There are 13 days left to go on the deal, and more than 92,000 bundles have been sold. At the time of writing, the deal has made $437,366 already, and it’s only been up for half a day. It looks as though this bundle is already set to break the records set by Humble Indie Bundles 1 and 2.
Duke Nukem Forever DLC to parody Team Fortress 2 and Call of Duty
The first Duke Nukem Forever DLC details have landed on the Gearbox forums, picked up by VG247. It will be called the Parody Pack. It will add three new game modes, four new maps and new weapons designed to send up a few well known, slightly more successful shooters.
There’s Call of Duke, a modern combat map populated by N00b T00b launchers, 2Forts1Bridge, with its own Heavy style minigun, and two other maps featuring sticky bombs and a weapon known only as the “DFG.”
The DLC will be out this Autumn, and will be free to the First Access Members who pre-ordered Duke Nukem Forever before its release. Two screenshots have been released along with more DLC details, which you’ll find below.
Dragon Age 2 has vanished from the Steam store
Want to buy Dragon Age 2 on Steam? Hold your horses. It’s not there anymore.
There’s been no official explanation for the removal, but Eurogamer note that it coincides with the release of the Dragon Age 2: Legacy expansion pack, which is available to buy now from an in-game store.
If you already own a Steam copy of Dragon Age 2, it’ll still work fine, it’s just been removed from the Steam shop. It’s still available to buy from Direct2Drive, GamersGate and EA’s own Origin store.
And in other PC gaming news…
An exciting moment for you here readers; LewieP lets us know that Team Meat have revealed the teaser trailer for their next game. We can’t tell much at this stage, but it looks like a provocative and thoughtful affair, truly postmodern in its artistic endeavour. The presentation here is awe inspiring and the soundtrack is so haunting that, and I’m not afraid to admit this, I cried a little after watching it.
Check inside for a collection of the best PC gaming news from today.
Notch teases creepy Minecraft mob
Notch just posted a spooky image of a new Minecraft mob on his Google+ feed. They look spooky as hell but, even spookier, one of them is carrying a block! What’s he going to do with it? ARGH!
Click through to see the full-size image.
Project Zomboid’s eureka moment: “we started selling the world’s worst games”
We recently met up with Project Zomboid developers, The Indie Stone, to discuss their many adventures trying to turn the indie sandbox survival sim into a commercial success. Yesterday we learned how help from Steam, Desura and FilePlanet saved the developers from exhaustion and pirates. Today we examine the serious problems the team faced finding a way to sell the game legally in the first place.
The problem was that Project Zomboid was technically an unfinished product, which made it difficult to sell using traditional retail methods. Their solution? To sell “the world’s worst games.”
Stronghold 3 Steam pre-orders come with free copy of Stronghold
Seige sim Stronghold 3 is available to pre-order now on Steam. Anyone buying the game before it’s released later this year will get a bonus Tower of London level, and a free copy of the original Stronghold. While you won’t get the sequel until it reaches its enigmatic “Q3″ release date, you’ll be able to download and play the 2001 medieval city defense sim right away.
The Stronghold games are all about building a medieval complex capable of withstanding any enemy attack. While keeping external forces at bay, you’ll have to satisfy the peasants within by throwing jousting festivals, or holding public executions if you’re a meanie. The third game is set to add new building tech to streamline fortress construction, and night-time battles will add some extra drama, because war is scarier in the dark. You’ll find some fresh Stronghold 3 screenshots below.
AMD’s 10 core Piledriver chips revealed
The net is alive today with news that AMD is planning a 10 core CPU sometime next year, based on a revision to their Bulldozer design codenamed Piledriver.
The new processor was revealed in a deck of presentation slides leaked by the Chinese news site Zol.com.nc, and shows that these new processors won’t have on board graphics and will require a new motherboard socket, called FM2, which supercedes the current AM3+ board. Just behind these ‘up to 10 core’ CPUs is confirmation of the Trinity CPU/GPU hybrid that was announced at Computex, which will also use the Piledriver architecture and FM2 socket.
Garry’s Mod sells one million copies
Back in 2004, Garry’s Mod turned Valve’s Source Engine into a toybox. Its intuitive UI, straightforward controls and building tools removed the programming barriers needed to be creative with Source. Since then, hundreds of thousands of people have used the mod to attach rockets to the G-Man’s head, build a giant robots or mess around with the physics system. The community has created hundreds of new game modes, mods and machinima using the tools.
Today, developer Garry Newman posts on his his site to announce that Garry’s Mod has now sold more than a million copies since its launch on Steam in 2007.
League of Legends is thriving; here are the numbers to prove it [UPDATED]
Just in case you didn’t know by now: League of Legends is a great game. In two short years, LoL’s grown to be the leader of the free-to-play pack, and we can’t get enough of it. But we’ve often wondered: just how MANY people like LoL as much as we do? It turns out that quite a few do. In fact, far more than a few. As LoL’s first season is wrapped up, Riot released it’s official batch of user statistics for their popular MOBA. Let’s see how LoL stacks up against the competition, shall we?
