Golden Joysticks: Guess the game
We’ve heard Tim hinting at his favourite for this year’s Golden Joysticks vote, but what about Graham? Check out the video above, and see if you can guess, whether or not you get it right doesn’t matter as much as the fact that GRAHAM DISCOVERED IT FIRST. You can find out the answer on the Golden Joysticks Facebook page.
You can make your voice heard by casting a vote on the Golden Joysticks website. If you vote in all categories, you’ll be entered into a prize draw for a chance to win a top of the range Alienware laptop, which should run all of the PC games nominated this year beautifully.
A Game of Thrones RPG screenshots show grizzled old men and wintry city
When Cyanide first started showing off their upcoming Song of Ice and Fire RTS, A Game of Thrones: Genesis, our first reaction was one of surprise. A real time strategy? Surely the best way to experience the cut throat world of A Game of Thrones is to get up close and personal with the despicable, traitorous denizens of Westeros and experience the political wrangling and uncompromising violence of the world first hand.
In fact, Cyanide’s French studio is working on an RPG that might do just the trick, though for now there’s basically no information on what the Game of Thrones RPG will be like. Blues News have spotted two screenshots, however. They show an icy town (Winterfell?), and two very serious looking men. Grizzled old blokes: confirmed.
Intel Extreme Masters New York: world’s best CS 1.6, LoL and StarCraft 2 players to fight for $93k
The best Counter-Strike 1.6, StarCraft 2 and League of Legends players will clash in New York next month, hoping to win a share of the enormous $93,000 prize pot up for grabs at the Intel Extreme Masters Global Challenge event. It all kicks off on Thursday October 13 and runs through until the finals on Sunday October 16. The best teams will also win the chance to participate in the Intel Extreme Masters World Championship in Hanover, Germany next year.
Blizzard’s Diablo 3 experiments: “Oh, this feels even better with direct control”
Everyone knows what classic Diablo plays like, but Blizzard has never been afraid to experiment. Part of that process for Diablo 3 involved looking at different control systems – up to and including seeing how the action would work with an Xbox 360 controller, or how its demon-slaying might play on consoles.
Yes. Diablo 3. On an Xbox controller. Read on to find out how Diablo 3′s game director feels about that.
Battlefield 3 game modes detailed, hardcore mode will return
A post on the Battlefield 3 blog gives us a run down of Battlefield 3‘s five game modes. Each mode will be playable on tweaked versions of each of Battlefield 3′s nine maps. Favourites like Conquest and Rush mode make a return, with a few key tweaks, and there will be a selection of deathmatch modes designed to encourage teamwork and offer faster, smaller skirmishes. Read on for a complete run down, and find out why it will be harder than ever to take down those pesky M-Com stations.
Corsair launching $10,000 Call of Duty 4 tournament, sign ups now open
Reckon you could no-scope a man at thirty metres before he even has time to take aim? Then point your trigger finger towards the sign up page for Corsair’s upcoming Call of Duty 4 tournament and get ready to kill men for money. Corsair are getting into keyboards and mice, and they’ve put together the $10,000 Vengeance Cup to put their new gear through its paces. You can register a spot for your team on the Vengeance Cup website now.
256 teams will enter the group stage on October 17 and the very best will fight through to the finals on Monday November 21. The top team will scoop a cool $6,000 and prizes of $3000 and $1000 will be awarded to the runners up. You have until Friday October 7 to get a team together and grab a spot. If you’re tempted but not convinced, consider the fact that prizes will be dished out as wads of cold, hard cash.
Steam’s midweek madness sale goes awesomely indie
The PC’s indie gaming scene is a wonderful thing, but there are so many bite-sized pieces of pure brilliance skittering about that it’s near-impossible to keep track. Enter Steam. In its never-ending quest to win our hearts and devour our wallets (not the other way around, happily), Valve’s storefront has bundled together a bunch of the best indie games on the block. Not only that, it’s given them a whopping 80 percent discount.
Both bundles clock in at $9.99 a piece – one focusing on strategy games and the other on 2D, well, anything. This isn’t just some bottom-of-the-barrel bargain bin deal, either. Among many others, the bundles include the likes of Bit.Trip Runner, World of Goo, Revenge of the Titans, and Sanctum. Basically, if you’re looking to dive into indie gaming’s deep waters but don’t know where to start, look no further. Now then, go! The deal only lasts until September 22, at which point the games will turn back into pumpkins. Or, you know, get their normal price tags back. One of those.
id Software CEO: Consoles give more depth than they take away
Since you’re reading this site, we’re going to assume you’re, well, a PC gamer. As such, we imagine you frequently drift into fond flashbacks to the days when big developers treated your platform of choice like royalty. Even with PC once again on the rise, random delays and glitchy ports run rampant. Meanwhile, buzzwords like “accessibility” and “wider audiences” leave the hardest of the hardcore out in the cold. If you like games that melt your graphics card and your brain, these are dark times we live in.
id Software CEO Todd Hollenshead, however, would disagree with that notion. Consoles, he says, have definitely stolen some thunder from gaming’s graphical side, but – in exchange – modern games are now better than ever. Here’s why:
Drop whatever you’re doing: Diablo III beta officially live
That strange tingling in your clicking finger? No, it’s not early onset arthritis. It’s an actual, factual premonition. Diablo III’s closed beta test, you see, has officially gone live. Assuming you’re one of the lucky few who got a golden ticket to Blizzard’s hotly anticipated hack ‘n’ slash, you can download and play a portion of the game’s first act right now.
And if you didn’t? Well, that’s a soul-crushing bummer. Put those pieces of your soul in a glass of milk, though, because all hope isn’t lost. Blizzard will be adding more players over the course of the test, so if you haven’t already, go drop your name in the hat here. (Note: you’ll need a Battle.net account to do so.)
SOE’s Smedley: subscription MMOs a vanishing breed
After revealing that DC Universe Online is transitioning to a free-to-play model, and that Sony Online Entertainment wanted it that way “from day one,” SOE President John Smedley now predicts that the future is free. In an editorial for GamesIndustry.biz, Smedley expands a bit more on his thinking, and explains why Star Wars: The Old Republic will be the last of the big subscription-based MMOs.
“In our cancellation surveys for EverQuest II,” Smedley writes, “fully 40 percent of the people that fill them out list subscription fees as one of the primary reasons they quit. Economic times are hard out there and a recurring subscription is something that glares at you from a credit card bill every month.”
As big as TOR promises to be, Smedley doesn’t think it will reverse the overall trend away from subscriptions toward F2P.
Major PC manufacturers equally satisfying
If you don’t want to build your own PC and can’t afford one of the custom builders like Falcon Northwest, it looks like happiness (or at least the customer satisfaction that empirically passes for happiness) is still within reach. According a survey by the American Customer Satisfaction Index, 78 percent of personal computer customers are satisfied with their purchases and service. Some are more satisfied than others, however, and with a score of 87 Apple once again gets the bragging rights over PC manufacturers like HP, the leader of the PCs with a score of 78. Dell and Acer trail slightly at 77, and Compaq (which technically still existed as part of HP until just this month) lags behind at 75.
That could reflect confirmation bias based on consumers’ expectations, and the frustrations that accompany having a less expensive open platform that gives you more choices about what you want to do with your computer and how you want to do it. But unless it’s way off, odds are you’ll still be happy with your store-bought PC – just not as happy as someone who just bought a washing machine. The ACS study says people love those.
Check out Core Blaze, an action MMO complete with blue ice panthers
Call me crazy, but an MMO’s aesthetics can go a long way towards making it stick out from the rest of the pack. That’s how I first noticed Core Blaze, an action MMO in the same vein as Vindictus, being made by Taiwanese developer Gamania. This hack-’n'-slash RPG is quite the looker, using an appealing Chinese art style built in the Unreal Engine 3 to give your monster-slaying an extra coat of polish. Read on to see gameplay footage and a grip of sweet screenshots that’ll put the fear of Liang Qu in you.
And in other PC gaming news…
Tim has been laughing at this video of bugs in Fifa 12′s player impact engine ever since he posted it earlier. He’s watched it four or five times today already and descended into fits of giggles every time. So here it is again, so those joining us from across the pond can enjoy the players falling over each other and flying through the air like demented jellymen.
Check inside for a selection of stumbling, uncoordinated PC gaming news.
Hands on with Sony’s external graphics card: it’s superb
Over the last week or so I’ve been playing around with Sony’s new Vaio Z laptop. It’s not really relevant for a PC games blog – I was looking at it for Stuff magazine – except for one thing. This ultralight notebook comes with an optional dock which adds an optical drive and USB hub along with extra monitor ports for when you’re sat at your desk rather than staring at an Excel sheet on the train. Inside that dock, there’s an auxiliary graphics card which adds an AMD Radeon HD6650 GPU to the on-board Sandy Bridge processor. And it’s stunningly good.
OnLive to run modded games and support more indie games
The cloud gaming service OnLive is out in the UK this week. We had a chance to catch up with the co-founder and CEO of OnLive, Steve Perlman at an event earlier today. He revealed that the company is keen to bring the experimentation of the PC modding community to OnLive, and will be setting up servers for their first modded game in the coming months. He wouldn’t reveal what the game was, but said that OnLive is planning to support the best PC gaming mods in future.
