Good Old Games turns three, offers users discount dungeons, dragons
Good Old Games is celebrating its third birthday by offering its D&D classics collection for sale at 60 percent off. For $34, customers can buy a collection that includes the Baldur’s Gate games, the Icewind Dale games, Neverwinter Nights, and Planescape: Torment. It also includes Forgotten Realms: Demon Stone and The Temple of Elemental Evil.
You don’t have to buy all these games, but remember: you get the biggest discount if you buy the whole package. Even if you just want the BioWare games and Planescape, you might as well get everything – the savings are pretty slim if you pick-and-choose. For a couple extra dollars, I’m happy to take a chance on the lesser-knowns in the package.
Where to start? Which of these games holds up best? What does the PCG collective have to say about Forgotten Realms: Demon Stone, and The Temple of Elemental Evil?
Global download speed study reveals significant disparities between countries
A study from Pando Networks reveals that the average worldwide download speed is 580KBps, Gamasutra reports. The big winner is South Korea, which averages an enviable 2,202KBps, a number which surely explains my lack of success on the StarCraft II competitive circuit, hobbled as I am by the United States’ national average of 616KBps.
The picture is even grimmer for Australian gamers (348KBps). English-speakers who want swift download speeds must move to the broadband Mecca that is Andover, Massachusetts, with an average speed of 2,801KBps.
And in other PC gaming news…
“Get down on floor!”
Oh dear, it seems Tom has been a little too inspired by those Payday: The Heist screens and decided to stage a burglary of his own. Now he’s wearing a disturbing clown mask and trying to take Graham’s Diablo 3 beta codes at gunpoint. The police have been called in, but he’s taken Owen hostage and is trying to trade him for freedom.
Check inside for a selection of armed and dangerous PC gaming news.
Payday: The Heist screenshots send in the clowns
Did you ever hear the one about the four clowns who walked into an abattoir? No, you didn’t, because crime is a VERY SERIOUS BUSINESS. Nine new screenshots have landed showing the Slaughter map, abandoning your traditional marbled bank vaults in favour of an icy slaughterhouse. In between the hanging carcasses, someone has hidden several safes full of gold, for no obvious reason, but that hardly matters. Where there’s gold, there’a s posse of clowns somewhere who’ll try and steal it.
Payday’s four-man co-op squad vs. hordes of cops framework invites comparisons to Left 4 Dead, and with good reason. Instead of safe rooms, bank vaults are the objective, and instead of hordes of undead, waves of armed policemen are the fodder, but for all the similarities Payday has its own raucous attitude and sweary sense of fun that makes it an exciting prospect. It was one of Tim’s favourite games of E3 this year. Check out his Payday: The Heist impressions to find out why, and see the new screens below.
Flash 11 out in two weeks, claims to be “a thousand times faster” than previous versions
In a fortnight Flash 11 will launch, and it promises to be a very different creature to the 2D engine we’re used to. Flash will be embracing the third dimension in a big way. Gamersmint highlighted the trailer above, with words from Adobe platform manager, Danny Winokur. “With direct access to the GPU [graphics processing unit], you’ll see a thousand times faster rendering over prior versions of Flash,” he says.
The video above goes into detail about their new molehill infrastructure that enables this mega-boost in processing power. Flash 11 will face plenty of stiff competition from other powerful plug in suites like Unity, but more powerful browser engines can only be a good thing for market that grows busier by the day. Do you play many browser-based games? Would you play more if they were 3D, and running at 50 frames per second?
League of Legends: Dominion First Impressions
I’ve been tinkering a little bit with Dominion, the new capture and hold map for League of Legends that not so quietly slipped into public beta testing yesterday. It’s available to play during off-peak hours (i.e. daytime) to all regions. And it turns out it’s… good. I think it’s going to be a huge success for developers Riot, with a few caveats.
Blockade Runner: Minecraft in SPACE! With SPACESHIPS
Do you ever wish Minecraft was a bit more, well, spacey?
Blockade Runner is probably what you’re looking for. Friend of PC Gamer, Andy Kelly, has just pointed out that Blockade Runner looks pretty damn awesome, and has a lite version available to download. As Graham eloquently put it “That game got good real quick.”
The devs describe Blockade Runner as “the beginning of a Multiplayer First Person Adventure Space Sim that will feature fully destructible, operational, crewable ‘living’ starships in a massive and procedurally generated galaxy.” I approve of this description.
There’s a lite version available to download from the offical site.The developers are opting for a Minecraft-esque payment system; fair enough considering the game is still in Alpha. The current release is selling for $10.
Let us know how you get on in the comments.
Deus Ex: Human Revolution ENB mod augments visuals. Lighting improved. Fist-chisels shinier
Deus Ex: Human Revolution’s dark, golden cityscapes are a beautiful place to wander around fist-chiseling people at the best of times, but the ENBSeries mod adds an extra sheen of cyber-loveliness for those running the game on an Nvidia card. The golden filter is toned down, colours are richer and the lighting tech is kicked up a notch or two. Even Human Revolution’s corridors are moodier, smokier places with this mod installed.
Your framerate will take a certain hit, but it’s worth an install if you’re curious to see what Human Revolution could look like with every graphical setting maxed out. If you’re running Deus Ex on a monster rig, you might just be able to play through the entire game at a reasonable frame rate. This is only the first version, too. We’re can’t wait to see what else can be done to boost the Human Revolution engine.
The tiny file can be downloaded for free from the ENBSeries site. To install, simply unzip the contents of the downloaded folder into the Deus Ex: Human Revolution directory that holds your Deus Ex: Human Revolution .exe file. I’ve hopped into a few saved games with and without the mod to grab some before and after pics, which you’ll find below. Unmodded images are first in the sequence.
Minecraft 1.9 pre-release now available. Features big-nosed NPCs
Earlier today, Notch tweeted that Minecraft 1.9 will be available to download this afternoon. Now we have a download link! Prepare yourself for Minecraft NPCs!
Renegade Ops might be out on PC tomorrow. It might not. Who knows. It’s still great
Here’s a grumble: we’ve still not got an announcement for when Renegade Ops will launch on PC. Gamers who’ve preordered it via Steam say that they received a message saying it would unlock tomorrow, which is useful-ish. But it’s been out on the consoles for over a week already.
I’m sad about the situation, because Renegade Ops is seriously entertaining. Not knowing when we can play it on PC is driving me crackers.
So: Renegade Ops. It’s a top down shooter in which you drive a little buggy around forests and hills, blowing stuff up. Hard. Everything about Renegade Ops is overcharged starting with the tech, which is just way too ambitious for this type of game. It’s powered by the Just Cause 2 engine – which lets everything explode with a kind of overbaked physics that leaves you grinning. The plot, driven by over-the-top comic book cutscenes features a lunatic supervilllain nuking a city as an opening gambit, and gets stupider from there. The feel of the buggies is beautifully judged; they bounce all over the hills and steppes like little toys – it reminds me a little of the old Micro Machine games.
And it’s perfect for the PC. Why?
Fret not, Zinio subscribers to PC Gamer UK. You’re getting a hat too. And everyone’s getting an Onlive trial
I’m in full on Oprah mode.
“YOU GET A HAT.”
“YOU GET A HAT.”
“YOU GET A HAT.”
“EVERYBODY GETS A HAT.”
Cue music, dancing and the wild celebrations. And possibly ticker tape.
If you subscribe to PC Gamer UK via Zinio, you’ll be getting the exactly the same gifts that the print subscribers and news-stand subscribers are getting with issue 232. That means you’ll be getting our PCG reader only TF2 hat, the “Killer Exclusive” and a free trial to the game streaming service Onlive. We’ll be sending out the codes for both to the email account you registered your Zinio subscription to. Many Bothans suffered a slight inconvenience to get you this. So we made a press release. It’s below.
Star Wars: The Old Republic guilds can now choose allies and enemies
The Old Republic’s release date is still clouded by the Dark Side of the Force, but we’ve been able to form guilds for months. Now, Massively report that the ominously named “Phase 2: Alignment” stage is now underway, letting each guild ally or declare animosity with up three others.
Dead Island “Director’s Cut” mod makes headshots vital. Leg and body shots: less so
Dead Island wasn’t exactly realistic. What with the electro-swords, the nuns and the knifing zombies in the chest. If you prefer your undead to be a little more quasi-Romero-real, you’ll want the “Director’s Cut” mod, which rebalances the combat, skill trees and items to deliver better pacing and a requirement for headshot precision. Mod creator tnutz says he “tried to refine and highlight the best aspects of the Dead Island combat and tie it together into a deeper combat system where you are rewarded for properly assessing the situation and acting tactically.”
The full list of changes and a link are below. They include: “Ground-and-pounding the head with fists is viable”. Not that games are violent or anything.
Assassin’s Creed Revelations trailer shows death in multiplayer, is mostly stabbing
This Assassin’s Creed Revelations trailer from Gamespot claims to show every way in which you can die in Assassin’s Creed Revelation’s sneaky, stabby multiplayer mode. Kills have become more brutal and acrobatic with each edition of the series, but the latest bunch of killers are especially horrible. They’re not assassins anymore, they’re axe murderers. How did the guy at 1:22 manage to sneak up to victim with such an enormous weapon?
Team Fortress 2 Beta update gives players multiple character loadout presets
An update has just been applied to the Team Fortress 2 beta on Steam that paves the way for multiple loadouts for each class, a great quality of life change for TF2 players. It also allows multiple misc slots, allowing you to carry more than one cosmetic item, and various balance changes. The full patchnotes are below.
