Wine for gamers, suggested pairings: pizza rolls, Hot Pockets
My World of Warcraft LAN parties were squalid affairs. Cartons of cigarettes, heaps of ashes. Cases of cheap domestic beer, fast food wrappers, and beer steins filled to the brim with Jack and Coke. It may have been fun, but I wished there was a way to bring class to a LAN gathering.
Enter GamerWine, further proof that these kids today have it better than my generation ever dreamed. Carefully crafted from grapes grown… somewhere, GamerWines is offering the 2008 “n00b” Merlot, 2007 “Stunlock” red, and for the “Gamer Widow” a 2008 Pinot Grigio. Perhaps you are still skeptical? Very well, then let me tell you that GamerWine is currently running a ZOMG EPIC 10% discount on all stock.
Why I play Football Manager: the story of Shane “the wonder kid” Paul
Football Manager 2012 has been released, and like every year, the same questions are being asked: Why does a game that looks like Microsoft Excel sell so well? Why would you want to manage footballers when they could be playing them? Why do so many people play it for hours on end?
Well I’ve played a lot of Football Manager over the years, so I’m going to try and explain why. It’s because despite all the stats and number crunching, Football Manager is a game about stories. It’s about the little narratives that emerge from every game. Like this one. The story of Shane Paul.
And in other PC gaming news…
Yes, you are seeing that video right, do not adjust your monitors. For some reason Snoop Dogg is presenting a video guide to how to survive in the Wasteland of id Software’s Rage. In this first video he offers his seven bare necessities to surviving the apocalypse, in the second he offers up his opinions on Rage’s arsenal. There’s really not much I can add here, any jokes I could crack are redundant in the face of such unrelenting weirdness. Thanks to Tom’s Hardware for this incredible find.
Check inside for the second video and a selection of PC gaming news. Sadly not presented by Snoop Dogg.
League of Legends Series Two Circuit trailer goes live, $5 million at stake
Humongous free-to-play real-time-strategy League of Legends’ Series Two circuit begins soon, and Riot Games has literally just released a trailer for it.
“The Season One Championship earlier this year broke viewership records, and I’m excited to share our plans for Season Two to encourage more competitive play,” Marc Merrill, Riot Games’ co-founder says in the trailer.
The events are set for Europe and North America, starting with regional championships and culminating in a huge live tournament. It all sounds jolly exciting.
Todd Howard on the lessons Skyrim has learned from Fallout 3
We’ve been speaking to game director Todd Howard about The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Previously, he told us about Bethesda’s problem with vigilante chickens reporting crimes, but he also discussed the changes that Bethesda have made since Oblivion, and many of them are inspired by Bethesda’s work on Fallout 3.
Lesson one, Oblivion’s progressions system, which had creatures levelling at the same rate as the player, has been overhauled. “[Skyrim]’s a lot more like Fallout 3, where as you level up you are going to see harder things, but the easier things stay around as well.” says Howard.
There will still be combat where it’s tougher, but these battles will be against a new or uniquely named enemy, putting an end to the boring battle-churn that dominated the later levels of Oblivion. “You’ll still run into the weaker stuff and you’ll just decimate it,” says Howard. Bad luck, mud crabs.
Planetside 2 battles to be set on “eight-by-eight kilometre continents”
Sony Online Entertainment’s upcoming MMO/FPS hybrid Planetside 2 is aiming to shake things up a bit. Taking a Halo-esque approach to its sci-fi universe, it aims to combine the persistent world of an MMO with the visceral, responsive mechanics of a first person shooter. As part of our six page preview in issue 233 of PC Gamer UK, we spoke to Planetside 2′s creative director, Matt Higby about the staggering size of the new battlefields.
“We have enormous, enormous gameplay space,” says Higby. Planetside 2’s settings – continents on the planet Auraxis – measure an epic eight kilometres square, with weapons capable of firing a full kilometre in distance. “One of our largest development efforts on this project has been hand crafting every single area of those eight-by-eight kilometre continents,” Higby told us. In this vast space, three factions fight it out: The Terran Republic, The New Conglomerate and The Vanu Sovereignty. And those fights can become pretty vast.
Batman: Arkham City Nightwing trailer zaps crooks with electro sticks
You didn’t think being released on consoles would stop Batman: Arkham City from putting out more trailers did you? Of course not! This one shows off the planned Nightwing DLC pack, which will offer you the ability to play as grown up Robin Dick Grayson in Arkham City’s challenge mode, as well as two new challenge maps. The trailer certainly seems to play up Nightwing’s acrobatic style of combat, and also shows off his very cool looking electric stun sticks, which should teach those criminal scum a lesson or two about not getting zapped in the face by a man in tight spandex.
The Nightwing DLC is planned for release on November 1st, which is actually before the PC version of Arkham City is released on the 18th. With Warner Brothers tell us they’re keeping the price of the PC DLC under wraps, for now. How much would you play to become Nightwing?
PC Gamer UK December issue – Planetside 2
Planetside is going to be enormous. Its battles will rage across entire continents and support hundreds of players at a time. It will have tanks, ships and, according to the man on our cover, gatling guns with laser sights for precision mass-destruction. You can read all about it in our preview in the latest edition of PC Gamer UK. It hits store shelves today. It’s also available online, digitally through Zinio and Apple Newsstand, and it should already be with subscribers now.
There are few things less subtle than a gatling gun with a laser site, but Max Payne is one of them. We catch up with the gravelliest hero in gaming on his new adventures in Max Payne 3, chat to Ken Levine about Bioshock Infinite, get rich quickly and horribly in Runescape, play Diablo 3, take a look at the new Syndicate and much, much more. We also give away a load of free stuff. This month our issues come with codes for six free games on Good Old Games, £20 worth of items in Runes of Magic and free money in any Sony MMO.
Battlefield 3’s Patrick Bach: “biggest benefit for the console has been that we’re leading on PC”
EA/DICE executive producer Patrick Bach sat down and had a big chat with us about imminent uber military shooter Battlefield 3. Obviously, it’s one of those cross-platform war shooters people seem so fond of these days, but did the limitations of the console hamper its development as a PC game?
Resoundingly, no, according to Bach, who believes that leading the game on PC has a positive trickle-down effect for console gamers. “Our biggest benefit for the console has been that we’re leading on PC,” said Bach. “It has forced us to push the limited technology of consoles compared to the PC to a new level, because we set the bar with what we wanted to create on PC and said, ‘How the heck are we going to do this on consoles?’”
Space Marine co-op mode arrives, in the grim darkness of the future there is only “waaagh!”
Space Marine has finally received its four player co-op survival mode, Exterminatus. An automatic Steam update should add the mode to the Online section of the Space Marine main menu, and will offer you and four friends two maps on which to trounce hordes and hordes of Orks. I jumped in for five minutes and killed about 115 with nothing but a Heavy Bolter and a big power-armoured booty. Stomp, stomp! Dakka dakka! Weapon unlocked!
Experience earned popping green monsters in survival mode will also count towards your overall multiplayer rank, giving you new weaponry with which to embarrass your enemies, which acts as an unnecessary extra motivation to team up and make a big gooey mess of a charging Ork Waaaagh!
Toshiba launches USB powered monitor
Remember when USB was for gamepads and mice? It seems that the future for the data transfer port includes fuelling low energy monitors.
Toshiba is the latest manufacturer to announce an LED screen which can be powered entirely from a standard USB 2.0 port. The cunningly named Toshiba USB LCD Mobile Monitor is exactly that, and while it’s not what we’d normally look for in a gaming screen, there’s a few things that make it look worth trying out.
The Gadget Show’s Battlefield 3 Holodeck: behind the scenes
Combine multiple projectors, an igloo-shaped screen within a special tent, a motion-tracking paintball gun, treadmills and a PC that can actually run Battlefield 3 and you’ve got The Gadget Show’s “Ultimate Battlefield 3 Simulator.” Placing the player in the midst of the military shooter’s action, it allows proper movement through the game and even simulates bullet hits with electronically-controlled paintball guns. It’s one of those completely bonkers (and rather expensive) ideas that somehow just about works, apart from the bit where the machine malfunctions and starts shooting Jason indiscriminately. We quite like that bit.
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim system requirements released, render giant spiders on 2GB RAM
Skyrim is just three weeks away, and excitement is running high in the office, especially in the part of the office occupied by Tom Francis, who has booked holiday from a job that involves playing games to play even more games at home. And by games, I mean nothing but basic sustenance and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Read about the first three hours or so he recently spent with the game in our Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim preview.
With less than a month to go, though, now is the perfect time to upgrade your rig. Thankfully, it looks as though you probably won’t need many extras. Bethblog have released PC system specstem specs. If you’ve got a DirectX 9 card with 512MB on-board RAM, 2GB of system RAM and a dual core processor, you should be good to go. You’ll also need “internet access for Steam activation.”
New XIII is a puzzle-based “interactive adventure”
Recently, the gaming world worked itself into a cel-shaded tizzy over the announcement that comic-book-based series XIII was making a better-late-than-never comeback. More games, after all, should have guns that fire both bullets and bold proclamations of “BAOOMM.” XIII: Lost Identity, however, does not look to be one such game.
WIN one of 100 Tribes: Ascend closed beta keys!
Shaz-to-the-bot. That’s the proper response when you’ve just been admitted to the highly-anticipated Tribes: Ascend beta from Hi-Rez Studios. We’re giving away a whopping 100 keys to our lucky fans so you can get the jump on the competition and find the best flag-snatching routes and sniping spots in the premier jetpack FPS. Want to know how to win early-access to the Spinfusor battleground of your dreams? You’re only a click away.
