World of Tanks heading to European shops next week
World of Tanks is free to play online, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be boxed up and put on a shelf. Wargaming.net announce that World of Tanks will be hitting retail in Europe on December 2. The box will cost 10 Euros, and come with 20 Euros worth of bonus gubbins, including 50,000 in game credits and a premium German tank, the PzKpfw 38H735 (f), boasting word salad armour and a gun that shoots dictionaries.
Indie Game Music Bundle: 10 soundtracks for $1
The Steam sale is doing a good job of expanding our game collections, but what about our ears? They need entertainment too. The Indie Game Music Bundle is here to help. You can pay what you want above a dollar for the collection, which includes sountracks from ten games, including Minecraft, Super Meat Boy, VVVVVV and Cobalt, from artists like C418, Souleye, danny B, Jake “virt” Kaufman. Find the full list below, with links to each album page, where you can listen to samples of many of the tracks on offfer.
New rules on FUPs from Ofcom
Tired of your broadband connection slowing to a crawl just as that sniper appears on the BF3 horizon? New rules from Ofcom, the UK telecoms regulator, aren’t going to end the problem of randomly rising ping times, but at least they’ll help you understand why.
In a document published today, Ofcom’s approach to net neutrality, the regulator spells out its thoughts on traffic management. ISPs should be clear about their policy, and describe in an easily accessible format that customers can use to compare services transparently.
Got 16 minutes to spare? Watch this TED talk
Interesting fact of the day: the current curator of the TED talks is Chris Anderson, the very same man who founded Future Publishing and made PC Gamer possible. If you’ve never watched a TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) talk before we thoroughly recommend you watch one and feel your grey matter slowly expand.
Which neatly segues into this paragraph. In the above TED talk – pointed out to us by Lewie Procter – Gabe Zichermann points out that your grey matter slowly expands while you’re playing video games. It also discusses why the whole world is getting smarter, how kids playing games is a very, very good thing, and how games are being incorporated into electric cars.
Zichermann himself is the man behind the fascinating notion of Gamification, where companies have realised they can make more money and be more productive if they bring game-like systems of challenges and rewards into the workplace. Things like “zombie lunchtimes” and “let’s bomb Yugoslavia” away-days.
And in other PC gaming news…
Do you remember Armadillo Run? Sadly the answer is “Probably not”. The physics puzzler was awesome, but has been largely forgotten. How awesome? Well according to this video Tom Francis spotted today, totally bloody awesome. The highlight has to be the little tank that drives the Armadillo along while firing rockets out of its gun. Priceless.
Check inside for a collection of physics enabled, rocketeering PC gaming news.
The Secret World creative director on the future of MMOs, feature creep and real-world puzzling
A few weeks ago I got to speak to Ragnar Tørnquist at Funcom’s offices in Montreal. He’s the developer behind critically acclaimed adventure games The Longest Journey and Dreamfall, and now he’s in charge of The Secret World – an real world MMO that’s taking everything you thought you knew about the genre and throwing it out the window. It’s shaping up to be something rather interesting. For more on The Secret World, read our hands-on preview, character preview, and PC Gamer US’s interview.
EU giveaway: The Book of Unwritten Tales
It’s time to don your finest hat of +1 winning. It’s competition o’clock on PCGamer.com. Today we have five copies of fantasy adventure game The Boook of Unwritten Tales to give away to our European readers.
The Book of Unwritten Tales has proven to be hugely popular in native Germany, charming players with its affectionate sense of humour. The Pratchett-esque parody adventure game pokes fun at World of Warcraft, Lord of the Rings andjust about every major fantasy franchise of recent years as it sends you on a quest to find a gremlin called MacGuffin. You take control of various characters on the journey, including the cheerful gnome, Wilbur, cocksure but incompetent adventurer Nathaniel and haughty princess Ivo.
It’s been out for a while in Germany, but it finally made it over to the UK last month. We’ve got five copies up for grabs. Check inside for details of how to enter.
CD Projekt working on AAA title, could be sci-fi
CD Projekt RED have told Polish gaming site Polygamia.pl that they’re working on a brand new AAA title, set in a “totally different universe” to their popular Witcher RPG series. More exact details haven’t been confirmed, but it makes total sense for the new game to be a sci-fi RPG.
“The biggest news is that we are going to work on a new IP, a totally new title,” Adam Badowski, a studio director at CD Projekt RED, told Polygamia. When the presenter guessed that new title was a sci-fi game, Badowski replied with, “You can keep guessing all you want, but we will reveal more when the time is right.”
AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! for the Awesome confuses search engines
2009’s SEO-challenging AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!!– A Reckless Disregard for Gravity was basically the bits from Mirror’s Edge where you miss-time a jump and fall to your death turned into a whole game. If you missed it the first time round it’s now been re-released as a “semi-sequel” titled AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! for the Awesome. It features all 82 levels from the original game, as well as 43 new ones and a “new lighting system and fancy shader effects.” It’s currently on Steam for just £3.49/$4.99, too.
Planetside 2′s Vanu Sovereignty armour, weapons and vehicles detailed
PlanetSide 2’s Vanu Sovereignty are the high-tech force of the game, embracing ancient alien technology to get about and shoot people. In this video their armour, weapons and vehicles are shown in minute detail. Knock yourself out if you care about the material their shoulderpads are made of (it’s Nanofullerite), or the what their kneepads are manufactured from (Nanofullerite again – maybe the Vanu Sovereignty got a bulk discount from the cash and carry).
It seems that developers Sony Online Entertainment have put a great amount of attention to detail into the design, though. It reminds me of those videos showing how much effort Crytek put into the paunchy, jumpy man’s suit for Crysis 2.
Steam Autumn sale is live: Orcs Must Die, Portal 2, Mass Effect, Renegade Ops super cheap
Do you hear that faint wailing in the background? That’s the sound of a thousand bank accounts going “noooo!” at the appearance of the Autumn Steam Sale. Thankfully for our wallets, it only lasts until Sunday, with dozens of new deals every day. Consider it a warm up for the monolithic Steam Christmas sale next month.
The sale kicked off yesterday, but you’ve still got six hours to grab some of the fantastic day one deals. The marvellous Orcs Must Die is just £2.99 / $3.74 (we gave it a score of 90 in our Orcs Must Die review). Portal 2 is selling for just £6.79 / $10.19. If you haven’t played Mass Effect yet, the first game is £2.49 / $4.99, and Mass Effect 2 is 75% off at £4.99 / $12.49.
Interview: The Secret World’s Bylos and Bruusgaard, Pt 2
Want to know everything ever about Funcom’s conspiracy loving MMO, The Secret World? Because – between our preview and the first part of this interview – I feel like we may be ruining the whole “secret” part. Then again, when you’re deciding where your precious, precious subscription money is gonna go, I feel like secrets are a bit overrated. So then, continue into the southern reaches of this post for lead content designer Joel Bylos and lead designer Martin Bruusgaard’s thoughts on the viability of leveling solely through investigation missions, endgame content, what they learned from Age of Conan, and tons more.
Arkham City’s DirectX 11 support is some kind of joker
Arkham City’s been out on those awful plastic box things for a good month or so now, but us PC gamers have had to put up with a wait. We know that this is because developers Rocksteady are cramming lots of cracking stuff into the game for the PC version. We know that when it’s finally released we’re going to have the most realistic experience you can have short of dressing like a gravity-defying flying rodent and fighting crime on the streets of Ipswich.
But all is not well in Arkham City. It appears that a number of gamers are having problems with all the shiny bells and whistles DirectX 11 brings to the game. For example, Jared Walton of AnandTech has an ultra-powerful gaming PC, but experienced huge frame rate drops until he scaled back the game from DirectX 11 to DirectX 9. It seems to be the experience many other PC gamers are having, too.
Ubisoft: I Am Alive skipping PC because “it’s not worth it”
After going off the grid long enough to generate cancellation rumors about its cancellation rumors, I Am Alive leaped back into the spotlight with Uncharted-esque climbing antics, enough shades of gray to power an entire ethics debate, and no PC version. And now, Ubisoft finally has a – frankly astonishing – statement for PC gamers who feel they’ve been left out in the cold: quit “bitching.”
Minecon Yogscast fall out down to “stress related misunderstanding” says Notch
Minecon was supposed to celebrate the launch of the finished version of Minecraft, but that’s been overshadowed by disagreements between Minecraft’s creator, Notch and the Yogscast team.
A couple of days ago Notch tweeted his disappointment at the alleged behaviour of the video podcasters, whose Minecraft-centric videos attract millions of international viewers every day. “Celebrity or not, you don’t f-bomb kids,” he said, adding that “Yogscast repeatedly insulted people, talked behind their backs, refused to cooperate, and acted like total spoiled divas nonstop.”
The Yogscast team have now denied this in a response on Reddit, saying “the quotes and actions that Notch attributed to us were not said by us or published anywhere by us.”
