Treasure Adventure Game trailer is just wonderful
Indie games sort of have the market cornered on charm, but damn. Treasure Adventure Game – as spotted by RPS – made me swoon, sigh, squeal, and emit many other sounds completely unbefitting a man of my status (namely, I have a beard). In a nutshell, it’s a lo-fi platform adventure game, but with alternate dimensions, sea snake monsters, and giant drill machines. I can’t claim to understand the whys and wherefores, but goodness, this looks great. Check out the above trailer, and then frantically rush to download the beta because I need this right now.
Square Enix opens new Montreal studio, begins work on another new Hitman
Agent 47′s back! …Again! Absolution’s not even out yet, but Square Enix is already diving head-long into sequel territory. So said the publisher in a tweet announcing its brand new Montreal studio, which will apparently open up a whopping 150 jobs. Take that, the economy.
IO Interactive, meanwhile, will continue to meticulously craft sets of murder dominoes for Agent 47 to knock down, so this is beginning to sound a bit like the year-on-year model Call of Duty employs with Infinity Ward and Treyarch.
Three crazy ways politics are taking over MMOs
If you feel like you’re not getting enough politics from your everyday life, never fear—several virtual worlds out there offer plenty of opportunity for you to practice your campaigning and scheming. Here’s a closer look at political systems for three of them.
Hard Stuff Q&A: Are SSDs worth it?
Q: I keep hearing about solid state drives being really great for gaming. Is it worth thinking about an upgrade?
A: When you’re talking about load times or frames per second, solid state drives can often perform up to 50 percent faster than conventional mechanical hard drives without even breaking a sweat. But it’s not all win: that wicked speed comes along with a pretty wicked price tag. Just how much more expensive is it? We priced out a 120GB solid state drive online at $120—the same amount that a 3TB hard drive would run you. Given how much space your rig’s operating system takes up, and the beefy size of most modern gaming titles, that 120GB solid state drive might be speedy, but it would fill up pretty fast. For gamers on a budget, grabbing a spacious 3TB mechanical hard drive for the same price as that solid state drive is a no-brainer.
GOG director explains the distributor’s new direction, how “good old” principles still apply
Last week, Good Old Games announced a shift toward games that are not quite so old. I asked Good Old Games’ Managing Director, Guillaume Rambourg, what this means for the core of the business, classic PC games, and exactly how GOG.com is going to balance its ideals and identity with the business of newer games.
He laid some fears to rest, and explained how “newer” games should not be confused with “brand new.”
MLG Providence in review: the story of Leenock
Somewhere in a wastepaper bin inside Disney’s headquarters, there’s a discarded script. It tells the story of a sixteen year old kid who flew far away from his homeland to compete against the world’s best. This kid – just out of childhood and cast with gratuitously youthful chubby cheeks – is pitted against fully grown adults twice his height and nearly double his age. He makes it through open pool play: a fiercely competitive vipers’ nest full of hopefuls he’s never seen play. He steps out into the searing heat of the tournament spotlight, and wins his first few games. Then the kid falters, dropping down to the losers’ brackets of the competition. He’s jetlagged, he’s inexperienced. It seems his moment in the sun is over. But then the crowd take him to their collective heart, and begin cheering his name. The kid lifts his chin up.
He wins his next game, and his next, and his next, until he’s won thirty eight bouts of his chosen sport across a handful of days. He’s at the final. He’s sixteen years old, at the final of one of his sport’s biggest events, placed against a Scandinavian star whose robotically perfect performance so far would be the story of the tournament. Would be the story of the tournament, were it not for the kid. The kid’s played thirty eight games already. If he wins game thirty nine, he’s won the entire tournament and joined an elite number of the planet’s best.
He wins.
A look at eight new mouse pads to ramp up your game
Mousepads are an often overlooked piece of gaming hardware. I tend to consider mine more of a coaster for coffee than something that can improve my gaming. Yet thin sheets beneath our mice can go a long ways in helping define comfort and precision. These mouse pads just scratch the surface on the multitude of options to aid your next killstreak.
And in other PC gaming news…
Skyrim’s graphics settings sure are versatile aren’t they? Push them one way and you get a game of incredible beauty, push it another and you get… this. Spotted by GameSetWatch, this video by Household Gamer has been dubbed ‘TF2 mode’ by some and ‘Runescape mode’ by others. It’s actually pretty cool in a low tech way. Makes want to spawn unlimited dragons in it. Cute, cartoony dragons.
Check inside for adorably textureless PC gaming news.
How to spawn unlimited dragons in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Remember back when we told you Skyrim had unlimited dragons? That was pretty cool, right? So it’s a shame you usually only see one or two at a time during the game. The magic of console commands, however, will let you fight as many dragons as your PC can render without exploding.
As you can see in the video, I get about a dozen dragons in the air at once, all while maintaining a decent framerate (the stutters only appear on the video). Check inside for how I did it.
Minecraft in insanely big numbers, 241 million logins a month, 11,000 skin downloads a second
If you haven’t got time to watch the 86 minutes of Minecon videos we posted earlier, here’s a brief guide to the kind of numbers involved in Minecraft.net, fresh from GameFront. You might want to prepare your eyes – these are some fairly hefty figures.
- There are 241,920,000 logins per month. That’s the equivalent of every person in Indonesia – the fourth most populous country on the planet – logging in.
- Some 1,000 people login per hour on average, with 4,000 people logging in per second after the 1.0 launch.
- Two billion files have been downloaded by the launcher. Two billion.
- In game, 11,000 skins are downloaded per second.
At the moment of writing, Minecraft has 16,804,266 registered users. 4,129,151 have bought the full game. It’s a good thing Minecraft doesn’t look like Crysis, as it would have broken the entire internet by now.
Prototype 2 trailer tours the zones of New York Zero
Prototype 2′s beleaguered version of New York City (now New York Zero, for some reason) will be split into three zones labelled according to a traffic light system that ranges from “everything’s gravy” to “completely boned.” The green zone has trees, and civilians who haven’t been infected with an experimental virus. Pedestrians in the yellow zone are less fortunate, and the developers don’t even show us what’s lurking in the red zone. It’s probably safe to assume it’s full of puppies and rainbows. We’ll find out what’s behind the big red door when Prototype 2 is released in April.
PC Gamer UK Christmas issue – Mists of Pandaria
For most people, Christmas is a day, but for us, it’s a whole magazine. This year we’re celebrating with Crimbo the Christmas Panda, who adorns our cover. What does Crimbo have for good boys and girls? Why it’s an enormous twelve page feature on Blizzard’s new games. From Mists of Pandaria to Heart of the Swarm, to Blizzard Dota, Christmas elf Rich McCormick has scooped all his Blizzcon news up into a big snowy wordball. Oh, and every reader gets a free copy of King Arthur – The Roleplaying Wargame.
You can read it all in the latest issue of PC Gamer UK, which should be on shelves shortly and arriving with subscribers right now. It’s also available online, digitally through Zinio and Apple Newsstand, and it should already be with subscribers now.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 player scores world’s jammiest knife kill
Given the sheer number of people who have died in warfare in the course of human history, it’s fairly probable that soldiers have passed on in wildly random ways. Take this clip from Modern Warfare 3, pointed out to us by CVG. A knife is lobbed across a level, lands on a helicopter and then drops onto some unfortunate grunt below, like a particularly violent game of MouseTrap. Thing is, that’s probably happened at least once during an actual war (minus the part where the knife phases through the steel wing of the chopper), which turns this clip from hilariously jammy to faintly disturbing.
The Secret World trailer introduces the Templars
Here’s a true fact: if the Knights Templar got royalties for each time their cabal was used in a book, film or computer game, they’d have at least £100. According to some conspiracy theories, the Knights Templar already have that £100 in their underground lair, and they’re planning to spend it on some Henri Wintermans and a bottle of Bells to celebrate the fact that they actually control the world.
ANYWAY, VG24/7 have pointed us in the direction of a new trailer for FunCom’s upcoming MMO The Secret World, and it features one of the Knights Templar’s new recruits – Rose. She likes: “Long walks in the dark, Spilling the blood of evil and Fuzzy sweaters.” She shoots a monster with a shotgun. That hardly seems fair.
The Secret World will be out in April next year.
Steelseries Simraceway SRW-S1 out now
Wheels? Where we’re going we don’t need wheels. At least, not in the traditional sense of bolting a giant steering column to your desk and planting huge metal pedals beneath your chair.
Steelseries’ new Simraceway SRW-S1 is a motion sensitive controller which works like the one that came with Mario Kart for the Wii, but has enough buttons to keep even the simmiest of driving sim fans happy.
