Minecraft – PC Gamer UK’s Game Of The Year
Can you dig it? Yes you can. Twelve months of getting square eyes with Minecraft.
When we each made up our personal list of favourite games this year, Minecraft was on nearly all of them. It’s a first-person fantasy game made of cubes. There are cubes of grassy soil stacked in contours to form mountains, smooth cliff faces that you can dig square tunnels into with your voxellated pickaxe, and cubic trees sprouting cubic leaves. Your head is a cube. The sun is a cube. In all probability, the world of Minecraft is a cube. You should also mentally cube the length of time you expect to spend in it, because it’s so stimulating and relaxing, so hypnotically compulsive, that you’ll never escape its grip.
25 best Fallout New Vegas mods
Fallout: New Vegas is good. Is it perfect? No. In hardcore mode, the rate at which you die from thirst isn’t high enough. I demand to die faster! Luckily, there’s a mod for that. In fact, there are lots of mods. There are tweaks that alter the weight of scrap metal, there are difficulty mods that turn you into a wimp and jack up your foes until they hit like a sack of broken glass, there are mods that turn this or that female companion into that girl from Code Geass, and there’s even a mod that makes stimpaks weigh more than you could possibly carry.
Most of them suck, though. Here are twenty five that don’t.
The Ball gets commercial publish date
The Ball, an Unreal Tournament 3 mod that came second place in this year’s Make Something Unreal competition, is being published by former winners Tripwire Interactive. It’s a first person puzzler where you have a giant… ball. Shut up, it looks great.
World of Warcraft has 12 million active subscribers
And I’ll bet most of them are the alliance on our bloody server. Ahem. Just received word from Blizzard that they’ve reached 12 million subscribers. These are people who have active game time or who played in an hourly internet game room thing in the last thirty days. The number doesn’t include expired or cancelled subscriptions.
Channel 4 to close digital investment arm
Channel 4, one of the UK’s publicly funded TV broadcasters, is shutting down its digital investment division, 4iP.
New Chief executive David Abraham has decided to scrap the investment division, which had an initial budget of £20 million. 4iP reportedly has around £6 million remaining in it’s investment fund, and, before it sinks into the molten lava that courses beneath all UK office blocks, has pledged to spend that on “digital format innovation.” Turning TV shows into games, then.
Channel 4′s Education division, responsible for games like Privates and The Curfew, is not affected by the change.
[via Develop]
Correction: This story originally indicated that 4ip was responsible for partly funding Channel 4′s educational games initiative. This was incorrect, and the story has been changed to reflect that.
Buy Left 4 Dead 2, get a hat and skillet in TF2
If you’ve ever bought Left 4 Dead 2, or if you buy it before 4pm Pacific Standard Time today (that’s 11pm, UK folks), you’ll get Ellis’s hat and a skillet in TF2. Look, a picture of the soldier threatening three tiny, quadriplegic Michelin Men that he’s keeping in one!
AI War developer’s two upcoming games
Arcen games, whose financial troubles have been splashed across our frontpage of late, have announced two new games. Hopefully, if they can release them before they shrivel up and moths explode out of their pockets, they’ll be so awesome that everyone will buy them and it’ll all be great. There are two: a zombie trap-laying roguelike thing, and a tower defence game.
Let me say that again: a tower defence game from the makers of AI war.
Global Agenda COO warns against “chasing WoW”
Successful shooty-guns MMO Global Agenda was a success because it was designed from the ground up to appeal to people too busy with family to maintain a World of Warcraft commitment.
The Sacrifice comic concludes, DLC out
The Sacrifice, Left 4 Dead’s thrilling comic, has concluded. It tells the story of how brave Bill went to the final respawn closet in the sky, as was revealed in The Passing, the Left 4 Dead 1 DLC released earlier this year. In a similar vein, The Sacrifice DLC has just shipped for free for both L4D 1 and 2, and lets you play through the fighty bit leading up to the climax of the comic. And the best part? Everything Left 4 Dead related has suddenly become ridiculously cheap.
Shogun 2: Total War’s comedy ninja assassin
In this new clip of Shogun 2: Total War, Creative Assembly’s community manager Kieron Brigden talks through a demo of the Ninja unit and his oddly bumbling but ultimately successful assassination attempt on an enemy general. I was tempted to take a video of this video of a video and talk over Kieron talking over the video in the video, but I thought it’d only encourage the internet and it might all get out of control. I’ve embedded the original below:
Call of Duty: Black Ops will have 3D for most devices
Update: Oh wait, I’ve read this wrong. They’ve actually just added support for most stereoscopic 3D devices across all platforms, including the PC. You can use your expensive 3D goggles with CoD:BlOps even if they’re relatively new. Sorry for the confusion – the original post is below.
Treyarch have announced that Call of Duty: Black Ops will have full 3D support! Rather than displaying a different sprite for every possible orientation of a character, they’ve fully modelled the enemies, weapons, and environments by rendering what they call “polly gonnes.”
A PC case that’s also an aquarium
Reddit user sirleechalot has build a PC in a fish tank full of mineral oil, with a Big Daddy and bubbles and gravel and everything. It’s just a media PC that probably couldn’t actually run Bioshock (it might be able to hand Aquaria), but it’s still gorgeous.
Duke Nukem Forever includes real-time peeing
Duke Nukem Forever looks goddamn hilarious. This video is the first inkling I’ve had that I want to actually play the thing. It starts with a first person view of Duke peeing, with the prompt “press X to exit.” The guy presses X, and Duke stops peeing, then starts again. Alright, I didn’t say I was a sophisticate. More hilarity embedded below:
There’s a Minecraft campaign coming for Left 4 Dead 2
Michael Louisseize has made a Minecraft map. Nothing amazing there though, right? I see more Minecraft maps than I see exploding people in computerised entertainment devices. BUT WAIT.
How to update Dwarf Fortress (without losing your saves)
Dwarf Fortress has just been updated to version 31.15. That’s good news! But maybe you want to get your saves over to the new version, or maybe you use the Mayday Green tileset to add intelligible graphics to the game but its creator hasn’t updated his pre-packaged release yet. Thankfully, manually updating the game and porting these things over isn’t that hard. It’s just a bit fiddly. Read on to be illuminated.
