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.

Minecraft started off in May last year as a Java-based curiosity that generated some blocky terrain and let you explore it. You could wander the bright grassy world, encounter gentle hills and the odd stony cliff face, and that was about it. Then Markus Persson, its sole creator at the time, added the ability to destroy and place blocks of any type. Then he added water and lava, and improved the terrain generator. He let you save your map, and then share it with people. Communities of friends would take turns adding landmarks and buildings to a saved game and writing diaries, trying desperately to play and build together in some meaningful way.

Skin deep

Around July 2009, when I started playing, Markus had just released Multiplayer mode. Players who’d supported development by preordering the finished game for £10 were allowed to wear a custom skin. I got my wallet out. I remember thinking, ‘I’ve just spent £7 for the privilege of editing a tiny pixellated image so I can look like a douchebag in a free computer game.’

My first experience of Minecraft was what’s now called Minecraft Classic – you can pick from a broad pallet of blocks, place as many as you like and destroy them instantly, and you’re invulnerable to damage from water and lava.

I joined a server with four people on it. They were building a castle, and talking about it in chat. I built a tower a little way off to watch them, but soon I got engrossed in the intricacy of creating it. I built a staircase around the stem, a viewing platform on top, and then I crenellated the shit out of it until it became a lighthouse. By then the castle was done, and they’d started work on a labyrinth beneath it and a village in the next valley, by the river. Satisfied with my work, I went for breakfast and returned much later.

Disaster. Griefers had struck the server, exploiting an early bug that allowed them to flood the map with lava, building horrible thin towers, and placing and destroying blocks wherever they could. It was three dimensional white noise in all the colours of the rainbow. I hopped between the walkways over the lava and tried to find the castle. I discovered the remnants of the labyrinth beneath it, now flooded. Nearby, I found my lighthouse.

Stumbling block

They’d destroyed everything they could reach, but they hadn’t been methodical enough to climb it and destroy the top first, so there was just a floating lighthouse. I connected it to the remnants of the hill I’d built it on – the only surviving scrap of natural terrain – and made it look like a ruin. Then I cried myself to sleep.

When that bug got fixed, the griefers just did it with water, and when that got fixed, they could still destroy blocks. It was better to play with friends on a secure server, or just to play by yourself, than to build on a public server and risk having your work riddled with holes as you slept.

As modders began to get comfortable with Minecraft’s Java anatomy, powerful server tools started to appear that dealt with griefers. Soon, it was possible to give players tiered building privileges, and Minecraft Classic became a civilised place. It even got its own sport: spleef, a game of digging the ground out from under your opponent so they fall into a prepared Pit of Shame.

Then, around August 2009, Markus released an in-development preview of Survival mode. This was available only to users who had paid, and introduced resource management, monsters and, eventually, crafting. You cut down trees to make a crafting bench, and use that to make tools and other furniture. As if you weren’t dying to make a castle already, it gives you a good excuse to have a central hub for your crafting activities, and to pretend you’re building a house.

Go for goal

Before Survival, you were happy to just make any old thing that looked nice. Now you’re playing a game. Suddenly, that little cabin you made is important. Can zombies fall onto the roof from that cliff up there? Will spiders slide out of that crack in the mountain face? Now you have goals and objectives. You need to get some sand to make glass so that skeleton archers can’t skewer you through the windows. Now you need some coal to make torches to ward off the undead while you’re mining.

But of all the monsters that crept up in Minecraft, the creeper is the most distinct. It’s a tall green quadruped with a permanent frown. Creepers hop around the landscape in small groups, and when they see you, they start to hiss and hop after you. When they get close enough, they puff up, flash white, and explode – destroying a huge chunk of terrain. They’re quite scary, but also a little bit cute.

Only a few of us knew about the game at first, but as Minecraft’s grip tightened on the office, we began to evangelise. “Hey Tom, look, I’ve crafted a pickaxe and I’m using it to hew a path into this cliff.” “Hey Rich, I’m channelling water down into that lake.” “Hey Tim, you can fill a mountain with TNT and blow it up.”

It starts to make you go all funny. My first castle was a 5x5x10 keep with barely a window in it, but every time you decide to fortify something, you’ll make it bigger and grander than the last time. When you flatten a mountain and build a wall around it, then build a keep inside that, then build another wall all around that, then a palisade surrounded by a trench and then a fence, and hundreds of peasant houses and farms for miles around, you realise you’re playing the game of the year.

It revolves around the same irresistible creative urge that made Lego king of the bricks-for-children industry, but it stays fresh because Markus Persson never stops making Minecraft. Survival mode already had crafting, so he kept adding recipes. This one time, he added boats. He added snowy maps, and you could throw snowballs at the monsters. He added mine carts that you can ride around in. He added secret underground dungeons, with loot and monsters. He added an ore that can be made into wires and combined with other elements to make logic gates. He added doors and fences. He added a dangerous fiery dimension that you can use to quickly travel around your main world via evil, purple, fiery gates.

But the Minecraft community has a list of achievements and bizarre creations just as long. Whether you’re importing the schematics of the USS Enterprise into a Minecraft map, using some sort of fan-made editing utility to build a working Arithmetic Logic Unit out of the game’s conductive Redstone wires, or just spending most of your adult life building an evil death castle where two treacherous mountains form a narrow pass, Minecraft will turn you into an obsessive architect.

Gold mine

The dream was always Survival multiplayer, though. Fending off monsters with your friends by night, building a castle by day? Oh yes. Right now, you can play a buggy version that renders players and monsters invulnerable, which entirely thwarts the premise of a survival challenge, but there are still restrictions that make it worthwhile. You can’t just build castles like a lunatic anymore – you’ve got to mine those materials first. In some cases, that involves chopping down trees, or turning a cliff into a quarry. For glass, you need to stick a lot of sand in your furnace; for more exotic materials, you need to go deeper underground. Like the early Survival build, it adds meaning to your mansion.

Minecraft sits among the very best of games, just because you can play so many games inside it. It’s a philosophy taken to its natural conclusion in glorious software. It’s a primal urge – to build a goddamn hill fort – in gaming form. Markus has sold enough copies to create an army of bricklayers. This is why Minecraft is the game of 2010.

Most of them suck, though. Here are twenty five that don’t.

These mods are the best of the bunch. Some are delightful departures from the New Vegas you know, others will become an essential part of your wasteland wandering, and one or two just make it prettier. You can’t use them all together, but you can use most. To install them, download the archives and empty them into your Data folder – find it in Steam\Steamapps\common\fallout new vegas\.

1. Centred third person camera

Why did Bethesda give us the weird over-the-shoulder cam in Fallout 3? Why didn’t Obsidian get rid of it for New Vegas? We may never know. Probably because they imagined players actually trying to take aim and fire in third person mode, which is insane. Third person is for screenshots and lightsaber fights – we’ve known that since Jedi Knight 2! Fortunately, every time a developer does this, one of the lovely modder people undoes it.

This mod also lets you zoom all the way out. How far? All of the far, that’s how far.

• [Download]

2. Black Company improved perks

A whole slew of balanced, interesting perks. It comes in two flavours – both are available at any level, but require you to meet certain criteria. In the first version, you need to have high abilities – those are the things you pick at the start and can only occasionally increase. The second version is identical, but requires you to meet skill point thresholds instead. They’re all wonderfully inventive and cover a wide range of interests and specialist player archetypes left out in the cold by Obsidian’s vanilla perks.

• [Download]

Bear in mind that I've maxed intelligence here too.

3. Better tag skills

This tweak doubles the bonus your character gets at the start of the game for tagging his or her three starter skills. These tag skills are intended as a reflection of your character’s past experiences and aptitudes before they ended up left for dead in a shallow grave. If you max out Strength and tag Melee Weapons, you’ll get a skill of 50. Not bad at all.

• [Download]

4. Kill the karma sounds

Okay, so I killed a guy, and I’ve spent the last five minutes picking through his belongings. I’m ashamed of myself. I need help. What I don’t need is some annoying string section blaring at me every time I happen to put a kitchen knife into a guy’s back and strip his body of clothes and valuables and then start chopping bits off of him for fun. This mod gets rid of the noise and text pop-up that annoys you while you’re doing these horrible, unspeakable things.

Tricky uninstall alert!
This mod works by overriding the karma noises with empty files. There’s no esp file to delete, and instead you’ll have to delete the relevant sound files that you’ve installed. The readme is kind enough to explain which ones. Wouldn’t it be nice if they were all zipped up in a bsa file? Wouldn’t it just.

• [Download]

These questions frustrated the hell out of me.

5. Bigger barter and dialogue windows

The barter window is an important window. There, you’ll discover that you can finally buy a fancy business suit to complete the Agent 47 impression. You’ll discover that hollowpoint rounds are so hot right now. You’ll discover that you don’t have enough caps to buy the bottle of dirty water that’ll save you from your imminent death. This mod makes the barter and dialogue windows bigger, so you can spend less time paddling around looking for the stimpaks, and more time despairing because you can only afford two of them.

• [Download]

It’ll be out on the 26th of October on Steam and in retail stores in Eastern Europe, and it’ll cost $19.99. If you own Killing Floor and pre-order from the 18th, though, you’ll get the protagonist from The Ball as a playable character in Killing Floor. HMM.

You can keep up with the game here.

[via Shacknews]

They also mention that they’re hiring to keep up with the growth spurt. If you fancy colouring in Orcs for a living, click here to try your luck.

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.

Oh right, they’re maggots. My items haven’t arrived yet, anyway, but you know how these things go. One day you’ll die and get a hat and a skillet. It’s a classic tale of rags to death to riches and frying pans.

Let me say that again: a tower defence game from the makers of AI war.

Lies! Look, there's some wind over there!

A Valley Without Wind

As Quinns so rightly points out over at mockpoopershootgun.com, A Valley Without Wind is great news for people with a vested interest in towers. AI War had a distinctive approach to AI – rather than make it pretend to be human, Arcen Games had it be a terrifying machine-o-mind instead. If this doesn’t instantly qualify Arcen for the title of “most likely to make an awesome tower defense game”, I’ll eat this sandwich. In fact, I’m such a good sport that I’ll eat it anyway. Right now.

You’ll be able to play it on your own or with a friend in co-op mode. It’s set during a fictional future ice age (not the future ice age that actually happened, then) in a world called Environ. It’ll have a JRPG-style narrative – women squeaking at you? – written by King of Arcen Games and all round nice guy Chris Park.

They’ll also be breaking one of the dumbest traditions of tower defence games – they’ll be giving the monsters AI. Yep, rather than just blindly stomping past a thicket of flamethrower turrets, they’ll be able to pose the question: “Is there a better way I can approach this situation without suddenly losing a lot of weight and gaining a fantastic all-round tan?”

Initially, you’ll be able to select from around five towers to take into battle with you. Like in AI War, you’ll be able to pick what they are (all of them, this time). You pick from a library of around 40 towers, and towards the end you can deploy almost double as many types of tower. We’ve very excited for this.

Alden Ridge

Alden Ridge looks like it’ll be a sort of Lovecraftian rogue-like puzzle game. Lots of undead, immune to conventional weapons, arranged in a challenging situational pickle. You’ll cobble weapons together out of weird stuff lying around, fight eldritch horrors, and you can even design your own levels. It’s co-op too.

Speaking to EDGE, executive producer Todd Harris said, “World Of Warcraft has set the standard in terms of what the market place and end gamers think of as MMOs. We think there can be a lot of different types of MMOGs that can be successful. I think small [developers] can do it if they’re conservative with their projections and their costs.”

MMOs can’t afford to try to be a huge phenomenon anymore – there are just too many of them. As Jim Edge pointed out, you need look no further than recent MMO tragedy APB for an example of what can go wrong when you think too big. Oh, Jim Edge. You are as wise as your beard is long.

Incidentally, I had ten copies of Global Agenda. I was quite looking forward to playing ten characters at once and cackling, but I accidentally mailed them out to ten people who came up with lame uses for jetpacks instead. I’m clumsy like that.

You can get Left 4 Dead 2 on its own for £5.09/$6.79, the original Left 4 Dead for £4.41/$6.79, and both bundled together for £7.81/$10.19. The 4-packs are pretty cheap too. International prices courtesy of SteamPrices.com, hyperbolic salesmanship courtesy of Whitaker. Man, I’m glad those boycotters showed Valve what for so we could have free content for L4D this long after the sequel came out.

Has anyone played through the new campaign yet? Which game did you play it in? What did you think?

Not that I’m complaining, but why is it so silly? If you send in two ninjas, do they wear bowler hats and get into amusing japes? Does one splash through an inch-deep puddle only for the other to plunge in up to his waist? What about if you send four – is the fourth one not quite as funny, but always gets the girl? Creative Assembly have yet to confirm.

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.”

As always with these fancy innovations, there’s a catch: you have to buy an integrated graphics processor just to play their game – which could cost around £200. That’s a hefty price to pay for a gimmick. What’s next, a tiny boom box that sit on your desk to replace your motherboard’s patented Annoying Tone Device™? Pfft.

Apparently, it’s rather good 3D. In VG247′s first hand encounter, Justin Kranzl writes: “Your weapon model points ‘into’ the field of view. Zooming or looking down the sights blurs the weapon detail in the foreground while leaving the remainder of the screen crisply rendered.”

Those of you who’ve been buying our paper-based website in the UK for a few years might remember our old PCG Extreme articles, where we forced various writers to go through various ordeals. We forbid Graham to sleep until he grew a beard, Tom had to charm girls and play games, and Adam Oxford had to build lots of overclocked PCs. While the liquid nitrogen case just froze off his left arm (now bionic) and didn’t squeeze many frames out of the rig, Adam did find that submerging most of the PC’s components in mineral oil provided a ton of cooling for such a simple and sustainable method.

There’s more info on sirleechalot’s original post on Reddit.

Look how much trouble he has drawing the smooth curve of the glans with the Xbox pad! If the game can keep the jokes coming like that, then you can colour me interested. Whether Gearbox get the port right or not, drawing willies in a PC game is something I’ve wanted to do ever since I discovered the wonders of the Nintendo DS’s Pictochat.

Yep, he’s made it in L4D2, and he’s made that lovely poster to go with it. It’s intended as a 4-level campaign with above and below ground levels, and the first one is pretty much done:

When he’s done with them, he’ll be running screaming through them with some familiar industry names:

• Left 4 Dead maestro and funny guy Chet Faliszek,
• God of War creator and actual God of War David Jaffe,
• and Minecraft craftsman Markus Persson.

Michael Louisseize owns and runs World of Minecraft, a massive community of Minecraft servers that supply their own Minecraft client wrapper for use with their servers.

I want to use the Mayday Tileset with the new release

You’ll need two things: the latest Mayday release, and the official Dwarf Fortress release from Bay 12 Games. Put them in separate folders, one called “official” and one called “mayday”. Open them side by side in separate windows.

Oh god those are DLLs. Breathe. Just breathe.

The goal is to move the relevant bits from the old Mayday release into their proper places in the official release. To start, find the folder in the official release called ‘Raw’ and just delete it. We don’t need no ASCII tiles, man! Next, copy the entire raw folder from the mayday folder in the official folder.

Now go down into the data folder of both releases. Delete Official/data/art from the official release and copy over the /art folder from Mayday. Next, open that folder and look at the various mayday.png files. There should be four tilesets to choose from. Remember the one that you like. In the official release, find the data/init folder and open init.txt. In there, find this batch of text:

[GRAPHICS:NO]
[GRAPHICS_WINDOWEDX:0]
[GRAPHICS_WINDOWEDY:0]
[GRAPHICS_FONT:curses_square_16x16.png]
[GRAPHICS_FULLSCREENX:0]
[GRAPHICS_FULLSCREENY:0]
[GRAPHICS_FULLFONT:curses_square_16x16.png]
[GRAPHICS_BLACK_SPACE:YES]

Change the first bit to [GRAPHICS:YES], and replace “curses_square_16x16.png” with the tileset you chose – I prefer “maydayMIN.png”. Save and close the file. In the same folder, delete colors.txt and replace it with the same file in the mayday/data/init folder.

You’re done! Hooray! If that’s all you wanted to do, you can delete the mayday file and use the official release to play now by running the Dwarf Fortress.exe in the root directory.

I want to move my saved games into the new release

This is easier. Just go into install folder for your old version of Dwarf Fortress and locate the /data/save folder. Copy the region folder(s) inside over to your new DF data/save folder. If it’s not there, you’ll have to create it. If your old saves were not using the Mayday tileset, though, you need to open each region folder and delete the ‘raw’ folder inside that. Then copy the /mayday/raw folder from the mayday release into each of your regions.

If your old save files were already created while using the Mayday tileset, though, you just have to copy the saves to the new folder.

I want to know what love i-i-is

It’s important to note that you should never just drag a new release into the old release and let everything work itself out. It won’t. It’ll do horrible things.

Do you have any questions about fiddling with Dwarf Fortress? We plan to keep this article updated with similar guides for all the various add-ons and popular texture packs you use. Do you use any other texture packs or add-ons? Let me know in the comments and I’ll do some digging for you.

The old areas will have new quests, new geography, and new dungeons. Horde players can now make Goblins, Alliance users can rock a Worgen, and all races can now use a few extra classes that were previously locked off. Blood Elf Warrior, anyone? The level cap will be increased to 85, the talent trees will be streamlined for all classes, and the whole game will feel new again.

You don’t have to buy the expansion to enjoy the new Azeroth or the changes to the talent trees, though. Those will naturally affect the whole World of Warcraft.

All the way through that video, they’re talking about spending and earning “currency.” It’s worth noting that this is virtual money they’re talking about – VG247 report that the video comes with some fine print to that effect.

I give up. Until one of us reviews this, I have no idea whether I’m excited about this or not. I’m pretty bummed about the dedicated server thing, but I’m not really to dismiss the game just because it’s Treyarch – a lot of these videos look great, and the obvious use of console controls can be misleading. What do you think? Are you excited? Nonplussed? Disappointed? Lost in an endless ocean of despair? A little thirsty, maybe?

[via VG247]

In his tweet, Josh said that there were minor spoilers and to stay away – hardly something you could say about a fake, right? Here’s the list of achievements:

• Sacrifice
  Ensure your squad escapes safely from Cuba
• Death to Dictators
  Use a single round to bring down Castro
• Vehicular Slaughter
  Destroy all enemies on vehicles during the prison break
• Give me liberty, or give me death
  Escape Vorkuta
• Slingshot Kid
  Destroy all slingshot targets in 3 attempts
• VIP
  Receive orders from Lancer
• A safer place
  Sabatoge the Soviet space program
• Tough Economy
  Use no more than 6 TOW guided missiles to destroy the tanks in the defense of Khe Sanh
• Looks don’t count
  Break the seige in the battle of Khe Sanh
• SOG Rules
  Retrieve the dossier and the defector from Hue City
• Raining Pain
  Rack up a bodycount of 20 NVA using air support in Hue City
• The Dragon Within
  Kill 10 NVA with Dragon’s Breath rounds
• Heavy Hand
  Use the Grim Reaper to destroy the MG emplacement
• Up close and personal
  Silently take out 3 VC
• Double Trouble
  Use only dual wield weapons to escape Kowloon
• Broken English
  Escape Kowloon
• Lord Nelson
  Destroy all targets and structures while making your way up the river
• Never get off the boat
  Find the Soviet connection in Laos
• Pathfinder
  Guide the squad through the Soviet outpost without them getting killed
• Mr. Black OP
  Enter the Soviet relay station undetected
• With extreme prejudice
  Get to the POW compound in the Hind using only rockets
• Russian bar-b-q
  Incinerate 10 enemies with the flamethrower attachment in the POW compound
• Light Foot
  Escape the ship with 2:15 left on the timer in Veteran.
• Some wounds never heal
  Escape the past
• I hate monkeys
  Kill 7 monkeys in under 10 seconds in the Rebirth labs
• No Leaks
  Make it through the NOVA 6 gas without dying on Rebirth Island
• Clarity
  Crack the code
• Double Whammy
  Destroy both helicopters with one TOW guided missile from the deck of the ship
• BLACK OP MASTER
  Complete the campaign on Hardened or Veteran difficulty
• Stand Down
  Complete the campaign on any difficulty
• Frag Master
  Kill 5 enemies with a single frag grenade
• Sally Likes Blood
  Demonstrate killer economic sensibilities by taking down 3 enemies with a single bullet
• Unconventional Warfare
  Use the explosive bolts to kill 30 enemies
• Down and Dirty
  Complete “SOG” and “The Defector” on Veteran difficulty
• It’s your funeral
  Complete “Numbers,” “Project Nova” and “Victor Charlie” on Veteran difficulty
• Cold Warrior
  Complete “Operation 40″, “Vorkuta”, and “Executive Order” on Veteran difficulty
• Not Today
  Complete “Crash Site,” “WMD” and “Payback” on Veteran difficulty
• Burn Notice
  Complete “Rebirth” and “Redemption” on Veteran difficulty
• Closer Analysis
  Find all the hidden intel
• Matinee
  Watch a film or clip with a friend
• Gamblin’ Fool
  Finish 5 Wager Matches “in the money”
• You can do it
  Reach rank 10 in Basic Training
• The Collector
  In Zombie mode, buy every weapon off the walls in a single game
• Hands Off the Merchandise
  Kill the Pentagon thief before it can steal your load-out
• Sacrificial Lamb
  Kill 6 zombies after getting shot by a Pack-a-Punched Crossbow bolt
• “Insert Coin”
  Access the terminal and battle the forces of the Cosmic Silverback in Dead Ops Arcade
• Easy Rhino
  In Dead Ops Arcade, use a Speed Boost to blast through 20 or more enemies at one time

So you’ll be shooting Castro, sabotaging the Soviet space program, doing escort missions in Russia, doing something in Hong Kong, firing explosive crossbow bolts, battling “the forces of the Cosmic Silverback,” and all sorts of ridiculous nonsense. Pffft. When I were a lad, we had panzerfausts, M1 Garands, and people shouting “MEIN LIEBEN!”, and we were bloody grateful.

[via Kotaku]

Their logic goes like this: Zarhym, a Blizzard employee, mentioned in an off-hand announcement about the current arena season that the next season would begin about a week after Cataclysm’s launch. Then, buried in a snippet of game text, it seems like both Wowhead and MMO Champion found this:

“Arena battles and Rated Battlegrounds are only available during an active player versus player combat season. Season nine will begin on December 14th, so be prepared at that time to take your shot at glory!”

One week before December 14th? December 7th. Additionally, it looks like Blizzard has hidden this date in cryptic, totally-not-obvious quest text – a Goblin engineer states that the chance of any sort of worldwide Cataclysm occuring is “less than 12.7%”. As Wowhead say, “Looks like we have a release date of December 7th on our hands. Tentative, of course, don’t quote us, but there you go.”

So here’s that list again:

Age of Empires III
Anno 1404
Command & Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight
Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 – Uprising
Napoleon: Total War
Plants vs. Zombies
Supreme Commander 2
The Sims 3
Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II – Chaos Rising
Worms iPhone

The Golden Joystick Awards have been the ultimate accolade in gaming since 1982 and is now recognised as the biggest and most popular gaming award event on the planet. Gamers cast 1,223,646 votes in 2009.

You can vote for whoever the hell you like, but if you weren’t sure, you could always vote for Supreme Commander 2. You know, if you wanted to. Because it’s the best.

The human team work for a power company. In one game mode, their job is to activate power nodes connected to a radar dish, and the Dinosaurs have to stop them. Dinosaurs are presumably angry at the power company for… burning fossil fuels? Because dinosaurs also become fossils? See, dinosaurs aren’t smart enough to realise that coal and oil are mostly ancient plant matter.

Two teams, five classes each, and each one engineered to be stronger than one other class – you can get the detailed breakdown of that here. The screens so far have shown a first person perspective for the human players, but no idea how you’ll control the dinosaurs. When we see some footage of the sauricide in action, we’ll let you know. Until then, you’ll have to make do with some videos of raptors mauling people at the Primal Carnage site. Here’s a good one to get you started:

[via RPS]

Here’s the download link to the HD version. When he let us know that he’d finished it, James told us via email that, “to be perfectly honest with you, the short is basically my application to Valve, so wish me luck.” Good luck James!

Zombie week is better than shark week.

The teaser site for the game, GKNova6, has started displaying angry dead people in big, on-fire crowds amidst its usual cold war military imagery. What else could it possibly mean, if not that you’re going to shoot soldiers who are also zombies?

[via VG247]

If you don’t know what he’s referring to, earlier this year, Activision fired Jason West and Vince Zampella, the head honchos at Infinity Ward. Lots of people from the Call of Duty-making studio left in protest, and then a group of Infinity Ward employees and ex-employees banded together with Jason and Vince to sue Activision for damages. It was like a train wreck – the internet couldn’t look away, no matter how horrible it got. The persistent world is World of Warcraft, of course, and the franchis “in steep decline” is probably Guitar Hero.

But Kotick’s point is that, apart from that notable exception, “the original founders of [our] studios are still running the studios today. The only thing that we try to do is to provide a support structure to make them more successful. If you do a really good job – and a lot of our studios do – you get to pick what is, in my view, the most difficult thing to pick in the industry: to make original intellectual property.”

Kotick went on to challenge EA’s ability to adapt to the expectations of the modern developer: “You can’t be a floor wax and then decide that you’re going to become a dessert topping. That doesn’t work, it’s your DNA. Their DNA isn’t oriented towards that model – it doesn’t know how to do it, as a culture or as a company, and it never has… Look, EA has a lot of resources, it’s a big company that’s been in business for a long time, maybe it’ll figure it out eventually. But it’s been struggling for a really long time. The most difficult challenge it faces today is: great people don’t really want to work there.”

I think it’s a case of the pot implying that the kettle is a metallic kitchen utensil used chiefly for heating liquids, but what do you think?

You also get a four page feature on the very hardest difficulty mode in Obsidian’s upcoming RPG shooter Fallout: New Vegas. Will Porter writes lots of things about it, and one of them is that it “feels how its already worthy predecessor was meant to.” It’s a rough old desert in the world of Fallout, and Obsidian understand perfectly how it hard it should be to survive there.

We’re also bringing you new info in Shogun 2‘s campaign mode. We saw a battle in action, and it’s a gorgeous display of wind, water and steel that really shows off how much the Creative Assembly have worked on their Edo aesthetic. This month, we’ve reviewed Puzzle Quest 2, Front Mission Evolved, City of Heroes: Going Rogue, Pro Evolution Soccer 2010, Tidalis, Quake Live, Dead Rising 2, Worms Reloaded, and we didn’t not review RUSE. Maybe.

In extra-life, Rich McCormick reveals his meanest StarCraft 2 strategy ever, Jon Blyth plays Magic: The Gathering in his secret den of shame, Tom Francis enters a disturbing, parallel Far Cry 2 where nobody can speak, Tony escapes a pack of in-bred psychopaths by jumping out of a hotel window (and then plays some Dark Corners of the Earth), and I came up with a decent excuse to print a screenshot of my World of Warcraft character wearing his Scarlet set and bunny ears in theViolet Hold dungeon.

When it hits shelves tomorrow, you’ll be able to buy it here. You can also subscribe here.

New Maps

• Way Station Zeta – 4 player
• Rigs – 4 player
• Etched Desert – 4/8 player
• Desolatia – 2 player
• Seraphim Isles – 4/8 player
• Igneous – 6 player
• QAI Labs – 2 player
• Tourneydome – 8 player

UEF changes

• Research: Naval Transportation – your experimental transports can carry naval units.
• Structure: UEF Aegis – a big experimental shield that covers “an entire base.” It’s got massive health, but needs a manual recharge that costs energy when it goes down.
• Structure: The Research Converter turns mass into research points. Got a stack of scrap metal and not much up top? Stick it all in this blender thingy to boost your brain power.
• Research: Speed Overdrive – select land units get a burst of speed for an energy cost.
• Research: ACU veterancy rate increase.
• New Unit: The Super Triton is an Experimental Dreadnought that has a shedload of massive guns, but a much shorter range than regular battleships. It’s the same idea as a shotgun, but much, much bigger. And it floats.
• Research: ACU structure build cost decrease.
• Research: Structure regeneration.
• New Unit: The Jackhammer is a mobile artillery cannon that must ‘unpack’ in order to fire. While unpacked, it has boosted health, but can’t move.
• New Unit:: The Field Engineer is a mobile assault bot that can repair other units. It can’t build, reclaim, or capture, but boy can it heal. You’ll want these tailing around behind your bigger experimentals.

Illuminate changes

• New Unit: The Sooprizer is an Illuminate gunship that, like the Darkenoid saucer, is a huge direct fire bastard of a thing. Unlike the Darkenoid, it doesn’t have any anti air and can take a beating from the ground.
• Structure: The Illuminator is a giant, white plastic phallus that provides temporary vision and radar in a “huge radius”, but suffers from a long cooldown period between activations and a high energy cost. We’ve all been there, buddy.
• Research: Tank Torpedo weapon – adds a torpedo launcher to the standard tank so that it can kill boats and submarines.
• Research: Amphibious Structures – your buildings can be built on water. Yay, now your massed submarines have a use!
• Structure: The Buhbledow is an experimental shield destroyer. It fires an EMP warhead that pops all shields in the impact area, can hit most of the map, but does next to no damage against other units and structures. Which is weird, because buildings and giant robots tend to have electronics in them.
• New Unit: Shotja is a hovering sniper robot. It can fire a high-damage round from medium range, but it’s got a long cooldown and slow movement speed. It may or may not be Australian.
• Research: “Air Health II”. Does that mean anything to you? I guess, you can unlock more health for air units. Exciting? No. Good for air units? Yes.
• Research: Air Teleport – now that’s more like it. Air units can teleport a short distance mid-flight. If they were thinking with portals, they’d teleport to the same place but facing the opposite direction – two bombing runs in one!
• Research: Structures can sacrifice themselves to heal nearby units.

Cybran changes

• New Unit: The Cybran Monkeylord is back. A big laser with lots of giant legs – what’s not to like?
• Structure: The Recycler is a stationary structure that automatically reclaims wreckage and crashed planes in a medium radius. It can’t reclaim living units. Again, I’d like to point out to Gas Powered Games that robots are not necessarily alive.
• New Unit: The Cicada is a cloak generator that completely hides every unit around it, but can’t hide itself. It can keep itself running for about a minute before it has to recharge, and that alone makes it more useful than my mobile phone.
• Research: Naval Jump Jets – they’ve gone and put jetpacks on boats, people. JETPACKS ON BOATS.
• Research: After they’ve exploded, your artillery shells can still see the enemy base for a few seconds. That’s pretty weird! Scouting with giant bombs is probably my favourite method of scouting.
• New Unit: The Intellitron is a new Cybran air scout unit that has wide vision and radar. It’s quick enough to outrun anti-air, which is, like… super quick. It’s a shame it can’t actually fight, then.
• Structure: The Boomerang is a nuclear defense structure that reprograms nukes to send them to their own launch pad. The returning nuke even fails to trigger enemy Anti-Nukes, and the only drawback is its low rate of fire. It’s also the best thing in any game ever.
• Research: Upgrade your ACU’s build rate. He builds faster now! The speed at which he builds is also increased, allowing for quicker construction that’ll let you churn out buildings at shorter intervals, and erect defences with GREAT HASTE.
• Research: Decrease the time it takes to build air units. See above for copious blather about building things quickly.

A bit of a belter, then. It’s got turrets that hack nukes, ships with jetpacks, floating bases, something that’s a hell of a lot like StarCraft 2′s siege tanks, and a giant blender that turns junk metal into intelligence. We’re also seeing lots of units whose only purpose is to allow the use of one powerful ability which costs energy – the resource that your planes and tanks and boats and buildings also cost to build. Energy generators are about to become a lot more important, then.

Now that SupCom 2 has ships with jetpacks though, should we just give up trying to innovate? I can’t think of a single interesting idea now that I know they’ve put jetpacks on ships. It’s like we’ve mapped the entire possibility space. You could put jetpacks on other things, but they all seem like lesser achievements, you know? What do you think? Where does SupCom 2 go from here?

PC Gamer: Wowhead started off as quite a nifty talent calculator. Did you always plan to host a huge database of quests, items, and abilities? Did you feel like there was a gap in the market you wanted to fill?

Guillaume: The talent calculator was purely a fun project I was doing during classes with a friend. Being an avid Diablo II player, I had been thinking about doing a calculator tool for that game in the past, but never got the chance. In December 2005, about a year after World of Warcraft had been released, we started playing around with coding a talent calculator for World of Warcraft. The challenge was to make one that was faster than what was available at the time.

The World of Warcraft database idea came in the month that followed the calculator’s launch, as we noticed how popular the tool was getting. While I’ve always admired the original database sites for their core concept, I wasn’t entirely satisfied with their implementations. So we simply applied the same recipe we did for the talent calculator and tried to create something we thought was better.

The talent calculator: where it all started. Shut up, I don't play hunter.

PC Gamer: There was a time when it seemed like everyone was using Thottbot for this sort of stuff, but now it seems you guys are far more popular. How do you think that happened?

Guillaume: I originally thought that Wowhead’s success was only based on the fact that we had something better to offer, and how we were relentlessly improving the site, adding new features and polishing the content. It certainly didn’t hurt, but that alone wasn’t enough. At the time there were new database websites sprouting almost every day. The major game changer for us was the fact that World of Warcraft players were starting to look for an alternative to the database sites that existed at the time – and luckily, we were also working really hard to have the best offering. Our most significant traffic increase happened during the release of the game’s first expansion, The Burning Crusade. With all the new content in the expansion, many players were looking for a reliable database to assist them. It was really about being at the right place at the right time.

Shaun: I remember searching for thorium veins on Thottbot back in Classic WoW because I was trying to farm Arcane Crystals. I got really frustrated when I viewed the maps. They had tons of squares all over the place appeared to be a haphazard manner that was correct only part of the time. They told me general areas where I could find the veins, but not specific places. These maps didn’t help me come up with any kind of farming route at all. For my purpose, they were useless.

In my frustration, I typed ‘thorium vein’ into Google and saw a link to “Wowhead”. After pondering the weirdly-named site, I clicked the link. A page loaded with a map of the Burning Steppes (now it shows you Un’Goro Crater instead) and little yellow dots at precisely the points where the veins spawned. I’m pretty sure my jaw dropped. I immediately signed up for an account, downloaded the client, and started uploading data.

I think if you asked our users, their experiences would probably be similar. In its day, Thottbot was quite popular. If the overall design and data of the site had been better, I don’t think Wowhead would have become popular. People are a lot less inclined to try a new site when they one they use serves their needs completely. If fact, there are a group of people for whom Thottbot still serves their needs, so they continue to use that site. However, it would seem the majority of people were looking for something else, so when Wowhead appeared on the scene it was readily-accepted.

PC Gamer: Today you’re collating user-collected data in a massive way. I certainly started using the Wowhead upload client after using the site myself, but how did you convince users to start the first wave of user-uploading?

Guillaume: We didn’t have much to offer users that would convince them to contribute to the site. All we did was promote the Wowhead Client application through a small promotional piece of text on the site’s homepage. Many players responded to the call, and started helping us simply to try and make the site even more complete. I’m very thankful for the impressive amount of contributions we received. It still surprises me.

Shaun: Our initial users needed little-to-no convincing at all, actually. When I found the site, I did it voluntarily simply because I wanted to help the fledgling site become more popular. In my eyes, the site was really focused on the user experience and it made me feel like the WoW data was really second to ensuring the user found what they came to the site to get. That endeared me to the site pretty quickly, and our early users felt pretty similar.

Wowhead

PC Gamer: Guillaume, you mentioned on Twitter that you were still checking the site a hundred times a day after you left. Have you let go yet?

Guillaume: Yes, thankfully. I was very worried about having withdrawal symptoms and not being able to stop being overly passionate about my “baby,” but it turned out just fine. The Blizzard folks have been keeping me very occupied since I’ve joined their ranks, which helped considerably. I still visit the site once a day or so to keep up with the latest updates.

PC Gamer: Shaun, how much of your data is collected by users these days? If the entire database was wiped, how long would it take to build it back up to something respectable again?

Shaun: If the entire site was wiped, we’d be back pretty quickly simply because we back up all that data. However, you were asking something a bit different.

We certainly try to get as much of the data as possible through our own game play on live and test servers, but the users are still a very important part of filling new data into the database. We’re also very lucky to have a large community of users who upload on a consistent basis, so I don’t think it would take much time at all to build our database back up.

Of course, that only makes up a small part of our site. By far, I think the most important part of each database page is the feedback left by users. If we were to somehow lose all of those awesome comments and screenshots and not be able to restore them, I think that would be a worse hit to the usability of our site than anything else.

Next page: What can Blizzard learn from Wowhead?

Last E3, Tim noticed that next to all the developers showing off their upcoming PC titles, Microsoft’s display was shamefully limp. Then, at Gamescom, they announced the return of two beloved PC franchises. They know we’re not happy, then, and in this interview over at MCV, Dave Luehmann openly admits that they should be doing better, and commits to reversing that. He said:

“There’s been a fair bit of criticism aimed at Microsoft that we were spending a lot of our focus on console, and we need to be putting resources behind PC as well. Other companies should look to Microsoft for leadership, but I’m not sure they do. It is our job to lead the way on PC. And in some ways we are doing that and in other ways we are not. So we need to step up. We are putting some real investment and big IPs behind the Windows platform. We’ve spoken of the first three, Fable III, Age of Empires Online and Microsoft Flight. However we are not going to stop there.

“I think it is the responsibility of first parties to push the business models in to new directions. We will test some ideas – some will work and some won’t.”

We’d like to ask you, our handsome, intelligent, often-furious readers: what do you think Microsoft should do to “lead the way on PC” like they say they want to? What will it take to convince you of their commitment? What do you want to see Windows do differently? How should they split their resources and IPs between the PC and their little black money making machine, the Xbox 360? And can Games for Windows Live survive and transform into a truly essential service, or should it just be taken out back and shot? Discuss!

PD102 suggested “using a Jetpack to hover just above people’s heads at a Cliff Richard concert.” That’s pretty lame, because other people behind you need to see Cliff Richard too. For shame!

Lack 26 may have let bitterness taint his entry. Better hope your supervisor at Jetpack Industries doesn’t read PCGamer.com, Lack.

“Using it to deliver jetpacks, then having to trudge home in the rain having delivered said jetpack to those lucky enough to afford them; knowing all the while that your own life is miserable and empty in comparison and every day you have to go through the heartbreak of giving away what you most desire for yourself, a jetpack, to smiling, rich, happy families so they can soar like angels as a tiny speck drags its feet back down the driveway and through the gates.”

Sir_Oddington reasons that there’s no use flying around in the sky when you’re missing out on a potential auxilliary poo storage chamber: “Hollow it out and use the metal shell as a spare sceptic tank.” Pro tip: if someone then straps it to their back and tries to start that thing up, dive for cover.

contrapositive tells it like it is: “Reaper rushing.”

DrugCrazed says: “To use as the beginning of a rube goldberg machine that pushes me up into the sky.” I demand that the first step in the sequence is you turning on your apparently-but-not-really strapped on jetpack, which shoots off without you.

RichardDRMC is still fighting the good fight. He says, “Convert it to a podracer for little children. Then alienate one of the largest fan bases with some shitty prequals. Just sayin.”

Bendito came dangerously close to my idea for a jetpack propelled rocking chair. He reckons you could use your jetpack for “Solo see-sawing”.

jimangi wins a copy of Global Agenda because he’d “craft it into refined metal,” but he also suggested that you could use your jetpack for “going to the shop for my copy of PC Gamer. That’s lame. Real men subscribe.” Ah, I love the smell of patent advertising in the morning. The smell of victory.

Godl1keStev3 reckons that the height of laziness would be “using a jetpack to go DOWN the stairs.” A winner is you, Stev3.

But Ociee made me lol the most with the mental image his entry conjures:

“Standing up.”

Well done guys! I’ll be sending you your codes via our forum’s in-built “electromagnetic mail” system. Check your private messages for your keys. Once you have them, whack it into Steam.

Now, to fetch the list of codes from under the novelty magnets I’ve stuck onto my new non-cooling, curiously-jetpack-shaped, all-the-food-smells-like-paraffin fridge. It’s a floating, smelly buffet!

We’ve actually seen this before though. If you hark back to the very first days of PCGamer.com, we put up this review for the Ultra Triton SE. It was part of a magazine feature where we asked manufacturers to come up with their cheapest high-powered rig, and the nifty trick of activating dud CPUs (for free, via 1337 h4x) won them the top spot. Now intel are charging for it – although apparently it’s a market test with a low-end CPU. Which… makes it… okay? Probably not. Let us know just what the hell you think of this practice. Would you pay to unlock more wattage for your microwave?

Look how excited he is that it's free!

Until he fixes it, Minecraft is entirely free, letting you play multiplayer survival mode like all the cool kids. Once it gets fixed, it’ll start checking to see if you’ve paid, just like before. By then, you’ll want to buy it. You can download the game at the Minecraft site.

The system fell over when Notch updated the server client to fix furnaces and add “sneaking” – features which I’ve been too excited to even try yet. He’s now using Amazon Cloud to distribute the updates, and is working to get a new server and have someone with big brainy-pants write super sleek modern codez. (Read: He’s doing magic to fix it.)

Remember to refer to the wiki for help with the game.

It’s very well made by a chap called Marco Spitoni, who’s been making CGI shorts for years. You might recognise this metal dragon hunting short he made that did the rounds a while back, for example. There sure are a lot of people making teaser trailers for Half-Life 2 fan projects. Who do you think will actually finish theirs first?

While we haven’t played it, Riot Games are saying it’ll have more isolated lanes that are harder to switch from. You’ll need to rely on map awareness and win a lot of small tactical battles – no huge mid-game clash for you.

“Mark absolutely loves APB, and everyone here loved what they saw. We’ve got our hands full of Gears Of War 3, BulletStorm and the recently announced Project Sword. If any talks like that are going on, then they would be confidential.”

A big fat maybe, then.

Yesterday we reported that APB’s servers were shutting down. If you’re curious, here’s our APB review.

[via BBC]

“APB has been a fantastic journey, but unfortunately that journey has come to a premature end. Today we are sad to announce that despite everyone’s best efforts to keep the service running; APB is coming to a close. It’s been a pleasure working on APB and with all its players. Together we were building an absolutely amazing game, and for that, we thank you. You guys are awesome!

From all of the Realtime World staff we thank you for your continued support.

The servers are still up, so join the party and say goodbye!

- Ben ‘APBMonkey’ Bateman (Community Officer)”

[via Edge]

*He mostly refers to himself in the third person.

See the little PC logo at the end there? I always worry about DICE’s stuff coming to PC, but that’s good enough for me.

I think the hidden message here is: “this will be screwed up and spooky and stuff. Disney was the WRONGEST about Alice.” They could even rename it Malice in Bloodmurdersland. You can have that one for free, Spicy Horse.

It’s also got some sort of batshit arcade thing in there. I’d best let 2K explain:

“In addition to the story-based missions, Joe’s Adventures opens up a slew of optional city-based quests packed with arcade action gameplay and a points-based system that allows players to move up the ranks on the online leaderboard through combos and multiplier bonuses. Deadly executions by head shot or charged explosives rack up points, and precision-timed vehicular power slides, lofty jumps and feats of supercharged speed maintain the adrenaline-charged fun for extensive replayability.”

…what?! Combo points? Multipliers? Look, I like to watch numbers go up as much as the next man, but is this really what the Mafia do? Maybe it’s a comment on Joe’s personality: normal cold-blooded killers have to use cover, but psychopaths get a high score board in their head and adrenaline pumped supercharged power slides.

Ben Bar-Haim, corporate vice president of software for AMD, had this to say:

“Steam represents an evolution for PC and online gaming, and the availability of ATI Catalyst graphics driver updates directly on the Steam platform can help further enhance the PC gaming experience for users of ATI Radeon products. AMD Gaming Evolved and Valve share the belief that ‘Gamers Come First’ – we now have the opportunity to work together to help ensure the best possible experience for PC gamers.”

But how does it work? Well, if your PC is a dirty nVidia beast like my work PC, you’ll have a new menu option in steam that’ll take you to their driver page. If you’ve got an AMD card like Craig’s PC does, it’ll download the update and give you the option of installing it – then the scary catalyst thing comes up and does horrible things to your resolution and then goes away. Graphics drivers updated!

I’m impressed with the speed of it. Has anyone had any problems with it yet?

In celebration of how cheesy this hilarious video is, let’s all come up with things Gandalf can say. I’ll start: “An MMO is never launched early, Mr Baggins. It arrives precisely when it means to.”

In his blog post, he’s steered clear of laying the blame on APB’s design flaws, reasoning that in a company of around 300 people that managed to burn through $100 million, “the problems had to run deeper than [APB].”

He also cites an example of the kind of advanced bureaucracy that was probably at least partly responsible for the rough state of APB at launch. One quality assurance person took the time to trawl through the beta forums to find every possible bug mentioned by players, and they were told off because that was the remit of another department. That other department’s job was just to assign a number between 1 and 100 to how positive the forums had been that week, not to collect bugs. So who was collecting bugs from the forums? It looks like everybody thought it was someone else’s job, or was actively prevented from doing it because someone else thought it was someone else’s job.

He’s promising more soon. It’s well worth following his blog. You can read the full post here.

I was wrong.

First, it wanted a username and password. I type those in, and check the “sign me in automatically” box. After I signed in, it showed me an empty progress bar for a bit. I don’t know what’s supposed to go in there, but it never bothers to show up. Then it told me that I needed to update. I was told that if I didn’t update, I couldn’t save. So I hit yes, and it shut down the game, installed a thing, and then nothing happened.

Please stop asking me yes or no. PLEASE. PLEEEEEAAASSSE.

So I started it back up again, and it asks for my login details again. I type those in, and check the “sign me in automatically” box – and check it hard. Then the lack-of-progress bar hung around for a bit, and then it said it had to update. SIGH. I clicked that, and then it shut down, and didn’t start up again. So I started up again and had to put in the password again – and I checked that check box even harder this time – and then it showed me the empty progress bar and then went away.

That’s the best thing about Games for Windows Live. It goes away. It creeps up to the top of your screen and vanishes. You’re allowed to feel relieved, but don’t let your guard down. At any time, it could return.

Once I was allowed to actually play the game, it really did take about five minutes. During that time, I had to start the campaign again – there were no magical cloud saves or anything fancy like that. When I finished the first mission, I got an achievement. For doing the first mission. An achievement I vaguely remember getting the other week when I played with some friends, and about a year ago when I first played it.

There are games I’ve played to completion on PC, and then when I dust off my Xbox 360 to play something like Brütal Legend, it doesn’t show me any achievements for those games. Looking at my profile, you’d think I’d never played GTA IV, or Dragon Age: Origins, or Fallout 3. I unlocked every last character in Street Fighter IV, and according to GfWL, I’ve barely touched it. These are all games I’ve played on PC. GfWL did its best to interrupt them, but made no effort to improve the experiences.

Games for Windows Live is a ridiculous embarrassment for the platform. Developers: if you’re using it in your upcoming game, you’re not doing it right. Put it on Steam, or Impulse, or GamersGate, or sell it yourself online, or just stick it in a box. Preferably with a cloth map.

Update: I was partly wrong. Partly! See below for details.

I’m sure GameServers.com are decent providers, of course, and it’s great for them that they’ve got the exclusive rights to host CoD:BlOps servers, but it’s not clear at this point what the benefit are for the consumer here. Can you see yourself renting one of these? I want my own personal bubble to run strange maps on, you know? Sometimes you need a bit of RTD, or to mess around on a surf server.

Update: IGN have done a video interview with Cesar Stastny, Treyarch’s PC lead for Black Ops, about the capabilities of the dedicated servers you can rent from GameServers.com. To their credit, the server package comes with a generous swathe of variables you can tweak and things you can do – including things I was sure you wouldn’t be able to in my opening paragraph, like restricting the weapons. You still can’t code your own mods, though.

Thanks to Forte in the comments for the tip.

NowGamer took the time to work out what all the increments are for the UK, US, and EU territories:

UK: £4, £8, £18, £35, £70
US: $5, $10, $25, $50, $100
EU: €5, €10, €25, €50, €100

At least they have the common decency of representing the money with real currency – SteamPointz would have been a bit much. The funds added to your wallet are non-refundable and non-transferable, although you can still buy games the old fashion way.

You can get down to it here, but I’m not seeing an easy way to access it via the Steam client just yet.

You play as the grandson of the character from Guerilla, and you’ve got to fight martians in caves beneath the surface. It’ll have the same breathtaking, fully destructible scenery, but nothing so far suggests that it’ll have the terrain deformation of the original. I’ve got mixed feelings about it. Am I excited to play the sequel to Red Faction: Guerilla that lets you blow up a bridge just as the evil cop guys drive under it? Sure. No-one loves explosive death hammers as much as I do. On the other hand, it’s also the sequel to the original Red Faction, which I seem to remember totally sucking because you were stuck in underground corridors. Can Volition resist the temptation to tell a bland story of Man vs Martian and keep the game about caving in skulls with a big hammer? We can only hope.

Ten codes. A few giga-shedloads of readers. We need to decide who gets to try on the jetpacks. Unfortunately, we’re not allowed to organise a jousting tournament since that accident last time, although I still maintain that it’d be safe enough if we used regular lances without explosive tips.

No, this time we’ll compete with comment boxes. Comment below with your idea for the lamest thing to use a jetpack for. Changing a lightbulb, keeping the carpet clean, that sort of thing. The ten lamest jetpack uses will win a copy of Global Agenda on Steam.

I spoke to Todd Harris, Global Agenda’s executive producer, about the new retail box. I asked him if there was a game in it: he said there was. I asked him if he wanted to talk about it: he said he did.

"Are you buying that new Global Agenda game?" "Nah, I'm not into modern war shooters."

PC Gamer: You’re releasing Global Agenda in a box! What’s the agenda there, then?

Todd Harris: Well, with no required monthly fees, we see an opportunity for even more people to join the GA world. Digital Distribution has been great for us. In fact we’re still the top selling MMO on Steam even though we released over eight months ago. But retail is a very important channel and so we’re excited to add UK players who want the full Global Agenda package – box included.

PC Gamer: Why did you decide to transition to a subscription-free game? How did the community respond?

Todd Harris: We moved Global Agenda to subscription-free because that’s the payment model our players asked for. It sounds simple but basically we put out a survey and chose the model that was overwhelmingly preferred by both our active players and potential buyers. So, with Global Agenda you buy the game once and play all existing content forever. Future expansion content will be charged for separately. Our inboxes were then flooded with thank-yous and hug e-mails so apparently the community likes the plan. I think it comes down to the fact that many of our players enjoy Global Agenda as their secondary MMO or as a shooter. They play the game very regularly but sometimes in smaller doses since our mission structure allows you to progress in 15-minute sessions of PvE or PvP as you choose. So, the no-sub model matches how a lot of people play the game.

PC Gamer: What’s been your biggest success with the game so far?

Todd Harris: We most proud of the positive player reviews and how they’ve supported Global Agenda growth since launch while so many other MMOs unfortunately decline after launch. We are the number one shooter MMO and our growth has come primarily from positive word of mouth. More specifically, our players tend to highlight the intense combat and freedom of movement that comes from the jetpack. Some MMOs don’t even allow you to jump and we let you fly!

PC Gamer: What’s the biggest thing on the game’s to do list? What would you ideally like to improve or add next?

Todd Harris: Our next free patch includes many community requests including achievements and badges, additional player crafting including a craftable prestige pet, and character profile slots to support quickly switching your weapon load-out and skill-point spec.

In future expansion updates we’ll be introducing even larger maps that allow more players to simultaneously battle on them.

PC Gamer: How do you observe that players participate in the game’s world? How many people are ignoring the territory-control aspect? How many people are going all out to pursue chunks of land?

Todd Harris: For PvE players, high level characters join a number of very popular gametypes. In our 10-person Defensive Raids your team protects the objective against a swarm of Recursive Colony robots. In our Ultra-Max difficulty dungeon-crawl type missions four players infiltrate facilities of the evil Commonwealth faction. We also have a DoubleAgent game mode where your four-person team goes against not only Commonwealth NPCs, but also two real players fighting alongside the bad-guys and trying to stop your team.

For PvP fans, our Agency vs. Agency end-game alows pre-made groups to compete against other player-made groups over territory and facilities. With no top-down factions the conflict is very player-driven and dynamic and unlike any other MMO endgame. Last season we had over 15% of our players participating in this AvA end-game, and it looks like the participation will be even higher this season.

PC Gamer: How many players are sticking to rigid schedules to hold zones?

Todd Harris: In the current Agency vs. Agency play, groups can choose which zone they participate in based on their player availability and timezone. We have weekend and weekday zones and within each zone there are regions with different published open-hours. This format has allowed smaller player agencies to own and hold territory. Last season the competition was very intense and it went down to the final hour of the final day before a winner emerged.

PC Gamer: Global Agenda is, at heart, a fast paced team shooter. On the design end, how do you make sure it isn’t just a spammy spam-fest?

Todd Harris: Our top priority during developent was class balance and the overall feel of the team shooter combat. Spam is minimized because some quick kill weapons, such as a Robotics’ turrets or Recons’ sniper rifle, can clear out players in a hurry. Then it comes down to good map design that allows those classes to do their thing while also supporting the roles for Assaults and Medics.

PC Gamer: Where can our readers buy it, and what will it cost?

Todd Harris: Global Agenda is available at retailers across the United Kingdom, including GAME, The Hut, Zavvi, Play.com, Shopto.net, and Amazon UK. The suggested retail price is £24.99 and we think PC gamers will find Global Agenda to be a great way to satisfy their MMO fix AND shooter fix in the same game – no monthly fee required!

PC Gamer: Thanks Todd.

Right, get commenting. Ten people will get a free copy of this game. Are your ideas lame enough for you to be one of them?

Death Knights have had their Frost and Blood presences switched, and the Blood tree overhauled to become the dedicated DK tanking tree. Hunters can now keep five pets with them and switch them on the fly – you can also store 20 pets in your stable. Gotta catch ‘em all!

A sore one for you: all types of armour now cost about the same to repair – as much as plate, that is. Now, when you wipe, everybody gets to rage quit.

But the big deal is the talent revamp. Talent trees are now 31 points of fun, clickable abilities – none of this “2% STA from items per talent point” crap. Those passive stat boosts unfold as you choose a tree and increase your ‘Mastery’ stat, found on high level items.

You don’t get to fly around Onyxgrimmar though. Not yet.

Classes: General

• Many class talents, spells, and abilities have been overhauled, added, or removed.
• All spell and ability tooltips will now display damage averages rather than minimum and maximum damage potential. This feature is on by default but can be changed via the Display settings under User Interface options.
• Ammo has been removed from the game.
• The character levels at which classes gain new spells and abilities have changed.
• Many item and class stats have been changed or removed.
• Rage has been normalized.
• Spells and abilities no longer have multiple ranks and now scale with character level.
• Talent trees have been altered. All player talent specializations have been reset, allowing for free re-specialization.
• Each specialization has been reduced to a 31-point talent tree.
• Players will now get a total of 41 talent points to spend.
• Players will be asked to choose a specialization at level 10. Doing so will result in the unlocking of a spell or ability unique to that specialization, as well as one or more passive bonuses.
• Once a talent specialization has been chosen, players may only place points in the primary tree until at least 31 points have been spent there.

Death Knights

• A dedicated tanking tree (Blood) has been implemented.
  The effects of Blood Presence and Frost Presence have been exchanged.
• The way in which runes recharge has changed.

Druids

• A new Eclipse mechanic has been added for druids.

Warriors

• Warriors can now equip shields in any equipment slot, including the main hand and face.
• (Not really)

Hunters

• Five pets can now be stored with the hunter at all times. Any one of these five pets can be summoned via the Call Pet ability.
• Focus has replaced mana as a new resource.
• Hunters now start with a pet at level 1.
• The Stable will now store 20 pets. If a pet is moved into the Stable, its talents are wiped.

Mages

• There is now a new spell fly-out UI feature for mage portals. Clicking on the Teleport or Portal buttons will expand the list of choices available.

Paladins

• Paladins now have a new resource bar.

Warlocks

• There is now a new spell fly-out UI feature for warlock pets. Clicking on this single button will open up the list of available pets to summon.
• Soul Shards have been removed from the game as items. Instead, they now exist as a resource system necessary for using, or altering the mechanics of certain spells.

Items

• Resilience no longer reduces the chance a player will be critically hit by an opponent.
• Durability: cloth, leather, and mail now have as many points of durability as plate, making the repair cost on death much closer to equal for all classes.

Professions

• The glyph system has been updated to now feature three different types of glyphs. Many class glyphs have been added, altered, or moved to different glyph types.

User Interface

• Spell Alerts have been added to notify players when procs on select spells and abilities occur. A visual notification will display around the character and the activated ability will be highlighted on the action bar.
• The Arena Teams pane has been improved.
• The Character pane has been redesigned. Character stats can now be shown or hidden via the Show All Details/Hide All
• Details button on the bottom left. When shown, all character stats will be visible in a window to the right of the pane. Stat sections can be reorganized by clicking and dragging them up or down the pane.
• The Professions panes now have more filtering and search functionality, as well as buttons to easily link recipes in the chat frame.
• A Professions screen has been added to the Spellbook to better display the details of a character’s primary and secondary professions.
• Many of the yellow System Messages that would display in the chat frame when leveling up have been removed.
• New text animations now alert players as they level up, also providing information on when new talents, spells and abilities are available.
• Professions and Class Trainers windows have been altered to more clearly display available and upcoming purchases.
• New Raid frames are in now. They can also be used in place of the standard 5-player party interface via the User Interface options.
• The Spellbook interface has been improved for greater ease-of-use and visual appeal.

If you think it’s for you, you can order it from Amazon and Play for about £27, get it on Steam for about £30, and you can pretend to buy it by clicking this link.

Click to deploy the enlarge-o-tron

Here’s my rundown of the various classes.

The Doctor

• He’s a bit behind on his hippocratic oath.
• He has a syringe. You don’t want what’s in the syringe.
• He dresses like a bird highwayman.
• Weakness: his balls.

The Priest

• This is a mad priest with a sword.
• Which means that he’s some bald man who says latin things after he cuts you up.
• If, by freak chance, you get hit by lightning while running from him, he’ll probably take the credit.
• Weakness: dress up like a schoolgirl and stab him while he’s processing the strange feelings in his tummy.

The Courtesan

• Prostitute by night, assassin by… also night.
• She’s got a fan! It’s probably deadly! Or it does nothing.
• Agile, fast, nimble, dexterous, quick, speedy, and good at stabbing a lot of things in rapid succession.
• Weakness: Richard Gere.

The Executioner

• A big man covered in blood with a large axe.
• Also has a smaller backup axe.
• Doesn’t mind stealth, as long as people have the decency to keep it at home.
• Weakness: Presumably he can be killed?

Ubisoft Montreal’s community developer Gabriel Graziani is maintaining that they “have yet to announce a release date for PC.” That release date they already announced? You thought that was for PC too, but that’s just ridiculous. Only a foolish fool would assume that the PC release would be the same as the console release, right?

At the very least, it’ll give them more time to hum and haw over ditching their famously draconian DRM – they’ve already caved and stripped it from RUSE. Alright, so Brotherhood is a multiplayer game and most of you will be playing it online anyway, but sometimes you just want to LAN it up, you know? Sometimes your internet goes down for a week and you want to mess around in singleplayer. Sometimes you just want a screenshot, or to show your mate what your new card can do, and can’t be arsed starting up the router. Maybe you live in a house with one internet cable. Maybe Ubisoft’s servers have got a nasty case of the barbarian cyber-hordes.

Another few months of reading angry forum threads full of potential PC customers might just tip the scales in our favour.

For a moment it also looks like you get a glimpse of the Cybran’s hinted Recycler: a boringly named ‘Mass reclaiming’ structure. But the reason the nobbly little structure isn’t familiar is that it’s actually the Mass Converter they added for the faction in the last patch.

Here’s the poster boy, Experimental Spiderbot: Monkeylord in all his SupCom2 glory.

And here’s a picture of their new cloak generator in action:

[video via BigDownload]

Lava is lethal to ground troops, but it's actually quite pleasant for Overlords.

It’s a “greed” game type, which means that you’re competing for resources against the enemy team. Once either team reaches the resource target, they win. If you’re very skilled at StarCraft 2′s multiplayer, hoarding resources will do weird things to your brain.

I tried playing against two medium AIs just there and they focused totally on minerals, accruing 10k before I was ready to rush them with mutas. I suppose you could have two of your 3 team mates focusing on attack, and have the third just pumping out harvesters and quietly teching up. Obviously, deciding between stockpiling your own resources and spending them on units to keep pace with the arms race is a vital balancing act that makes Greed so fun in RTS games. This one has deep fried Zergling in it, so it’s 1% better by default.

You can also give your Sim the “Vehicle Enthusiast” trait at character creation. They can name their cars from the off and also fall in love with their motorised mates at a much faster rate.

The obligatory hilarious bug fix is that “Ghosts will now properly exit vehicles after arriving at their destination.” Oh I don’t know, back in my day ghosts all knew how to use noclip.

You can sift through which patches you might need here. Full patch notes courtesy of Blue’s News:

New Features

• Sims that drive extensively can now develop a relationship with their vehicles. Vehicles can be named once a friendship is formed.
• The Vehicle Enthusiast Trait is now available. Sims with this trait can name their vehicles immediately and develop relationships with them more quickly.

Base Game Updates

• Fixed an issue where ghosts could become stuck in vehicles under certain conditions. Ghosts will now properly exit vehicles after arriving at their destination.
• Nameable items can only be named when they belong to the active household.

World Adventures Updates

• Career titles for Sims visiting Egypt, France and China will now display in the Relationship Panel tooltips.

The Sims 3 Create a World

• Create a World users need to install a new version of The Sims 3 Create a World Tool. Users can find the Create a World page from the “Games” drop down in the site header.

If there was a reason to stop playing Neptune’s Pride, it was because you’d quite like to have some friends left. Because you could wait until your mate had gone to bed and then betray them as they slept, every single request for allegiance, offer of trade, or informal peace treaty agreed on MSN at 2am was worth about as much as a pair of cardboard socks. It made for a few great sessions full of amazing anecdotes, but it also got a bit exhausting.

In this game, with a big horde of zombies threatening all pointy-eared life, there’s something to unite against. And, well, if the zombies happen to overrun this town just before the Free Peoples of Elfington get there to crush the undead, then I suppose it’d be a senseless waste to leave all that gold lying around. It could rust, or get eaten!

We’ll have more info for you soon. For now, you can ogle their official site.

Speaking to Eurogamer, Meredith said, “I don’t think boxed copy on PC is going to last much longer. It just feels like the boxed PC game is on its way out. Square Enix, as much as they love us, are not going to pay us for no returns.” He told them that part of the problem was that PC gamers made better purchasing decisions by choosing digital distributors over high street retailers. He also said that Football Manager’s success had zero impact on the decision.

SURE IT DIDN'T

It’s been common knowledge for a while that they’d decided to put the series on hold for this year – it’s common for these games to release a new version each year, with stats that reflect the most recent football season. When they announced that, it sounded more like a break – an extra year to work out some bugs and polish more features. Now it looks like they’ve put it on hold indefinitely – instead, they’re making something for the iPhone after an 80% downsizing in 2009.

He also had a go at bus driving simulators.

“I was in GAME at the weekend and I couldn’t believe how little [PC games] there was. I saw a game, Bus Magnate I think it was, and I thought, ‘Wow, is that what the PC market has come down to?’”

Yep, because you only get really mundane simulator games in retail stores. And Championship Manager is way above all that, with its sexy war guns.

Cybran Nation

• Intellitron: Air Scout
• Boomerang: Nuclear Missile Defense
• Recycler: Mass Reclaiming Facility
• Cicada: Experimental Mobile Cloak Generator
• Monkeylord: Experimental Spiderbot

UEF

• Research Convertor: Research Conversion Facility
• Field Engineer: Mobile Repair and Support Unit
• Super Triton: Experimental Dreadnought
• Jackhammer: Experimental Unpacking Cannon
• Aegis: Experimental Shield Generator

Illuminate

• Shotja: Sniper Bot
• Buhbledow: Experimental Shield Destroyer
• Sooprizer: Experimental Gunship
• Illuminator: Experimental Intel Gathering Station

Maps

• Way Station Zeta (2v2)
• Tourney Dome (4v4, FFA)
• Rigs (2v2, FFA)
• Etched Desert (4v4, FFA, 2v2)
• Desolatia (1v1)
• Seraphim Isles (4v4, 2v2)
• Igneous (3v3)
• QAI Labs (1v1)

 
Field engineer! Sniper bot! Mass reclaiming facility! Mobile cloak generator! Research converter! This is going to get nuts. We’ll let you know if and when this list is official, and what the price and release date will be. Thanks to RebelliousUno for spotting the list.

[via GameSpot and Gamereplays.org]

Tanks are big! Guns are loud! Avalanche is a verb! World of Tanks is an upcoming MMO, currently running a closed beta, where you play as a sentient tank (or possibly a man inside a tank). The heavy tanks have incredible frontal armour – attack them directly, without flanking them, and you might as well be blowing rose petals out your death-chute. Like most things in war, it’s best doing it from behind.

In VVVVVV (pronunciation guide), you’re the captain of a ship that’s stranded inside a spacial anomaly, forced to leave the Comfy Chair and venture into the area’s crazed physics to find your crew. It’s a difficult platformer where you can flip gravity while you’re touching the floor, but you can’t jump. So if you see a spot you want to get to, you have to plot a zig-zag path between the floor and the ceiling.

It’s a nonlinear game without powerups, unlocks, or any kind of weird barriers to entry. You can access any part of the game just by going there. It’s really hard, and the music is really good, and you can buy it here.

If you’ve never played the original Knights of the Old Republic:

• You should. Do it now.
• Beware of spoilers in the comments.

I’m loving the cutscenes they’re showing in these trailers. Interacting with the world via dialogue is something that’s missing from most MMOs, and that’s a shame. Why won’t WoW let me snark at bosses before I down them?

[video by Kotaku]

From a small team of developers led by Jonathan Blow, The Witness is about exploring a mysterious, abandoned island and solving puzzles to unlock new areas. Details until now have been sporadic – nothing for months, then two thousand words on how they built the lighting engine, and never anything on the plot or the nature of play. This is the first real information on what this game will be like.

It’s an early alpha, which seems to be what developers say now when they’re showing off their gorgeous footage. It looks great. The lighting is fantastic. It’s got a sort of maze puzzle recurring throughout, and, like Braid, it ramps up the complexity naturally as you encounter puzzles.

[via The Witness]

BETTER THAN THE ZOO. Red 5 studios are not calling it an MMO, but there’s some sort of mission sharing going on in that video, and they’re promising frequent, free updates. They’re also doing a beta signup at their site.

They’re tactfully avoiding any mention of consoles or platforms, but we see PC keyboard prompts. So that makes us squee.

In addition to teaching you how to safely penetrate a layer of porous, waterlogged rock, it tells of the entire life cycle of a fortress – and the brief epitaphs of the four unsuccessful expeditions before it. It’s here, and it’s great. There’s a Batdwarf, zombie slugmen, floating soil plugs suspended by a wooden shaft, idiot nobles demanding impossible shit to the ruination of all, and a very special lever.

I’ve always suspected that adventure games were just thinly veiled excuses to tell a story. I’ve had the most fun in them while reading the dialogue and learning about the characters, not nailing a rope to a cart and tying it to a bus and loading a crate of chickens onto the cart.

In Symon, brought to our attention via the ever lovable IndieGames.com, you’re a bedridden patient in a hospital who can only dream away his days. The dreams are dark, melancholy affairs filled with a mush of elements from his life, his regrets, and his nostalgia for his old life.

Puzzles are mostly dipping things in things – dipping a sad blue bunny in orange paint to cheer it up, then giving it to the kids you never had in exchange for a picture of your wife. Using a cheerful book on bitter chocolates to make them taste sweet, to help the frog you stepped on as a child feel better and give you a set of baby’s pyjamas.

It’s a pretty wild concept, and a gorgeous game. Play it in your browser here.

Total Annihilation ships with its expansion, Core Contingency. These were the spiritual ancestors of the first Supreme Commander game, and their unique strategic quirks were much referenced in the massive comment threads for both of my SupCom 2 vs StarCraft 2 articles from last week. Stardock say they’ve revamped multiplayer connectivity, added a new launcher that’ll help you get it running on your PC, and that it “includes easy access to tips and tricks for getting the most out of it.” With permission from Atari, they want to eventually incorporate user created content from fan sites and integrate it with ImpulseReactor, their developer tools that hook into Impulse.

You can buy it here for £8/$12.35.

Zodiac on their official forum said this:

“We are thinking hard about the next Rollercoaster Tycoon game on PC. We have a question for you, our loyal fanbase. How ready are you for the next Rollercoaster Tycoon? In the years since the last version, what are the key features you’ve dreamed about for the next release? What would make you rush out, buy it, and keep playing it? We’d like to know!”

The last Rollercoaster Tycoon game was released in October 2004, about six years ago.

Thanks to Link in the forums for the tip.

The first thing you’ll notice is that this is played with a 360 pad. His health is actually his “Ego”, which hopefully isn’t some sort of dreadful acronym, and it regenerates. There’s also a terrible buggy section where the poor guy flips it, and a bit where Duke gets grabbed by a cyclops with rocket launcher hands. Weee!

[video by HardwareCanucks]

Disgusting organic races are great

In Supreme Commander 2, there are three factions: The UEF, who are people with guns; The Cybran Nation, who are people who put their brains in machines; and the Illuminate, who are people who worship aliens. Yawn. Now take the horrible, wonderful, totally gross Zerg. They’re like the Borg – they assimilate lifeforms. They don’t do it by plugging you into a phone charger, though. They do it by giving you Athlete’s Face. The day I discovered that you could use waypoints to spawn any number of Infested Terrans in a few instants, I also discovered what it sounds like when a thousand people throw up and fart at the same time. And what it’s like to have to run to the bathroom in the middle of a league match. And the value of flushing twice.

StarCraft 2 has a lot of colour. Even their version of the people-with-guns, the Terrans, are pretty funny. They quip at you. They chatter. They seem obsessed with whatever it is they’re doing – the original’s Firebat was the prime example (Mr Firebat was retired from multiplayer for the sequel). All he would talk about was fire. “Need a light? Fire it up! Wanna turn up the heat?” Each of the races are vibrant and wonderful. Supreme Commander 2 needs to get some of that colour. Why can’t the Cybrans make with the funny? They’re brains in jars, that’s easy! “I miss having toes. I love slipping into a lukewarm electrolyte solution of an evening. Does my cerebellum look big in this?”

Hard counters are the only counters

Okay, StarCraft 2 player. You’re Terran, here are some zerglings. How do you kill them? You stomp them with Hellions.

Right, SupCom 2 player. Some tanks. How do you kill them? Well, you could tech up to short ranged artillery, or you could, you know, get some gunships running. Build more tanks, back them up with missiles. How about assault bots? You could even shell them from the ocean.

I mentioned yesterday that we used to play this at lunch. We’d sit there while it was loading and say, “I fancy doing artillery today.” When we first got stuck into StarCraft 2, we tried that too. “Oh, I quite like the sound of Banshees today.” Doesn’t work, does it? It’s a bit like going into a game of rock paper scissors and just massing scissors. In Supreme Commander 2, you’re never going to go into a fight and suddenly realise, “Oh no, they’ve built those!” and pull the hell out. You still need tactics, of course, but the best tactic is just to build a load of everything and then chuck them all in.

StarCraft 2 may not let you move and shoot at the same time, but at least it simulates reality in this way: it doesn’t give you the room to try every tactic at once. Like in real life, if you put all your eggs in one basket, and then drop it, you’re screwed.

Stealth vs Detectors

StarCraft 2 has a whole host of ways to hide your units. Invisible airships that pound at your harvesters because you don’t have any equipment that can detect them. Burrowing insect things that pop up behind your defenses and squirt acid in your face. Invisible snipers. Invisible space elf jedis. There’s also a host of detection equipment – the Raven is a Terran flyer that can poop out turrets and reveal cloaked units. The Protoss Observer reveals cloak and is cloaked. As well as giving Rich the not-entirely-guilty pleasure of squelching the odd Zerg expansion with his invisible death planes, a strategy game with stealth and detectors also allows you the pleasure of revealing that, yes, you do have an Overseer and he can spot thoseDark Templars and he did just tell the Hydralisks where to aim.

Oh come on, it’d be great in SupCom 2. Stealth tanks that need special woogly towers to reveal them! Invisible spider robots, people! Maybe a cloaking shield that fudges radar? Imagine a cloaked boat on legs. Imagine the sneaky thrill you’d get by upgrading all your gunships to reveal cloaked units right when your opponent thinks he’s got you.

Supply lines

You know what I miss from the original SupCom? And from the Total Annihilation? Command and Conquer: Generals, even? That moment when you’ve swooped in and bombed a bunch of power plants, that’s what. StarCraft 2 has that. Punch through some supply depots with a few Banelings and you’ve not only paved the way for an upgraded zergling rush – you’ve also cut his max units down.

In SupCom 2, your unit cap is something like 500. Everything is built up front.

In the original SupCom, your economy was rolling. You didn’t pay 100 mass to build a guy, you payed 2 mass every second for 50 seconds, or something like that. If you were building an army and someone took out your mass extractors, you were screwed – you couldn’t cash your cheques. You should have defended those, fool! This is something StarCraft 2 represents correctly – you need to protect your supply lines. Even if those supply lines are betentacled floating elephant beetles.

Win buttons are stupid

Let’s face it – nuclear weapons aren’t really that funny or strategically interesting unless you bend the rules. In SupCom 2, the rules are: you can make nukes, and then fire them, and then win. If the guys don’t build an anti-nuke defense, then… they should have.

In StarCraft 2, nukes are fun. They’re a tactic. You build them at a Ghost Academy, and they’re called down by a Ghost – a special ops guy with a sniper rifle, cloaking device, and cool goggle stuff on his face. The Ghost gets to the target you designate, crouches down, and a big red icon appears. The target player has about 20 seconds to find that Ghost and kick his ass before the thing lands. It deals about 500 damage to everything in the radius – so you’d need three to KO a command centre, but the SCVs are toast.

In SupCom 2, your reaction to a nuke strategy is to remember that you didn’t make enough anti-nukes. They’re stupid win buttons, and the best thing about SupCom 2′s nukes is that they can be excluded from the game entirely.

The reverse article, 5 lessons StarCraft 2 could learn from SupCom 2, is here. Do let me know what you think in the comments below, and remember: caps are your friend.

“This is pre-alpha footage so please don’t just us too harshly.” Most devs would kill to have pre-alpha footage that looked and played like this.

She's certainly made an impression on him.

It’s an 8 player brawler with frying pans, scary clowns, blood, guts, and exploding rats. It’ll will have four game modes, and we know about two of them: regular old death match, and revenge mode, where you have a target to kill and can safely sneak past others.

For those of you whose purchasing decision hinges on whether or not a game is published by Ubisoft, you should know that this is published by Ubisoft. Here are some screens:

So what’s different from the original? They’ve added a new plot arc – 2 hours of new story that started popping up in similar console and portable versions last year. Dave Gibbons, who created the Watchmen comics with Alan Moore, has drawn new facial expressions for the dialogue scenes. They’ve also added a hint system and re-jiggered the audio. Most amusingly, one of their feature bullet-points is “Addition of contemporary first person perspective minigames.” That first person sure is what all the cool kids are into.

Broken Sword spends a lot of time hanging around best-game-ever lists. It’s a mature, globetrotting adventure series, with more intrigue than a plot to stop a plot to rekindle a plot to build pyramids for the Illuminati so that Lincoln can come back to Earth. You can grab it here.

It will star Team Fortress 2′s Heavy, Strong Bad of HomeStarRunner.net, Max of the Freelance Police, and Tycho of Penny Arcade (or, more to the point, the ill-fated Penny Arcade Adventures). The Steam store page promises that “These characters come together in ways some never thought possible, in a setting few would have predicted.” I mean, it’s at… the inventory, right? That’s what it says. I’m guessing they come together to… play poker? Here is the teaser video from a few days ago:

As they mention in their announcement post, Telltale will have to draw heavily on the personalities of the characters in order to pull this off – otherwise it’s just a poker game, innit? Also, do they plan on giving Tycho a voice, or what? And how does Strong Bad hold cards with those boxing gloves on?

Update: Servo at Gas Powered Games offered some insights into how feasible these would be. Here’s what he said:

“I can understand why they didn’t do any of these on Starcraft. Of the 5 items you listed, 4 of them are really, really hard to add to a game that doesn’t have them built-in from the ground up.”

Give me back my camera

After twelve years of development, StarCraft II let you zoom in slightly and temporarily wiggle the view to the left and right. That’s, you know, fine. It’s nice if you want a lovely close-up of a Queen blasting your Hatchery with eggs. It doesn’t help you play, though. Supreme Commander 2 lets you zoom all the way out so that you can see the whole map. If you could do that in StarCraft II, it would be the same game, but it’d be far less annoying than the current affair – scrabbling around the map, wearing a hole in your mouse mat. Servo says:

“Strategic Zoom – Crazy hard. Our game was built from day one with this technology in mind. This is a huge technical hurdle for anyone.”

Let me queue up infinite units

In StarCraft II, you need to personally queue every unit you want to build – and when you do that, you pay for it up front. This is micromanagement – I’m pretty sure that used to be a dirty word in RTS games. It means that players who are good at clicking on a lot of things a lot of times are better at translating their strategic vision into a hard victory.

In SupCom2, you don’t get a pat on the back for for being click happy. You can set a factory to produce a certain unit or group of units forever. More importantly, you only have to pay for the first one. The rest comes out of your bank when the other units start producing. Imagine if you just had to set your Barracks to producing marines as fast as it could for as long as you had the money – you could take your eyes off of the Barracks and actually take care of that second expansion, finance your end-game push. Sure, some people could do that in their sleep, but some people choose StarCraft over sleep. What about the rest of us? Servo says:

“Queuing units should be a minor technical speedbump for any game that has the ability to accumulate resources. Probably this was a design decision to increase the distribution (and value) of CPM (Clicks per Minute). Starcraft just isn’t Starcraft if it isn’t physically demanding on the user.”

Shields vs Artillery

Artillery is part of the reality of war. StarCraft II doesn’t have any. It’s an entire dimension missing from the game – what happens if I have a really slow unit that can hardly defend itself, but is really good at shooting giant shells at a target halfway across the map? Blizzard don’t really know.

And how do you counter it? Shields. You can build your own artillery inside your shields, or leave shields around your factories as you close your forces in on the source of the shelling. It’s a great spectacle in SupCom 2, and an opportunity for StarCraft 2 to come up with some new units. An upgrade for the spore crawler that lobs broodlings? A great big phallic attachment for the siege tank? Servo says:

“Shields & Artillery are not nearly as sexy if you don’t have a built-in physics simulation to calculate impact points, and large zoom to take in the whole shield. Having said that, Company of Heroes did have really beautifully done off-screen artillery, so that at least is certainly possible with good sound cues.”

Super units

Ultralisks aren’t actually that big, you know? The Protoss walker thingies can take a beating from enough Mutalisks. No unit in StarCraft 2 is truly ‘super’. That should be a crime. Supreme Commander raised the bar when it came to super units, and StarCraft 2 just toddled under it. Why can’t I build a Heavy Carrier? Why can’t my Nydus worm snatch Banshees out of the air and breathe fire? Scrabbling around in the dirt is fine, but I prefer sailing through the air on a boat with legs. Servo says:

“It makes units unmanageable when they take up too much screen real estate. You need a zoom to permit compensation at significant scale differences.”

Moving and shooting at the same time

Here’s an industry secret: they stopped making StarCraft: Ghost because they couldn’t work out how to let you run around and shoot at the same time. In StarCraft 2, marines pursuing an escaping Overseer will actually stop in their tracks to let off little bursts of gunfire. When it flies out of range, they start running after it. When they catch up, they stop again, and fire while it escapes. These guys have massive suits of armour on that assist their muscles – you telling me the armour isn’t strong enough to keep the gun steady while you run?

Note: I’m not talking about the attack move here. I’m talking about units who have to make a decision between moving and firing, when the units in Supreme Commander 2 can do both. I’m talking about the fact that you even need an attack move. It starts to get clunky in StarCraft 2 when you’re attacking something and your units in front stop as soon as they enter range – meaning any units not in the front row are forced to run around them and find a better spot. Unless you’re micromanaging them, only about 10% of your force will actually be shooting at things, and your force could even be gradually fanning out and getting in range of point defences like Photon Cannons. That’s not how armies work. They’re drilled, for one thing. A real soldier will never stand around shooting if they’re blocking fifty other soldiers from chiming in. Servo says:

“Do not try this at home. This multiplies the AI load due to each weapon system having its own tracking and priorities. It also requires a blended animation system to look right. SupCom units can have upwards of 10 independent targeting systems slaved into a unified animation, and threaded into the multiplayer packets. Game has to be built and optimized to support this. Also looks less akward when a robot does this than an organic soldier.”

While I’m busy giving SupCom2 the same treatment, riddle me this: what else could StarCraft 2 learn from its peers?

Nukes: they're never fair.

• The pre-order only maps, Emerald Crater, Iskellian Coast, QAI Prototype Facility, Seraphim VII Site, and Weddell Isle, are now available to all. Christmas day!
• New Custom AI difficulty – you can mess with their difficulty level, their overall strategy, build speed and resource modifiers, and even a setting for whether they’ll gun for the leader or pick off the stragglers.
• Shield generators now show a range marker bubble when you’re placing them and when you mouse over them. The shields are also faction-coloured now.
• New unit: Cybran Mass Converter. OH IT’S ON.
• New exclusions: Artillery and Mass Converters. IT IS NO LONGER ON.
• You can now hit Ctrl+U to hide the interface if you want to take pretty pictures.
• Ai will try not to nuke its own units.
• Added tactical wizard drops.
• (Not really)
• Lots of balance tweaks: nukes are more expensive, Cybran battleships have slightly shorter range, hunkered units aren’t affected by the Magnetron, etc.
• All your saved games and replays have been automatically murdered. Your campaign progress escaped unharmed.

Full patch notes are here. As I mentioned above, some users are finding that the game won’t start since the patch. Here’s how to fix it. They’ve also added an exclusion that prevents you from using DLC units. But… there’s no SupCom2 DLC, right?

A steam forumite pounced on a Gas Powered Games poster to ask about the exclusion. Thejuice027 asked, “What is this ‘No DLC Units’ exclusion? Is it that we have downloadable content units available that I don’t know about, or DLC units coming soon?”

The reply was “It’s a secret.” Ruh roh.

It would make sense to add something new to the SupCom 2 mix since the launch of StarCraft 2. While some of us here are still suffering from plenty Banshee-related insomnia, I’ve started to tire of the ‘Craft and return to my grand bot matches in Supreme Commander 2. We’ll be phoning Gas Powered Games to ask the same question hundreds of times in an annoying voice until they tell us what this all means, but know this: it’s probably DLC with new units.

To get it working again, you need to find a file called Game.prefs, gain its trust, and then violently delete it. If you know about Appdata, it’s in there under Gas Powered Games. If you don’t, here’s where to find the thing. Remember to substitute your username – you can also navigate there via My Computer.

On Windows XP:
C:\Documents and Settings\(your username)\Local Settings\Application Data\Gas Powered Games\Supreme Commander 2\Game.prefs

On Windows Vista:
C:\Users\(your username)\AppData\Local\Gas Powered Games\Supreme Commander 2\Game.prefs

On Windows 7:
C:\Users\(your username)\AppData\Local\Gas Powered Games\Supreme Commander 2\Game.prefs

Additionally, if you’re having trouble saving replays after a match, try waiting 10 seconds before hitting the ‘Save Replay’ button. If you’re having trouble zooming out and can’t seem to set factories on a build loop, check to see if you’re actually playing StarCraft II.

And because I’m a trained internetologist, I managed to backtrace the actual webs that the mods live on. Then I was able to get the web address of the page I was looking at, by taking a picture with my camera and texting it to my email and getting an associate to read it out over the phone while I typed it in here. Here’s the first person mod itself, and here’s the time sync mod he’s using to have his system time dictate the in-game time.

The site, GameDownloader, is surprisingly full of content. The first thing I saw on the front page was a Stalker mod, the Metro 2033 demo that just dropped, and an ArmA II: Operation Arrowhead patch. They require that you download their little application first, though, so I took the plunge and started it up on my work machine. The result? It scans your hard drive to see what games you have installed. There’s a “yes, please do that” option, and a “no, I don’t want to use your service in ANY CAPACITY” option – you can’t just, you know, use it to download files from their site.

It found eight games on my PC, and asked if I’d like it to find any more. I have more than eight games on here, of course, but it caught the big ones: World of Warcraft, StarCraft II, Blizzard Hipster Fanboy Simulator, SupCom2, Left 4 Dead 2, Team Fortress 2, etc.

“No,” I said. “Do not pillage my PC for more games. You’ve HAD ENOUGH.” Now it’s got this little “G” symbol in my system tray, and I can launch games from it – including Just Cause 2, which I own via Steam. If you click it, it logs you into Steam, fires up the game, and then whistles nonchalantly.

It’s worth noting that I didn’t have to enter any information at all, let alone personal information, before I could just download the Ruse demo from there. It put it in some weird folder, but it doesn’t have to be run through the downloader – it’s just a zip file.

In summary, it’s not as bad as you might think – despite putting you on the spot to scan your hard drive and hanging around in your system tray for longer than it has to, it does what it says on the internet tin and doesn’t stick around if you don’t want it to. Just remember to prowl around in your settings and make sure everything’s to your liking.

The first one I played was Grow Cube. There’s a big cube of dirt, and you’ve got some arbitrary knicknacks, water, fire, and a dude. Put the dude down first and he does nothing, because there’s nothing to do. Put the water down next and an underground reservoir appears – and the guy starts digging down to reach it. It starts to look like Minecraft, actually, although when I stumbled onto Grow, Minecraft was still just a glint in Notch’s eye.

It’s a puzzle, so you immediately want to crack it. You’ll play around with different combinations, and by the time you’ve run out of buttons to press you’ll notice that some elements have hardly advanced since the beginning, while others have transformed into massive, central features. You try pressing the late bloomers first, and that helps – your cube is more colourful, the treehouse is bigger, etc – but it’s not just a matter of giving things enough time to grow on their own. Some elements only interact when they’ve both reached critical junctures in their evolution. Others can be forced into a sudden and violent transformation that fully develops them in just one turn. From seed to mighty oak because you had the right colourful junk lying around.

Grow RPG takes the idea further. Now you’re fighting against an enemy – you make the world, and he destroys it, turn for turn, by using his own set of unseen abilities. You’ll drag a little town onto the map, then he’ll pound the earth, making big chasms. You’ll pick the water next, and he’ll send a little blue blob out to guard his evil fortress. Your town upgrades itself, but his blob grows an eye and horns. When you’re done with your icons, the game is done – you’ll know if you’ve maxed everything or not – but you can sit and watch roughly ten minutes of adventuring in your world that highlights the areas you could have developed. Your little RPG man walks to the town, and if it’s fully upgraded enough, he’ll buy a sword. He’ll go to the castle, and if it survived the world’s genesis, it’ll have loot for your guy to equip. It culminates in a battle with the evil one, and if you did max everything while building the world, your little guy will get his vanquishing on.

Late last week, the ever lovable IndieGames.com pointed me at the newest Grow game, Grow Valley. It’s a sequel to Grow Island, and does a better job of explaining the rationale behind Grow. As with Island, the seven symbols have names – Engineering, Mechanics, Design, and that sort of thing. You can start off with Design, then have Architecture lay the groundwork for hydroelectric power while Design mulls things over, add Information Systems to get people ringing eachother on their cell phones, and work from there.

While you’re just spawning these little guys, each a champion of a particular school of applied science, you’re also making rational choices. It starts to make sense, but it never stops being this mad playground – flying to the moon through a cut-out in the sky, building underground apartments and a flying train, a chemistry lab built like a giant beaker, dragonfly cars, and a bizarre commiseration ending for doing the worst job possible.

The unique simplicity of play, combined with the great visual pay-off for even the poorest decisions, make the Grow series ideally suited to having some other folk crowded around your monitor. There are tons of these games on the Eyezmaze site, and a few other games of a more traditional ilk too. If you get really stuck and don’t want to go all Beautiful Mind with pages and pages of combinations you’ve tried, try some investigative journalism.

The reason: AMD was a stronger, more recognisable name than ATI. I think it’s also so they don’t have two acronyms on there, because that would be confusing to people. Hardware companies hate confusing people – that’s why their products are so easy to understand and compare to each other.

ATI AMD are also moving into “Fusion chips” – hybrid cards that integrate video processing and other specialist functions as well as the general computing power of a CPU. Are you looking forward to the day when your graphics card is also handling AI and game logic? Or does it, frankly, scare you?

[via The Register]

I’m usually pretty excited for Final Fantasy games (what? FFVII was a PC game, we can talk about that here), but the MMO part just makes me nervous. How can the grind of a Final Fantasy game survive without that constant drip-feed of story and rendered sequences that make the singleplayer experiences so engrossing? Judging from the ratio of cut-scene to game in this trailer, they don’t want us dwelling on the game part of this too much yet.

This is FunCom’s MMO, The Secret World. Doesn’t it look ridiculously good? Oh, okay, there’s some nonsense about Illuminati and Templars, but an MMO without levelling sounds like an ISP that doesn’t need 5-7 business days: an improvement.

In combat, you get to pick seven active abilities (buttons to press) and seven passive abilities (stuff like, oh, increased speed, better resistance, etc). Some of the spells inflict states on enemies that other spells can exploit. It sounds almost Guild-Wars-y – you’ll need to pick your build to suit your team.

It’s also great that you wont end up looking like you’ve been swallowed by a suit of armour, or wearing a green traffic cone because it’s got great crit rating.

FunCom are the guys behind The Longest Journey and its sequel, Dreamfall. Notice the magical-girl-in-her-underpants theme. Right, have at some artwork and screens.

He basically uses everything he can – MDF board, clay, duct tape, paint, jars… he carefully recreates props from games, and then sells them as items of unique, bad ass art. They’re both amazing and awesome. Here’s the process he went through to construct the Force a’ Nature. Here’s his Big Daddy costume (scroll all the way down, it’s actually wearable. MURRRRRMRMMMM). Here’s his portal gun. To think that Blue Peter could have been this interesting.

Thanks to Lee for the tip-off.

Although who would specialise in Infantry? They’re like smaller, weaker, slower tanks. And air force is just cheating. No, there’s something unnatural about not being in a tank if you can possibly help it. Be warned: if you attempt to disagree in the comments, someone in a tank will just roll right over your argument with 30 tons of common sense.

Tom interviewed the living daylights out of Gabe, and came up with the whole history behind the Half-Life movie – it turns out that they were approached by lots of rubbish proposals for movie cash-ins, and felt that the only creative team that could do it justice was Valve itself. Here’s the full quote from Gabe:

“As a WoW player, I would much rather that the WoW team made the movie, right? Than anybody else. I like Sam Raimi, I’ve been a fan ever since Evil Dead came out, but I would rather see Blizzard making the movie. We think that customers are like, ‘OK, we’re kind of sick and tired of the way you guys are slicing and dicing the experience of being a fan of Harry Potter, or Half-Life, or The Incredibles, and you need to fix it.’ And the people that fix it will be rewarded, and the people that don’t will be on the rubbish heap of history, or whatever the phrase is.

“Where we got into this direction was after Half-Life 1 had shipped. There was a whole bunch of meetings with people from Hollywood. Directors down there wanted to make a Half-Life movie and stuff, so they’d bring in a writer or some talent agency would bring in writers, and they would pitch us on their story. And their stories were just so bad. I mean, brutally, the worst. Not understanding what made the game a good game, or what made the property an interesting thing for people to be a fan of.

“That’s when we started saying ‘Wow, the best thing we could ever do is to just not do this as a movie, or we’d have to make it ourselves.’ And I was like, ‘Make it ourselves? Well that’s impossible.’ But the Team Fortress 2 thing, the Meet The Team shorts, is us trying to explore that.”

This is just the tip of the iceberg of stuff Tom uncovered on his trip to see Valve this month. Our Valve Issue is about to hit shelves and appear in our online shop from the 1st of September – subscribers should be expecting it to materialise in their circle of deadly hero power crystals any day now.

It’s called Neverwinter, because the city is called Neverwinter. It is never winter there. You’d think that’d mean it was a great holiday destination, like Bath. But sadly, it’s assailed by hordes of undead, deadly plagues, assassinations, and civil war, which is also like Bath. They’re working with author R A Salvatore and D&D people Wizards of the Coast to make sure it’s proper authentic Neverwinter action.

It’ll be part of a “multi platform event,” which means they’re doing a book and a board game too. This will be Cryptic’s first game that isn’t a big old MMO (although I was sure it was going to be) – we’ll see how they get on, shall we? You can keep an eye on it here.

Liam Fox MP said:

“It’s shocking that someone would think it acceptable to recreate the acts of the Taliban. At the hands of the Taliban, children have lost fathers and wives have lost husbands. I am disgusted and angry. It’s hard to believe any citizen of our country would wish to buy such a thoroughly un-British game. I would urge retailers to show their support for our armed forces and ban this tasteless product.”

Medal of Honor doesn’t feature any UK soldiers and isn’t a British game – it’s being made by Swedish developer DICE and published by international publisher Electronic Arts.

DICE have said that the decision to include the Taliban as an enemy team in multiplayer wasn’t intended to stir up feelings or provoke the issue. Karen Meredith, the mother of a soldier killed in Afghanistan, told Fox News: “I just don’t see that a video game based on a current war makes any sense at all. It’s disrespectful.”

[via CVG]

On Wednesday, 157 of over 200 Realtime Worlds employees lost their jobs as corporate restructuring firm Begbies Traynor began to tackle the job of restructuring and selling the Dundee company to help offset its accrued debts, estimated at £3m. Joint administrator Ken Pattullo said: “As a smaller entity, MyWorld is attracting considerable interest from potential buyers. Twenty three members of the team who had been working on the project clearly add value to it as a standalone business, hence the fact we have been able to offer a limited number of those jobs back.” Project: MyWorld originally had around 60 team members working on the social world-building game, which was initially expected in 2011 before Realtime Worlds went into administration.

We’ll be keeping an eye on MyWorld, as well as APB’s ongoing patch process, and keep you updated on how they look.

• Jedi Consular
  • The Shadow deals damage with a double-bladed lightsaber
  • The Wizard fights with a single bladed lightsaber while healing allies.
• Imperial Agent
  • The Operative can use stealth. In combat, uses a blaster rifle or energy blade for burst damage.
  • The Sniper class deals straight ranged damage with his sniper rifle.
• Sith Inquisitor
  • Sorcerer - straight damage with sith favourites like force lightning. Armed with a single bladed lightsaber.
  • Assassin - Can use stealth to surprise foes, dealing massive burst damage with a double bladed lightsaber
• Bounty Hunter
  • Powertech - We’ve asked Bioware what this means. Shields? Jetpacks? Some sort of utility class with tricks up his sleeve, probably.
  • Mercenary - Again, no idea what this is yet, but we’ve asked Bioware to clarify. More likely to be a straight damage dealer to Powertech’s utility class.
• Trooper
  • The Commando wears heavy armour and acts as a tank.
  • The Vanguard isn’t as well armoured and focuses on quick damage.

We’ll bring you more info as it becomes available.

[via Darth Hater]

The first two games featured very little TARDIS action, and certainly no magical, mind-bending, “why is there a cathedral in this phone box” moment. This time, the Doctor is missing and the TARDIS is stuck in a “riptide”. I presume that’s some sort of space riptide? A time riptide, in the ocean of time? Maybe it is just a regular riptide on a beach somewhere. That suggests you won’t be able to actually transition into the TARDIS.

Regardless, the opportunity to poke around in there is something that’s been missing from the series so far. They’ve even added in a new bit: the Doctor now has a drawing room, filled with nicknacks and easter eggs from the TV series. I hope they do justice to the controls, though – the centre console is the ideal my desktop aspires to, and if it’s just WASD to move it around, I’ll cry chrono-tears.

You can keep track of it here.

It’ll ship with a 12-mission strong campaign mode across four cities, a sandbox mode, and a level editor. The game spans a hundred years of transport history – it starts with the gorgeous automobiles of the 1920s and progresses to the sleek sheen of the year 2020. Collosal Order, the developer, obviously don’t know that we’ll have teleporters by then.

It boasts seven “social groups” (people who like trains, people who like cars, etc?), five types of transport, and 30 distinct vehicles – including water buses! Which I find are just boats. But still!

There’s been a real gap in this genre of late – the last city manager I can remember really enjoying was Monte Cristo’s City Life. They followed that up with Cities XL last year, which I didn’t play. With no signs of any decent SimCity game from EA, this will probably be the essential city management game of 2011.

I’ll be keeping my horrible little eyes on this one for you.

Here’s some more info on the new vehicles and weapons you’ll get to play with as the BAF:

“Players can outfit themselves with Multi-Terrain Pattern uniforms and DPM smocks designed for arid desert areas. Amid the array of the available armaments are the trademark L85A2 infantry assault rifles, machineguns in the form of the L86A2 Light Support Weapon, the L110A1 and the legendary GPMG, along with the L115A1 Long Range Rifle and the formidable AS50 for snipers. Vehicles include the modernised Warrior and Jackal 2 MWMIK armored trucks, with air support provided by Apache AH1 gunships and AH11 Wildcat multirole helicopters. The Merlin HC3 and Chinook HC2 are the backbone of airborne troop transportation.”

Also, there are guns and helicopters!

A spokesperson for the corporate rescue firm Begbies Traynor has said that they “want to offer reassurance to gamers that APB will not only continue as an online service but will be improved and supported 100% during this restructure.” They’re aiming to effectively transform RTW into a well oiled, APB-developing machine. They’ve put a test realm online that you can try out here, with the following changes to the core game on that realm:

• Improved vehicle handling
• Time for open world vehicle break-ins has been lowered from 10 to 3 seconds
• Arrest and Rescue times have been lowered
• All weapons rebalanced and now include recoil
• All weapons fire out to 100 metres
• All weapon audio has been updated
• Crouch is now client-side predicted
• Accuracy modifier on sprinting
• Accuracy now regains over time rather than instantly
• Vehicle husks now block weapons fire
• Field of view is now weapons specific
• Hit VFX should now align with the direction of the weapons fire correctly.
• Added graphics options for Dynamic Shadows, Environment Shadows, Ambient Occlusion, High-Quality Bloom, Distortion Value, Anisotropy, and Anti Aliasing.
• Various VoIP crash fixes

They’ve also added some new hats and outfits, instrument packs, and body kits for your car. We’ll let you know if it’s any good.