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Techland

Techland

Call of Juarez: Gunslinger goes back to the Wild, Wild West

Tom Senior at

Call of Juarez: The Cartel tried to move Call of Juarez into modern Mexico. It was rubbish, so Techland are sensibly returning to ye olde wild west setting that made the first two games stand out. Ubisoft have rustled up a live action trailer and a few screenshots for the next title in the series: Call of Juarez: Gunslinger, set in the dusty salons and baked tundra of the American frontier. An unreliable narrator will tell the tale of your duellist's dealings with famous gunslingers like Billy the Kid and Jesse James, according to Joystiq.

Also, you'll be able to shoot men in the head for points. That's justice in the Wild West. As great poet and performer William Smith once said "To any outlaw tryin' to draw, thinkin' you're bad / Any draw on West best with a pen and a pad / Don't even think about it, six gun, weighin' a ton / 10 paces and turn just for fun, son / here are some pictures of a videogame:"


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Dead Island: Riptide announced

Tom Senior at

Dead Island was a surprising hit when it landed last year. It filled a satisfying survival sim shaped hole that DayZ has recently been catering to. There's good news for fans of the first game. VG247 have news that a sequel called Dead Island: Riptide is on the way. For now there's no information a beyond that name, but Riptide does have a watery feel to it. I'm going to resolutely hope for zombie sharks until more information is released this summer. What would you like to see from the sequel?


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Win the Dead Island Bloodbath Arena DLC

Tom Hatfield at

You there! Do you enjoy slaying the undead? Of course you do, so why not enter our latest competition and win the chance to kill more zombies than ever before? We're giving away five copies of Dead Island's new Bloodbath Arena DLC, which adds a new survival mode. Better yet, as these prizes are digital, anyone can enter! What are you waiting for?

Check inside for details of how to win.


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Dead Island banned in Germany

Tom Senior at

Dead Island has been well and truly banned in Germany. Developers Techland join everyone else in expressing their lack of surprise at the decision. "This isn't unexpected," they told Eurogamer. "Germany has its unique regulations regarding video games and violence and the industry can only comply."

Turning the blood green won't help them with this one. Dead Island has been put on "List B" by Germany's Federal Department of Media Harmful to Young Persons. It's a list reserved for media that contains extreme torture or Nazi content. It's probably best not to think about what gets onto "List A."


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Dead Island Bloodbath Arena DLC is out now

Tom Senior at

The promised Bloodbath DLC for Dead Island has arrived on Steam. The pack includes four survival maps, described as being both "deadly and hazardous." In each map you must fend off infinite waves of zombies for loot and XP. These survival mode spoils can then be carried back into campaign mode and unleashed on the unsuspecting zombie citizens of Banoi.

There are leaderboards, too, and a new weapon called "the brain wave bomb," which sounds like it should cause an explosion of ideas and creative solutions to the zombie outbreak, but is more likely to involve the cooking of zombie brains. It costs £7.99 / $9.99, but if you pre-ordered Dead Island, you'll get it free, which is nice.


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Dead Island Bloodbath Arena DLC out next week

Tom Hatfield at

The first batch of Dead Island DLC, titled 'Bloodbath Arena', will arrive on the 22nd of November. The DLC adds a survival mode, pitting you and your friends against waves of zombies in four different arenas. Leaderboards are promised, as is the ability to carry experience earned in survival over to the campaign. There's also a new weapon, dubbed the 'brain wave bomb'. We don't know what it does, but it certainly sounds cool.

The DLC is priced at a steep £7.99, but will be free to anyone who pre-ordered the original game. If you haven't bought Dead Island yet, check out our Dead Island review to help you make up your mind. Alternatively if you prefer your content free and user created, take a look at our Dead Island mods post.

Check inside for some screenshots of the Bloodbath Arena DLC.


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Call of Juarez: The Cartel review

Tom Senior at

A gangster emerges from cover, points his guns in the wrong direction and sidles toward me like a drug-addled crab. How did this man even survive this long in a Mexican drug cartel? I shoot him the face and turn on his two-dozen equally dopey friends, tapping the fire button impassively until the assault ends. This is justice in Techland’s vision of the modern Wild West. Brutal and boring.


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Dead Island creators trademark Dead World

Tom Senior at

A report on Siloconera is saying that Techland have coined the "Dead World" trademark, strongly suggesting that a bigger, bloodier sequel to Dead Island is in the works. In spite of the fact that Techland put out the wrong version of the game on release day, Dead Island ended up doing quite well. It filled the deserted open world zombie survival niche quite nicely with some horrendous gore and a big, beautiful island. You can find out what we thought in our Dead Island review.


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The 10 best Dead Island mods

Henry Winchester at

Despite being slightly broken on release, Dead Island has scored legions of fans who enjoy nothing more than slaughtering zombies in its open-world island. We liked it. Thanks to a Halloween tie-in sale it’s currently sitting at number five in the Steam charts, and it's already got an impressive number of mods for such a recent game.

This is partly due to it being fairly simple to mod, and partly due to bits of it not working on release. Open up its PAK files in WinRAR, then tweak certain settings with notepad to your undead heart's content. This simplicity has resulted in mods which do everything from make zombies’ heads come off every time you hit them, to changing the game to make it more like Crysis.


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Dead Island patch boosts level cap, nerfs zombies, adds new weapon mod blueprints

Tom Senior at

Techland have been tackling the hectic task of getting Dead Island up to scratch head on with a series of post-launch patches. In recent weeks crashes and major bugs have been the focus. The latest patch marks a change of tack, and sees the devs rebalancing Dead Island's undead hordes, adding extra stuff in the form of new weapon blueprints, levels, and crate rewards, and boosting the XP rewards for those on a second playthrough. It's looking as though Techland made the right decision in delaying the upcoming Bloodbath Arena DLC pack, but how long will it be before we can finally play a polished, bug free version of Dead Island? Get the full patch notes below, via Eurogamer.


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Dead Island DLC delayed while devs fix bugs

Tom Senior at

The Bloodbath Arena DLC for Dead Island has been pushed back so Techland can spend more time fixing launch bugs. The devs made the announcement on the Dead Island Facebook page, spotted by CVG, and is good news considering the impressive selection of launch day bugs. A day one patch squashed many of them, but a little more polish would go a long way.

The Bloodbath Arena DLC will add a series of four survival maps that can be played co-operatively. It was due to arrive this month. Techland are set to announce a new date shortly. If you can't wait that long, spice up Dead Island with the fan made mod that adds devastating head shots and more spectacular close combat moves. In spite of the bugs, Dead Island is fast, bloody fun. See what we thought in our Dead Island review.


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Dead Island review

Tom Senior at

"Why won’t you just die?” I cried, plunging a cleaver into a zombie’s skull. Car totalled, I was stuck on the side of a mountain, fending off the undead. Having blunted my weapons on his friends, this last one was proving hard to dispatch. A few more frantic swings, a terrible splat, and it died. I stood breathless. The zombie’s severed head rolled off the edge of the cliff.

Scary, horrible, hilarious. Three traits of the best zombie fiction, which developers Techland have successfully infected their openworld zombie apocalypse sim with.


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Dead Island DLC to add co-op survival mode

Tom Senior at

If the launch of the upcoming Dead Island DLC is as controversial as this week's release madness then we'll have to break out the extra-strong tea to cope. The Bloodbath Arena pack will add four new survival maps that will let players fight unlimited waves of zombies in order to survive for as long as possible. With no limit to the enemies, you'll never actually survive the survival maps, but "inevitable death maps" sounds a lot less inviting. Slay zombies! Earn points! Stave off your inevitable demise! The DLC will be released later this month. No price has been announced, but special edition purchasers will get it for free.


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Techland responds to "Feminist Whore" skill in early Dead Island code

Tom Senior at

Fresh issues have appeared in Dead Island's problematic launch, which has already been marred by the fact that Techland apparently distributed an incomplete, buggy version of their game through Steam. Now Duncan Harris points us to a post on the Steam forums where a Aleksei Vasiliev spotted that the mistakenly released code contained a skill called 'Feminist Whore'.


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Dead Island gets a second chance at life

Greg Henninger at

Those who dragged their corpses out of bed this morning, with bloodshot eyes and a hunger for the launch of Dead Island, found themselves facing off against a horde of gameplay bugs. Whoops. But developer Deep Silver jumped into action with a launch day patch. (You can also simply reinstall the game; the new build contains the day one patch.)

Unfortunately, the update may render all previous save games unusable. Fret not, fellow zombie slayers—you can start a new game as the same character you've been using, then use "Chapter Select" to recoup most of your lost progress.


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Dead Island patch to fix nearly 40 launch issues

Tom Senior at

Alongside the launch of Dead Island today, Destructoid bring news of a huge patch set to hit this Friday which fill fix 37 bugs, from animation glitches, to UI problems and a few issues with unresolved quests. Checkpoints have been tidied up, "enemy reaction to fire" has been tweaked, and thrown items can no longer be picked up by co-op partners to stop thieving survivors from jumping in and nicking your precious electric katana. You'll find the fixes listed below.


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Dead Island trailer celebrates launch next week

Tom Senior at

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Dead Island is out next Tuesday in the US, and Friday across the rest of the world. In case you've forgotten what's in it, Techland have released a new video showing zombies, blood, more zombies, machinegun fire, explosions and MORE BLOOD. Dead Island promises an open island, explorable in four player co-op. Check out our Dead Island preview for a better idea of what to expect. One thing's for sure. There will be blood.


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Dead Island trailer makes horrible mess in co-op

Tom Senior at

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You won't have to face the zombie apocalypse alone in Dead Island. The new trailer shows several characters teaming up to take on the hordes, decapitating multiple fiends with single strikes, baseball batting attackers into flames and generally causing a huge, horrible mess. Do zombies even have that much blood in them? Do humans even have that much blood in them? Where can I find a medical professional who will answer all my zombie-related inquiries? Answers in the comments below.


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Call of Juarez: The Cartel trailer has seven minutes of in-game action

Tom Senior at

Call of Juarez: The Cartel abandons the dusty Wild West setting of the first two games and in favour of backstreets of modern day Mexico. The pious gunslinger, Reverand Ray is gone, too, replaced by three vigilantes, all of whom will be playable in the three-way co-op mode across 20 missions. The video above has seven minutes of man-killing action in night clubs, car chases and dusty back streets.

There are plans to release a co-op demo in future, but it could arrive after the game comes out on July 19 in the US and July 22 in Europe. Head over to the official Call of Juarez site for more.


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Dead Island screenshots have dodgy haircuts and zombie violence

Tom Senior at

Four new Dead Island screens have appeared, showing the back of playable character Logan's head in action. Even this limited glimpse of his scalp is enough to tell us that he's sporting the horrendous not-quite-a-mohican hairstyle that we thought we'd seen the last of with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2's Soap Mactavish. While Logan's head lingers in the uncanny valley of haircuts, his hands are busy fending off the zombie apocalypse that has gripped Dead Island's open world paradise.


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