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Techland

Techland

Dead Island banned in Germany

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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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E3 2011: Dead Island trailer has decapitation and drunkenness

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Tom Senior at

The Dead Island E3 trailer over at Machinima makes the uneasy transition between zombie slaying and clubbing. One moment we're chopping off heads, the next we're chugging whisky.Emerging into the light the next morning to find most of the part-goers trying to eat each other probably counts as the worst hangover imaginable. For more Dead Island footage, check out the eleven minute developer walkthrough Techland recently released.


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Dead Island trailer shows eleven minutes of in-game footage

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Tom Senior at

Gametrailers have eleven whole minutes of Dead Island footage showing the game's exciting open world island and remarkable levels of gore. The footage is interesting in a very different way to Dead Island's other recent trailers. Those vidoes dwelled on the tragedy of a paradise gone bad. If this video dwells on anything, it's decapitation, and good knife-throwing technique. See for yourself below.

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Dead Island trailer shows first in-game footage

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Tom Senior at

The second trailer for Dead Island tries to make you feel sorry for the zombies. DON'T FEEL SORRY FOR THE ZOMBIES. It is the first and last mistake you'll ever make. In case you'd forgotten, the first Dead Island trailer was amazing. The in-game footage was never going to be quite as spectacular, but that paradise island sure looks pretty. Check out the brand new Dead Island screens to see a gorier side to the island.


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