PC Gaming News Message Board older than one year ago

The 1.0.3 patch makes changes across the entire game, including many alterations to Inferno difficulty.

2012′s IGF Awards caused not a small amount of consternation behind the scenes. A good deal of this was bad sportsmanship, with developers claiming it was rigged against them in various ways that it absolutely was not. But other issues like games that had already won being re-entered did become a more serious issue. Responding to this, IGF bossman Brandon Boyer has said that this shall no longer be allowed, with any finalists disqualified for another go. And scraps the mobile category. And yet, even now, still bloody well ignores writing.

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Today’s FPS games rarely last long on my hard drive, stuffed as it is with maps, dice and musty tomes of history retold. It’s more than a decade since my deathmatch days , which makes me feel indescribably ancient. It’s only fitting that it takes a Kickstarter project to rekindle my interest, as Kickstarter so often seems like fertile ground for old roots to sprout new shoots. Ground Branch is a multiplayer tactical shooter with a team of both industry and military veterans working on it, including folks from the original Rainbow Six and Ghost Recon teams at Red Storm, and special ops chaps from [REDACTED]. Authenticity is the key word, with full body modelling from a first-person perspective, realistic reloading and gear, and no unlocks or kill streaks. It’s already looking good as you can see for yourself below.

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Mr. Vince Twelve’s magnum opus Resonance is finally upon us, but is it all adventure fans have been hoping for? We threw Richard a large bag of point and click friendly Malteasers, a brand new notepad and pen, and the chance to finally stop holding his breath for it.

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If you were about to load up Diablo 3, you might want to think about going in to work today instead. Blizzard has taken the game down for maintenance starting today at 3am PDT, so it can get patch 1.0.3 ready.

The game will be back online at "approximately" 1pm PDT (4pm EDT), Blizzard reports, so you'll be able to download the patch and get back online sometime around then. Europe and Asia won't go under maintenance until 3am CEST tomorrow (9pm EDT tonight), running through 1pm CEST, so don't expect to log into Global Play (or into the game, if you're in Europe or Asia) at that time.

For a few years now, RPS has been nervously eyeing tablets from afar, not entirely sure what to do about them. Well, I say nervously – actually, John spends most of his time doing unmentionably intimate things with his beloved Asus Transformer Prime. Microsoft last night turned up with something that might just end our dilemma. It could introduce brand new ones at the same time, though.(more…)

I was going to start off by explaining in excruciating detail the precise meaning of “7 Day FPS,” but I see Alec already took care of that – though admittedly, I tend to believe Doom evolved from tadpole creatures after John Romero’s hair collided with the laws of physics and caused the Big Bang. Oh well. To each his own. So then, that out of the way, how about we dive right in? The 7 Day FPS challenge yielded hundreds of bite-sized manshoots, but honestly, many of the most inventive first-person shoot-ers chose to do things that hard way and not laboriously slaughter 534853 armed thugs. Let’s have a look, shall we?

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SteelSeries has released a special edition of its Siberia v2 headset, which is not only much pinker than the standard Siberia v2 (or the rest of the company's product range, for that matter), but is also the only headset on offer from the brand that comes with a built-in higher purpose.

Ten percent of every $89.99 Siberia v2 Pink Edition purchase will be donated to The Breast Cancer Research Foundation. Not only will you look remarkably stylish during your next raid, but you'll also get to enjoy the warm inner glow that comes with doing good for humanity. For bonus warm fuzzies, patrons can donate additional funds on top of the 10 percent that's donated automatically.

The Pink Edition Siberia v2 features all of the same bullet points as the original, including 50mm drivers and a retractable, uni-directional microphone.

I haven’t played Oregon Trail since I was this tall. And since I can’t gesture with my hands on the Internet, you can assume I mean as tall as the word “this.” As I remember it, though, Oregon Trail managed to twist the American school system’s central tenets of tedium and largely inapplicable knowledge into bonafide fun – at least, as far as ancient edutainment games go. The fine folks at Sparse Vector, however, have managed to take said obscure Oregonian lore and apply the hell out of it. So take that, America. Super Amazing Wagon Adventure, then, has its down home country roots in Oregon Trail and even allows you to hunt buffalo, name incredibly dysentery-prone characters after your awful friends, and whatnot. But – as the trailer beyond the treacherous trek that is the break demonstrates – there are also giant ants. And zombies. And machine guns. And buffalo-seeking missiles. And it’s mostly, er, a shoot-’em-up.

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The Microsoft Big Announcement Speculation Game can finally come to an end, as the company announced a new tablet device called Microsoft Surface this afternoon during a Los Angeles press event. Microsoft calls it the "companion hardware innovation" for Windows 8, an OS that was designed to work on mobile devices specifically.

The Surface includes a kickstand built in to the device, as well as an optional cover that contains a touch-typing, super thin keyboard and a multitouch trackpad. Because the device runs a full version of Windows 8, it presumably will run any games that work on that OS, but we'll have to wait and see how those games play. We can also presume that the Surface will work right alongside any other Smart Glass features to be announced for the Xbox later on. We'll have more on Surface in the future, so stay tuned.

Two strange spinoffs of the Ultima series brought the familiar RPG gameplay out of the world of Britannia and into worlds full of dinosaurs and 19th-century space travel. Thanks to EA and GOG, you can now explore these "Worlds of Ultima" with nothing at stake but your time.

GOG is offering Worlds of Ultima: The Savage Empire and Ultima: Worlds of Adventure 2: Martian Dreams for free, and without the burden of having that Savage Empire box somewhere in your house where another person could see it. Thanks, digital distribution!

The death of decent society comes ever closer with the news that the Australian Parliament is creating a category for those ultraviolent games you might have read about or envisaged in your bleakest nightmares. Now it falls to the individual States and Territories to pass their own complementary legislation for regulation and, if all goes well, by the first of January 2013 “adults [will be] able to choose what games they play within the bounds of the law”. A terrifying notion, I’m sure you’ll agree.

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The board game Clue (Cluedo to those in Europe) was created in 1949. About 40 years later Clue Master Detective was created, leaving the core game intact, but adding more suspects, weapons and rooms. Civilization 5: Gods and Kings follows a nearly identical model. Seemingly a response to criticism that there wasn't enough going on in Civilization 5 as there was in Civilization 4, the Gods and Kings expansion tosses a bunch of balanced mechanics into the game simply to give more.

To understand the present we must look to the recent past. Civilization 5 already had its "Game of the Year Edition" launch last year, normally marketing's indication that a game's development has come to a conclusion. Yet, here we are with Gods and Kings, a $30 expansion that adds new civilizations, wonders and buildings; with two big game mechanic additions being religion and espionage.

I appreciated Civilization 5 for being a better game than any of its predecessors, opening up the series to more players, instead of creating the strategy game feedback loop that only builds mechanics for the hardest of hardcore, thus leaving newbies locked out or working eight times harder to understand what's happening. Civilization 5 streamlined nearly every mechanic in the series and made combat tactical for the first time, only allowing one unit per hex instead of a "stack of doom."

Boiled down: Civilization 5: Gods and Kings takes two years of patches and adds religion and espionage to the mix for those who felt the game wasn't busy enough. Oddly, and not in a negative sense, the new mechanics actually simplify the game in many ways, with religion and espionage supplying bonus options that can be used to devastating effect by those with a strategic mind.

The latest details on what it's like to play a werewolf in The Sims 3: Supernatural.

There you were, playing your favorite game featuring a secret octopus father, thinking to yourself," Man, I like Octodad, but wouldn't it be better with secret octopus ghosts hidden randomly throughout the world?" Thankfully for you, crazy person, the team behind Octodad just released "OctodadEditor," which is apparently "the basis of the editor for Octodad: Dadliest Catch" (the Octodad sequel, obviously).

Sure, the editor's a bit on the buggy side (indie development, folks!), and it's PC-only, but just think about all those secret octopus ghosts! Someone's gotta make that madness happen! Grab the editor right here, and head over to the Octodad blog for more thorough instructions on how it all works.

My need for puzzle games is insatiable, constantly fed by the teams of enslaved designers I have generating me new Slitherlinks and Doodle Fit levels, as Telegraph cryptic crossword setters weep as their fingertips bleed from setting me more and more clues. Gathering them all a few seconds pause in their toils is Splice, a new puzzler from Auditorium developers, Cipher Prime. Will it do?

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Perhaps the biggest addition in Civilization 5's upcoming Gods & Kings expansion is religion. But don't go thinking its some innocuous cultural addendum - as the Firaxis folks above explain, religion in Civ 5 is all about subjugation.

I very much fancy giving this a crack, but Quantum Conundrum is the current game on my pixel-plate and it is only fair to finish one meal before proceeding gluttonously to the next. Neocolonialism is a turn-based, multiplayer-centric strategy game that’s all about sucking as much money out of the world for your own personal gain as possible. “It is a game of world domination that does not have nukes, but does have austerity packages.” Like I say, timely.(more…)

Free RPGs of old! I hadn’t thought about the Worlds of Ultima games for a long time but they are now free on GOG.com and seeing that made me hunger for a continuation. Rather than taking place in Britannia, land of vice and virtue, the short-lived spin-off series transports the Avatar to fantastical Vernian environments, namely a savage jungle empire and a Victorian era Mars. The second game, Martian Dreams, even had Freud and Tesla in it which earns an automatic +2 points out of arbitrary number of choice. I love this sort of thing in my RPGs but for now it’s enough that both games can be mine again for free and more of the same, old or new, would be very welcome. They are hither and thither.

Bafta winners Bossa Studios are behind the adaptation of the popular TV series.

BlackFoot Studios is seeking $425k on Kickstarter by July 6 to fund the game Ground Branch. The studio seeks to launch the first-person shooter for PC and Mac in 2013.

BlackFoot Studios is deeply rooted in the genre, as Founder/Creative Director John Sonedecker is credited in over 20 games in his lengthy career in the industry. He worked on Ghost Recon and the original Rainbow Six game before founding the Ohio company in 2004, according to the game's website.

Details on the depth of character and weapon customization as well as design choices are nearly too dizzying to list, though Sonedecker spelled out the development team's aspirations in the commentary video above.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in!]

Hello youse.

I’ve got some lovely stuff lined up for the months ahead, including some early looks at new releases. I’m confident I’ll be early out of the gate with things like Descent 2nd Edition and even City of Horror, the second edition of my darling Mall of Horror. OH YEAH. With the future schedule pretty much filled, I want to make sure that over the next few weeks I get the chance to tell you about lots of good stuff that I haven’t had the chance to cover in depth. I’ll quickly cover a few of these today.

So let’s begin!(more…)

Sundays are for remembering bugs of games past. The one where snakes couldn’t bite you if you were laying down. The one where, out of nowhere, you got a jeep, driven by a man in a red beret. Those were good bugs. Sigh. Anyway, there’s a lot of other things going on in videogames. Let’s have a look at some of those.

• Simon Parkin’s The Rise and Collapse of Yoshinori Ono is essential reading: “But Ono is a far smarter man than the scattershot front might suggest. Despite his relatively high position within the company, these outrageous attacks on his employer are too sustained and calculated to be a momentary lapse in judgement and, while he is clearly angry for having worked himself into hospital, there’s a smile and quickness behind the eyes that suggests he is fully in control of all he’s saying. He clearly takes pleasure in his irreverence, even if there is a genuine seed of resentment at its core.”

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I dub this week, Success Week. A lot of projects have seen themselves crossing over the finish line with their targets reached, or massively exceeded. As we mentioned last week, Tex Murphy made it, but incredibly it just finished cents away from $600,000 of their $450,000 goal. I wonder if we are already blasé about these figures, but they got an extra one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Give me that much money and my life is changed forever. And that’s on top of the $450k they asked for. Just incredible amounts of money are out there for the taking, so long as your project is interesting enough, and your promotion canny enough. With perhaps a dash of luck.

Usual reminder. Please email me at the address above with any Kickstarters you think should be on the list. There’s no promise that everything will be featured, and of course, our mentioning a project here is in no way an endorsement that you should give it your money. That’s your call.

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Do you like getting games for less than full price? You do! Well then have I got a treat for you. Here’s not one, not two, not three, not four, but five (five!) brilliant deals on games that you might be interested in playing. If nothing from this selection tickles your fancy, you can no doubt find something else to play on the constantly updated record of gaming bargains over at SavyGamer.co.uk. Here’s your bargain bucket: (more…)

There may be no beta weekend in sight, but rather than dreaming of Guild Wars 2 you can explore the world from this birds-eye, interactive map.

A few days ago, a thread on Reddit revolving around a tense Civilization 2 match received quite a bit of attention. Within the thread, user Lycerius detailed a scenario within the game that has been in play for about ten years. The American, Viking, and Celtic nations in his decade long battle remain locked in a 1700-year-long war, fighting over what little resources remain following years of nuclear carnage; in-game the year is 3991 AD. Now Civilization's mastermind, Sid Meier, has weighed-in on the nearly two thousand (in-game) year conflict.

"My first thought was, 'Wow! I can't believe anyone has been playing Civ II for that long,'" Sid Meier told The Associated Press (via Yahoo) in an interview. "It's been more than 15 years since we released that game, and I don't think any of us expected a decade-long game would come out of it. It would be amazing if we could come back in 2025 and find out if someone's had a 10-year game of Civ V going."

We note, for future generations, not to look to the global landscape in Lycerius' Civilization 2 match for hints into our own destiny. It's just a game. We wouldn't want this intense match to become the Mayan calendar equivalent for our family in the far-flung future.

The Diablo 3 Wiki now has Level 60 character builds. Nuke!

Valve and Payday: The Heist developer Overkill team up to show the origins of Left 4 Dead.

Forge is a new PvP-centric MMO that touts no level grinding and a low time commitment.