PC Gaming News Message Board older than one year ago

Every day, in addition to The Daily Fix, we list off the day's biggest stories in this simple and easy to read format.

Those who have already exhausted the myriad ways to wreck stuff in Goat Simulator will be happy to hear that the game's first patch both squashes bugs and brings new content for your cloven-hooved avatar to destroy.

"Goat Simulator patch 1.1 adds local splitscreen multiplayer and a whole new playable map, coming in the middle of May," wrote Coffee Stain Studios in a recent tweet. The developer fails to offer any specifics on what this new map might contain or how the addition of a second goat might alter Goat Simulator's baffling gameplay, but we expect to hear more soon.

If you haven't already played Goat Simulator, you can grab the game from Steam for $10. Respected goat resource GoatFinder lists prices for actual, live goats from $75 to $500, so consider Goat Simulator a bargain-priced entry to the world of naughty livestock. [Image: Coffee Stain Studios]

Halfway through the first season of A Wolf Among Us, A Crooked Mile represents a new high point in Telltale's story.

The next journey through the land of Mordor is going to be costly on the PC.

Ubisoft's next big thing "will leverage Uplay to support the games services."

Each Monday, Chris Livingston visits an early access game and reports back with stories about whatever he finds inside. This week, survival horror in DayZ’s experimental branch.

While nearly two million players have paid to act as DayZ’s beta testers, there’s a much smaller subset of lighthouse customers acting as beta testers to those beta testers. On a handful of DayZ experimental branch servers, changes are rolled out and played with weeks before being introduced to the early access game at large. This week I opted into the experimental branch, keen to inhale the future of DayZ before most players even get a whiff.

… [visit site to read more]

Goat Simulator is pretty much a dicking about simulator but oh, how lonely and pointless it is to dick about by yourself! Perhaps that’s the entire reason the goat is acting up. Why, put it in a pen with another real goat and perhaps they’d happily amble about and chew the cud all day long. I suppose we’ll find out in May, as developers Coffee Stain Studios are planning to add split-screen co-op with the first big patch and a new map t’boot.

… [visit site to read more]

The 1.1 patch will include several new goodies, including multiplayer goat-ing.Because a goat simulation can always use some more flesh.

Hey bro, wanna bro out with some video games? Like any real bro, I love my VGs and I love them even more when I can get my bro on with my bros! The lesson here is: even if you’re doing something ironically, you are still doing it and should feel bad (I certainly do). So look, Broforce really is named Broforce and it does star 1980s and ’90s action heroes with bro-ised names like MacBrover, B.A. Broracus, and Brobocop.

If references to popular culture from when you were younger sets you off into fits of giggles, you’ll adore it. However, if you can get past the questionable bro spin, it is some pretty pleasant shooty platformer fun, and something you may wish to cast an eye over now it’s on Steam Early Access.

… [visit site to read more]

Game director Colin Johanson on Living World Season One and the MMO's community-driven future.

The first thing I ever got published in PC Gamer was a reader review of Outcast. In the next issue I was being paid to write, but I can assure you the two events weren’t connected. In fact, having written about why I really didn’t like Outcast, I was lucky to get work at all. “Pixels the size of your fist” I believe I wrote of the not-actually-voxel-based free-roaming action-adventure. Well, I’ve now got a chance to be wrong all over again, as a bunch of the original developers have bought all the rights from the wow-do-they-still-exist Atari, and have just launched a Kickstarter to see the game remade.

… [visit site to read more]

The fear of a crowdfunded project being bought up by a larger company - whose motives may not necessarily be in line with those of backers - has become something of a trending topic ever since Facebook's acquisition of Oculus VR. Chris Roberts, creator of the super-mega-crowdfunded Star Citizen, took to the Internet to alleviate such concerns this week, just as his game crossed the $41 million funding mark.

"We don't need to go to anyone with deep pockets to make our dream a reality," Roberts wrote. "To mass-produce hardware like the Rift, you need an outlay of hundreds of millions of dollars. Luckily our ships are digital so we have hardly any cost of goods, just the cost of developing the universe of Star Citizen and running servers that Star Citizen's universe will be simulated on."

Regarding the Facebook acquisition of Oculus, Roberts doesn't seem concerned. Star Citizen natively supports the Rift, and Roberts himself was a backer of the VR headset on Kickstarter. He hopes that Facebook's funding will help Oculus compete in the market, and eventually release an attractively-priced consumer version of the Rift. Roberts wrote that until he sees something that causes the team behind Oculus to lose the "passion that convinced me to back the project," he will remain a committed partner. [Image: Roberts Space Industries]

Bethesda has revealed the first content patch due to arrive for The Elder Scrolls Online later this month, introducing the zone of Craglorn.

When I saw the 22 minute length of the new Ultimate General: Gettysburg beta footage I thought, ‘No way am I watching all of this. I’ll skim it.’ 22 minutes and 45 seconds later and I’ve watched the whole thing. It is full of tiny men fighting and on-screen annotations (Like a recipe? –Headline Justification Ed) explaining the tactics and AI manouvers underpinning the game’s accessible, historical real-time strategy. Come see what hooked me below the fold.

… [visit site to read more]

Batman & Robin is, I will insist until my dying days, one of the best-executed superhero movies. “What killed the dinosaurs?” Arnold Schwarzenegger asks as Mr. Freeze. “The ice age!” he cries as he starts blasting away with an ice laser. It wanted to be an absurd take on dim memories of Adam West-era Batman silliness and by Jove, the neon eye*crag* certainly succeeded. Modern spandex flicks, no, they’re trying too hard to be mature, edgy, and grown-up. The balance they try to strike between the fantastic and the human rarely works.

Come see what I mean in a new trailer for the tie-in Amazing Spider-Man 2 game, then I’m sure you’ll agree with me that Batman & Robin is brilliant and we should all thank Joel Schumacher.

… [visit site to read more]

Casting players as space-janitors cleaning up after an alien attack, Viscera Cleanup Detail is pretty great as one-note wacky physics sim jokes go. Now let’s go one step further. Imagine playing as the dying lab technician without whom the space marine hero would be lost. Dragging useless gnawed legs behind her, she leaves diary entries hinting at puzzle solutions, scrawls cryptic warnings in her own blood, and plants supplies. Stack chairs and crates to reach odd hiding spots, hunt down iron tablets to top up her blood ink, and sacrifice everything to ensure that bumbling dolt triumphs. An idea for me to make in the next Peter Molydeux game jam, perhaps. Anyway.

For those who insist upon only buying games on Steam, keeping their games library as tidy as their space station, Viscera Cleanup Detail is now on Steam Early Access.

… [visit site to read more]

Version 2.0 of Nvidia's GeForce Experience offers enhanced support for laptops and the ability to stream PC games to the Shield from (almost) anywhere.

It’s Monday and, if you have the same system shocked headache as I do, you might find it comforting to peruse a selection of in-development games. There are videos, there are GIFs (but only one!), there are fine anecdotes. There are promises of a brighter future somewhere on the horizon. It’s videogaming ibuprofen.

Cyberdragons! Colour blindness! Dwarven rumours!

… [visit site to read more]

Valve have greenlit another 75 games for release via Steam. If you’re a writer covering game news, this poses a problem. Do you only mention the games readers might already heard of? This current batch includes the Kickstartering Chaos Reborn, the (also Kickstartering) Duelyst from former Diablo 2 and Rogue Legacy devs, the fiddly platforming roguelike Catacomb Kids, plus Hero Trap, Lemma, and a few others we’ve already covered on these pages.

Do you attempt to mention the other 65 games which people probably don’t already know? This latest batch includes a great many games in which static drawings of anime characters hover near menus, for example.

Or do you attempt to fit the game names into the lyrics of an Animaniacs song?

… [visit site to read more]

All this week, our victorious champion will be live-streaming The Elder Scrolls Online. Keep up to speed with his adventures, right here.

I stepped out last week to conquer distant lands and it looks like no one at RPS posted about the Age of Wonders 3 level editor in my absence. I guess they must not be cool people, or they’d realise there’s nothing better in life than robustly featured editors for creating your own new lands to conquer. Especially for a game in which Adam enjoyed himself but craved more variety. There’s a video demonstration of the editor in action below.

… [visit site to read more]

Here's what you'll need to get the action game running perfectly on your machine.

Do you have fond memories of King's Quest, Space Quest, Maniac Mansion and Zak McKracken? We're reliving the glory days of adventure gaming.

If you've been wishing campfires would help give away the position of DayZ's, uh ... "spirited" brand of survivors at night, this might be your month! Developer Bohemia Interactive is planning on implementing a patch that gifts the destructive element to players, both for building campfires and igniting flammable objects. Reworked physics and player control are also planned, as is a fix to address messaging spam.

Citing strong fan feedback as an inspiration, Bohemia's patch will implement 1:1 movement between mouse controls and the head of a player's avatar. Weapons are planned to act differently, though - the more cumbersome a player's equipped bargaining tool is, the longer it will take to swing in a different direction and fire. A system will also be added to let players charge projectiles, be it an item or the arrow they're aiming from a bow.

Lastly, Bohemia hopes to fix a messaging problem where the "client and server 'spam' messages at each other, hoping that some of the messages get through." The studio believes this is the major hurdle in surpassing the 100-player limit per server. The fix is expected to appear on experimental servers sometime next week before appearing in this month's update.

No word yet on a patch to make the rest of DayZ's player base as awesome as (NSFW language) fire extinguisher guy. [Image: Bohemia Interactive]

#Dungeon, the roguelike that will build labyrinths by converting tweets into monster-filled chambers, will start its social media adventure on July 4 on PC, Mac and Android. The date was tweeted on the game's official Twitter account, paired with hashtags that make us wonder what sort of room a release date tweet would make.

If you're a little too eager to wait that long, developer Hitpoint's recent post to Indie DB notes that a closed alpha should be "happening soon." Further details will be made available on the #Dungeon Twitter account, so keep an eye on that if you're dying to know what a series of #swag tweets will build. Considering #Dungeon is slated for July 4, we're pretty curious about what the #Murcia sections will look like, too. [Image: Hitpoint Games]

Undercover cop at a cat show. Bladerunner interrogation. Bluetooth technology. … [visit site to read more]

Sundays are for waking too early and spending the morning staring into the coffee, searching for signs.

• We begin with typically excellent and thorough work from Electron Dance, where an investigation into concepts of choice and narrative becomes a fascinating tour of hypertext and holodecks. It’s the best thing I’ve read this week.

We’re used to the common wisdom of books and films being uni-directional media. We start on page one and know we’re finished when the credits roll. We’re drawn to the idea of “The Narrative”, a master sequence of events being played before us. Even films like Inland Empire (David Lynch, 2006) or 21 Grams (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2003) which present fragmented stories, still take their passengers on a directed ride from start to finish. We’ve bought into the idea that storytelling is about a journey to an endpoint, an authored destination.

The real destination is the creation of meaning, whether that be the reader’s interpretation or reconstructing the author’s intent. The work is not completed by reading the final page but by reading the all of the pages.

… [visit site to read more]

Get your mop ready.

A few of the 10,000 tickets released are now fetching ridiculous prices on eBay.

Fan of games like the Skylanders series and Disney Infinity, but hoping for something a bit less cartoony? Or maybe you just really need some new 60mm scale figures for your tabletop warchest? Prodigy from Hanakai Studio might be able to help you out. The game, which combines small-form figures with an electronic board and PC, was successfully funded on Kickstarter today, reaching its $100,000 goal in fewer than three days.

Prodigy takes place in a darker world than similar games, and is squarely focused on turn-based squad battles. Players place the figure of their choice onto a grid-like surface, which registers the character and displays it onscreen. You attack by placing a card onto the surface, or combine cards for special attacks or abilities. A piercing attack, for example, is activated when a player lays down an Attack and Focus card. You can see the game in action by checking out the pitch video above, or checking out the Prodigy Kickstarter page.

Hanakai has not announced any stretch goals for the funding campaign, but there are still plenty of higher reward tiers available. Got a spare $5,000 lying around? You can design your own character to be placed into the game. For $10,000, you can design the character, help conceptualize its figure, and meet the development team in Paris. Ah, Paris. The city of Sorcerer Kings.

Prodigy is expected to finish development by the end of 2015. [Image: Hanakai Studio]