PC Gaming News Message Board older than one year ago

Ubisoft has revealed what resolution and frame rates we can expect from the racer on next-gen consoles.

We broadly accept space-Nazis and robo-Nazis in video games because they’re so fantastical, but Wolfenstein: The New Order‘s marketing strikes an odd note. Take this new trailer, which mixes Nazi robodogs with a Nazi referee gunning down a player in the 1950 Brazil World Cup. This is comic book villainy, certainly, but it’s a touch tone-deaf to have goofy Nazi atomic robomen while cracking jokes about what else the Nazi regime might have killed people for had it continued. The blurring of real and fictional is a bit off.

Curiously semi-serious plot aside, it is looking awfully pleasant, with chunky great guns, power armour, robodogs, and leaning to shoot around corners (leaning in a mainstream FPS! oh joy!).

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If murder is a merry lark then why, surely it’s even better with a chum! Hotline Miami is mostly a dark journey into the night alone without anyone to hold your hand but hey, shhh shhh shhh, it’s all okay in the sequel Wrong Number. A new trailer shows your murderman sometimes has a little heavily-armed help, though I couldn’t say for certain whether they’re an AI buddy (which they appear to be), a co-op pal, or a figment of your imagination.

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And some stuff in the store is discounted, too.

Overwatch could pertain to the military definition of one vehicle supporting another with immediate fire.

Australian indie developer League of Geeks announced the upcoming release of Armello, a digital board game and strategy-RPG hybrid due to launch in 2015 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and iOS.

As we previously saw at GDC, gameplay in Armello unfolds in the context of a multiplayer board game with card-based mechanics. Players choose among multiple playable clans, and can forge temporary alliances with other players as they quest for a ruling seat at the royal palace. Defining gameplay components include a day/night cycle, a dice-rolling combat system, and an in-depth equipment system that can be managed between turns.

Armello seeks $200,000 AUD to reach its initial funding goal. Ports for Android and Windows tablets are also being considered, pending stretch goal funding.

[Video: League of Geeks]

The creators of Dungeons of Dredmor are working on a great new building sim. Just watch out for the fish people.

The first major update to Windows 8.1 is available starting today. Take a look at the changes you can expect to see.

New endgame content and rewards arrive with new battle zones.

The team wants to bring the digital card and board game to PC, Mac and Linux.

Hello youse.

Before the column goes VIDEO HEAVY over the next few weeks, I wanted to glide into it with a little chat about how I went through the process of deciding my TOP 50 BOARD GAMES OF ALL TIME. It was really hard, and I’m still unsure of myself, and I want to give you all an opportunity to remind me of any great games I might have missed, because I’m in a panic about it. Let’s talk.

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My favourite part of every MMORPG is almost inevitably its character creator. EVE Online aside, I’ve found styling virtual dolls more fun than their attempts to hook me into dull lifeless worlds and dreams of becoming a hero. A good character creator is worth the download alone and oh my, I’ll certainly give Black Desert a go if it comes westward.

A new video from the F2P South Korean MMORPG shows off the finest character creator I’ve seen since APB, including squillions of sliders to tweak a dozen different parts of the face, squish around body shapes, style hair like a pro, and even give characters heterochromia with star-shaped pupils like some sort of glam rock Dr. Quinn.

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Another trademark may indicate what Microsoft is looking to showcase at E3.

Rob Sherman, author of interactive fiction project Black Crown, asked if he could write about videogame inventories. We were powerless against the result, which pairs a personal journey through the English countryside with the a treatise on the power of possessions and the reasons videogames must do better in representing them.

There was once, and still is, a boy and a man called me, and one summer, two summers ago, I could be found tiptoeing along a main road in southern England, my boots full of dusty blood.

I had only taken them off once in the last day, and at that point I had nearly wilted from the sight and smell. I took my diagnosis on top of a chalk escarpment, a widow’s peak, a combover of woodland. The couple on the bench next to me were after-work drinking from cans, and looking at the wealds rolling away from them. They must have thought that some medieval leper had staggered out of the local hospitalers, holidaying on his stumps.

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Today is d-day for Windows XP, but what happens to all those PCs left in a vulnerable security blackhole?

Sometimes a game project seems too ambitious to post. How could this possibly ever be made? But then, there is a trailer, and there are screenshots, and it is nice to dream from time to time. Sticks & Starships has all the buzzwords du jour: it’s open-world, procedurally generated, about exploration and building, and uses voxels. It also pairs that Minecraft-y/Starbound-y core with a Civilization-style march through the history technological progress, as players begin with primitive tools (like Sticks) and build towards larger and more complicated machinery (like Starships).

So that’s No Man’s Sky meets Minecraft meets Civilization. Easy enough for its two-man indie team to produce? Stranger things have happened. The trailer below gives some reason to hope.

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Ubisoft has announced when its open-world action-driving The Crew will finally be available, and released a new gameplay trailer.

Look at this Secret Ponchos screenshot: that poncho is anything but. There it sits, boldly in the open, flapping in the morning breeze. No, we’re told, it’s a secret. Fine, we’ll pretend we don’t see it if it makes developers Switchblade Monkeys feel better. In much the same way, we know from this tweet that the rootin’ tootin’ multiplayer shooter is clearly now coming to PC in addition to consoles but oh no, that hasn’t been formally announced, so whatever could this cryptic image mean?

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Man.

A Light In Chorus‘ creators claim it’s “a game that’s more concerned about mood and feel than win-states,” and I think they might just be onto something. I feel like I just skinny dipped in the night sky, and it was only a little weird.

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Rezzed 2014 was a place where games were crammed into every corner, even some that weren’t scheduled to be there. Daniel Ratcliffe, creator of Minecraft mods ComputerCraft and qCraft, sat on the floor to the left of the Leftfield Collection to show me his puzzle game Redirection. It’s a maze game in the Stephen “increpare” Lavelle mould in which you place blocks to re-shape paths and direct robots towards objectives.

There is now a block in front of you. Rotate and continue below, where there’s a video and I’ll attempt to explain its appeal a little more.

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Welcome to Postcards from The Elder Scrolls Online, a look at Bethesda's new MMO. Stay tuned for more entries in the coming weeks. Prior to writing about games for a living, I was spending much more time on MMOs than I do now. Once upon a time, I was hell-bent on topping the Everquest 2 server leaderboards for quests completed, and I put more hours into that game than I did my university course (maybe that's not saying much). After that, I got up to Level 65 in World of Warcraft - I even queued up for the Burning Crusade launch, something I've not done for any other game. Since then I've had brief skirmishes with Rift, The Old Republic, and Final Fantasy 14, but no MMO has grabbed me (and my time) like EQ2 and WoW did.

Still, the pangs are always there, so when Richard asked if I wanted to check out The Elder Scrolls Online, I was happy to. If anything, Bethesda Game Studios' recent efforts had done great jobs of satiating my hunger for games gone by. Skyrim in particular felt like a single-player MMO, constantly rewarding me for every little thing I did in its timesink of a world.

So, don't consider this a review of TESO. Instead, it's offered as my musings on returning to the fold with Bethesda's first foray into it. And in my first week I encountered Harry Potter flashbacks, smart-talking cats, and almost-naked epiphanies. [Images: Bethesda]

A real highlight of the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in the last couple of years has been the Advocacy Track. This is made up of a series of talks, round tables and presentations regarding issues within gaming about diversity, tolerance and inclusivity. And in a GDC where not a single woman was speaking at the Independent Games Summit, there are clearly still some massive issues. Rather brilliantly, the sessions within this track are being made free to all, rather than just those who attended the conference. Highlights are below.

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Launching this month, the latest Radeon graphics card offers impressive performance for 4K gaming and an easy-to-install cooling setup.

Richard Boeser is this close to finally releasing his dual-world cooperative platformer Ibb and Obb on PC, as it’s due to arrive this May. He’s apparently not content, as he’s also partnered with Tomasz Kaye to make Chalo Chalo, a racing game “where planning ahead is more important than speedy reflexes.” You play a dot gliding across a world of randomly generated shapes, where different colours of surface slow or speed your journey to the finish line. It looks like the screenshot above, it moves like the trailer below.

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I’d be a bit unsettled by the notion of random Internet denizens deciding my every action and footfall if they didn’t sort of already do that anyway. I mean, my job only exists because of the web’s ravenous hordes, so I’m basically a puppet for their whims. That said, Choice Chamber sees Twitch chatters taking on a bit of a different role than they did in genre (?) pioneer Twitch Plays Pokemon. The idea here is that one person controls a side-scrolling platformer character, and everybody else decides, well, pretty much everything. Levels formations, level themes, enemies, helpful minions, weapons, power-ups, how high the player can jump, etc, etc, etc. Soundodger developer Studio Bean has taken the experiment in crowd control/cacophony to Kickstarter.

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Silicon Studio, the creative force behind RPG Bravely Default, has released a tech demo for its next-gen real-time engine. It's pretty stunning.

Each new interesting Kickstarter seems to feel obliged to make at least one enormous mistake. The Breakout‘s – a point and click adventure from Pixel Trip Studios – is to not explain the game in its pitch video. Face and Palm, sitting in a tree, K.I.S.S.I.N.G.

However, scroll a few screens down their Kickstarter’s front page and you’ll find, buried there, what should have been at the top – in-game footage, and some gorgeous screenshots. This is a 90s-style (and hand-painted pixel designed) adventure, set in a WW2 prison camp, from which you’re trying to escape. I’m belatedly interested.

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While our ancestors might be upset that Age of Mythology: Extended Edition pits their sacred deities against one another for human entertainment, the new global lighting system, enhanced graphics and Steamworks support does make the blasphemy undeniably attractive. [Image: Microsoft]

Why is Space Noir named so? Because it’s set in space, and the story’s noir. But what happens when you remove the space and the noir? Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world; and the first gameplay trailer for N-Fusion’s spaceship-y shooter arrives. The sample does exactly what it doesn’t say on the tin: it’s light on story so we don’t get a sense of the game’s noir, and goes down within a planet’s atmosphere so we can’t see about its space.

What we can see is five minutes of a ship pulling fancy acrobatics and blowing hordes of enemy fighters out the sky with zapbeams and lock-on missiles in arcade-y combat, if we forgive the egregious deception long enough to look.

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He's a lot "beefier" this time around.