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The effort and ambition put into student game projects never fails to surprise me. I was a spectacularly lazy student, and hed I studied game creation I doubt I would have managed to produce anything like Noxious, which is a tribute to Dead Space made by Full Sail students. (Via Indiegames.) It’s a brief shooter (around 15 minutes) which can be downloaded in full, for free, here. Full playthrough video below.

(I feel that with this name it should have been inspired by Nox, but ah well.) (What a lot of parentheses.)(more…)

The bucket’s being delivered slightly later than usual this morning, I accidentally spent an hour or so playing Mirror’s Edge to help soothe my post-Bit of Alright weary head. Those indie developers sure know how to pour alcohol down their mouths and into their bellies. But soothe my head it did, and so I’ve managed to pull it together just long enough to compile a list of cheap games for your digital typewriters this weekend. Now I’m off to find some bacon. Remember to visit my website about cheap videogames when you get a chance. Here’s your bargain bucket: (more…)

Dave and Vinny attempt to save humanity with the help of missiles, hacking, and the Crazy Snider.

That first-run copy of Mass Effect: Deception you picked up may just be turning into an odd collector's item. Bioware has issued a statement on the slew of errors fans have found in the novel, stating that all will be fixed in future editions of Deception.

"The teams at Del Rey and BioWare would like to extend our sincerest apologies to the Mass Effect fans for any errors and oversights made in the recent novel Mass Effect: Deception," the apology post on Bioware's forums reads. "We are currently working on a number of changes that will appear in future editions of the novel."

Currently, there's no word on when the revised edition will be available.

Fast, you see, because racing cars are fast… I am good at this, eh? Anyway, Slightly Mad send word that their ongoing community-focused racing game, Project CARS, has a new release version available to everyone who has signed up, and has supplied a fancy gallery of car-images from the game, which you can see here and below. (Clicky for full size.) The new building includes a “brand-new 2011 Formula A car” with “more than 700hp of engine power.” As well as new content “including the Ariel Atom V8, the 250cc Superkart and the Northampton circuit.” Also, somewhat bizarrely, they have announced that the game has new force feedback features which are tuned against the racing skills of the man who used to be The Stig from Top Gear, Ben Collins. So that’s a thing that happened. Fancy racing pics below!(more…)

For the last couple of years Intel have been sponsoring a game design competition called Level Up, and it’s returning in 2012 – although it is branded “2011″ for some reason – with the promise of a $10,000 prize for the winner along with a guaranteed spot on Steam. The idea is simple: submit a game demo, and potentially win big. The basic rule of thumb is: submit Windows executable demo, and you could be a contender for any number of winner categories. The deadline for submitting is March 19, 2012 at 11:59 PM (U.S. Pacific Time). Admittedly, that basically means those of your who are already working on something are probably the only people in with a chance, but it’s worth a punt for your part-finished game. You can check out past winners of the competition here. The main page for the 2012 event is here, and the rules for entering are here.

Blizzard has announced that 100,000 more Diablo 3 beta invites have been sent out in North America, so if you opted in to beta access with your Battle.net account, you should log in and see if you've gotten a notification. Blizzard warns that phishing activity may increase with this new wave of invites, so take care.

If you weren't one of the lucky one hundred thousand, don't fret: Blizzard promises to send out more invites eventually. You can go back to rolling classes now!

Hi-Rez have announced some significant changes to their beta of Tribes: Ascend. The next patch will overhaul the UI and change the class options, making the focus more on customisation and less on existing class-based loutouts. They explain: “We will be collapsing the total number of playable classes from 12 to 9, but adding the ability for players to unlock new weapons for each class and further customize their loadout. Three of the nine classes will be available right away so a new player will have access to a Light, Medium, and Heavy class in his or her first match.” These are some big changes to the ongoing testing of the game, and a sign that the devs are as responsive to feedback as they have been claiming. The full patch notes are here.

Good morning, Internet! I’ve been off having adventures, but I suppose I’d better try and put together an entertaining Saturday. Let’s kick off with the latest Aliens stuff: after that CGI trailer it’s good to get at least a few fragments of game footage, which is what you can see below. This latest emission from the developmental innards of the Gearbox creature show a bunch of scene-setting stuff, and then a little of the running about with a gun shooting Aliens stuff. I’m tentatively excited about this one, and it’s been a while since I’ve thought that about a licence shooter.(more…)

Breathe in, breathe out, and everything's zen, because next week's Rock Band DLC is a three-pack from alt rockers Bush. All the tracks are off the band's hit 1994 debut album "Sixteen Stone."

Deus Ex is leading the revenue revolution for Square Enix, whose digital entertainment -- games -- department in April-December 2011 grew 6.2 percent from the previous fiscal year, totaling $704.7 million in net sales. Games now comprise 56 percent of Square Enix's total revenue, where in the same period of 2010 they made up just 52 percent.

The company's operating profit rose 11.5 percent to $169.4 million and its net income ended at $65 million, up 175.2 percent from the previous period. Square Enix cited Deus Ex: Human Revolution and its online and social titles as the main factors behind its financial progress.

#openthread Believe it or not, that bed is not actually a murder scene! It's a thing that someone with super-amazing taste and instincts thinks you'll want to buy. More »

#xboxlive Stephen Toulouse—known as StepTo to those listening to Major Nelson's podcast, or unfortunate enough to feel the cold kiss of the Xbox Live banhammer—has given his two weeks notice to Microsoft. The director of Xbox Live Policy and Enforcement will leave Feb. 16, after 18 years with the company. More »

r19278b
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Critical Fixes:
+ Fixed a combat memory leak.
+ Fixed a crash that could occur when clicking the research cube on
the star map.
+ Fixed a crash that would occur in the research screen when the
slider was set all the way to government.
+ Torpedoes now apply damage to planets.
+ Fixed a bug that caused battleriders to crash the design tooltip.
+ Fixed a crash that could occur when requesting enclaves.

Other Fixes:
+ Fixed missing Bio-missile art for Morrigi.
+ Fixed a couple Human, Hiver and Morrigi DLC art issues.
+ Fixed the problem with some carriers not being able to rotate while
riders were docked.
+ Fixed an issue with riders taking too long to dock.
+ Fixed a couple issues that were leading to phantom fleets, related
to deployed gates and defense fleets.
+ Carriers can now carry other carriers.
+ Fixed an issue where loaded games could mix up player ID's.
+ Fixed known issues with Kingfisher.
+ Fixed issues where ships were not targeting stations correctly in combat.
+ Fixed an issue where destroying the mission section on the ship
would kill all crew onboard.
+ Fixed an issue with Game Setup options resetting when switching maps.
+ Fixed issues with combat AI splitting targets.
+ Fixed issues where bio-missiles were not launching.
+ Added missing bonus for Expert Systems.
+ Added missing bonus for Orbital Drydocks.
+ Added missing bonus for Heavy Platforms.
+ Corrected bonus for Materials Applications.
+ Fixed a bug that was causing designs to return incorrect attributes
once they had been committed.
+ Fixed a bug that was reporting the build times for ships with naval
stations incorrectly.
+ Removed duplicate "destination" text from fleet lists.
+ Made a change to address the concern that missiles would continue to
move after combat had ended.
+ Battle riders are now silent while docked.
+ Fixed known issues where tracking weapons would fail to hit ship
targets after their sections were destroyed.
+ Turrets no longer fire missiles after the crew are killed.
+ Fixed an issue where assault shuttles would not return to tender.
+ Fixed combat AI not launching battle riders.
+ Fixed the decimal place in reported post-combat damage.
+ Fixed issue where ships would not point off the horizontal combat
plane to aim.
+ Fixed an issue where the AI was making poor/mixed weapon decisions
when designing ships.
+ Fixed an issue where a colonization was available for targets with
known enemy colonies.
+ Fixed a handful of sounds that did not have attenuation set and were
therefore audible from everywhere in combat.
+ Fixed known issues where the Hiver gate traffic was not being
updated correctly.
+ Fixed known issues where Liir were no longer being slowed in
proximity to gravity wells.
+ Addressed handful of engine types that could be heard constantly
regardless of distance from camera.
+ Addressed variety of standard turrets that weren't able to target straight up.

Other Changes and Additions:
+ Psionics can now be researched, designed into ships and activated in the game.
+ It is now possible to repair riders in the repair dialog.
+ Added antialiasing to many parts of the game. 3D scenes now use FXAA
antialiasing by default, which can be disabled in the launcher if desired.
+ Reduced fleet icon click radius on the star map.
+ Biomissile and other super-class weapons are now reported in the
post-combat dialog.
+ Added plague effects.
+ Increased pitch range of turrets across the board to make them more
effective at PD off the combat plane.
+ Sensor range discs now have clearly defined boundaries in combat.

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Valve has finally put together its schedule of events for 2012, announcing the big things happening in Team Fortress 2 in the coming months. Most notably, Valve says its final character video, Meet the Pyro, will air in 2012 and it will feature "lots of blood pretty much all the way through."

The TF2 team is also working on a secret project that isn't a hat or a map, Valve reports. This leaves speculation open to new characters, a feature-length film, a live-action feature-length film, or a live-action feature-length film starring Brendan Gleeson, Jude Law and Emma Stone. These are the only options.

The Steam Workshop has a shiny new blog, and Valve says it plans to unveil another secret at the second annual Saxxy Awards. We're pretty sure this secret will be the announcement of the TF2 movie's sequel, starring Katherine Heigl as Brendan Gleeson and Brendan Fraser as everyone else.

Coming from Capcom's blog...

As you may well have heard by now, the title of Revelations is indeed misspelled on the spine of the game box (as "Revelaitons"). Unfortunately, the initial North American shipment of the game will reflect this error, but we just got confirmation that subsequent shipments of the title are being repackaged to have the correct spelling. Meanwhile, customers who have received the misspelled version can contact our Customer Service line at 650-350-6700 or by email at accounts@capcom.com and we'll send you a new insert for your case. So yay!

Link

#theweekingamingapps This week we featured five different titles across several different platforms in our daily Gaming App of the Day posts, but that doesn't matter to you, does it? No, you're too busy playing Kingdom Rush. More »

How many times have you been in the middle of an intense Call of Duty: Black Ops Zombies round when you've had to suddenly stop? Well, Activision has a solution in the latest update: save and load games mid-session.

It's just one of the additions in this free update, which also adds the ray gun, six different tiers of in-game point packs that players can purchase through the app, and monkey bombs -- relax, they're not real monkeys strapped with dynamite or anything. They're actually cute little toys that explode, which may actually be worse now that we think about it. We like toys!

#nfl2k Earlier this week, the official Madden NFL 12 simulation of Super Bowl XLVI took both the underdog and the under for the first time in the past nine years, calling the New York Giants as 27-24 winners over the New England Patriots. A simulation run on dearly departed Madden nemesis NFL 2K5 returned the opposite result. More »

If you're near Los Angeles on February 10, and you're eager to celebrate the upcoming release of Rhythm Heaven Fever, you can party with other like-minded people at the iam8bit gallery.

Nintendo, Giant Robot, and iam8bit are teaming up for a launch event, at which attendees will be able to play the game (with headphones, hopefully!) and pick up custom swag. Go find out who else in the world dares to play a rhythm game about interviewing wrestlers and playing airplane badminton!

#deadendthrills Since we ran a feature on Duncan Harris, the groovy "video game photographer" behind the website DeadEndThrills, I've been sharing some of his work each week here. More »

Many are still busy plowing through the insane amount of content included in Skyrim. Maybe you're not one of them. Maybe you've unlocked and spent every perk point, cleared every dungeon and punched every NPC in the nose. Maybe you've tried out every mod and are looking for more. Bethesda will relea...

#halo Halo: Primordium, by Greg Bear, released just after the new year, and if you're curious what the book's all about, Macmillan has provided Kotaku with this five minute clip from the novel's audiobook version. More »

Another Sony patent has been discovered, and it shows a similar control system to the Wii U. Obviously Sony isn't doing this for the PS3...not yet anyway. It's not quite the Wii U, but you can see the similarities.

Yes, your retail copy of Resident Evil: Revelations next week will come with the 'Revelaitons' error. Collector's Edition it might not be, but I'm sure we'll always look back on this and laugh...or Capcom will cry.

We know you're used to coveting Mass Effect save files, so this should come as no surprise but you'll probably want to hold onto your Mass Effect 3 saves. In an interview with GamerZines, associate producer Mike Gamble said it "wouldn't be a bad idea" to keep them.

Of course Gamble didn't go into any specifics -- the save files could affect future DLC or any potential entries in the Mass Effect series beyond the third and final Shepard-focused game. Or maybe it's just so BioWare can forever track those monsters who decided to shoot Wrex in the face. You know who you are and you should be ashamed.