|  |  |  | | | | | PC Gamer » PC Gamer – The global authority on PC games | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | It’s not always easy convincing your friends to jump into an MMO with you. It got a bit easier this week, when Rift launched its Ascend-a-Friend referral program and a 7-day trial, but maybe a few of your fellows are still holding out. Maybe you’re that stubborn friend dragging their feet. First, shame on you. Secondly, PC Gamer’s here to help. We’re celebrating the spirit of playing MMOs with friends by giving 25 lucky winners two copies of Rift each—as in, you and a friend get to explore Telara as a dynamic duo. Want to know how to enter? I know you do. Read on. All you have to do is leave a comment down below, stating your ideal RIFT character build, and why you enjoy that particular combination of Souls. (Remember, you combine 3 souls in a build, and you can read summaries of the 32 different inter-changeable Souls on Rift’s official site.) For example, as a Rogue, I’d go with a Bard + Bladedancer + Saboteur combination so that I could pretend that I’m attacking enemies with explosive mandolins. While you’re at it, be sure to Rate Up the comments that you think propose some particularly awesome combinations. This contest is open to US residents only. We’ll pick 25 winners on Friday, May 20th, so get creative! If you already play Rift, you can still gain some bonus karma by giving two friends free copies of the game! Now that’s a true pal. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Yesterday marked the 1-year anniversary since the official launch of S2 Games’ popular MOBA Heroes of Newerth, and they’re partying like it’s their birthday—which it totally is. Alongside their free-to-play week, which lasts until Sunday the 22nd, they’re giving the community bonus in-game shop currency and some new avatars created by popular demand. But what if your birthday wish is that you could play the game for free forever, instead of ponying up at the close of next weekend? That’s where we come in—we’re giving away 10 free copies of HoN, perfect for the newbie who’s enjoying themselves this week or the veteran that wants to get their friends involved. Read on to find out how to enter! S2′s made a lot of changes in the recent update to make the game easier to understand for new players. For instance, tons of UI changes were implemented to help explain the more complicated systems, like the items and tooltips, so that they’re much more clear and concise. S2 has also introduced fully interactive hero guides, which are ranked by the community and give players the ability to set default preferences for recommended items—incredibly handy for someone trying out a new hero for the first time. This patch also rolls out two avatars, one that’s just plain awesome and the other that’s awesomely goofy: Thor Thunderbringer and Winston Charmadon.  Do you prefer demigods or dapper dandies? So, want to play this game for free past May 22nd? Excellent, because entering our contest is easy. Simply leave a comment below before May 20th suggesting an avatar you’d love to see for any HoN hero. The ten funniest ones (as in, I laugh out loud at the office) will win a free copy of HoN! Heck, if your suggestions are good enough, the devs might just take notice of your comedic genius and put ‘em in game! | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Getting a headset that rivals your 2.1 external speakers' sound is tough to do without dropping $200 (or more). And yet, the Tt eSPORTS Shock manages to do just that, and at a very reasonable $80. Each sound that flows into your ears is powerful, smooth, and snappy—whether it's a fireball detonating in Dragon Age 2, a Geisha's soft advice in Total War: Shogun 2, or the background music hammering away in Mass Effect 2's Afterlife club. I never detected any audio glitches or muddied sound, even with the volume jammed to ear-bleed levels. The magic doesn't stop there: the plush, soft ear cups fold up into themselves for easy and compact storage (via a strong metal hinge on each), and the plastic that covers them is bendable and rugged. The white coloring peppered with dashes of black and red looks fantastic, and the mic and sound cables are long enough to connect to a PC over six feet away. These headsets are helium-light as they rest on your noggin, and the microphone is surprisingly clear for in-game chat (but not quite to studio-recording quality). There aren't many extras though—you won't find THX/DTS support or 5.1 virtual surround software, for example, but that's fairly common for the sub-$100 realm. Considering that some other headsets cost three times as much and still don't sound as good, I can't recommend these enough. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | It has been a dramatic day of news, from the Eidos and Deus Ex website hacks to the huge Modern Warfare 3 leaks. We even discovered that Tali will be returning as a team mate in Mass Effect 3. Hooray! But Wrex probably won’t. Nyoo! You’ll find more reasons to laugh and perhaps cry a little in the list of the most important news stories in PC gaming today. We threw a few hilarious videos in there for good measure, starting with this one, a man face acting gaming’s worst voice acting. It’s a must watch.
Today we discovered Owen’s greatest fear. GIRAFFES. It’s not until you actually look at them properly for a few moments that they start to look unnervingly weird. Which animals do you fear the most? | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | South Korea’s Global StarCraft II League and the USA’s Major League Gaming represent the twin peaks of global e-sports. Through a new league exchange system, those peaks are beginning to merge together to one glorious, truly international mountain. The system kicks into gear in June, with MLG’s Columbus leg. Four Korean players – up and coming stars ST_Bomber, IM.LosirA, SlayerS_MMA, and ex-Warcraft III hero FOXMoon – will be added to that show’s lineup to compete for the title.
On the other side, MLG Colombus’ top three non-Korean finishers will be plonked straight into the GSL’s Code A – one step below the competition’s prestigious Code S class, home to the world’s greatest. For future MLG dates on the tour circuit, the tip-top finisher will bypass Code A entirely, and hop straight on a plane for Korea’s Code S tournament, room and board paid for by the GSL. Likewise, the MLG will handle all costs for the four Korean players they’ll be accepting into the pools at their upcoming events. Read the full statement here. This change sticks a spoon in the global talent pool and swirls it up a bit, potentially providing a shot at the established Korean scene for new and exciting players like Sweden’s ThorZaIN without them needing to foot the bill themselves. While we’re on the subject, it’s the GSL Code S final this weekend. E-sports fans: don’t forget. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | It’s the weekend! In fact, it’s Friday 13. To dodge all that bad luck flying around outside, we’ll be locking ourselves safely indoors to play some videogames. Here’s this week’s account of what we’ll be playing this weekend, and why.
Tom Francis – The Witcher 2
 Which I can’t talk about. I was not a huge fan of the first one – the world seemed nice, but I hated who I was playing, the dialogue was malfunctioning all over the place, and I don’t like games where women throw themselves at me – it always seems like such a sad thing to fantasise about. But Rich Cobbett keeps enthusing about the second one, so I’m keeping an open mind for that. Richard Cobbett – The Witcher 2
 It's one of the most anticipated RPGs of the year, so obviously it would be grossly mean of me to sit here, smugly patting the review code and looking forward to getting back home tonight and get back to hacking monsters with a silver sword/wooing sexy sorceresses. So far, I'm having much better luck attracting the first than the second. Art mirrors life, I guess. It's definitely not a perfect game – for all the Polish polish and obvious love and attention that's gone into it, it's an RPG with more than its fair share of rough edges, but I've been having a great time with it so far. Can't say much more than that right now for all the usual pesky embargo reasons, but look out for the review… oooh… real soon. Rich McCormick – Mount & Blade
 Mount & Blade's potential enthuses me to the point of enthuso-mania: carving a groove into central Europe with my dastardly hussars, leading cavalry charges in two-hundred man battles, my trusty scimitar removing heads with ease. In practice, the grubby presentation and weird internal logic (I had a village elder tell me his tiny hamlet's main exports were cheese, milk, sheep, cattle, weaponry, textiles, metal, wood, and wine. There were nine people in the village. Either they were the nine most industrious villagers in south Poland, or he was LYING.) mean that I give up before I've recruited a party, and need to shout the words FIRE and SWORD to stop myself getting distracted by a passing bumble bee. This time, I'm going to play it properly. I'm going to roleplay my character, raiding bandits and robbing the rich to give to the poor. I'm going to shoot men from horseback and make kings and emperors bow to my army's whim. Or I'm going to find one villager and ride my horse into him again and again because it's funny. Tim – Portal 2
 Yeah, Portal 2 is good. But how cool is Valve's perfect implementation of cloud saving? I come to work, I play for an hour at lunch. I go home, and pick up exactly where I left off. It's amazing. I take some screenshots for a feature at home, they're waiting on my Steam Cloud screenshot page at work. It even saved the miniscule amount of progress I made when testing if it would run on my laptop. Sure, we're in a privileged position where we're actively encouraged to play games at work. But what a privilege Valve makes it. PC gaming is brilliant. Graham – Shores of Hazeron
 There are too many games. I haven't even started on Shogun 2 or Dragon Age 2. I've got Cargo and Capsized. I should spend more time with Ace of Spades. I've got the first ten hours of Deus Ex: Human Revolution tempting me to a second playthrough, I've got code for future indie hotness Voxatron, and Tom and I have yet to finish Portal 2's co-op. PC gaming is mental and amazing and exciting and simply too much. But if I had to choose just one game to play, it'd be Shores of Hazeron. It's an indie MMO set in space, in which you build your own spaceship – designing the deck plans, even – and then explore a galaxy of planets you can land on. I haven't played it yet, the website looks like it was designed in Microsoft Publisher circa 1997, and it might be awful, but hot damn if it doesn't sound like a game worth devoting a sunny weekend to. Tom Senior – Super F!@#*£g Meat Boy
 This weekend I will be playing Super F!@#*£g Meat Boy, to give the game its full title. I will be cursing my way through the hundreds of impossible levels, failing time and time again, all the while ranting with increasing fervour at the tiny red character on my screen. Here’s an excerpt, with some select words altered to protect those of a delicate sensibility. “Why the jolly did you jump there? What the Darwin do you think you’re doing you silly, silly, little lump of joy? Call yourself super? I’ll give you super you aesthetically pleasing, bag of flowery loveliness!” And then one of my flatmates will burst into my room, screaming “Tom what the Shakespeare are you ranting on about? It’s 5AM in the forking morning!” What will you be playing this weekend? | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Square Enix have released an official response to earlier reports that thousands of users’ details had been stolen in an attack on their Eidos and Deus Ex: Human Revolution websites. They confirm that 25,000 email addresses have been stolen, but add that these were not linked to any personal information. They also say that the sites in question contained no credit card information, though 350 resumes have been stolen. You can read their full statement below.
Here’s the statement, posted on the Square Enix news site. “Square Enix can confirm a group of hackers gained access to parts of our Eidosmontreal.com website as well as two of our product sites. We immediately took the sites offline to assess how this had happened and what had been accessed, then took further measures to increase the security of these and all of our websites, before allowing the sites to go live again. “Eidosmontreal.com does not hold any credit card information or code data, however there are resumes which are submitted to the website by people interested in jobs at the studio. Regrettably up to 350 of these resumes may have been accessed, and we are in the process of writing to each of the individuals who may have been affected to offer our sincere apologies for this situation. In addition, we have also discovered that up to 25,000 email addresses were obtained as a result of this breach. These email addresses are not linked to any additional personal information. They were site registration email addresses provided to us for users to receive product information updates. “No dissemination or misappropriation of any other personal information has been identified at this point. “We take the security of our websites extremely seriously and employ strict measures, which we test regularly, to guard against this sort of incident.” 
The numbers given by Square Enix are much lower than the 80,000 figure suggested earlier, and there’s no mention of the source code that the hackers claim to have stolen. Eurogamer have been contacted by a hacker claiming that a group called Gnosis, not Anonymous, are the hacking organisation behind the attack. The hacker also told them that the source code mentioned by the perpetrators of the attack referred to the source code of the website, saying that Deus Ex: Human Revolution “is not at risk.” The hacker claims that they “knew about the hack yesterday, and one of us went as far as to contact Eidos to try and warn them about a potential data leak. They were, however, unreceptive and insisted in the event something like this happened it would be an internal matter.” The hacker, who goes be the handle Venuism, said that Anonymous “do not want to hurt people around the internet”. “That’s not our style,” he said. “We are not ‘whitehats’, but we will not scam you, steal credit cards and do dirty stuff with them.” | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Kotaku has dropped a payload of leaked Call of Duty: Modern Warfare details covering everything from the locations and characters of the single player campaign to the precise number of maps in the multiplayer mode. Find out more about the characters you’ll be playing as, the new vehicles you’ll be driving and the new locations you’ll be blowing up in the huge info blowout below. Spoilers ahead.
The single player campaign will be set across 15 missions. It will pick up where Modern Warfare 2 left off with the invasion of Manhattan by Russian forces. As with previous Modern Warfare titels the campaign will skip between many different locations across the world, and have you playing as a number of different characters, not all of whom will survive. Locations include Manhattan, the catacombs of Paris, India and Dubai. YOu’ll be playing as a Russian Federal Protective Services agent, an SAS Operative and a tank gunner. We can also look forward to the return of the AC-130 gunship from previous Modern Warfare titles. Kotaku have released VERY spoilery details of the single player campaign here. The multiplayer mode will contain 20 maps, though it’s not certain at the moment how many of these will be in the game on launch, and how many will be released as map packs after launch. The excellent co-op Spec Ops mode of Modern Warfare 2 will make a return as well, and will be split into “survival” and “mission” modes. Five survival maps and seven mission maps are listed, some of which may be cut or altered before release. All of the information above comes via Kotaku, who say that they received the information through multiple sources. The game’s due out on November 8 this year. The multiplayer maps and single player locations are all listed below some of the leaked first images of the game. 
Multiplayer maps - Alpha
- Alps
- Bootleg
- Bravo
- Brooklyn
- Carbon
- Coast
- Dome
- Exchange
- Hardhat
- Interchange
- Lambeth
- Meteora
- Mogadishu
- Paris
- Plaza 2
- Radar
- Seatown
- Underground
- Village
Spec Ops mode Survival - Carbon
- Dome
- Radar
- Seatown
- Village
Mission - Civilian Rescue
- Flood the Market
- Invisible Threat
- Little Bro’s
- Out of Africa
- No Fly Zone
- Wing Man
*SPOILERS* Single player campaign locations: - Dharmasala, India
- New York, New York
- A plane transporting the president of Russia
- A town in Sierra Leone
- London, England
- Mogadishu, Somalia
- Hamburg, Germany
- Paris, France
- Prague, Czech Republic
- A castle in the Czech mountains
- Berlin, Germany
- The Kremlin in Moscow, Russia
- Dubai, United Arab Emirates
- Washington. D.C.
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Here’s a dose of mad Brink parkour skills, via Splash Damage writer and designer Ed Stern’s Twitter feed. The freerunner defies gravity to complete the assault course in just 18 seconds. Impressive, no? The runner admits it’s not quite perfect, but says that “17s will be unbeatable,” which is a challenge if ever I heard one. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | When Tom was out at BioWare’s Edmonton office last month, executive producer Casey Hudson confirmed that our favourite Quarian, Tali’Zorah vas Normandy, would return as a full-time squadmate. The obvious next question: would Wrex? Casey Hudson: Wrex will be… basically everyone that's a main character is in Mass Effect 3. Everyone – every single team character in the entire series – is in Mass Effect 3, but not necessarily as a squad member. So Wrex will be there but not necessarily as a full squad member. The squadmates we can confirm are Garrus, Liara, Ashley or Kaiden, James Vega, and the one that we can mention that we haven't mentioned before is Tali. PC Gamer: Will some of the main characters who aren't full squadmates tag along for one mission? Casey Hudson: Yeah. Basically when the story moves to deal with that particular main character, there might be a plot where they join you for a little while, and they're with you for that mission. Casey says the returning characters, particularly Shepard him or herself, make the Mass Effect series unique. Casey Hudson: I would argue that this is the only trilogy in games. There have been games where there were three, but in terms of planning it out from the beginning, with a story that was meant to span three games, and actually finishing all three games – I don't know if that's ever been done before. Certainly bringing your character across and those decisions, that hasn't been done before. So we have a really, really exciting opportunity, which is to take all of the stuff that we've built and it's not now just about continuing it, but it's about letting people end it. And end it in ways that, especially if you've been following the series, you know what it would mean to end certain conflicts in certain ways. You know the values behind it, and the history behind it, and especially the people that are affected. We talk about the Genophage, and how you could resolve that in different ways, because you know so many people affected by it: Grunt and Wrex and Mordin and these characters that you can actually put a face on. So it's pretty exciting to be able to finish it. You can hear more about what Tom thought of Mass Effect 3 in the PC Gamer UK podcast, and we’ll have more juicy info from Casey tomorrow. You can subscribe to all our Mass Effect 3 news and previews if you use an RSS reader. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Ice Pick Lodge are best known for the dark and strange survival horror, The Void, but they’ve taken a very different direction with their next game, Cargo, swapping moody existentialism for giant penguins. The aim of the game is to entertain tiny fat naked baby-men, so that you can use the “fun” they produce to buy new objects from the sky. The video above gives us the first footage of the creation tools that will let you combine these bought objects into vehicles and other contraptions. It looks bonkers but wonderful. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | This is the last of our Deus Ex: Human Revolution diaries. Yesterday, Graham scythed through computer security. Two days before, Tom killed every single person he met in the name of science. I’m focusing on a more cerebral approach, sneaking past any obstacle I can’t talk my way through. I’m surreptitiously fiddling with the lock on my co-workers office when I get the call. It’s my boss, and it’s clear from the tone of his voice that he’s not happy. I close down the hacking interface I’ve been using and wheel about, trying to look as nonchalant as a man with matte black robo-arms who’s just been trying to worm his way into a locked room to dig out dirt on his co-workers can. But David Sarif’s not bothered about that. He’s upset because I’ve taken too long.
My first job as Adam Jensen – after the game’s introductory mission blew off my arms, legs, and ability to talk like anyone other than Batman – was to interject in a hostage situation. The victims are Sarif Industries employees, like me, and they’ve been taken by a group of anti-augmentation terrorists. The mission’s sold as time sensitive. But I’ve heard that schtick before from other games. I can leave the mission hanging, leave my helicopter pilot dawdling, and leave the hostages unrescued for as long as I like while I break into offices and read the juicy gossip secreted on the computers inside. Surely? Sarif’s call says otherwise. The extra time I took made the hostage takers antsy, and they’ve gassed their charges. That’s eight of my co-workers’ deaths on my robo-hands, all because I was too busy snooping through their emails and climbing through vents to come and shoot their captors. This wasn’t meant to happen. I’ve already spoken to others about their hostage rescuing escapades. I swear Graham never mentioned they were dead. I’d remember something like that. I offer a moment of silent sadness to the hostages’ pretend memory, and get back to hacking the door. What’s another twenty minutes of wandering around? It’s not like the hostages are getting any more dead.  So that's why he needs the sunglasses. There’s the vestiges of a sidequest in this earliest part of the game. Someone is pilfering Neuropozene, the medical goo that augmented types need to keep on hand to ensure their mechanical parts aren’t rejected by their weak human body. I was convinced the mystery would be solvable before I packed myself off on my first mission proper, and my poking and hacking uncovered a stash of items and an incriminating note in one of the office’s ventilation shafts. But there the trail ended: my hacking ability was too low to allow access to a critical office cubicle, and I was saving my Praxis points. I packed up and headed out, after rifling through one final desk for gossip fuel. Sarif gave me the same choice in weaponry as both Tom and Graham, but I plotted a different course. Like Graham, I wanted to play non-lethal, but I was keen to try two distinct methods: talking, and hiding. The sniper-style tranquiliser rifle would be unwieldy in exactly the kind of tight spot I planned to find myself in, so I went for the stun gun instead. It’s a beautiful bit of near-future design: black and yellow plastic that fires a glob of taser-like electricity and folds up to look like a particularly naff mobile phone. Not that I had much cause to use it. I’ve seen Human Revolution’s stealth in action before, but this was my first chance to try it in person. I was half way through the facility before I was even heard, three quarters before I was seen, the game’s Rainbow 6: Vegas-esque cover system feeling consistently reliable. I halted at the facility’s final open-plan office, watching the terrorists’ patrol routes for a few minutes. My back to solid cover, I inched down the stairs. Human Revolution is surprisingly generous with its cover: chances are, if it’s got a vertical surface, Adam can duck behind it. I’d been holding onto my Praxis points, unwilling to spend them without genuine reason. At the foot of the stairs, I found one. I plugged my initial allotment into a stealth ‘helper’ aug, part of a suite of abilities designed to assist the sneaky player in their invisible travels. Now, when I moved, my minimap glowed with a circumference of sound: the noise my clunky footsteps were putting out as I bounded around the level. Perfect for me. Sneaking games get me so overwhelmingly paranoid that I spend levels in a perma-crouch, waddling in silence even with no terrorists nearby to hear my shuffles. Now I had a quantifiable value to measure my stance against. I could stay out of sight all I liked, but if those waves of sound lapped against an enemy’s eardrums, it’d flip them into an alert state.  I've read all her emails. The area in front of me was rich with terrorists, their vision cones leaving few corners of the room unswept. Spying a door off to the side, I planned an exit, before rolling deftly into cover with the space bar. I opened the door in a crouch, and came face to ass with another terrorist. Panicking, I hammered the left mouse button, bringing up my most recently selected weapon. A good few thousand volts flicked from the muzzle of the stun gun into my opponent’s unlucky buttocks, and he crumpled to the floor with a sad little moan. Moving quickly, I slammed the door shut behind me, rifled through the unconscious body’s pockets, and grabbed his leg. Considering this excursion wasn’t planned, it was going better than expected. Until his friend walked in. He spotted me crouching over his workmate, who was slumped on his back, arms wide, one leg cradled softly in the augmented arms of a strange man. It looked worse than it was. I immediately dropped the unconscious man’s leg, and raised my stun gun, firing another blurt of electricity. My rude interrupter collapsed too, but not before yelping a warning to the men outside. Sprinting over to his body, I grabbed him by the arm and pulled him into the same dark corner I’d been trying to stash his colleague. Hiding bodies has a practical application, as well as letting you put one man’s hand on another’s crotch: should a conscious foe stumble on a sleeping one, he’ll shake him awake and raise the area’s suspicion level. The sleeping terrorist’s warning was more useful than expected: the region’s bad-men were all drawn to the same point, and while they fussed over their spooning friends, I was able to slip through to level’s final confrontation with Zeke and his lady hostage. After my fairly successful infiltration, I was comfortable with my current level of sneaking ability. I resolved to jam my next Praxis points into the speech centre of my brain, and upgrade Adam’s social augs. With that in mind, I tried to talk Zeke down from the edge. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | S2 Games are launching a free-to-play period to celebrate Heroes of Newerth’s first birthday. This will let players enjoy the game for nothing for the next week-and-a-bit. The DOTA-style multiplayer game has enjoyed plenty of success over the last twelve months, and now has more than 50,000 players a day. With dozens of unique heroes, and more being added all the time, it’s unlikely you’ll be able to see everything Heroes of Newerth has to offer in a few days, but for the magnificent price of nothing, it’s certainly worth a look.
You can sign up for a free Hereos of Newerth account now on the Heroes of Newerth site. The account will remain active until the free trial’s closing date on Sunday May 22. The launch of the free trial coincides with an update that revamps the item shop and adds tooltips to help new players get into the game. A new hero guides feature has been added as well, creating strategy guides created and voted for by players. You’ll find full details in the latest Heroes of Newerth newsletter, and much more on the official Heroes of Newerth site. For an overview of some of the most recent additions to the enormous hero roster, check out our Heroes of Newerth news feed. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Brink was due to get a UK release on Steam today, but its product page has mysteriously disappeared from the store. Users who try and access the game’s official Steam page are informed that “This item is currently unavailable in your region.” Search for “Brink” and you get by the past few trailers but no download page. According to posts on the Steam forums, most players who activated their copies soon after the 1am release this morning have been able to play. Lots of UK users, including those who pre-loaded or bought a retail copy, can’t boot it up either. We’ve contacted Splash Damage and Bethesda for comment and will update as soon as we get some information. Lucky US gamers have been shooting each other up since Tuesday. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Co-creator of The Office, Stephen Merchant, has been talking to MTV about his role as Wheatley in Portal 2. Merchat said that the role was one of the most exhausting he’s ever done, but would be interested in coming back for a sequel after seeing fans’ reactions to the game.
Merchant described his surprise at fans reactions to his performance to MTV, saying “when I started to mention to people who know about such things, ‘I’m doing this game, Portal 2,’ they got very excited, suddenly. More excited than anything I’ve ever done before, weirdly. “Gamers are incredibly enthusiastic about the stuff they love. Suddenly I realized, this is quite a big deal and what I thought was an easy gig, I suddenly felt this responsibility to try and do a good job.” Merchant says that the recording sessions for Portal 2 were more active than anything he’ done previously. “I found the entire thing really exhausting. More than anything I’ve ever done before because I’m in this little recording booth, shouting down these imaginary corridors, imaginary gantries, pretending to fall off things and really trying to move around and live it as best I could. “I know it sounds really pretentious, but really try to move around like this robot so my voice would feel like it was animated. I was really working hard to try and put myself in that environment, I guess, which is not something I normally do as a performer.” 
While the Office and Extras star has never played Portal, he says that Valve were able to quickly get him up to speed with a series of clips from the game. While the high energy nature of the recording sessions initially put him off ever doing a similar project again, he was turned around by fans’ enthusiasm after the game’s release. “What I was really pleased by how people seemed to respond to it in the way they do with a movie they’ve enjoyed, or a TV show they’ve enjoyed. They seemed to respond to it as entertainment. “It never occurred to me that people would respond to it in the way they do with other stuff I’ve done. I felt like, ‘Oh, actually this is a really legitimate, creative art form now.’” Finally, Merchant admits he knows nothing of any future plans for Wheatley or the Portal series, but would consider reprising his role. “I’m a robot,” he says, “I don’t need to die. They could bring me back anyway if they wanted. Make it a prequel!” | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | The Deus Ex site and Eidos.com were defaced and taken down yesterday when a splinter group of the hacker organisation Anonymous broke through Square Enix security to steal the personal data of more than 80,000 registered users. According to IRC chat logs of the hackers’ conversations unearthed by Krebs On Security, they plan to release the information on file sharing networks, and are recorded discussing whether to release the “src” as well. It’s unclear whether they mean the website source code, or that of one of Eidos’ games.
 Visitors to DeusEx.com logging on to the site yesterday will have seen the above message, left by the hackers after the attack. According to the hackers’ IRC chat logs, the names credited with the hack belong to a series of Anonymous members disliked by the real culprits, evo and @n. It’s unclear whether the attack had a real purpose, but the outcome could have been worse than data theft, as his excerpt from the hacker chat suggests. Krebs On Security have the rest of the chat log here. [16:07] evo: one thing that would be funny
[16:07] evo: i write a nasty virus
[16:07] evo: that will bsod on startup
[16:07] evo: fuck up all your drivers
[16:07] evo: delete tons of files
[16:07] evo: forkbom on start
[16:07] evo: etc
[16:08] evo: we put that in an exploit kit
[16:08] evo: on the main page
[16:08] evo: there security will be responsible
[16:08] evo: for like
[16:08] evo: thousands of fucked up computers
[16:08] evo: and it would make the news Square Enix hasn’t yet commented on the hack, which also saw 9,000 resumes stolen. The affected sites are now back up. If you are a registered user at Eidos.com or Deus Ex, it might be a good idea to change your passwords. Anonymous have also been implicated by Sony in the recent attack on the Sony Online Entertainment and Playstation networks. The hacking group denied responsibility, but has suffered from infighting in the past few weeks. Anonymous veterans have told The Financial Times that it’s likely that the attacks were committed by rogue members of the organisation. "If you say you are Anonymous, and do something as Anonymous, then Anonymous did it," one member told the FT, "Just because the rest of Anonymous might not agree with it, doesn't mean Anonymous didn't do it." The attack is another blow to Square Enix, who recently amended their financial reports in the aftermath of the Japan earthquake to reflect the “extraordinary loss” the company has suffered. The company made a loss of $148 million/£90.6 million in the last year, with sales down 35%. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | This is a plea to game developers around the globe. We understand you want to put some boss fights in your game. They can be a lot of fun, those epic battles with the most ferocious of foes. But there are some things we’d like you to consider – some things that could help you create a boss fight that’ll leave us in awe, rather than banging our heads against the monitor in frustration. So here, dear developer, is a list of boss fight dos and don’ts. Ignore them at your peril.
Don’t feel you have to have one Boss fights might be the traditional way to up the challenge at the end of a level, chapter or game, but since the early days of gaming we’ve come up with a whole host of other ways to keep things interesting and varied. Boss fights can be invigorating, but only in the right context – if your game doesn’t need one, dear developers, don’t put one in.  This is how the most intellectual action game in the world finishes. Sigh. Worst offender: BioShock
After the intricacy of BioShock’s story, the precision of its design and the creativity of its combat, why on Earth did Irrational feel it necessary to include an utterly incongruous boss fight at the end? Your confrontation with Rapture leader Andrew Ryan, and the subsequent escape, were wonderful moments, their quiet understatement elevating them above other games’ attempts to do something similar. And then it ends with a giant bad guy with glowing eyes and ludicrous powers. A fine example of when to not bother at all. Do make the boss huge Of course, there are exceptions. There have been a great many boss fights against enemies who are all wee and tiny. But as a rule… huge bosses are cool, right? They’re a visual spectacle, something intimidating – something to get your adrenaline pumping.  OHAI! Star pupil: Gunman Chronicles
Half-Life-powered indie game Gunman Chronicles, released back in 2000, was famous for its enormous bosses. From huge dinosaurs to massive alien beings, it was a game that fully embraced the idea that bigger really is better. Few other games have rendered quite such spectacular bosses, even with today’s new-fangled graphics engines. Don’t make it an awful difficulty spike Boss fights are supposed to be challenging. That’s the point of having them in your game in the first place. We get that. But what we don’t get is why, developers, you so frequently opt to make them quite so ludicrously difficult. Managing a game’s difficulty is certainly no easy task, but when your boss requires ten, 20, even 30 attempts to beat, the chances are you’ve got the balance wrong.  I never did like gardening. Worst offender: Batman: Arkham Asylum
Some of Arkham Asylum’s boss battles are admittedly brilliant, but there’s one that stands out for all the wrong reasons. Your fight with Poison Ivy is an absolute nightmare. Organic spikes stab you every which way, while Ivy fires upon you while you’re pre-occupied with avoiding the environmental dangers. Also, there’s nowhere to take cover. Also, you have to “beat” her a bunch of times in a row before she finally pops it. Come on, Rocksteady. Your game is great! You don’t need to cheat like that. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | I often get emails asking for advice on upgrades, most of which I try to answer as quickly as I can, but one that came through the other day struck me with a problem that I imagine is more common than you’d think. The writer wanted to know what the best graphics card would be for his motherboard, and proceeded to list all the bits and bobs inside his PC. Some of them were nearly ten years old. Two things were immediately obvious from his mail. Firstly, that a graphics upgrade alone wasn’t going to get Crysis 2 running at full speed. Secondly, that he’d obviously made a mistake identifying his components. According to the email he was running an Athlon FX chip from the middle of the last decade with a Pentium 4 motherboard circa 2001. Since he also reckoned he was using two GeForce graphics cards in SLI configuration, I surmise that the writer is probably right about the chip, wrong about the mobo (since that predates SLI technology). Or that it was someone deliberately being silly and trying to catch me out. The serious question the story raises, though, is how do you know what motherboard is inside your machine, and what its compatible with when you come to upgrade? The easiest way is through Windows’ own System Information tool. You can call this up by typing its name into the search bar of the Start menu, and it should come up with a screen that looks something like this. The highlighted lines are the motherboard manufacturer, the model number and the current BIOS and revision number. 
Unfortunately, this isn’t a foolproof piece of software. If you can’t get any useful information from it, you’ll have to open up the side of your case and have a look at the motherboard itself. If you’re lucky, the manufacturer name and product code will be clearly visible – as in the image at the top of this post – and you can go along to their site and look for a manual online. This branding could be anywhere, but the most common places are by the CPU socket, near the expansion slots or along one of the edges. If there’s no obvious stamp, however, there’ll be other identifying marks.  One of them should be its FCC ID code. This is the serial number assigned to components when they pass through testing at the Federal Communications Commission in the US. This should be printed onto the PCB itself or a white sticker that looks like the one above. You can check it at the updated FCC Site here. Turns out the component pictured is a WiFi adaptor from an old , abandoned motherboard. Who knew?
If there’s no FCC label, you could start your component sleuthing by trying to figure out the manufacturer using its factory code. This is a six character code beginning with a D which usually appears next to a symbol that looks like a circle with an arrow pointing through it. Gigabyte, for example, is D33006. The hard drive below is from Kingston. I can’t find an up to date list in English, so you could try translating this page or just Googling the code and seeing which name comes up most often. Armed with the manufacturer name, the BIOS code and version which appear when you first boot the machine (and in System Properties) should give you an exact match. 
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | New Diablo 3 footage shows Followers, companions that can be recruited to support your character in battle. There are three classes, the Enchantress (magi-blaster), The Scoundrel (dashing arrow-shooter) and the Templar (wide man, big hammer). The video shows that Followers cam be leveled up and equipped with different weapons, rings and amulets. As an added bonus, we get our first look at the male Demon Hunter at about a minute in. The recent Activision Blizzard earnings call revealed that there will be a Diablo 3 beta later this year. There’s still no firm release date. Check out the Diablo 3 site for more. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | The upcoming action RPG from 38 Studios (and the team formerly known as Big Huge Games) made an appearance at this year’s GDC and PAX East, and now the developer-guided tour has been posted online. The video focuses mostly on fighting, which is best described as a flashy union of Fable and Mortal Kombat. The UI is very console-oriented in this video, but we’re told that the PC version will be getting special treatment and attention. 38 Studios founder (and former Boston Red Sox pitcher star) Curt Schilling is a die-hard PC gamer, and only a fool would give the boss a sloppy version. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | So you've got a sweet 5.1 surround sound speaker setup and an awesome gaming library to support it—but if you're running those speakers via your motherboard's onboard audio, you may as well be using $20 speakers from your local drugstore. What you need is a dedicated soundcard, and Creative—the pioneer of soundcards for PC gaming—has released its newest flagship warbler: the Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium HD. Creative rebuilt the X-Fi Titanium HD from the ground up for Windows 7, ditching support for some legacy audio architectures. While this does create an easier to use experience (i.e. switching playback devices mid-gameplay), it means that any Windows XP users out there will not be able to use this card. That said—it's worth the upgrade. Creative has pulled out all the stops and turned the X-Fi Titanium HD into an audiophile's dream card—dedicated headphone amps, a durable EM shield, and swappable op-amps (small amplifiers designed to enhance analog signals). Changing these amps will alter the overall tone of all sounds produced, depending on personal preference. Installing the card is as easy as plugging it into a PCI-E port, screwing in the top bracket, closing the case, and running the drivers. There's also a suite of included software. Some of that software is essential, such as Creative's gaming audio and recording tools, and some of it is unfortunate, such as trials of bloatware media players. The card offers standard 3.5mm headphone and microphone jacks, Toslink (optical sound cable) input and output, and even gold-plated RCA line inputs for analog recording. Plus, the card supports Dolby Digital, DTS, and Creative's own EAX 5.0 standards. Notably missing is Dolby TrueHD support, and 3.5mm jacks (the orange and black plugs) for older surround sound systems, but provided you've purchased yours in the past five years, this shouldn't be an issue.  Playing Mass Effect 2 with the Titanium HD lets you savor every last explosion, laser, and dispute about Salarian ethics. OK, so it's a technically impressive card, but tech only goes so far: what really matters is the quality of the sound—and the X-Fi Titanium HD will kick you in the ears with awesomeness. Hook this baby into an optical A/V receiver and the deep rumbling bass of a tank rolling by in Company of Heroes or the piercing squeal of an F1 engine kicking into high gear in F1 2010 are pitch-perfect. Positional audio is processed so well that I could have played Left 4 Dead 2 with a blindfold on, and headshotting zombies would still have been a breeze. The huge, acrylic EM shield on the X-Fi Titanium HD keeps internal PC interference away, and makes static noise levels whisper-quiet—a huge difference in atmospheric games like Dead Space 2, where even a tiny static buzz can kill the immersion. Also flawless are the inputs, with voice communication that transmits crystal clear, as opposed to the distortion and robotic recording you can expect from onboard audio. Of course, if you do want to sound like a robot, Creative included its VoiceFX and Silence microphone features, allowing you to knock out background noise, or transform your voice into elves and ogres, with surprisingly pleasant results. With this card's release, Creative is once again the undisputed king of gaming audio. If you're looking to upgrade from an existing soundcard, or onboard audio, the X-Fi Titanium HD will make your speakers sing with joyous explosions and gunshots for years to come. $180, www.creative.com | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | If you like World of Warcraft, or colourful boxes and are European then you should definitely check out out big World of Warcraft giveaway. If that doesn’t take your fancy, check out Graham’s attempts to pull off the perfect crime as stealthily as possible in his Deus Ex: Human Revolution diary, or take a trip around the world of Guild Wars 2 in the latest trailer. We have a bumper crop of news-o-links today, featuring A Game of Thrones, Dirt 3, Mortal Kombat, Planescape Torment 2 speculation, Brink, Assassin’s Creed Revelations and loads more. Enjoy!
- Still Alive is quite lovely when it’s played really, really slowly.
- Mortal Kombat kollection is koming, I mean, coming.
- A Game of Thrones – Genesis website is now live.
- Here’s a new Dirt 3 trailer.
- Obsidian contemplate the pros and cons of making Planescape Torment 2.
- Brink updates detailed.
- Section 8 Prejudice Assault mode is unlocked.
- More Assassin's Creed Revelations info emerges. Will feature revelations, killing.
- More Hitman Absolution details emerge. It’s going to have a Hollywood cast.
- Lineage is dead, in the west.
- Battle.Net has the patch notes for the latest World of Warcraft hotfixes.
- Gas Powered Games CEO Chris Taylor thinks that the free to play model is the way forwards.
- 95% of The Witcher 2 available to preload.
Here’s a question. Does anybody out there listen to gaming soundtracks outside of games? If so, which are your favourites? | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Capcom senior vice president Christian Svensson has been writing on his blog about the Capcom’s increasing focus on PC gaming. As well as teaching companies about new business models, he argues that PC development can teach a company about the global market, saying that in a technological and business sense, PC gaming “is always at the bleeding edge.”
Svensson says that he is one of a number of people in Capcom trying to promote a greater focus on PC gaming within the company “When I entered Capcom nearly six years ago, I viewed PC as extremely important for the company, not just to grow a new audience for our brands, but because of what the PC market teaches a company. “The PC helps teach a company how to be a global and how to embrace emerging markets and business models. As we continue to expand our businesses in Russia, China, Korea and Brazil, the PC becomes increasingly important as it is the primary platform in those territories. “Our core technology for all of our platforms has been informed by and pushed by the PC, which is always at the bleeding edge.” Svensson also mentions that Capcom have more upcoming PC games than ever before, adding that “our Japanese COO and the head of the consumer and online software business increasingly request a PC version if one is not being proposed at the outset of a project.” Upcoming Capcom projects include Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City, Dead Rising 2: Off the Record and the recently announced Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition. “The future is getting better for Capcom fans who are PC gamers all over the world,” says Svensson. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | To celebrate the release of the Worldbreaker expansion pack and the Assault on Icecrown boxed set for the World of Warcraft Trading Card Game, we’ve got a crate-load of World of Warcraft loot to give away to our European readers, with first, second and third prizes up for grabs. First prize includes – deep breath – the now-rare World of Warcraft: Cataclysm Collector’s Edition boxed set, a super-rare Mottled Drake loot card that unlocks an in-game flying mount, the Assault on Icecrown boxed set, the World of Warcraft Trading Card Game Worldbreaker Epic Collection, a World of Warcraft Trading Card Game booster pack, the Wrath of the Lich King soundtrack, enormous Horde and Alliance flags and an inflatable Frostmourne sword, as seen modeled by the PC Gamer UK team here. PHEW. We really have to give them away as soon as possible, because we keep falling over them. If you live in Europe, read on for details on how to win.
Here’s the complete roundup of all the prizes, sent over by Cryptozoic Entertainment. So. Much. WoW. 
First prize - World of Warcraft: Cataclysm Collector’s Edition
- Horde and Alliance flags
- Assault on Icecrown Citadel boxed set
- Super rare Mottled Drake loot card that unlocks the Mottled Drake flying mount in the game.
- World of Warcraft Trading Card Game World Breaker Epic Collection
- World of Warcraft Trading Card game booster pack
- Inflatable Frostmourne sword
- Wrath of the Lich King soundtrack
- World of Warcraft stickers
Second prize - Assault on Icecrown Citadel boxed set
- World of Warcraft Trading Card Game World Breaker Epic Collection
- World of Warcraft Trading Card game booster pack
- Landro’s Lil’ XT card that unlocks Landro”s Lil’ XT non-combat companion in the game
- Inflatable Frostmourne sword
- Wrath of the Lich King soundtrack
- World of Warcraft stickers
Third prize - Landro’s Lil’ XT card that unlocks Landro”s Lil’ XT non-combat companion in the game
- Inflatable Frostmourne sword
- World of Warcraft Trading Card game booster pack
- Wrath of the Lich King soundtrack
- World of Warcraft stickers
All you have to do to win is live in Europe and post an answer to the following challenge in the comments below: The next World of Warcraft expansion will probably add a new continent. Ideally, we’d like a PC Gamer continent all to ourselves. Come up with a funny name for such a continent, and briefly describe its greatest landmark. The three most chucklesome entries will take the prizes. Good luck! | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland has spent the past 150 years casually batting aside just about every attempt to reshape its capricious, meandering story into a logical narrative. Tim Burton gave it a crack last year with Alice in Wonderland, tossing 19-year-old Alice back into the phantasmagorical fantasies of her childhood to ditch the hoop skirts, confront the Red Queen, and transition to spirited, headstrong womanhood while name-checking Carroll's cast along the way. The result was charmless and distasteful. So what a coup it might have been if EA had re-released American McGee's Alice at the same time, and showed how a young PC game developer had taken a suspiciously similar approach ten years earlier—and made it work. McGee's Alice, now in her late teens, had been traumatized by the loss of her family in an accidental fire and spent a decade cozily detached from reality in Rutledge Asylum until the White Rabbit beckons again. But the Wonderland he leads her back to has become a far more grisly scene than the last time she visited. Armed at first only with her Vorpal Blade and native haughtiness, she makes her way through the game's nine distinct provinces, at once retracing steps from her previous adventures and at the same time, slowly and painfully coming to grips with the unacceptable reality that lay outside of Wonderland.
 TKTKTKTK The Blight Rabbit Like the innumerable adaptations we've seen over the years, American McGee's Alice whisks us through encounters with the Mock Turtle, the pepper-wielding Duchess, the Caterpillar, the Tweedle bros., the Mad Hatter, the Jabberwock and, of course, the wicked Red Queen herself—in all of her manifestations. As such, it doesn't sound much different than what Burton did last year—except that once McGee introduces us to his oppressive Wonderland, he supplies us with a few neat tricks (like using our skirt to float over gaps) and with a gentle pat on the butt, sets us free to explore and discover the world on our own. And, what a world. Columns of rotating clockwork gears. Bombardier ladybugs. Creaky automatons. A chessboard realm in which Alice herself must become a chess piece—subject to chess rules—in order to pass. Acres of foliage in which smartly waistcoated grasshoppers lie in wait to toss Alice unceremoniously into a nearby river. With its heavily stylized environments drenched in hypnotic, vibrant, swirling colors, American McGee's Alice has the distinction of being one of the few games to boast extremely high production values that, a decade later, still look as impressive today as they did then. These include its beautifully detailed animations—step away from the keyboard and let Alice get bored while she's holding any of her weapons and see what she gets up to. But as lovely as the graphics were—and still are—Chris Vrenna's soundtrack contributes at least as much to the game's rich, intensely evocative ambiance. It's breezy and whimsical as the original novel itself at times, but later, it's as if a maniac is loose in our memories knocking over everything in his path: music boxes, bells, ticking clocks, burbling teapots, crazy Aunt Edna's glockenspiel. There are often no clear demarcations between Vrenna's compositions and the groan of twisting wood or children shrieking madly in their cells in the background—they're woven into a smooth, menacing tapestry of sound.  Within every playing card is a couple gallons of blood. Riding the Blunderbuss Despite McGee's pedigree in seminal shooters such as Doom and Quake, the enjoyment of combat in Alice comes more from whimsy than tactics: once you've pegged a creature's or boss's patterns—which you'll do very quickly—it is from there more a matter of deciding whether to soften them up with the Croquet Mallet and then clean up with your Ice Wand, or follow a volley from the Blunderbuss with a hailstorm of Cards from a comfy distance. Victory tops up Alice's health, or meta-essence to power her weapons, or both, and along her way she'll pick up a few clever power-ups, including one that transforms her from a polite young lassie with a knack for blade handling into a hellish bug-like demon that deals mega damage with no manners. But while combat isn't at the heart of what makes American McGee's Alice such an exemplary, timeless game, Alice's confrontation with the Red Queen delivers a strong emotional climax to the experience. Surely GLaDOS took a few cues from this homicidal harpy: confronted by a young woman whose adventures have emboldened her, the Queen first hisses warnings, then humiliations, then accusations, and finally outright threats. But her most telling epithet is this: "I rule Wonderland alone." And here the game delivers the hefty payoff that, for example, Burton's movie couldn't. Because Alice's struggle has been literally our own struggle throughout the entire game, so naturally our response to the Red Queen, even when she warns that her destruction will be our own, is to whip out the Jabberwock staff and take the bitch out.  This stage would be right at home as a Quake map. What's in a Name Whether Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was a whimsical daydream committed to paper, a feisty professor's rebellion against the rigidity of mathematics, or a chaste love letter to a young Alice Liddell, American McGee's Alice is not an adaptation of that beloved novel. It is its own game, and I doubt it was hubris that led American McGee to put his name right there in the title. Instead, it's an acknowledgment; McGee took somebody else's characters and scenarios that were so familiar to us, and like all talented creative people, he cannily transformed them into something new, fresh, and even contemporary. And then he turned his richly imagined world over to gamers so that we could do in it what we do best: play. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Imagine piling your family into the station wagon and taking them to see the magnificent Grand Canyon, only to find that there's no actual canyon there anymore, just a few rocks and a small kiosk manned by an elderly gentleman reading a paperback book. You ask him where the Grand Canyon is, and he squints at you and replies, "the what?" That's what it's been like for fans of American McGee's Alice, originally released to effusive praise in 2000. We played it, we dug it, we lent it to our friends, and we never saw our discs again. But unlike other classics from the era, Alice never showed up in digital stores or GOG.com. Even used copies start at around $50 on eBay. "Why, EA?" we lamented, "why won't you re-release this beloved PC classic?" And EA not only heard our lamentations, but went above and beyond by including the original American McGee's Alice with Alice: Madness Returns in a bundle called Alice: Madness Returns – The Complete Collection, available exclusively through EA Store. So, let's recap: If you purchase Alice: Madness Returns – The Complete Collection for $49.99 through EA's North American online store (otherwise known as "fifty dollars") you get American McGee's Alice as well, and we really must insist that you play that game first. It holds up spectacularly well today, and should be experienced before taking accompanying the haughty and prim heroine – who's nonetheless got a real knack for edge weapons – on her return sortie to crazyland. And if you’ve played it before, well, feel free to go ahead and play it again: the resolution of American McGee’s Alice now tops out at a comely 1920×1200 (as opposed to 1600×1200 in the original). PC Gamer says, better late than never, and better free than ever. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Imagine piling your family into the station wagon and taking them to see the magnificent Grand Canyon, only to find that there's no actual canyon there anymore, just a few rocks and a small kiosk manned by an elderly gentleman reading a paperback book. You ask him where the Grand Canyon is, and he squints at you and replies, "the what?" That's what it's been like for fans of American McGee's Alice, originally released to effusive praise in 2000. We played it, we dug it, we lent it to our friends, and we never saw our discs again. But unlike other classics from the era, Alice never showed up in digital stores or GOG.com. Even used copies start at around $50 on eBay. "Why, EA?" we lamented, "why won't you re-release this beloved PC classic?" And EA not only heard our lamentations, but went above and beyond by including the original American McGee's Alice with Alice: Madness Returns in a bundle called Alice: Madness Returns – The Complete Collection, available exclusively through EA Store in North America. So, let's recap: If you purchase Alice: Madness Returns – The Complete Collection for $49.99 through EA's North American online store (otherwise known as "fifty dollars") you get American McGee's Alice as well, and we really must insist that you play that game first. It holds up spectacularly well today, and should be experienced before taking accompanying the haughty and prim heroine – who's nonetheless got a real knack for edge weapons – on her return sortie to crazyland. And if you’ve played it before, well, feel free to go ahead and play it again: the resolution of American McGee’s Alice now tops out at a comely 1920×1200 (as opposed to 1600×1200 in the original). PC Gamer says, better late than never, and better free than ever. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Red Orchestra, made by the team which became Tripwire Interactive, is one of the most successful mods of all time. As of two years ago, the commercial adaptation had sold over 400,000 copies, spurred on by Steam's support and by the Make Something Unreal contest. You can read more about the game's development in a feature called Modded Warfare in the latest issue of PC Gamer UK; but what lessons can indie developers and modders draw from the team's success?
Modding teams benefit from being BIG At its height, the Red Orchestra modding team consisted of 60 people. "We had great animators, researchers, programmers, designers… but then every team has guys who only show up in the IRC channel… there were probably 20 full time producers, 20 who would do something cool occasionally, and 10 or 15 who were worthless" says John Gibson, the lead programmer. However, this huge talent base meant that even when, for example, their lead map designer pulled out, taking his maps with him, they had someone else, to hand, who was willing to step up and fill the gap. Not everyone was professional and, as Alan Wilson, the lead historical researcher and now Vice-President at Tripwire says, "1 or 2 were worse than worthless"; but because of this depth, development never stopped.  The original mod was low on polygons, high on quality. Don't get complacent or cocky If everything's going well and the game is getting a good reception – don't be rest on your laurels. Having won all the early rounds of the Make Something Unreal tournament, "we got cocky", says John "we saw ourselves as the juggernaut that was going to destroy all comers." As they got complacent, the other mods started to catch up, and a few, like the mod that later became the game Damnation, became real challengers. "There was this moment where I thought we were going to lose" says John, "so I got everyone to make a list of the top ten things that another mod will have that could cause us to lose. I then took this top ten things of the hundred I got and said ‘We're going to be this mod; we're going to make these ten things and put them in our game. And we did." ALWAYS stay friendly with Valve Before Steam came along, dealing with mainstream publishers was a nightmare; ""they’d offer crap deals, terrible percentages, and remove anything unique whilst taking the intellectual property for themselves." The Tripwire boys, fresh from winning Make Something Unreal, couldn't find a contract they would sign. Then they saw Valve’s new Steam platform. John contacted Doug Lombardi (Valve’s marketing and PR director) and he responded; he knew about Red Orchestra and wanted to talk, giving them a very good deal. That was the turning point. Red Orchestra was the second or third non-Valve game on Steam. Since then, Tripwire have continued to work with Valve and say "We'll always be Steam fanboys. " The friendliness, the help and the amazingly reasonable percentages – all mean it pays to stay friendly with Valve.  Tripwire are good buddies with Steam
Keep adding content If you're going to digitally distribute a game, especially through Steam, you have to keep giving content away for free; it drives long-term sales. "We just got into this role of releasing free content." says John "We were learning how to make digital distribution work; a lot of people think of it like a Walmart shelf but it's always a work in progress. You've got the opportunity to keep upgrading things." The repeated sales generated by three years of updates, in which they doubled the in-game content, gave Tripwire the cash to keep going and at the end of 2006 they were able to start work on Red Orchestra 2.
Helping your own games' modding communities is a similarly good way of generating new content; Tripwire helped Alex Quick port his mod Killing Floor to Red Orchestra and got him a full steam release. They have also released other Red Orchestra mods, such as Mare Nostrum, as free Steam add-ons. A million dollars is never a million dollars. Always, always read the small print. The Make Something Unreal contest was an advertised as having a "million dollar prize" – but this prize fund was in fact for the whole contest and hence was split between several different elements, including the smaller prizes the contest winners had taken, marketing, and so on. As Alan remembers it, "The infamous million dollars. I got hate mail after we won "the million dollars". We turned around and tried to make a retail game, as the million dollars included engine licenses for unreal 2.5 and 3.0, which are worth a huge amount. When all was said and done, we had about $30,000 and some engine licenses." | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | The next major Civilization V patch will add a hotseat multiplayer option that will let multiple players take their turns on one PC. Community manager 2K Greg has posted on the 2K forums with news of the patch, which is set to arrive “June or possibly early July.” We can probably expect more bug fixes and balance changes from the next update, too. “This patch will contain far more than just Hotseat,” writes Greg, “the other details of the patch will be revealed in the future.” For more on Civ 5, check out the official Civilization site. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Deus Ex: Human Revolution starts, as you'll know if you read Tom's diary yesterday, with a mission to stop terrorists from stealing a prototype from one of Sarif Industries’ labs. The difference is that where Tom decided to play as a psychopath – “play as” – I'm making my way through the game as a stealthy, non-lethal hacker. I sneak by enemies, and if I can't sneak, I snipe them with my tranquiliser gun, and if I can't snipe, I punch them so hard they go to bed. I'm basically roleplaying Batman.
Being Batman is hard. He makes it look easy because he's Batman, I guess, but this is too early in the game to upgrade any of Adam Jensen’s augmentations. At this point, I’m just a regular guy with robot arms, robot bones and sunglasses embedded in my forehead. I compensate by crouch-waddling wherever I go, but every terrorist I meet spots me eventually. I've been shot at by almost every person in the building, through warehouses and stairwells and laboratories. I'm not so much stealthy, non-lethal hacker as a cowardly, non-lethal guy who runs away a lot. With sunglasses embedded in my forehead. Which is how I find myself up in the rafters above one of the science labs, looking down at four patrolling terrorists. There's not much to hack this early on, but there are man-sized vents everywhere, and one has led me to the perfect spot to pick people off with the tranq gun. I target one, fire, and a second later he flops to the ground. The perfect crime. Until his friend sees. Uh oh. He screams, “I've got a man down!” and runs over to wake him up. All the other terrorists in the room turn alert; they're not hostile yet, because they haven't seen me, but they're looking now. I target the now crouching samaritan terrorist, fire, and after a second he flops over the slumbering body of his friend. The perfect crime. Until their friend sees. Uh oh. The process repeats twice more and by the time I'm done, the corner of the room is a tidy pile of sleeping men, snuggled together like bear cubs. It's a good thing terrorists can't look up. The other end of the beam I'm crouched upon leads back into another vent, which winds down into the room where the hostages are being held. I rescue the shit out of them, resist the urge to non-lethally punch them for fun, and slip back out via the vent. The perfect crime.  This is exactly the kind of thing I didn't do. Partway through the first mission, I get my first Praxis point. This is the point where I make a real decision about how I want to play the game. First, a confession might be useful: I’ve never really played the original Deus Ex. I missed it when it first came out, and although I've since tried – again and again – I've never reached beyond its opening mission. It’s partly how the game has aged, partly having every other game in the world to play, but really there's not a good reason for it. I've just never made the time, no matter how often it appears at the top or near the top of the PC Gamer Top 100.* But I've read a lot about Deus Ex, and if there's one thing I know, it's that it isn't supposed to be about simply running into rooms and shooting people. I put my first Praxis point into hacking, so I can find more thoughtful ways to destroy my enemies. It immediately comes in handy. At this point in Tom's story, he snuck by a camera, picked up a turret and threw it at the camera to destroy it. I slipped into a side room instead, hacked a computer terminal and turned off the camera from there. OK, so Tom's solution was probably cooler in this case, but the hacking is surprisingly robust. More on that later. Eventually, I reach the final room of the mission, where terrorist leader Zeke is holding the last hostage. At key points in this conversation, you're given a choice of what to say, and I try to talk him into giving himself up. It doesn't work. Zeke leaves with the hostage and I hear a number of gun shots outside. By the time I get there, Zeke is gone, escaped, and the hostage is lying dead on the ground as a SWAT medic tries to save her. It's not clear whether Zeke killed her or if she was shot in the crossfire. It gets worse. Outside the building, I meet one of the hostages I did manage to save. He's the husband of the woman now lying dead inside, and I have to tell him what happened. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | The latest Guild Wars 2 footage shows off the extraordinary city of Lion’s Arch. Guild Wars 2′s artists are responsible for some of the most spectacular concept art in the world. It looks as though ArenaNet are determined to try and bring that art to life. Keep up with the latest Guild Wars 2 news on the official Guild Wars 2 site, and our Guild Wars 2 news feed. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | VG247 have just spotted a tweet from UK member of parliament Ed Vaizey that suggests the Total War developers, Creative Assembly could be developing a new game based on the Alien films. His tweet reads: “Great visit to Creative Assembly one of UK’s best developers. Now hiring for new blockbuster based on Alien” “Based on” suggests it might not be an official alien game, but The Creative Assembly is owned by Sega, who published Rebellion’s Aliens vs. Predator reboot last year, and are behind Gearbox’s upcoming Aliens: Colonial Marines. They have the rights to the Alien franchise. This could be happening. We’ll bring you the latest details as soon as they emerge. ZOMG. Get the latest updates below.
Sega have told CVG that the new Alien title will be “a peer to Dead Space 2,” and is currently only confirmed for consoles. It would be very surprising to see the Total War developers move away from PC development, however. Sega boss Mike Hayes has told CVG that Creative Assembly have been “given the direction to win awards.” “This is very much a triple-A project,” he says, “We want this to be a peer to the likes of Dead Space 2.” Eurogamer say that The Creative Assembly are planning to grow their studio to work on the new title and confirm that development is already underway, though it won’t be ready to show at E3. According to RPS, development will be handled by the team behind console hack and slash, Viking: Battle for Asgard. The game will be based on the first Alien film, which suggests more tension and scares than the mass bug shoot of Aliens. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Late last year Valve announced the “shortest delay in Valve's proud history of delays” for Portal 2. An interview with the Portal 2 team has explained some of the reasons behind the delay, and revealed that Valve chief Gabe Newell was the biggest supporter for the eight week slip.
In an interview with Develop, Portal 2 project lead Josh Weier explained the thinking behind pushing back Portal 2, saying that the decision was “not especially controversial.” "Newell was asking about what we wanted to do with the extra time, and he said there was no data to suggest a delay was going to hurt us, and that in fact all the stuff we said we wanted to do for the game made it sound like it was going to be really good." "It wasn't like we were racing to get Portal 2 out the door before the fiscal year-end to please our stockholders,” he added, saying “our fans are our stockholders, really. “What really would have been a controversy would have been to get a game out early and it not being very fun." Portal 2 writer Erik Wolpaw said that staff welfare was an important factor in considering the delay, saying "I think the only negative approach to the whole delay thing was people asking if the team could handle another eight weeks. That was carefully examined because, of course, you do hit a bit of crunch time there." Gabe Newell said recently that Valve have moved towards shorter and shorter development cycles, in part to help protect designers from long, wearying crunch periods. Ultimately, it looks as though the Portal 2 delay paid off. We gave it 94 and an Editor’s Choice award in our Portal 2 review. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 8 Realms is a new browser-based empire building game from Runescape developers, Jagex. In it, you can build cities, train fighters and go on land-grabbing crusades, stealing enemy resources and generally wrecking up the place for fun and profit. You can get into the beta right now for free. Simply head over to the 8 Realms site, sign up for a free Jagex account and enter the word “attilathehun” into the beta key box. Once you’ve built your first farm, you can grab an exclusive PCG flag for your empire on the activity screen. Go forth and represent. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Not only have PC games never been cheaper, they've never been reduced in price so fast. That hot new release may cost you between £30 and £35 when it comes out, but you can safely expect that to drop by 15, 25 or sometimes even 75% over the next few months. Digital distribution services such as Steam and Good Old Games are constantly running sales and promotions. If you wait, you usually get the best version of the game, and often all its DLC bundled for free. What do you do with the money you save? You buy more games! Take some risks! Try more genres! Maybe there was something that caught your eye back in the day, but you didn't have £30 to gamble on actually liking turnbased strategy games, or not being put off by a score of 70%. Maybe classics such as Psychonauts or Sacrifice simply slipped your attention at release, and you just never got around to catching up. Maybe you're simply attracted by a screenshot or a funny description. For £5, it doesn't really matter whether a game is an unsung gem, or just something to pass the time on a dark, rainy evening. Of course, we've set our sights a little higher, tracking down the best games that you can buy online for under £15, £10 and £5, as well as a selection of formerly commercial games that have officially been re-released as freeware. We've avoided a few, such as Deus Ex, in the name of giving some less-recognised games a turn in the spotlight, and of course, there'll be sales on now that there weren't at the time of writing. If the game you want isn't cheap enough yet, just hold fire. With digital distribution, you'll rarely wait very long. LESS THAN £15 Torchlight
£12.99/$14.99
Steam 
While it may only be a snack compared to the banquet promised by Diablo 3, we all enjoy a Mars bar now and again. Torchlight understood like few others what makes action-RPGs fun, with satisfying combat and simple but effective tweaks to the format – such as being able to send your pet back to town to sell unwanted kit instead of wasting your time walking. The sequel arrives later this year, but the first game is still perfect popcorn entertainment. Burnout Paradise: The Ultimate Box
£14.99/$19.99
Steam 
Slam the pedal to the metal in one of the first – and still one of the most entertaining – open-world racing games. It looks good, feels good, and you won't want for speed as you race around Paradise City in search of races to win and stuff to smash into. There's even a dedicated Crash Mode to show off in, so you really can claim that you really meant to total your car, honest. Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines
£14.99/$19.99
Steam 
Only one game has earned the right to be seen as a potential successor to Deus Ex – and it's not Invisible War. Bloodlines' shooting side is piss-weak, but the RPG elements more than make up for it. Install the fan patches, though: the official version lags far behind what it can be. Monkey Island Bundle
£10.49/$14.99
Steam 
Two of the most beloved adventure games ever, updated and in one package. The Secret of Monkey Island remake was slightly underwhelming, but remains worth playing for the series' place in history. Monkey Island 2, on the other hand, was a phenomenal upgrade to a far better game, with excellent voices, great repainted artwork, and a (sadly short) in-game commentary from its original creators. Both are available individually for £7 apiece if you only need one. The episodic continuation, Tales of Monkey Island, is still £25. Bioshock 2
£13.99/$19.99
Steam 
Pity poor BioShock 2. Cursed with having to try and continue a game that most people agreed was already finished off quite nicely, thanks, then almost immediately overshadowed by BioShock Infinite, it's no wonder it sank with fewer traces than its own underwater city setting. But here's the thing: it's an excellent sequel, with some terrific storytelling and better level design than the first game. While it may look like the first game, it ends up as a complete thematic inversion, with some achingly wonderful emotional scenes. Batman: Arkham Asylum: Game of the Year Edition
£14.99/$29.99
Steam 
Hands-down the greatest superhero game ever made, turning you into the predator striking from the shadows. Bat-feel enemies' fear as you Bat-defuse situations with quick Bat-thinking. Writing by Paul Dini and the voices of Kevin Conroy and Mark Hamill are just the cherries on a dark but awesome cake. Super Meat Boy
£11.99/$14.99
Steam 
How to describe one of the best platformers in years? Think frustration. Pain. Death. Replay. Saws. Explosions. Frustration. Frustration. More Frustration. Impossible. Missiles. Hell. Slippery. Meat. Platforms. Comedy. Massacre. Replay. Frustration. Agony. Smashed controller. 8-bit. Punishment. Frustration. Jump. Explode. Jump. Luck. Fate. Precision. VICTORY! Oblivion: Game of the Year Edition
£14.99/$19.99
Steam 
Not only one of the best RPGs in recent years, but the perfect way to get ready for Skyrim. This includes the standard game, plus both expansions – the dull Knights of the Nine, and the far more interesting Shivering Isles. For another £5, you can get the Deluxe edition, which comes with all the Oblivion DLC – but don't worry too much about missing out. Amnesia: The Dark Descent
£12.99/$19.99
Steam 
Prepare to enter a world of survival horror that's as good at frightening you with silence as monsters. Amnesia is a masterpiece, turning one of gaming's most generic premises into an unforgettably scary experience. At this price, it's worth turning the lights off, your speakers up, and taking the gamble that you'll still be able to play after a few levels. Fallout Collection
£12.48/$19.99
Impulse 
All three of the original Fallout games in one pack. Fallout remains the fan-favourite, with its dark humour but serious setting. Fallout 2 eased back a little, with more overt parodies and the best city in any Fallout so far – New Reno, where you can do anything from take out trash to become a porn star. The third, Tactics, is a combat-focused spin-off that can safely be ignored. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Hot on the heels of yesterday’s batch of screenshots, a trailer has arrived for Fallout: New Vegas’ second helping of DLC, Honest Hearts. The expansion sends the player to Utah’s Zion National Park to battle shotgun wielding tribesmen, and is coming out next Tuesday. It’s the first of three expansions scheduled for the coming months. | | | | | | | | | |  | |  | |  |
