SPINTIRES – Off-Road Driving Game That Sports Unique Terrain Deformation System – Releases June 13th
IMGN.PRO and Oovee Game Studios announced today the global release date of SPINTIRES – the ultimate heavy cargo off-road experience. SPINTIRES is going to be released globally on the second Friday of June 13th. Continue reading
Unity 5 – Teleporter Demo Shows Physical-Based Shading, Full Deferred Rendering & Global Illumination
Unity has released a new video showing an internal tech demo (titled ‘Teleporter’) that helped the team develop some of the new features and workflows coming with Unity 5. This tech demo shows real-time physical based shading, full deferred rendering, image-based lighting and Global Illumination techniques. Enjoy! Continue reading
Watch_Dogs Creative Director Shares More Information About PC Specs Requirements
Jonathan Morin, Creative Director of Watch_Dogs, has revealed some additional information about the PC specs requirements for Ubisoft’s upcoming open-world title. According to Morin, dual-cores CPUs will not be able to run Watch_Dogs (so it will be interesting to see how our simulated dual-core system will behave). Continue reading
Unreal Engine 4-powered Caffeine – Demo V0.2 Released
Great news for all horror fans as Dylan Browne has released the second demo for his upcoming Unreal Engine 4-powered game, Caffeine. According to Dylan, this new demo is based on the Unreal Engine 4.1.1 base engine, and features some new areas as well as native support for resolutions up to 4K. Continue reading
FIFA World – Online Free-To-Play Soccer Title – Enters Open Beta Phase Today
Electronic Arts Inc today announced that EA SPORTS’ FIFA World, a new free-to-play game for PC, is entering a Global Open Beta now supporting nine languages. EA has also released some new screenshots for FIFA World that look pretty amazing for a F2P game. Continue reading
“X Rebirth 2.0 – Secret Service Missions” Now Available, Brings New Features & Improvements
Egosoft announced today the release of X Rebirth 2.0 – Secret Service Missions. After considerable effort and with an eye to all the feedback it has received, X Rebirth 2.0 represents a major update for a wide variety of gameplay mechanics. Continue reading
Goat Simulator – Update 1.1 To Be Released On June 3rd
Coffee Stain Studios announced that the 1.1 patch for Goat Simulator, which will add local splitscreen multiplayer, parkour mechanics, new playable goats and a whole new map, will be released on June 3rd. Continue reading
League of Legends' new audio engine is just "a few patches away" - and brings surround sound
Riot Games are switching over to a new tool for controlling the music and sound effects in League of Legends. That’ll mean marginally clearer champion barks in the near future, proper support for surround sound setups, and even slight performance improvements.
But the biggest gains will become apparent in the coming months and years, as Riot experiment with the new sorts of noises the engine allows them.
Hex devs Cryptozoic label Wizards of the Coast lawsuit "bullying" and "frivolous"
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When Magic: The Gathering types Wizards of the Coast sued Cryptozoic the other day, they didn’t mince words. In Hex, they said, Cryptozoic had produced a “nearly identical copy of Magic” - one that not only mimicked the “look and feel” of their venerable card game, but also its specific mechanics and flow.
Cryptozoic don’t see it that way. They’ve condemned the Wizards’ lawsuit as “frivolous legal action”.
“As a small company, the daunting task of defending ourselves from the bullying of a much larger corporation is difficult,” wrote the developers. “But we are committed to HEX: Shards of Fate and ultimately we will prevail.”
Tabletop Simulator's Steam Workshop brings physics to favourites like Risk and Pandemic
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One Tabletop Simulator modder has taken the minimal precaution of naming his creation ‘Risq’. But that’s about as far as copyright awareness gets in Tabletop Simulator’s budding Steam Workshop, which brings the Pokemon Trading Card Game, HeroQuest and Monopoly’s Nintendo Edition to its wobbly desk.
How Codemasters teach AI to drive
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The core of any racing game is good handling. You’re simply not going to enjoy driving a car round a track if it doesn’t behave how you expect, if a supercar is slow or a touring car has no grip. But after the handling comes the competition. How do you know you’ve mastered the ins and outs of a BMW M3 unless you can prove it by beating ten other drivers to the finish line?
That takes AI. And AI is hard.
I spoke with James Nicholls and Clive Moody to discover what it takes to teach a computer to race. And race well.
Deus Ex: The Fall devs on difficulty of porting to PC: “Expectations are really high”
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Ports have always been a problem for PC. Often non-existent or riddled with bugs, they can make us PC gamers left out in the cold. They’re a problem for developers, too. NFusion Interactive originally made Deus Ex: The Fall strictly for mobiles but they were then asked to port it over to PC. On its arrival - despite being a solid Deus Ex game - it was panned for its dated graphics and complex control scheme.
I spoke with nFusion’s Jeff Birns and Joe Parisi about the problem with ports.
Dota 2 International prize pool breaks $6 million, exhausts its stretch goals
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Dota 2’s International is going to rewrite eSports’ top-earners list once the Championships reach their climax on July 18. Its prize pool now sits at an unprecedented $6 million, thanks to the support of fans who bought into the tournament’s Compendium.
Mars RTS Offworld Trading Company is the game Soren Johnson "always wanted to make"
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Marketplaces make for fantastic battlefields: plenty of cover, and all the excitement of exploding fruit.
Former Civ brain Soren Johnson has something else in mind for his market battlefield, though: an RTS in which corporates must fight not only to build a sustainable colony on Mars - but ensure they turn a profit in the process.
You can now learn Japanese by playing Minecraft
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As any linguist will tell you, the most effective way to learn a new language is an ever-present risk of being catapulted out of a window or splatted by a trap should you utter an incorrect infinitive. It's how feral babies learn languages in the wild.
Kotoba Miners is an online university in Minecraft that's prescribes to this brutal teaching method. The virtual tutor is currently running a Japanese language course, one in which players must learn to communicate or die.
Dark Souls 1 will be "functional" on Games for Windows Live for the "foreseeable future"
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Taking a peek at From Software’s Steam stats yielded two worthy bits of information. First, that Dark Souls 2 has done amazingly well on PC. And second, that about as many would-be warriors are visiting Lordran now as there were when Prepare to Die was first released a year and a half ago.
That makes Dark Souls’ ghostly connection to Games for Windows Live an ongoing concern. But Namco Bandai insist the game will exist there functionally for the “foreseeable future”.
Space Hulk gets co-op: terminating Genestealers is better with chums
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Space Hulk just got injected with a bunch of new content today. Puppet masters commanding lumbering terminators can now work together in cooperative mode, and showcasing all this friendliness and companionship is a new campaign, Harbinger of Torment, designed specifically for four players.
The co-op is part of a free game update that also includes a number of bug fixes. And Space Hulk is going cheap right now over at the Humble Store, as it’s part of the current Spring Sale lineup.
Microsoft unveils the Surface Pro 3, its 12-inch laptop-slayer
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I was gearing up to buy myself a Surface Pro 2, and I didn’t think anything would change that. Not even whatever Microsoft was planning to announce at their Surface event. A Surface Mini seemed to be on the cards, but no, said Microsoft. Instead of going smaller, they’re going bigger with the Surface Pro 3.
Once again, Microsoft are calling it the tablet to replace all laptops, a powerful hybrid with a big screen and a handy kickstand. It’s hardly a revolution, building on the Surface Pro 2 rather than redesigning it entirely. But that excellent foundation makes it a tempting device.
EVE Online: PLEX Activation Codes kill off EVE Time Codes and usurp their position
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EVE Time Codes are a thing of the past, CCP announced today. ETCs have been sold by various outlets for a good long time, but they’ve declined in use thanks to PLEX. Since ETCs and PLEX basically served the same core purpose, giving more game time, CCP are doing away with ETC to make things less confusing. EVE? Less confusing? Madness.
From the start of this month, CCP began distributing PLEX Activation Codes to partners instead of ETCs. PACs enable pilots to purchase PLEX, between 1 and 28 on the account management screen. And the cost will be the same as the price of PLEX sold by CCP itself.
A new you: PlanetSide 2 gets implants and gives the medic class a fresh coat of paint
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PlanetSide 2 has been in for a spot of surgery, and has come out with some implants. Not pert buttocks or enhanced pecs, but bits of tech implanted into soldiers that allow them greater flexibility, improving loadout choices.
Three tiers of implants are available to players, and everyone will receive a tier-1 implant: Enhanced Targeting to kickstart the body modification craze. More implants can “drop”, a bit like a traditional loot system but absent the actual act of looting, or can be purchased for certs or Station Cash.
Raising Arizona: Wasteland 2 gets a new region and is launching in August
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It’s been a while since inXile raised $2.9 million for Wasteland 2, making it the 7th most successful video game Kickstarters apparently. It’s been on Steam Early Access for those that hungered for an early peak, but now there’s an end in sight. Not a release date - not yet - but a release window.
The end of August, Rangers, that’s how long you’ll have to wait to get the finished version of inXile’s post-apocalyptic tactics RPG. Well, that’s not too long. And in the mean time, the beta has been updated with a whole new region.
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