What to do in Assassin's Creed Unity's Paris: Murder, stealing and a bit of detective work
Paris is a busy, bustling place. I was once chased down a street by a dog after watching some rugby there - exciting stuff! Ubisoft reckons that its digital version of Paris in Assassin’s Creed Unity is pretty exciting and realistic too.
As always, Unity will be stuffed with diversions, some returning, some completely new. Creative director Alex Amancio goes over what you can expect when you’re sauntering out the 18th Century city.
Blizzard to deploy Australian servers for World of Warcraft ahead of Warlords of Draenor
Blizzard have dedicated a set of realms in World of Warcraft to ‘Oceanic’ players for a long while now - but they’ve always run on datacenters in other continents. That’s to change in the weeks before the release of Warlords of Draenor. A new bank of servers in Australia will serve the country and New Zealand with that greatest of gifts: reduced latency.
Riot chase down League of Legends hackers; "Every player to trigger this exploit will be punished"
Riot Games are preparing a patch to tackle a wave of cheating in League of Legends - triggered by the discovery of a new and powerful exploit. Commonly misunderstood to be a bug, the exploit finds players taking advantage of a quirk in skill activation.
“This is a bannable offence,” said the developers last night. “Every player determined to have triggered this exploit will be punished.”
Codemasters' Toybox Turbos offers kitchen table careening in the mode of Micro Machines
You’ve never seen Toybox Turbos before, but it’s going to start looking intensely familiar from the moment you push play on its trailer.
The inspiration for Codemasters’ miniature isometric racer in a household setting is clear to anybody who ever peered over the shoulder of a friend playing Micro Machines in the playground.
Flak in the USSR: World of Warplanes 1.6 introduces new Russian jets, more airspace
Wargaming might not yet have replicated the staggering success of World of Tanks with its skybox-scraping variant, but they’re updating it with the same frequency and dedication. World of Warplanes 1.6 adds a new line of Russian MiG fighters to the game, an extended map, and a ‘multirole’ class which will make existing planes newly customisable.
Shelter 2 trailer makes survival look gorgeous while being totally harrowing
Shelter put you in the paws of a badger mother caring for her newborn cubs over the course of a year. You kept them safe from harm, found them food, and nurtured them to self-sufficiency. I loved it and urge you all to go play it. Now.
Shelter 2 may look like more of the same but it’s a very different animal. Might and Delight have taken all the mechanics of the first game and reframed them. They’ve made a new type of survival game.
Phonopath turns you into an audio codebreaker
There aren’t many games that teach you skills, real, translatable skills but Phonopath is something of a unicorn. It’s a puzzle game with a simple concept - listen to a soundbite and work out the password it contains to unlock the door to the next puzzle.
Where it gets interesting is that it’s up to you to work out what sort of audio wizardry you need to apply to the sound to crack its code.
By its conclusion you’ll be an audio cryptographer.
Football Manager 2014 has been played for 23,000 years, and that’s not including the pirates
The Football Manager series has sucked more hours from players around the world than almost any other. Even now, a year after its release, Football Manager 2014 sits in the top 10 charts on Steam.
Miles Jacobson, Sports Interactive’s games director, revealed to me that on Monday, 20 October, FM14’s players had racked up more than 23,000 years of play time.
Well, in fact, it’s significantly more but that’s just from the people who bought it.
The Witcher 3's opening cinematic shows why you don't get into staring contests with crows
The Witcher 3 is still some ways off, but you can pretend you’re just about to play it by watching the opening cinematic, shown off at the Golden Joystick Awards today.
Beardy Geralt’s following the trail of his old flame, Yennefer, who seems to have gotten into a spot of bother.
Outlast 2 is in development; stock up on clean underwear
Outlast left me a nervous wreck. I rarely make it to the end of first-person horror games, but I was reviewing Red Barrels grisly asylum adventure, and thus had no choice. It’s brilliant and also not very nice.
So I’m not sure if I’m going to be powering through the sequel. Red Barrels confirmed that it’s being worked on right now, set in the same universe as the original, but in a different place with different characters.
League of Legends is close to making $1 billion from microtransactions this year
For a game where spending isn’t mandatory, League of Legends sure nets a lot of money. Microtransaction revenue for the MOBA is up from last year, with Riot making $946 million through in-game purchases. It’s getting pretty close to that ridiculous $1 billion figure, which no online game managed to achieve last year.
SuperData Research has published its list of the top 10 online PC games, based on microtransactions, with League of Legends sitting in the number one spot.
Dark Souls 2 is the Golden Joystick Awards' Game of the Year
The Golden Joystick Awards were on tonight, here in Blighty, and all the awards have been doled out, with Hideo Kojima getting a Lifetime Achievement Award, and Dark Souls 2 being hailed as the Game of the Year.
Take a gander below at the full winners list.
First blood in the World of Warcraft Arena World Championship will be shed next week
Even though Blizzard admits that World of Warcraft’s Arena PvP is “kind of hard to watch,” it’s there if you want it. The World of Warcraft Arena World Championship is part of BlizzCon 2014, with two groups of four teams duking it out in an attempt become the group champion.
The first round kicks off next week, on October 31st, and while all teams will be heading to play at BlizzCon itself, the winners will secure two of the four spots in the semi-finals.
Spooky Races: Project CARS gets a Halloween trailer
Cars can be properly intimidating. Glowing red eyes, noxious fumes pouring out of their exhausts, engine snarling and roaring, the whole thing made of metal and fire - even a Volvo estate could be scary if you were in a dark alley and near sighted.
So it’s probably not completely barmy that Slightly Mad Studios showed off a Halloween trailer for Project CARS at the Golden Joysticks tonight.
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