17 June 2014 • 21 hours 15 min ago •
Story by Jeremy Peel
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Radu ‘Rdu’ Dima last night became DreamHack’s Summer Hearthstone Champion. The Romanian had cracked portrait after portrait of top players - Darkwonyx, Ek0p, Reynad and finally Amaz - to win the biggest cheque in professional Hearthstone yet.
But his win was overshadowed by controversy, after Twitch viewers noticed a Battle.net message during his last few games that gave away the contents of Amaz’s hand. As community opinion divided over whether or not the hint was solicited, both tournament organisers and Rdu’s opponent emerged in support of the 17-year-old.
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17 June 2014 • 19 hours 56 min ago •
Story by Jeremy Peel
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In the last two weeks, an offhand Reddit comment by a Mojangster has escalated into the biggest community kerfuffle Minecraft’s had in years. You can’t make money in Minecraft without Mojang’s express permission, is the gist of the rule that has server hosts up in arms.
Mojang wrote a long clarification before the weekend, in which they expanded the terms of the existing EULA to allow for server monetisation that wasn’t “forced” upon players. But for server hosts who’d been running payment systems in-game for years without restriction, it felt more like a clampdown.
So, more questions from them, and more answers from Mojang - who are determined to see all servers compliant with the rules by August 1.
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If there's one thing Valve are good at, and they are good at a great many things, it's big-ass countdown clocks. Giant-butt timers that wind down to a mysterious and unknowable finale. They've whacked a fresh clock up on the Team Fortress 2 website, one that at the time of discovery had less than 24 hours left on it, that suggests a new update to Valve's free-to-play shooter is incoming.
An ARG we were supposed to have picked up on a few weeks ago, perhaps? Did we miss a clue somewhere along the line? So mysterious, so imminent.
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17 June 2014 • 19 hours 1 min ago •
Story by Jeremy Peel
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Do you know what Peggle is? Peggle is a game about firing ball bearings into a 2D space studded with objects designed to knock them off course. It’s about hoping - praying - that the ball will eventually drop into a high-scoring hole, and enjoying the fireworks when it does.
It’s free for an unspecified length of time on Origin.
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Some of you may have woken up to an unexpected email from Blizzard inviting you into the Warlords of Draenor alpha. The closed test lets some players go hands on with the new World of Warcraft expansion ahead of its release this December.
As the test progresses more features and areas coming in the expansion will become available to play with but for now alpha testers only have access to Frostfire Ridge “a harsh land of ceaseless winter and volcanic peaks,” and they can only play as the Horde, too.
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17 June 2014 • 18 hours 21 min ago •
Story by Jeremy Peel
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Double Fine’s really big cup of turn-based tactics turned up on Microsoft’s stage at E3, where the two were declared married by Phil Spencer, with a thousand baying games journalists as their witness.
But it’s a complicated, open relationship - one which prohibits cavorting with Sony, but does nothing to affect the PC’s blossoming love affair with Massive Chalice.
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17 June 2014 • 17 hours 35 min ago •
Story by Jeremy Peel
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It might have felt like Battlefield 4 followed fast in the jetstream of Battlefield 3 last year - possibly because DICE didn’t reach for Bad Company or any of their other sub-brands, instead slapping on a new number.
But actually, 2012 was the only year we haven’t seen a new Battlefield game in the last seven. Which makes it a little odd to find EA Studios exec Patrick Söderlund defending the series against claims of annualisation. It’s not a publisher policy, he says, but a happy accident caused by EA letting its studios do what they want.
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17 June 2014 • 15 hours 23 min ago •
Story by Jeremy Peel
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We’re still in the throes of Paradox Development’s grand strategy renaissance - so it seems fitting that each new release should have a showy Latin moniker to match. This new “mini expansion” is named Res Publica, which means ‘public affairs’ rather than ‘Europe is Everywhere Four’ or whatever Europa Universalis IV meant.
Res Publica is also the root of the word ‘republic’, which should give you an idea about what kind of new political powers this expansion will afford us.
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17 June 2014 • 14 hours 40 min ago •
Story by Jeremy Peel
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The Binding of Isaac’s Rebirth remake rips the Zelda-like’s Flash underbelly from beneath it and replaces it with a new engine. That’ll mean new 16-bit graphics, everything from the original game’s Wrath of the Lamb expansion, and best of all, local co-op. Played by babies.
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Since Star Citizen’s Arena Commander module launched, there’s been a lot of chatter about the flight model and control methods, with some citizens not gelling with the way ships control or having issues with the methods used to fly these vessels.
Chris Roberts has addressed some of these concerns, clarifying why some systems work the way they do and promising to continue working on these things to keep the citizens from staging some sort of bloody space revolution.
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Dead Space is resting, but not quite in peace. The space horror franchise devised by Visceral has been taking a break after the conclusion of the trilogy, but EA Studios VP Patrick Söderlund doesn’t think we’ve seen the last of the series.
"Do I think that we will create a Dead Space game again? Yes, I think so,” Söderlund told Polygon. “But when we do so, we have to think about what made the previous ones successful and how we go about envisioning Dead Space for a new generation.”
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The Forest is a scary time. It’s all fun and frolicing to begin with, embracing the newfound freedom that surviving a plane crash and losing a child offers, but then people want to eat you. They invite you home first, but their home is a cave filled with horrors and entrails. It’s just poor decorating, and that’s unacceptable.
Sometimes it breaks, as Early Access titles are wont to do, and sometimes that means a corpse explodes and kills you. That might be a feature though. Some of the game’s oddities are most certainly not, however, and Endnight Games has chucked up an updated version that fixes a slew of issues - they hope - while adding important things like sharks.
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Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare tells a story, and Sledgehammer Games wants you to know that it’s good stuff. Frank Underwood Kevin Spacey is in it, so that’s a good start.
Take a gander at the behind the scenes “story” video below for absolutely not details about the story at all. Other details rain down, though.
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Gunpoint came out last year. And it was one of my favourite games of those and, indeed, most twelve months. The general rule with indie games that aren’t built on the foundations of multiplayer seems to be that, by month six of release, the game will receive only the minimum of support. The developer has to move onto other projects to feed themselves.
Not so with Tom Francis and Gunpoint, it seems. Not only has Francis released a free game on Steam while working on Heat Signature, he’s only gone and made a new engine for Gunpoint and added Steam Workshop support. Gosh.
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