Speaking of giving us the option I can't wait until they launch the store update. It will be interesting to see how much they let us customise it. Tho I guess that part of the update is on valve time.

That could very well be 2016 given how they use to measure time.

BattlEye bans now extend across Arma 3, DayZ and Arma 2: Operation Arrowhead

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In a sitrep blog update to Arma 3 players, Bohemia Interactive have announced that players banned by their BattlEye anti-cheat system will also be banned from other Bohemia games.

Those games currently include Arma 3, DayZ and Arma 2: Operation Arrowhead.

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Resident Evil HD Remaster shambles onto Steam; launching early 2015

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A HD remake of the original Resident Evil game has appeared on the Steam store, set to be released in early 2015. The exact differences between the PC version and that of the initial Gamecube version is still to be determined, but the store page does mention some pretty promising features.

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This Project CARS Gamescom trailer looks absolutely stunning

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Cars! I love cars, our Rob loves cars, and Project CARS loves cars. Their new trailer fresh from Gamescom aptly demonstrates just how much: it’s got classical music, panoramic shots and cars drenched in just about every weather effect known to man.

Cars.

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Begin your Jedi training with the Sixense STEM System and Oculus Rift DK2

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When I was a smaller human being, I used to pretend to be a Jedi by deflecting tennis balls with a plastic lightsaber. One day the tennis ball won, and my seemingly indestructible lightsaber snapped in half. My path to become a real Jedi was over…

That was until as of five minutes ago, when I saw this tech demo for the Oculus Rift DK2. A company called Sixense Entertainment have tinkered away at a new peripheral that works in tandem with the Oculus Rift DK2 to enable full position and orientation tracking for both the user’s head and hands.

Technical lingo aside, all you need to know is that it works. See for yourself in the video below.

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Drift Stage – Classic Arcade Racer With Late 80s Visuals – Gets New Teaser Trailer

Well, that was too good to be true. Both Gamescom and Siggraph have passed and the rumor about Nvidia revealing the GTX 8xx cards has proven false.



C'mon Nvidia. Do it quickly so there's a domino effect and I can grap a 290(X)/780(Ti) for cheap!

Former designer apologises for Sacred 3: "die-hard fans didn't get the game they wanted"

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In our Sacred 3 review, Fraser found that Keen Games had eschewed the open world, day-night cycles and quests that once defined the series in favour of, well, not very much. A “banal premise” and “crude” co-op combat.

A junior designer who left during the action RPG’s development has taken it upon himself to apologise for the state of the eventual game.

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Orc-ward: World of Warcraft UK subscription price to rise for Warlords of Draenor

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Blizzard have reevaluated pricing for World of Warcraft in light of “local and regional market conditions”. Not in the Azeroth auction houses, but globally: the developers have compared currencies all over the world. They've decided to hike up the price of UK subscription by an extra pound a month when Warlords of Draenor launches on November 13.

Players with auto-renewing subscriptions need not worry, however: Blizzard are granting them a two-year price freeze.

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Star Citizen reaches $50 million in funding by selling more virtual spaceships

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Space garage simulator Star Citizen has rocketed past a slightly impressive $50 million milestone this weekend, thanks in large part to the sale of some new Constellation class spaceships.

A big chunk of that freshly donated cash will be spent on employing linguists, whose job it will be to create three real languages for the game's three biggest alien races.

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Hearthstone spectator mode is in "active development" and "coming along"

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Hearthstone became an unexpected Twitch sensation upon its beta launch in what feels like 1937. It transpires that watching somebody else think about playing a card for 30 seconds before deciding against it can be as fun as doing it yourself - and so players have clamoured for an in-game Hearthstone spectator mode ever since.

It’s now towards the top-end of Blizzard’s ‘to implement’ list, and in “active development”.

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Why Riot Games aren't planning on matching the Dota 2 International's $10m prize pool

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Even after the runaway success of the Dota 2 International Compendium and the $10 million prize pool it crowdfunded, Riot Games have decided to stick to a relatively tiddly $2m pool for the LoL Championship Series this year.

It’s part of a plan to ensure League of Legends will be around for decades to come.

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Ever imagined an Assassin's Creed MMO? Unity's producer has

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In some ways, Assassin’s Creed is prime MMO material that wouldn’t be tarnished in translation: it’s already about bunny-hopping through a world filled with visible artifacts, that flicks on and offline without warning.

Vincent Pontbriand made the same point last week without any mean jokes at the MMO genre’s expense. The Assassin’s Creed Unity producer said he’d “love” to build a massively-multiplayer entry in the stealth-parkour series.

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Hands on with The Golf Club

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After some testing I have figured out that the nice man who commentates over The Golf Club stops reading out your score after you reach about 20 over par. I'm guessing the developers didn't bother to have him record all of those extra lines, in the mistaken belief that nobody could be as bad at a golf game as I am at this golf game.

The Golf Club is currently in Early Access on Steam, launches properly tomorrow and deserves a much better player than me. It's definitely good though. I can at least tell that it's alright. So here, without deviating from the basic facts of the game in some futile effort to hit wordcount without betraying my ignorance of the sport, are some reasons why.

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Sunless Sea's combat system has been thrown overboard

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Sunless Sea, Failbetter’s eldrich nautical sandbox, is very good. It’s not finished yet, but it’s still worth buying and diving into. I wrote words about it in my Sunless Sea Early Access review, and some of those words detailed the sedentary battles. They were not-quite-turn-based affairs, and their premise - that before you shoot a ship or undersea beasties, you must illuminate it - was a bit more interesting than their execution. 

But as Early Access games are wont to do - though not as frequently as one might expect/hope - Sunless Sea is going through some big changes. The old combat system is being thrown overboard, and its replacement is quite a different animal. 

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Surgeon Simulator: Anniversary Edition pits surgeons against teeth and eyeballs

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Naming conventions for new versions of games are bloody odd. Games that got a luke-warm reception suddenly get Game of the Year versions, digital titles get Collector’s Editions even though there’s unlimited stock, and now, we’ve got Surgeon Simulator: Anniversary Edition, but there’s no anniversary. 

I guess the A&E pun was too good to pass up.

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No Man's Sky won't be infinite, but it might as well be

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Skyrim is big. Grand Theft Auto V is big. Dragon Age Inquisition is big. No Man’s Sky is cosmically vast. It’s so huge, that it might as well be infinite given our fleeting, mortal lives. 

Hello Games co-founder Sean Murray told IGN that the team started with a 32 bit number, which meant that it would take explorers around four or five thousand years to visit every planet - and that’s only if they spent a second on each world. 

That wasn’t big enough for them, though. 

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Enemy Starfighter will be at the PAX Indie Megabooth, so let's watch a lovely trailer

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That space flight sims are making a comeback is utterly bizarre. That the genre has regained momentum and is producing things like Star Citizen or Elite: Dangerous isn’t bizarre, it’s that it ever stopped being a prominent genre in the first place. 

Potentially just as intriguing as the vast, detailed sims built by genre vets are games like Enemy Starfighter, with its minimalist art style and mechanics that are as evocative of Homeworld or Flotilla as they are Elite or Freespace. 

It’s returning to the Indie Megabooth at PAX this year - our Rob took a gander at Enemy Starfighter at PAX East - which is as good an excuse as any for a new trailer. 

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Kholat is a horror game inspired by a 55-year-old mystery

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The sort of horror that we get to experience in games tends to have a fantastical bent - whether it’s brain-munching zombies taking over a country or monstrous creatures prowling an asylum, whatever frightening things they may contain, the premise is never not silly. 

The “Dyatlov Pass Incident” did happen, though, and it’s the setup for IGN.PRO’s upcoming horror game, Kholat.

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Puppygames co-founder: customers "are worthless to us"

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Times have been tough over at Puppygames, leading to the developer switching from development of free-to-play Battledroid to an arcade roguelike called Basingstoke. The developer has four months of money left, but Battledroid still had a year of development ahead of it. 

Perhaps that was the impetus for co-founder Caspian Prince’s blog post, today, where he laments the supposed de-valuation of games. “You are worthless to us,” he says in regards to customers. Specifically, he means that a sale has become so insignificant, netting the developer so little, that it barely has any value. 

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EA "haven't always been great listeners" but are "getting better"

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It’s become community management 101 for the major publishers: tell the players that you’re listening; that you’re a pure conduit of feedback prepared to reshape games in accordance with comments on the internet.

EA in particular have committed themselves to the idea. They’ve said more than once that beta feedback for Battlefield Hardline was responsible for pushing the game back into next year. And CEO Andrew Wilson says the company is “getting better at listening”.

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Notch is back aboard the VR train: "I'm over being upset about Facebook buying Oculus"

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Mojang were in talks with Oculus to build a version of Minecraft for the Rift - right up until the VR company announced their acquisition by Facebook, and Notch publicly pulled the plug.

“I definitely want to be a part of VR, but I will not work with Facebook,” explained the Mojang founder. “Their motives are too unclear and shifting, and they haven’t historically been a stable platform. There’s nothing about their history that makes me trust them, and that makes them seem creepy to me.”

Given a few months’ distance and an unending stream of brilliant VR demos, however, Notch has started to come around.

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Oculus VR "could" become a Sony or Microsoft, but "don't want to"

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Oculus have found themselves in a curious position. With the backing of Facebook, they’re not only able to produce the hardware to push VR into the mainstream, but the platform to sell its games.

They’re not interested in locking down VR development, though. Oculus might have the tools to become a Sony or Microsoft - but “that’s not what we’re gonna do”.

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You know, sometimes the advances in technology are a pain in the a*s.

Just now, when I was getting over the silly idea of getting that 34" 21:9 QHD monster monitor because it's expensive, that it would need a very powerful gfx card and (more importantly), with it being soo wide the IPS glow would drive me nuts... now comes LG and announces that they will bring a curved version of that monitor to IFA2014!

http://www.guru3d.com/news-story/lg-to-unveil-34-inch-219-curved-ips-monitor-at-ifa-2014.html

And some p0rn tech pics

Oh, man! That's not fair

Thank God Pemalite is no longer here to see that. He'd be jealous

that does look sweet, way too expensive and big for me

Mojang plan to pre-release Minecraft 1.8 this Thursday

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What is a Minecraft 1.8? We’ve waited so long that it bears repeating: Minecraft’s 1.8 update constitutes the most significant injection of new surprises into Survival mode in years. Expect Endermites, Guardians and rabbits. And expect it all within the week.

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Activision want to be "involved" in the indie movement: hence Sierra's return

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Depending on your age and allegiances, you’ll know Sierra either as a) the true kings of ‘80s adventure games, b) the great enemy of Guybrushes everywhere, or c) the publishers Valve spent half of the last decade suing over Half-Life.

Activision have taken advantage of those divergent identities by relaunching Sierra as a catch-all label for all their indie-ish ventures. 

“The indie movement is happening,” said Sierra’s MacLean Marshall. “And for Activision not to be involved in that... it has the big brands sure, but I think it would be a miss if we didn’t look at the indie movement as well.”

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Alienware: Steam Machine owners will "sacrifice content" for the sake of Linux

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It’s been tough to parse Alienware’s position on the Linux-based SteamOS. At E3 they told us that the Steam Machine will increase Linux gamers by “20, 30 fold, overnight”. But with the first Steam Machines delayed into 2015, they’ve upstaged their own Linux box with a Windows-based living room PC: the Alienware Alpha.

So who would win in a fight, Alienware? A living room PC running Windows, or the same PC running SteamOS?

“It depends on what you’re looking for; there’s advantages to both,” said Alienware general manager Frank Azor. “[With] the Linux version I do think you’re going to sacrifice a little bit of content.”

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Pillars of Eternity backer beta now open to higher tier pledgers

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From one angle, it’s a surprise to see the classic RPG do so well out of early access. How can a genre which thrives on density and choice find success in letting players potter about the map before it’s fully drawn?

InXile made it work by fencing off regions in Wasteland 2’s beta, and Obidian have taken a similar tack for Pillars of Eternity. Their new beta, open to select backers, consists of the village of Dyrford and its busy environs - and is entirely spoiler-free.

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The Odyssey is the Smite World Championship's answer to the Dota 2 Compendium

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That whole Dota 2 Compendium thingymabob was a bit of a success wasn’t it? It certainly generated a substantial prize pool for the International. Now Smite developer Hi-Rez are doing something similar with The Odyssey. 

It’s a program for the Smite World Championships, where new items will be put up for sale, special Odyssey items, and each purchase will add more to the Championship prize pool. Will any of these items turn enemies into pigs? Allow players to disguise themselves as beggars? Probably not. 

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Here's Johnny: Geralt makes a new chum in this 35 minute demo of The Witcher 3

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CD Projekt Red have released footage from the Gamescom and E3 demo of The Witcher 3, so now you can all slap your eyes on it.

It’s set after Geralt has taken care of a naughty griffon, separating its head from its feathery body. The 35 minute demo takes him from the massive hub city of Novigrad to the marshes, forests and mountains on the south. He also makes a new friend, Johnny. 

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The Humble Jumble Bundle will keep you in strategy games for a good long while

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The Humble Jumbo Bundle 2 is a good ‘un. For the next fortnight, you can pay anything for The Incredible Adventure of Van Helsing Complete Pack, Deadlight and Galactic Civilizations II: Ultimate Edition. All three are good fun, but GalCiv’s the real gem in the trio. It’s a cracking space 4X game, and should keep you going until Galactic Civilizations III leaves beta. 

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Hatoful Boyfriend flies the nest on September 4th

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I am crushed. I’d planned on finally finding out what it’s like to date a pigeon on Thursday, but Devolver Digital dashed my dreams against the rocks today when it tweeted pigeon dating simulator Hatoful Boyfriend’s delay today. 

It’s now due out in a fortnight, on September 4th.

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Rad news: Wasteland 2 is only a month away

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If you’ve been feeling a bit shitty about the world lately, fret not, because come September 19th, you’ll be able to leave it for a post-apocalyptic wasteland in inXile’s Wasteland 2. 

Brian Fargo tweeted the news today, though a release date had already been hinted. It was going to launch this month, but inXile warned that it could be delayed until September, which it has been. 

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Tee off: The Golf Club launches

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Yesterday, Steve stepped up to the tee and dispensed his hands-on impressions of The Golf Club. If it sounded like something you’d like to hit a few balls on, then you’re in luck, since The Golf Club, with its impressive course creator, launched today. 

£26.99/$34.99 is what you’ll need to throw Steam’s way if you want to launch tiny balls across impossible mountains or into groups of unsuspecting deer. 

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