|  |  |  | | | | | PC Gamer » PC Gamer – The global authority on PC games | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Total Annihilation was one of the PC’s most forward-thinking strategy games – it threw out all the arbitrary conventions of the genre and created something more like a simulation. The result was a game plenty of PC gamers still consider unsurpassed. More recently, its creator Chris Taylor took over development of Age of Empires Online, a free-to-play version of the old classic. When I got to chat to him recently, I asked about the unconventional economy model TA used, and why he didn’t stick with it. PC Gamer: That structure was something you moved away from in SupCom 2, I wondered if you considered it a mistake, or just something you hadn’t perfected yet. Chris Taylor: One of the things that at first I thought was kinda novel, and then wondered if that was the right approach, was designing a game for myself. So Total Annihilation was a game I designed for myself. It was like everything I wanted in an RTS game, I put into Total Annihilation. Units could shoot while they moved, real physics, the fact that stuff was more emergent – based on rule system rather than hardcoded. So there’s a lot of things that I really wanted to do. But as I went along and as the stakes got higher and as the games got more complex and the teams got bigger, I started thinking to myself: well, maybe I should be designing this game more for the people who are playing it, and not myself. Which I think actually works well. I mean if you talk to some very successful developers and teams, they say “Oh yeah, we sit around for hours and days, and we try out all these different ideas and gather all this feedback, and we do a lot more of that kind of research.” And so I went more in that direction. And what happens is you get games that can actually sell more. So Supreme Commander sold more units with its somewhat less surprising and quirky game design than Total Annihilation did. So it was kind of true; if you wanted to make a game that people enjoy and wanted to play, you had to pay more attention to what they thought, what they wanted to do. So it works. But you do lose some of that crazy artistic stuff. Game design is an art. It’s a real challenge. So what we’re doing with AoEO is we’re trying to make sure people are comfortable, and they can jump in and they can play, but then there’s some modes, some boosters, some content that has fresh ideas in it. Just the fact that we have the Defense of Crete, for example, where you’re playing co-operatively/competitively, you actually have to explain it to someone a few times before they understand exactly what that is. You’re like “No no, you’re playing with a buddy against the computer, which is a comp-stomp, and then you’re going to turn around and you’re going to compete with your other friends – single or in pairs – to beat their score. So that’s where we’re taking it to some places where people might [say], “Oh yeah, really? That’s an interesting idea.” So let me answer your question by saying that it’s a mix of both, it’s a mix of doing some fresh things that are kind of interesting and new, and doing some things that are comfortable. So you have one foot in each camp, as you push a design forward. Previously Chris told us why he thinks Steam’s dominance will shift, why he couldn’t go back from free-to-play games, and why PC gaming is bigger than ever. On Tuesday we’ll have a podcast of this interview – with both Chris Taylor and Danan Davis of Microsoft Games, so you can hear what else they had to say about PC gaming, Age of Empires Online, Rise of Nations and the future. 
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Every week, Richard Cobbett rolls the dice to bring you an obscure slice of gaming history, from lost gems to weapons grade atrocities. Remember when CD-ROM first came out and games desperately wanted to be movies? This is what happened when they finally got their wish. Back in the 90s, the gaming industry collectively looked behind its sofa, found a forgotten carton of orange juice that had been sitting next to the radiator for a few years, and decided to see how it tasted. In the fermented insanity that followed, developers everywhere became convinced that the way forward for games wasn’t to make them deeper or more exciting, but to make them into films. Interactive movies, if you will. The excitement lasted a couple of years. The hangover and regret never quite faded. Game Over is the obscene tattoo around the nipples of that whole sorry affair.
You know that old saying about not judging a book by its cover? Game Over is not a book.  I think we could pretty much stop here, couldn't we? I won’t spoil what makes this straight-to-video stinker so… unique… just yet. Instead, let’s take a look at what it offers. First, the stars. Yes, Game Over has stars. Two of them. Walter Koenig and Yasmine Bleeth. Its tagline is “CTRL-ALT-DEATH”. For Special Features, it proudly promises “Spanish Subtitles. Stereo. Trailers” and even “Menus”. The printing on the DVD case suggests it was knocked off on someone’s home inkjet printer, with the main image being a blatant Matrix rip-off accompanied by a girl wearing a shiny outfit designed to give the illusion that she’s topless without actually being so crude. Needless to say, she’s not in the movie, although her hairstyle is, so that’s something. You’ll note the lack of a rating on this one. This will soon cease to be a surprise. Game Over voluntarily gives itself a PG-13 though, due to containing – I quote – “VIOLENCE AND SOME DIALOGUE”. Oh no! Not dialogue! Anything but that! Think of the children!  'Remember, if IMDB calls about this movie, my name is Hubert Whifflebottom'. When you’ve seen as many bad movies as I have, you learn to spot the warning signs early. In the case of sci-fi movies, nothing screams “DANGER WILL ROBINSON” like seeing a movie with no budget try to compensate with bullshit. You know the kind of thing I mean. If you don’t, the fact that the titles take the form of a wacky futuristic police report will quickly explain it. We’re not watching a movie, you see. We’re accessing NET POLICE FILE A1233922, because it’s The Future and numbers are Sexy. (I wonder what A1233921 was about. Probably the epic tale of a poor kid chased off a cliff by jackbooted stormtroopers for torrenting an episode of The Big Bang Theory. You’d think the fact that this is the story of the near-annihilation of humanity… sort of… would warrant a snappier file designation…) Page after page of Future Bullshit follows, welcoming us to a world where the police prioritise a person’s Tech Patents over their actual criminal records, yet still take surveillance photos with snappy, clicky cameras instead of something stealthy and futuristic, like a camera that doesn’t go KACHUNK CHUNK every time the shutter fires. This sequence mostly serves to introduce us to our hero, Steve Hunter, who is about as interesting and charismatic as that name suggests. Much of the movie is spent watching him sitting in a Future Chair, just grunting and sweating a lot. You have been warned. Before we’re deemed ready to meet the man himself, we’re introduced to his boss Elaine, talking to a therapist about his mental health. Seems Steve has been suffering from depression of late, not to mention antisocial behaviour – not least using a computer avatar of his face to call the office. The therapist asks Elaine if she’ll lend her resources to an unusual form of therapy. “You have my full support and the full support of my staff,” she tells him, which would be much more generous if her company – CyberCinema – didn’t have a ståff of precisely three. Including her and Steve. We’re not told what the therapy is, but I don’t think it spoils much to say that it ends up being of the “Cheer the hell up by defeating a megalomaniac AI in a fight to the death” school of treatment, as recommended by Freud, Jung, and the TriOptimum Corporation. Ask your therapist about it today! And if you don’t have a therapist, ask your doctor and you’ll soon have one!  There should have been a DVD extra to see if you remembered all the crap in Steve's room. Such things have to wait though, as we cut to Steve’s Futuristic Apartment of The Future, which happens to be littered with CRT screens and what are clearly old Macs, but only because The Future is on a bit of a retro kick. Well, not really. But I’m trying to be nice and work with it here. Steve is woken up by a badly rendered CGI screensaver that informs him that the Death Toll is currently over 23,000 and rising. A copy of Genius Today magazine subtly hints that he’s the inventor of a new warfare system, as well as being the world’s greatest (cough) game designer. He groggily comes to from a pillow made of bubblewrap, and calls on his personal AI, Synthi, to give him the day’s news. “You have one wireless link priority letter,” she tells him, because that’s how computer slang works. For the next couple of minutes, we get to watch him hack – his evil plan being to… send spam to the apparently sinister Net Police, while talking constantly about how badass this is and how important it is to have a free exchange of information. Having suitably helped clog the pipes and degraded everyone else’s internet connection without apparently noticing the irony, he turns his attention to the message. This turns out to be Elaine, who for some reason thought it would be smart to start brushing her teeth while making a video call, and has to spit out a mouthful of paste before leaving her message. What is it with The Future and not understanding basic videocall protocol? It’s Mortal Coil all over again.  Pictured: The exact moment you lose the right to complain about your colleagues perving. Elaine drops some old fashioned exposition on him, letting us know that she’s a kickboxer (relevance: zero) and that the Forestry Commission is coming into work for purposes that absolutely, definitely don’t have anything to do with evil purposes. Steve replies with a virtual version of himself that’s actually a slightly worse actor. We also find out that he makes his AI call him ‘Master’, which is just creepy, followed by it telling him that the Net Police are in town. He sabotages their car by remote control, locking them inside and making their loudspeaker yell “FREE THE NET! FREE THE NET!” on an endless loop. He’s able to do this because the Net Police are using an encryption code that he created, which is meant to make him sound technical and 1337, but really only makes him look like he utterly sucks at designing security systems. No wonder he went into game design instead. Much tedious bullshit follows, but finally he gets into work – the offices of CyberCinema Inc. It’s a TARDIS style building – on the outside, a regular looking commercial block, inside, a factory built of sheet metal corridors and big empty rooms, like a lost land in The Crystal Maze. Steve flashes his badge at two Net Police cops outside and heads in, finally coming to a door bearing the sign “YOU ARE ABOUT TO FACE THE ONSLAUGHT, ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK”. His card doesn’t open the door, so he just jimmies the lock open with it, pausing only to stare up at the camera with an expression that says “Please forget I work here, and pretend I just did something incredibly rebellious.”  By far the most entertaining character in the film. (She gets two scenes.) On the other side of the door is Zoey, CyberCinema’s only other employee, and what the filmmakers think a typical female geek looks like – a spunky engineer type wearing a glittery cat like mask and a Japanese artwork covered “CUTE GIRL” vest, along with a bright pink bra strap hanging off her shoulder. She has goggles hanging from her neck, chews on toys, fidgets constantly, and if this film had been released a few years later, would likely even now be changing her name to Edward Wong Hau Pepelu Tivruuuuuuuuuuusky the 4th. She is however the only person in the movie who actually seems to be having fun with it and appears able to do that crazy thing they call ‘acting’, so never mind. She’s busy creating the ‘Evil Genius’ character for CyberCinema’s new game, Maximum Surge. Steve is ecstatic, despite the fact that it looks like Mr. Punch with Walter Koenig’s face, carefully modelled by beating it with a shovel. She briefly tries to pull Steve’s attention away from things that aren’t on screens by inviting him to play basketball, but he’s far too busy. “You always make time for her,” she complains, gesturing to the game’s heroine, Jo – an equally shovel-smacked Yasmine Bleeth, who you might remember from Baywatch. She had more polygons there. Maybe even a couple of NURBS. “She’s my girl,” sighs Steve, and he’s not joking. “Even better than the Jo I created for Titania.” “What, you mean the chest to waist ratio and the way her hair moves when she runs?” “She’s a perfect date. Best of all, she comes with an on-and-off switch.” “Right. And at the end of the hot date, you’re still there with your face squished up against the screen and still no closer to getting into her pants,” says Zoey, her own pants clearly quite willing to receive. “We’ll see,” says Steve. And that’s just creepy. On that, they download the Evil Genius into an AI bot and splice it into the game, because that’s how game development works, and Steve heads off in search of Elaine and hopefully a plot point that doesn’t involve the hero of this movie discussing his gaming masturbation fantasies with colleagues. (Spoiler: There’s much more of that to endure…)  Walter Koenig, guest star of your nightmares for the next ten years. That plot point turns out to be Drexel, the best computer ever made. It’s got enough power to run for centuries. It can resist a nuclear bomb. It’s artificially intelligent. It looks… like a beer keg on a tripod with a sinister red Cylon eye. Around it stand Elaine, holding a clipboard and trying to look serious, two research assistants who are secretly Net Police agents who for some reason (which will soon be explained) haven’t arrested Steve already, and the evil therapist, although we don’t know he’s evil yet, since the horns and smell of sulphur could still be a red herring thrown in to put us off the scent. Most of this scene is incredibly tedious exposition, about how Steve’s war programming has left him a bitter, burned out shell in his mid-20s, and that Drexel is (cough) a fire-fighting AI co-ordinator in the middle of being tested, and totally not Skynet. Supposedly it can power itself indefinitely, and survive a direct nuclear blast, and of course, has no off-switch. The cheapness of the prop isn’t helped when Steve gives it a couple of less than convincing whacks to test its supposedly unstoppable strength. Note to engineers: Stop building things like this! It never, ever works out well for you! The same goes for videogame systems and holodecks that can kill people. And while we’re on the subject, stop making 3D movies as well.  Bow before the conquerer of humanity! Also available in microbrew form! The short version is that Drexel can create VR simulations and read brainwaves. It’s been brought to CyberCinema, supposedly because they have the kind of computing resources that a lab capable of building an omnipotent AI can only dream of, but really because it’s crazy, and has decided it wants to play computer games against Steve. Not being a fan of his own creations, Steve promptly decides to screw with it behind everyone’s back – or so he thinks. In reality, this all being part of the plan, everyone is actually in Elaine’s office, watching via security cameras, and wondering what’s taking him so long to try and sabotage the damn thing for their as yet still unexplained purposes. Pausing only to politely let Zoey out of the movie, Drexel promptly goes rogue and insists that unless Steve fights it, he’ll have Elaine killed by the evil therapist, who turns out not to be a therapist at all, but the head of a conspiracy that’s working with Drexel for sinister purposes. Drexel decides to raise the stakes by telling Steve that if he loses the game, he’ll have Elaine killed, forcing him to plug himself into the VR rig and… quite literally… enter the world of videogames. Prepare for pain. Yes, half an hour into the film, we find out the reason it exists. During the 90s, Sega released a console called the Mega CD, which was home to lots of FMV based games. The rest of Game Over is a movie stitched together from… clips of these. Pretty much any clips. Intro movies, briefings, shots of people shooting guns, death sequences… any out of context bit that can even vaguely be hooked together and tie into what – for want of a better word – we have to call the movie’s plot. The phrase “things that happen on screen in linear order” would probably be more appropriate though. Elaine escapes from the evil therapist and tries hacking the system by hitting a keyboard a lot. Steve grunts and yells a lot. The evil therapist guy regrets not having grown a moustache to twirl. He’s not much of a planner. The bulk of the clips come from an unreleased game called Maximum Surge (or, in the film’s imaginative universe, “Maximum Surge”), which featured a warlord called Drexel – hence the name of the computer. In-game, the characters refer to a substance called Dagon Energy, so that’s also backported out and made into a real world thing – the fictional energy source powering Drexel-the-computer. Corpse Killer has a couple of lines that can sound vaguely like something an AI would say, so we spend pointless scene after pointless scene watching a guy in a rasta hat shooting at unconvincing zombies to justify the presence of those lines. When the footage runs out of that stuff, Steve finds himself fighting in China for a bit, or facing a heavyweight champion in the ring, just to pad things out a tiny, tiny bit more. No. It doesn’t work. It doesn’t work at all. Not only are there lots of repeated scenes and completely incongruous moments, every game’s video quality is radically different (Prize Fighter for instance is in monochrome) and their scripts make it incredibly obvious that no, they weren’t actually written to be subverted by an evil AI in The Future. How does the game get around the fact that they have nothing in common? Barely. Even when it comes to Drexel himself, they hit a problem. In Maximum Surge, Drexel-the-warlord was played by Walter Koenig. Since this movie couldn’t stretch to that level of celebrity for redubs and additional footage, this is the solution they found to keep their villain consistent. If there’s anything more boring than playing the average Mega CD game, it’s watching little clips of them intercut with a guy pretending to sweat and give a damn. Maximum Surge is the only bit that actually has any real relevance, being nothing but Yasmine Bleeth – an actress I suspect to have been hired more for her ability to fill out a set of combat fatigues than her ability to breathe life into the character of Jo – bouncing around a sandy future world, shouting at the camera. To hide the lack of footage that can even vaguely be bent into the storyline, Drexel mostly fights back by forcing Steve into other games, like Corpse Killer and Quarterback Attack. Poor, poor Steve. He’s the Captain N of shitty FMV, and it turns out that his ideal virtual girlfriend is more than a little bit of a face-punching bitch. At least we’re spared the horror of a segment in Make My Video. The only thing more embarrassing than watching the movie try to pass off in-game cut-scenes as actual drama is what it does in the outside world. To its credit, it does have a couple of touches I like – the Net Police agent who’s painted as a complete jerk turning out to be working against Drexel as part of a counter-conspiracy against the evil therapist guy, and the occasional line of dialogue from the games that raises a smile – if sometimes unintentionally. Mostly though, it makes no damn sense at all, to the point that the easiest way to tell how much tension you’re meant to be feeling is by checking how much of Elaine’s shirt (yes, she’s wearing something underneath it) is falling off at any one time.  Emergency! Her shirt's gone to DEFCON 1! A special slow-clap has to go to the villain for his evil plan though. It turns out that Drexel actually went rogue before plugging into the game system, and simply ended up getting addicted to shitty Sega CD interactive movies. With nothing else possibly able to hold his attention after the likes of Sewer Shark, it told the government that either it got to play with Steve, or the entire world would be turned into a cinder. The evil therapist quickly proves that he can be much, much crazier than that by revealing that he’s working directly with Drexel in exchange for state secrets he’s had the computer steal from around the world, which he plans to sell back to the original owners. For money. That will soon be utterly irrelevant. Due to the apocalypse. That he knows is coming. And is even now helping make happen. If trying to wrap your head around that hurts too much, here’s the most awkward scene ever. Amazingly though, this isn’t even evil therapist guy’s lowest moment. That comes when he shoots his assistant, only to be left sitting amongst the corpses muttering “I’m surrounded by incompetence”, in direct violation of the Evil Overlord Code. Meanwhile, Steve finds himself back in Maximum Surge, facing groups of scantily clad female mutants whose explosion squibs make it look disturbingly like he only ever goes for boob-shots. (Which the actual camera generally avoids, so sorry, Bleeth fans.) The rest of the film is little more than this, with footage of people typing and shouting things like “You’ve got to get me back into Maximum Surge!” but ending up in a martial arts game featuring the most bored actors I’ve ever seen in an FMV game, or desperately overdubbing lines from Corpse Killer to make it sound like its hammy villain (played by Vincent Schiavelli) is Drexel planning to conquer the world instead of being a loony on an island who wants to reanimate the dead with voodoo and mad science. The film doesn’t end when the heroes finally reach Drexel’s lair and kill him in one shot as much as when the producers finally hit the required running time and get to go home before anyone says “Why not just put a Faraday cage around Drexel and leave it to stew in its own impotence?”  Koenig has done more than just Star Trek and Babylon 5. (But not much to brag about of late) By this point, Steve is a bloody, sweating wreck, and Elaine’s shirt is practically on the floor. The therapist gets shot and Drexel is hit by a virus that temporarily shuts it down, but not quite, but then it’s defeated for real, and if you care, seek help. Steve is finally freed from the game, and returns the world to normality by helping Elaine put her shirt on properly again. They leave behind the exploded, non-functional Drexel, which of course boots right back up as soon as nobody’s looking, because this kind of movie always feels it has to end on a huge, dramatic cliffhanger. It may have failed at creating drama for about an hour and a half, but you’ll never forget those last final seconds of lingering threat! In this case though, we can assume the world was safe. No matter how much evil and ambition Drexel has, he lacks the one thing that might make him a recurring threat to peace and humanity. A soul? A plan? No. Any more stock footage to abuse. Looks like we can be doubly glad that interactive movies died. Turns out, it saved the world. 
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  This week, Head Intern [sic] Anthony assembles a team consisting of Lucas, Chris and PCG’s newest editor, Tyler Wilde (formerly of GamesRadar) to stop the Reapers and save the Galaxy. But first, they must discuss the topics of the week that was. Stories include Modern Warfare 3, League of Legends’ new Tribunal system, Age of Conan going free-to-play, the announcement of Ghost Recon Online, Windows 8 and Duke Nukem Forever finally going gold. We also do a round of Truthiness and Falsity, answer your questions and say our goodbyes to Anthony.
PC Gamer US Podcast 274: Hello Tyler. Goodbye Anthony. Have a question, comment, complaint or observation? Leave a voicemail: 1-877-404-1337 ext 724 or email the mp3 to pcgamerpodcast@gmail.com. Subscribe the podcast RSS feed. Follow us on Twitter:
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@logandecker (Logan)
@Havoc06 (Chris)
@DanStapleton (Dan)
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@Ljrepresent (Lucas) 
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | In the last Magicka Dev Diary, we got insight into the fine art of balancing PvP for a game that gives you so much freedom when it comes to spellcasting. Now, the dev team from Arrowhead tells us what their beef is with crowd control abilities, and why fights in the Magicka arena are never over ’til they’re over. Welcome to another Dev Diary! This time around, we'll be talking about our thoughts on water bombing, and the efforts we made to balance the game. In our opinion, water bombing (see the above video) is a valid tool for the Magicka player to use when fighting in PvP, and as previously mentioned, it's no small task to strike a balance between elements that are used for their effects, against elements which are used for their damage. Many a coffee cup was upturned—and many Bothans died to bring you this information!  Purple Lightning: the logical progression of Purple Rain. Looking at the second tournament held by Kreitor, we saw water bombing as a very potent tactic. Water bombing was basically casting one earth together with four water, creating a powerful projectile blast that knocks down other players, then locking them down with a water beam. We all know that being knocked down pretty much sucks, since you completely lose any ability to defend yourself. When experimenting with water bombing, we noticed a few things. First of all, the push from the water came from the direction of the player casting, not from where the water bomb landed. This might have been good for balance—making sure that you can't just knock people out from behind their shields—but on the basic level it didn’t make sense, because really you should be knocked away from the explosion of water. We also noticed that you might fly a long way, sometimes even suffering a fatal landing. We changed the way water bombs affect wizards, so that even when you are knocked back by water, you are always standing. You can still be knocked out from behind your shield, or knocked into mines, but you’re not completely defenseless. You can always just put up another shield.  When you're already burning to death, you might as well jump off a cliff to make it more dramatic. This change brought with it another change, this time to the water beams. It is now very, very hard to use a controlled beam of water on someone, without them sliding to the side and out of the beam. By no means does this make the water beam useless! But it’s no longer so easy to pin someone against the wall, or squirt them off a cliff. Many of us have played generic MMOs, and we all know how irritating it can be to lose character control. It's simply no fun. Playing a game should never mean standing around, waiting for your enemy to finish you off. We designed the game to always offer a way out, no matter the situation. (For example, if you’re frozen, you can always just thaw yourself.) So it’s our goal with Magicka PvP that it should never be completely impossible for you to recover from your situation. This means that until you finally die, there is no reason to give up: there is no “I'm gonna lose” moment, where you just release all control and wait passively while you’re finished off. This has created a lot of interesting situations, such as where the attacker expected their attack to be deadly, but the attack didn’t quite kill their opponent. This can result in a turnaround, where the heavily injured player grabs initiative. As you can see, Magicka PvP is a lot of fun, and you’ll all be enjoying it very soon!  Waterbombing, IRL. 
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | The Marauder's like a pair of Air Jordans—they look fantastic, but they're expensive, and buying them won't improve your skills at the game you know and love. As part of Razer's line of StarCraft II gear, the Marauder's main feature is nifty dynamic backlighting that gauges your APM (actions-per-minute), exclusively in SC2; in other games, it simply glows a static color. And, annoyingly, this smallish keyboard requires two USB ports to make the lights work. Depending on how many actions you're spamming, the Marauder shines from a Protoss blue (when you're almost comatose) all the way to blood-red (when you're a GSL superstar). Unfortunately, the APM colors might show you how bungling of a SC2 player you really are. While playing against platinum-league vet Norm Chan, my keyboard never surpassed green (one step above lifeless blue); I could only achieve a satisfying red through rapid-fire-clicking waypoints while my fingers played a drum solo on the hotkeys. After Norm ruthlessly thrashed me, the Marauder added insult to injury by blinking red to make sure I knew I lost. Gee, thanks. Without the Lite-Brite gimmick, the Marauder is a less-than-stellar keyboard. Razer inexplicably decided to smash the arrow keys and Insert/Home/Page Up block into the numpad—this jarring change left me constantly fumbling for keys. Still, you can reassign almost all of the buttons, and each key has a nice tactile feel: they're sturdy, springy and have an aesthetically-pleasing gloss. But paying $120 for what's essentially a StarCraft mood-ring—that spectators will enjoy more than you do—just doesn't make sense. $120, www.razerzone.com ◆ Category: Dream 
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Today in the office Owen and I went head to head at lunchtime in Frozen Synapse to decide who between us is the VERY BEST AT EVERYTHING. You can find out the answer in the match above. I control the awesome red guys and Owen’s bossing the snotty green dudes. We’ll have a rematch soon enough, that’s for sure. But what else has been happening in PC gaming today? Find out, in this week’s final edition of And in other PC gaming news…
- There's going to be a new Creatures game.
- Eurogamer have some images of the upcoming Section 8 DLC pack, out this week on XBLA, hopefully headed to PC soon.
- There's some new Battlefield 3 in-game footage hidden in the latest edition of PWNED.
- New Dragon Age 2 artwork teases possible DLC, or could it be Dragon Age 3?
- Also on CVG, Modern Warfare 3 survival spec ops mode gets detailed.
- CD Projekt explain why the Witcher 2 patch was so huge for some people.
- The Old Republic Trooper Class gets a video.
- There’s a superb Far Cry deal on Steam now.
- Remember Homefront? It’s getting some DLC.
- Not to miss out on the DLC bandwagon, the new Dawn of War 2: Retribution patch adds some, along with a load of balance fixes.
There has been a ton of DLC announcements today, from Dawn of War 2 Retribution, Homefront and Section 8 above to the release of the new Shogun 2 pack earlier. What do you think of these mini-bite addons, do you think they’re a good idea? Or would you rather pay for something more substantial, like an expansion? Let us know in the comments. 
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Over on this side of the Atlantic, in the wonky world of tea swigging, ale chugging top-hatted men we like to call Britain, today marks start of a three day weekend, which many Britons will spend riding around on penny farthings because the football season is over. We won’t be doing any of that stuff. We’ll be enjoying the finest in PC gaming entertainment on our future-machines. But what will we be playing? Find out below.
Tom Francis – Frozen Synapse 
I’ve been reviewing this in the office, but it’s not going to stop me playing it at the weekend too. The beta was a hit when we first started playing it in the office about a year ago, and the official release yesterday has caused a relapse. You tell your men where to go and where to aim for the next five seconds, then test out your plan to see if it works. Once you’ve tweaked it and committed, the only thing that can go wrong is the enemy not doing what you expect. I have now formed The Bros In Synapse, not so much a guild as bunch of people who know each other well enough to hold a grudge. We will fight, slowly and without skill. The thing I love about Frozen Synapse’s multiplayer is the lack of time pressure. Games have a turn limit, but you can take as long as you like over each turn. Not just ten minutes, but three days if you need it. Your partner generally doesn’t get pissed off, because they’ve got other games on the go at the same time. You end up feeling like a grand chess master, flitting between a dozen different opponents and outwitting them all. When you win. $20 gets you two copies over at the official site, and you can enter those CD keys into Steam to add it to your collection there. Tom Senior – Terraria
This weekend I will be playing Terraria. It’s initially quite a challenging game because instead of a tutorial or a FAQ, there’s a man in a beige shirt who wanders around the world like he’s escaped from a mental asylum saying things like “Smashing a shadow orb will cause a meteor to fall out of the sky. Shadow orbs can usually be found in the chasms around corrupt areas.” The trouble is, the Guide is invincible, and seems to be extremely inquisitive. I return to my hand crafted house after an adventuring trip undergound to find him standing in the middle of my front room. “If you see a pot, be sure to smash it open. They contain all sorts of useful supplies,” he says. “Get out of my house,” I say. “There is treasure hidden all over the world. Some amazing things can be found deep underground!” he says. I try to pickaxe him in the face, experimentally. It passes right through him. He doesn’t even react. That night he leaves the house for a stroll and lets in a horde of zombies. I hack four of them to death before managing to shut the door. This is the last straw. I follow him out of my house the next morning. As soon as he stops I dig a hole beneath him. I keep digging as far down as I can go, he falls with me. Then, once I think I’m deep enough, I quickly bar wall him in with stone blocks. He’s trapped. He stands completely still, unconcerned. The next day I emerge from another dungeon run and spot my impromptu prison. It’s completely empty. Suddenly worried, I rush to the surface. To My house. He’s in my kitchen, standing there like a beige Batman. “For a nurse to move in, you might want to increase your maximum life,” he says. Is that a threat? I’ll find out this weekend when I resume my attempts to get rid of the Guide once and for all. Craig Pearson – Team Fortress 2 
This weekend I can't talk about the sekrit game of Team Fortress 2 I've signed up to play in. But I'll probably be playing as *redacted* on the *redacted* server, stabbing *redacted* at least once. Graham – Minecraft 
When I first started playing, I’d spend four, five hours in Minecraft every night, but now I only return whenever Notch releases a significant new update. He’s done that this past week, with 1.6′s addition of maps and the multiplayer netherworld. So this weekend – in amongst Frozen Synapse, and maybe GTAIV, and maybe The Witcher 2 and Brink – I’ll be playing on my “Home” saved game. This is a world I’ve spent months with, building a vast castle, on a beautiful coast line, and I’ve always got a few projects in progress. I’m currently expanding my farm to grow the amount of sugar cane I need to build the bookcases for my new cliffside study, and I’m waiting patiently for the trees in my underground garden to mature. Owen Hill – Dirt 3 
Dirt 3 is handsome and realistic, but it’s also very silly. Ever since I jumped into an online Zombies lobby with a friend standard rallies just don’t do it for me. Two Ford Fiestas hide in a warehouse. They catch a glimpse of a green, zombified Impreza approaching and dive out the fifth floor window before scarpering in opposite directions. The Subaru is too eager to chase and ends up on its roof, rocking slowly from side to side. We offer some taunting toots of the horn – just for lols. It’s hard not to picture Thomas the Tank-style faces on the front of your motors when this kind of thing goes down. And there’s nothing wrong with that. But that’s enough about us. What will you be playing this weekend? 
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | We’ve given away a ton of prizes to our European readers recently, and we thought it was about time we showcased the victorious in a post we’ve decided to call “This week’s winners.” As it’s the first one, we’ve got lots of catching up to do, so let’s get cracking. Read on for the winners of our Call of Duty: Black Ops First Strike, Portal 2, World of Warcraft, Tales of Monkey Island, Tron Thruster gamepad, Rift and Eve Online giveaways. The sad thing is we’ve notified many of these winners, but they haven’t responded to claim their prize, so have a check to see if your name appears below. You could be one of this week’s winners.
World of Warcraft giveaway
 We asked you to come up with an idea for a new PC Gamer continent for a theoretical expansion for World of Warcraft. You did us proud, but there could only be three winners, and they are: Nox, Eccles and slaaneshi611. Check your direct messages on your PC Gamer forum accounts to find out how to claim your prize. Portal 2 giveaway
 We had ten Portal 2 codes going spare, so we gave them away through Facebook. We asked you what you’d do with one use of a portal gun in real life. The results were hilarious, and occasionally disturbing. These were our winners: Franco Baccarini, Michael Price, Josha Munnik, John Briggs, Jonathan Armer, Chris Heaslop, Ross Lloyd, Mykolas Sindeikis, Adrian Lunatitc, Janos Victor Morrisseyh. Rift goodie bag giveaway
 Aeons ago, we asked you to come up with brand new types of otherworldly portals to win one of ten Rift goodie bags. We still have some lying around unclaimed. Are you among these winners? If so, drop an email to tom.senior@futurenet.com to claim your prize: Himbern, Spatula, Dan_JR, James G, TheSmallAngryGamer, Kihira, Hermit, Lady Fleata, Dusk777 and Jimangi. Art of Eve Online books giveaway
 A while back we asked you to come up with a name for a PC Gamer constellation to win one of three gorgeous Art of Eve books. Two of the three are sitting on my desk right now. Are you one of the two who haven’t claimed your prize? Darktan, Keydet96, brentcolby, check your forum account direct messages to find out how to get your book. Call of Duty: Black Ops First Strike giveaway
 The Call of Duty: Black Ops First Strike map pack is prohibitively expensive, which makes winning them for free the best way of getting hold of a copy. We gave away ten through Facebook, and the winners were: Matt Phillips, Mario Dreizehn, Andreas Sjödin, Yomartin Nguyen, Jim Darkeye Aalto Welander, Richard ‘ramrod’ Gregory, Andrew Swain, Callum Morton, Jeremy Laubach, Matt Rose Al Gore. Thrustmaster Tron Legacy wireless gamepads giveaway
 A while back we asked you why the hell you’d want a wireless game pad. Six lucky answerers claimed one of the six Thrustmaster Tron Legacy Wireless gamepads we had to give away. Those six people were Michael John Fitzsimmons, Chris Cassell, Gareth Leonard, Ross Meredith, Matt Fawdrey and Shaun Immersion Rattue. Monkey Island Collector’s Edition giveaway
 We needed the best grog recipe we could lay our hands on, so we stole ten copies of the Tales of Monkey Island Collector’s Edition boxed set and used that to entice you to give us your best ideas. It worked! Here are our ten top pirates: David Lecina Fuentes, Andy Griffiths, Murray Lane, Lorna Reid, Robert James Slessor, Chris Love, Joe ‘Targy’ Targan, Steven Payne, Andrei Neamtu and Tom Old. We have a few exciting competitions that are yet to be judged, which means there’s still time to enter! We have five extremely fast Solid State Drives to give away AND one lucky reader could walk away with the mammoth Witcher 2 collector’s edition boxed set. We’ll reveal the winners of those two competitions in a future edition of This Week’s Winners. Thanks for all the great entries so far, and keep checking back for more great giveaways for the EU and the US on PCGamer.com in the future! 
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | When I got the chance to interview Chris Taylor recently, I asked him what he thought of Steam. Then, off his blank look, I asked specifically how he felt about its dominance of the digital distribution market for PC games. Chris designed two of the world’s cleverest strategy games: Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander. More recently, he and his company Gas Powered Games took over development of Age of Empires Online, a free-to-play version of the old classic. He thinks Steam’s dominance will shift before long. PC Gamer: What do you think of Steam? Is it a good thing or a bad thing? Digital distribution generally seems to be a good thing, but is it bad that Steam has something close to a monopoly? Chris Taylor: I have games on Steam, I have an account, I buy games there. I have three different digital distribution platforms on my PC, it’s driven mostly from the game I want to play. If it’s on there, if it’s exclusive, it narrows the field. I actually don’t generally have to do a whole lot of soul-searching. Your question though was what do I think of the fact that it’s taken a footing? It’s obviously extremely popular. Kudos go to the Valve guys for having the vision to build it. And they made a big bet – they made a big, scary bet, and they get rewarded for that. Ask me the question about where they are in the market five years from now: I think it’s gonna shift. I think the playing field’s gonna level out. Because exclusive content drives it. I mean once upon a time we had a Sega console. There was a company called Atari that had a big market position. It changes and it shifts based on the way the company continues to evolve and interact with its customers, the service it delivers. I think that now we’re seeing so many new players come, they have to come to the market with their first party games. And if they deliver really outstanding games, the platform follows. So I think it’s all gonna work out in the end. But like I said, you’ve got to give kudos to those guys for jumping in and being first and doing a really good job, and taking a chance. Previously Chris told us why he couldn’t go back from free-to-play games, and why PC gaming is bigger than ever. Tomorrow we’ll have his thoughts on Total Annihilation, and why his priorities changed as he moved on to Supreme Commander and Supreme Commander 2. 
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