Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 video shows eight minutes of multiplayer blasting

Black Ops 2's future setting moves its gruff warrior sorts into a world that's used to drone warfare, but hasn't invented awesome laser cannons yet.

Black Ops 2's future setting moves its gruff warrior sorts into a world that's used to drone warfare, but hasn't invented awesome laser cannons yet. That lets Treyarch weave a pleasantly paranoid plot in the single player campaign without jeopardising the great golden goose that is CoD's multiplayer mode. I imagine Call of Duty devs are quietly terrified of messing around with that world-winning formula too much, which is why the eight minutes of multiplayer scooped by IGNlook so darn familiar. The appearance of a little robot 5:44 in livens things up a little, though.

What do you think? Has Black Ops 2's new setting, zombie campaign mode, polished up PC versionand open character design systemconvinced you to give it a try when it comes out in November?

Here's what The Division's inaccessible Dark Zone areas looks like

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Call of Duty: Black Ops zombie co-op campaign teased by trailer

Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 is getting an expanded co-op mode called "Tranzit" that'll send four survivors on a zombie road trip across the US.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 is getting an expanded co-op mode called "Tranzit" that'll send four survivors on a zombie road trip across the US. As one of those survivors you'll get to bus from place to place, mounting heroic stands against the zombie army at each location. IGNmention "buildables" that con be constructed to furnish you with new weapons, or open up extra areas, which are probably full of more zombies.

The latest Black Ops 2 zombies trailer shows a fuel stop, a diner, a farmhouse reminiscent of Left 4 Dead's Blood Harvest finale, a power station and a town center blighted by lava pools. Zombies AND lava? It's the doompocalypse alright. You'll find the video stamped into the page below.

Parts of the video show a tiny snippet of someone shooting zombies of the roof of the bus in first person, suggesting that we'll have to defend against legions of zombie marathon runners as the bust travels between locations.

As well as "Tranzit" there will be a versus mode that will put two four-player teams into the zombie apocalypse and encourage them to compete for zombie kills without killing each other. There will be a more traditional survival zombie mode for fans of Treyarch's previous efforts.

Treyarch could probably spin zombies into a separate release if they wanted to. It's been a fan favourite since its cheeky first appearance in World at War. Is the zombie mode your favourite part of Treyarch's CoD games, or just a fun distraction?

Gordon Freeman returns in Renegade Ops, out next month

Gordon Freeman will be a playable character in the PC version of Renegade Ops.

Gordon Freeman will be a playable character in the PC version of Renegade Ops. The top down blaster will let us play as the Half Life hero and drive around in the Half Life 2 buggy, firing off rockets, taking out tanks with mounted machine guns and unleashing swarms of Antlions to quickly wipe out dozens of enemies at a time.

Renegade Ops is the latest from Just Cause and Just Cause 2 developers, Avalanche studios. A far cry from the sprawling, open world action of their previous titles, Renegade Ops will be a more traditional co-op shooter, with a very, very strange Gordon Freeman shaped twist.

“Working with Steam and the Half-Life team makes this game extra special.” said Sega's director of digital, John Clark. “Gordon Freeman is a deeply-established character in the gaming world and we are proud to have him included in Renegade Ops.”

Renegade Ops is out on Steam on October 14, and will cost $15.00 / £9.99 / €12.99 / AUD$ 20.00. Catch the first screenshot of Gordon in his buggy below, with more to follow on the site shortly. The One Free Man is back!

Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 system requirements and enhanced PC features detailed

Treyarch have upgraded the DirectX 9 Black Ops engine to a "leaner" DirectX 11 edition that promises "significant improvements" for us PC players.

Treyarch have upgraded the DirectX 9 Black Ops engine to a "leaner" DirectX 11 edition that promises "significant improvements" for us PC players. The updated engine should make more efficient use of GPU power, and will have "more quality vs. performance options than ever before." The upgrade means that it won't run on Windows XP, however.

"Performance has been a top priority for Black Ops II PC from day one" say Treyarch in a post on the Black Ops 2 site, spotted by Eurogamer. "Black Ops II PC features enhanced lighting, shadows, antialiasing, bloom, depth of field, ambient occlusion, and other enhanced effects that are still in the works. And the game can run at higher resolutions and higher framerates on the PC."

There's no frame rate limit either, so we'll be able to cram even more Call of Duty into our eyeballs every second than ever before. Treyarch also released some minimum system requirements so you can plan an upgrade if you need one:

Black Ops 2 PC system requirements

OS: Windows Vista SP2 or Windows 7 CPU: Intel Core2 Duo E8200 2.66 GHz or AMD Phenom X3 8750 2.4 GHz Memory: 2GB for 32-bit OS or 4GB for 64-bit OS Gnomes: Four hardened micro-gnomes with front line combat experience Video Card: Nvidia GeForce 8800GT 512 MB or ATI Radeon HD 3870 512 MB

The extra polish should help to sell Black Ops 2's future setting a little better on PC but with Warface, Battlefield 3 and Planetside 2 kicking around, it'll be going up against some big engines this winter. If only there was a way to put them all in some sort of thunderdome and make them fight for our love.

Game Of The Year Free Game - full terms and conditions

Game Of The Year Free Game - FULL TERMS AND CONDITIONS
Promotion Terms & Conditions
The "Game Of The Year Free Game" promotion ("Promotion") is open to people aged 18 years and over who are resident in a Green Man Gaming trading country ("Applicable Countries") except employees and immediate families of the Promoter, or anyone else professionally connected with the Promotion ("Participants").

The Promotional site is open for Participants to claim and redeem their Free game from Thursday 18th December 2014 to Friday 2nd January 2015 at 23:59 GMT (the "Promotion Period") or while stocks last.

To participate in this Promotion, all Participants must complete the following steps during the Promotion Period:

Visit https://www.playfire.com/a/register/user

and enter the required details including a valid email address ("Applicable Email Address").

The Participant must complete this form and submit details – by submitting these details and requesting the Free Game the Participant is accepting these Terms and Conditions, including opt-in to Green Man Gaming and Playfire communications.

The Participant must link their Playfire account with a valid Steam Account for a period of 90 days.

The Participant will receive emails to acknowledge their participation in the Free Game Promotion and validate their Steam account, and the second with their Steam key for the Free Game. ( Note: the second email may take longer than 24 hours to send)

One Free Game only per valid Participant, household or IP address while stocks last.

The Free Game will be activated on Steam and will require the Participant to have a valid Steam account.

The Participant should note that Regional restrictions may apply to the Free Game and the Promotion.

By registering for the Promotion, the Participant agrees that they meet the age certification criteria of the game and the age declared in the submission form completed on

Participants must supply a valid email address and this must be the same email address (Applicable Email Address). Failure to provide the Applicable Email Address will invalidate your redemption of the Free Game.

By accepting the Free Game offer and submitting their details, the Participant is agreeing to be bound by the Terms and Conditions of this Promotion and the Terms and Conditions of Green Man Gaming Ltd.and Playfire Ltd https://www.playfire.com/a/terms

If the Participant wishes to unlink their Steam account and/or delete their Green Man Gaming /Playfire account within 90 days of receiving the Free Game, the Promoter reserves the right to have the Free Game deactivated at their sole discretion.

The Promotion will finish and the Free Game offer will be withdrawn when stock of the Free Game is depleted.

By submitting their details for the Promotion the Participant is also agreeing to be opted-in to be contacted by Green Man Gaming Ltd.. The Participant may opt-out at any subsequent time by visiting Settings > Personal Profile in their Green Man Gaming account ( https://www.greenmangaming.com/user/account/#setti...- when signed in) or by using an unsubscribe link in applicable communication.

If the redeemed activation key for the Free Game is found to be ineffective upon receipt, the Promoter must be notified in writing within 7 days of receipt, otherwise the Free Game will be deemed to be accepted as received. This does not affect your statutory rights (if any).

If there is any reason to believe that there has been a breach of the Terms and Conditions or incorrect, illegible, fraudulent or other invalid or improper information has been provided, the Promoter may at their sole discretion refuse to process an entry or fulfil any Free Game.

The Promoter may withdraw this Promotion at any time or amend the offer at their sole discretion.

The Promoter is: Green Man Gaming Ltd, Hamilton House, Mabledon Place, London WC1H 9BB.

Renegade Ops might be out on PC tomorrow. It might not. Who knows. It's still great

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Here's a grumble: we've still not got an announcement for when Renegade Ops will launch on PC.

Here's a grumble: we've still not got an announcement for when Renegade Ops will launch on PC. Gamers who've preordered it via Steam say that they received a message saying it would unlock tomorrow, which is useful-ish. But it's been out on the consoles for over a week already.

I'm sad about the situation, because Renegade Ops is seriously entertaining. Not knowing when we can play it on PC is driving me crackers.

So: Renegade Ops. It's a top down shooter in which you drive a little buggy around forests and hills, blowing stuff up. Hard. Everything about Renegade Ops is overcharged starting with the tech, which is just way too ambitious for this type of game. It's powered by the Just Cause 2 engine - which lets everything explode with a kind of overbaked physics that leaves you grinning. The plot, driven by over-the-top comic book cutscenes features a lunatic supervilllain nuking a city as an opening gambit, and gets stupider from there. The feel of the buggies is beautifully judged; they bounce all over the hills and steppes like little toys - it reminds me a little of the old Micro Machine games.

And it's perfect for the PC. Why?

I think it's the best LAN party game we've seen on the PC for years. It's got up to four player co-op that can be played online or over a LAN. Each player takes one of the Renegades, and with it a special ability. One of them can turn into a shield and bounce rockets away, another can drop airstrikes. There's persistant progression and with it, decent replay value too. As you play you'll gain points that can be put into a very simple talent tree.

I've loved playing Renegade Ops on console, and will shortly mount a campaign to make it the Official PC Gamer lunchtime game of choice. I realise I'm facing an uphill battle in this, given the Diablo 3 beta and our ongoing obsession with SupCom.

There's a four-pack available on Steam here for £20. If you're hosting a LAN party this weekend, you should definitely consider it. Just don't be sad if it doesn't come out for another few weeks.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 Hardened and Prestige editions detailed

Are you already dead set on picking up Call of Duty: Black Ops 2?

Are you already dead set on picking up Call of Duty: Black Ops 2? Then you might be the sort of player intrigued by a shinier special edition ultro-box version. MP1sthave word of two offerings, a "hardened" edition with a "collectible steelbook" and a "prestige" box which comes with an MD-27 Dragonfire Drone. That's not an in-game item. That's a drone that you can fly around and use to scare dogs. Attach a gun to it and you have a pretty close facsimile of the futuristic doom-bots we'll get to mess around with in Black Ops 2 (please don't do this).

Read on for a list explaining which extra bits come in which box, and a couple of pictures proving that they exist. No price announcement just yet.

Black Ops 2 is due out on November 13.

Hardened

Bonus In-Game Content: Nuketown Zombies & Nuketown 2025 Exclusive Xbox Live CLAW Avatar Prop & Zombies Avatar Costume Limited Edition Challenge Coins Official Soundtrack by Jack Wall With Theme by Trent Reznor Collectible Steelbook Also Includes: Exclusive Weapon Camp & Exclusive Player Card Backgrounds

Prestige

Bonus In-Game Content: Nuketown Zombies & Nuketown 2025 Exclusive PlayStation 3 System Multiplayer Theme & Zombie Theme MD-27 Dragonfire Drone with Remote Control Limited Edition Challenge Coins Official Soundtrack by Jack Wall With Theme by Trent Reznor Collectible Steelbook Also Included: Exclusive Weapon Camp & Exclusive Player Card Backgrounds

Do video games make people violent?

The debate over the relationship between violent games and violent behavior continues inside and outside the United States.

The debate over the relationship between violent games and violent behavior continues inside and outside the United States. In its initial response to the tragedy in Newtown, CT, the US government said it intends to ask the Centers for Disease Controlto “study the root causes of gun violence, including any relationship to video games and media images.” Critics cite studiesthat link aggression and violent games, claiming that interactivity as a component of games makes them unusually potent. One politician labeled games as " electronic child molesters."

It's an enormous and serious topic—one that we believe gamers shouldn't shrug off, but take it upon themselves to engage critics and fellow citizens on. In the interest of that, Logan, Evan, and Tylerhopped into our podcast studio (inappropriately, the room that most makes it look like we're inside an insane asylum) to talk about their personal relationship with violence in games.

2014 Personal Pick — Xenonauts

Phil's 2014 personal pick
If Xenonauts were receiving a proper award, it would be X-Com of the Year.

Personal Pick Xenonauts

Along with our group-selected 2014 Game of the Year Awards, each member of the PC Gamer staff has independently chosen another game to commend as one of 2014's best.

If Xenonauts were receiving a proper award, it would be X-Com of the Year. It is, in its design, structure, depth and challenge, utterly X-Com. It's blatant in its similarities, almost flagrant. Not even XCOM, the Firaxis reboot, was this much like X-Com. That's why Xenonauts could never hold a place in our Game of the Year Awards proper. It's intentionally derivative. It's not forging a bright, new future for PC gaming. It's not even proving that new design innovations can fit snugly into older templates, a la Divinity: Original Sin or Endless Legend. It is, pretty much, just X-Com again.

That's a good thing, to be clear—or, at least, a thing that I'm happy has happened. Every year PC Gamer picks a fresh Top 100. It's a round-up of our favourite 100 PC games, judged from a present-day perspective and unfettered by nostalgia or reverence. X-Com made it last year, but didn't place highly. It came 83rd; XCOM: Enemy Unknown came 6th. It's easy to see why. XCOM is the better game, able to more cleanly express the core idea and hone in on the most relevant and engaging systems. But X-Com is the more interesting game. It's deep, complex, brutal—all the things that can make a game so satisfying to master. It's also 20 years old, and it shows. That interface still gives me nightmares.

Combat in Xenonauts

That's why Xenonauts is a success. It has the same complexity and depth, and, as such, is filled with impossible situations that so effectively punish even the smallest of mistakes. But it's all wrapped up in a package that works. The interface is clean, and the graphics are crisp. That, it seems, is all it takes to revitalise such a well-proven template.

I'm being somewhat unfair. Xenonauts does do more. It's like a really good cover song: familiar and comfortable, but given a fresh twist and its own distinct personality. You can tell how fond its developers were of the Gollop brothers' game. The things they've fixed and tweaked are the sort of things that only dedicated fans would think to fix and tweak. The changes feel born of people who have spent long enough staring at an isometric battlefield to think "yeah, you know what? This is bullshit."

For instance, you are no longer responsible for every aspect of administration. You have an unlimited supply of medkits, grenades and stock weapons, because you are in charge of saving the goddamn world and maybe buying basic supplies is not the best use of your goddamn time .

The peculiarities of the setup that do remain intact are there because they're vital to what the game is. You're the world's last line of defence, and so even if North America does have a shitty time under your watch, it makes no sense for them to pull their funding and go it alone. But then, that's the key challenge: that's what keeps the world map screen such an integral and tense part of the game's strategy layer.

That's only one half of what made X-Com—and thus what makes Xenonauts—such a lasting classic. The turn-based tactical assaults are an almost paralysing web of choice and consequence. Xenonauts nails these missions. They're completely open ended in how you choose to approach them, both in the tools you take, and the decisions you make on the ground. You have a broad array of options, and many of them will result in catastrophe. Xenonauts does catastrophe right. It's version of Chryssalids are bloody terrifying—a near unstoppable force that colonises the map, turning civilians and soldiers alike. There's nothing that tells you you've made a mistake than being forced to gun down the mindless zombie that was once your top sniper. There's also little that's more effective at giving you the motivation to do better.

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It's Christmas. Would you like a free game? Of course you would! Thanks to our friends at Playfire, you can get a free Steam keyright now . Follow the link for full details.

The Division's first big post-launch update will make Dark Zone PvP more rewarding

The Dark Zone will get more rewarding for high-level players in The Division as of update 1.02. It will be the first major patch since The Division launched on March 8 when it rolls out tomorrow, though the free update introducing Incursions and squad loot trading is still taking shape. Middling rewards and massive risks spur few players to attack their fellow agents in the Dark Zone, making the current

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 in development at IW according to Captain Price actor

The actor behind the most famous walking talking 'tache in gaming, Bill Murray (not that one), has made mention of a somewhat inevitable follow-up to Modern Warfare 3.

The actor behind the most famous walking talking 'tache in gaming, Bill Murray (not that one), has made mention of a somewhat inevitable follow-up to Modern Warfare 3. "Yeah, on Monday I am off to meet Infinity Ward about the next game, Modern Warfare 4, I'm doing work on the sequel to Modern Warfare 3, it carries straight on and I only ever appear in the Modern Warfare games” he told This Is Xbox.

It looks like Treyarch and Infinity Ward will continue to share the Call of Duty series year on year. I quite like the idea that Modern Warfare will continue as an ongoing 24-esque action series while Black Ops becomes steadily more bonkers. By 2022 Captain Price will have come back from the dead eighty times and killed every single terrorist in the world and Black Ops will be set on Mars.

What would you like to see from Modern Warfare 4?

Most Original Game 2014: Jazzpunk

Phil Savage: There’s a moment in the first level that, for me, perfectly captures what makes Jazzpunk so original.

Jazzpunk

Check out our game of the year awards 2014 pageto find out how the awards were decided .

There’s a moment in the first level that, for me, perfectly captures what makes Jazzpunk so original. It’s an animation that plays as you climb through the window into the Russian embassy. You land in a roll, and a two-note musical fanfare announces your arrival. What’s great about it isn’t that it’s a funny entrance, but that it’s the only time you’ll see it happen in the game.

Game development, by necessity, values efficiency. Animations and assets need to be reusable. That’s what makes Jazzpunk so essential. It’s all about the random flourishes—the joy of discovering something new and unexpected. I played it with a constant sense of anticipation. Anything could be behind the next encounter, from a simple pun to a fully interactive minigame. Jazzpunk isn’t just ‘Most Original’ because it’s different from everything else, but also because it’s so consistently different from itself.

It’s funny, too, which is important in a game about comedy. Even the way it structures its jokes is different to other comedy games. Portal ’s humour is delivered in segments separate from its puzzles. Where Portal tells you a joke, Jazzpunk invites you to be a part of the joke It hands you control of a trigger that will detonate the next punchline. There’s a chance you’ll ruin it by botching the timing. It never matters. There’s always another joke, and another chance to be the catalyst for something hilarious.

Wes Fenlon: In a Repo Man world, where everything is given a generic white label like ‘food’ or ‘automobile’, Jazzpunk would be labelled—to borrow from Phil—‘random flourishes’. Jazzpunk fires bespoke jokes from a supercharged joke cannon at such a rapid pace that you can’t walk around for more than ten seconds before running into something completely unexpected. Sometimes the jokes are one-off soundbites or out-ofthe- way gags, but just as often they’re puzzles or the types of interactions that, in an ordinary game, we’d call missions. In Jazzpunk, they’re simply tools to break the fourth wall or serve up the next pun.

Jazzpunk is constantly playing with the medium. Sometimes 2D objects show up in its 3D environments. Sometimes you’re meddling with the flow of time. Sometimes you’re putting spiders in jars, which seems like a typical collection quest until you throw them in some poor bastard’s face. It wasn’t what I planned to do with the spiders, but what better way to complete an objective than that?

It took me months to play Jazzpunk, because I took a break between every level. I was always hungry for more, but at the same time, 20 minutes of Jazzpunk contains more laughs than most games. It felt criminal not to savour every one.

Andy Kelly: It’s when I interacted with some random wedding cake and found myself in Wedding Qake (sic), a fully featured deathmatch minigame echoing the golden era of 56k modem multiplayer, that I realised Jazzpunk was special. Its dedication to a single joke is impressive, and it made me laugh, over and over again, which few games ever have.

For our full verdict read our Jazzpunk review.

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It's Christmas. Would you like a free game? Of course you would! Thanks to our friends at Playfire, you can get a free Steam keyright now . Follow the link for full details.

QUICK: Dismantle all your Division crap before the big April update nerfs it

Ubisoft is set to release a to The Division on April 12, and higher-level players in particular should take note. Not only will there be a Gear Score to elevate you above the newbies of the secret government agency, but crafting is about to get way more expensive. While it's not absolutely necessary to craft your own armor and weapons in The Division, it's arguably the best way to supplement your inventory

Black Ops 2 launch trailer rocks to squirrel-suits, spiderbots and splodes

Launch trailers usually go up at a game's launch.

Launch trailers usually go up at a game's launch. Not so in the case of Black Ops 2, which has boldly put this video out a whole month early. Unless this isn't a trailer to celebrate the launch of the game but a trailer for the launch event itself, in which case the arrival of Black Ops 2 on shelves will herald no small amount of flaming, screaming death, destruction, gunfire, horses and humourless-looking men throwing themselves off cliffs and out of planes. Most companies settle for free drinks and a tombola, but not Activision.

Well, gosh. The promise of more tactical play in the Strikeforce missions certainly doesn't take a back-seat to simple bombastic destruction. But will the focus on rogue robots remove some of the guilty visceral thrill of gunning down hordes of squishy, jam-filled men?

2014 Personal Pick — BioShock Infinite: Burial At Sea Part 2

Sam's 2014 personal pick
I’ve wanted to write a spoilery assessment (warning: you've been warned) of BioShock Infinite: Burial At Sea all year, and now appears to be the perfect time.

Bioshock Infinite Personal Pick

Along with our group-selected 2014 Game of the Year Awards, each member of the PC Gamer staff has independently chosen one game to commend as one of 2014's best.

all year, and now appears to be the perfect time. While I briefly considered nominating this for some kind of best expansion award, talking about this as a personal favourite of the year and being able to discuss the ins and outs of the story makes so much more sense—because if you muddled your way to BioShock Infinite: Burial At Sea Part 2, having completed the previous episode, BioShock Infinite, BioShock 2 and maybe Minerva’s Den, this closing of the Irrational era of the series was a huge moment. It was not only a farewell to Rapture and Columbia, but a goodbye note from Irrational as the studio in its post-Infinite form ceased to exist.

I think Burial At Sea works a little too hard to pander to fans. In Part 1 of Burial At Sea, a Rapture-bound Booker DeWitt teams up with a noir-styled Elizabeth to find a lost child called Sally. After a wander in pre-fall Rapture, it veers into more familiar splicer-slaying territory. By the finale, Booker is killed as many of the same themes from Infinite’s ending are reprised. Burial At Sea Pt 2, by contrast, puts players in Elizabeth’s shoes for the first time. Elizabeth is reluctantly in league with BioShock antagonist Atlas, who leads a rebellion against Ryan that will throw Rapture out of balance. Elizabeth helps set in motion Jack’s arrival in Rapture, in a story that is quite clearly intended to be canon for the original BioShock.

To quote my colleague Phil Savage when I discussed this with him, Burial At Sea fills in plot holes that did not need to be filled in. You don’t need to know what Kurtz’s morning was like before Willard arrived in Apocalypse Now (maybe he had a shower? In the dark, of course). And you really didn’t need to know what the Space Jockey in Alien was up to, did you? It was much more fun as a question, not an answer. Clinically debunking the mythology around beloved fiction rarely serves the story.

In pleasing players who were so keen to see those two fictions of Columbia and Rapture collide and to close the loop on any potentially unanswered questions about the two cities, Irrational perhaps picked the safest of all the infinite outcomes to explore. Elizabeth’s presence, it turns out, 100% solves the story of Jack’s coming to Rapture. But did the story of two BioShocks need solving?

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There was an opportunity for a far wilder and weirder turn for that fiction, I think. While it may be the most satisfying way to close out from a fan perspective, critically speaking, did this really serve the story as well as it could’ve done? I’d argue maybe not. The story of Jack, Andrew Ryan and Fontaine was complete.

However: I say all this knowing that I enjoyed every second of Burial At Sea as a fan. The critic in me knows all of the above but really doesn’t mind that much. BioShock was the beginning of the next age of games for me back in 2007, a formative and influential title that challenged older notions of cutscene-driven storytelling (even if a lot of those principles had already been pioneered in System Shock 2, BioShock basically popularised them). To revisit that world was an indulgence, and god damn it, when fan service is made directly for you, there’s no shame in loving it.

And I did love Burial At Sea. I got the briefest glimpse of Sander Cohen creating his twisted art, a villain who I hadn’t seen in almost seven years but certainly never forgot. I was breathless in the final stretch as Elizabeth slowly maneuvered into certain betrayal at the hands of Atlas, who angrily slipped out of the Irish drawl and into the American twang of Frank Fontaine, his true and barely-hidden identity. I will never, ever forget this anti-Ryan propaganda videoby Atlas that you find later in the story. Burial At Sea was an extravagant finale for BioShock in its current form, filled with moments designed to get an emotional response from players who have the same background with the series that I do.

It’s comparable, actually, to Mass Effect 3’s Citadel DLC from last year—a farewell to one era of a series players have lived with for nearly a decade. Irrational’s closure makes it more poignant in retrospect. I sensed Ken Levine’s love for comic books in the way these universes were thrown together. Elizabeth meeting Andrew Ryan for the first time is Levine’s Superman meeting the Joker: it’s not what we’re used to, but how can you not want to see it?

I think Irrational put pleasing fans ahead of the story—and you know what, given that this is the last Irrational game we’ll ever see, though certainly not the last time we’ll see its influences or its philosophies, the Boston studio deserved to do that. Burial At Sea is a fond farewell to BioShock and Infinite, one that I almost consider a fourth BioShock game in its own right.

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It's Christmas. Would you like a free game? Of course you would! Thanks to our friends at Playfire, you can get a free Steam keyright now . Follow the link for full details.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 gets free game mode, map Collection 2 DLC released

If you're partial to Modern Warfare 3's tight arena tussles then you might be interested in investigating the new game mode, Face off.

Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 collection pack 2

If you're partial to Modern Warfare 3's tight arena tussles then you might be interested in investigating the new game mode, Face off. It allows for quick, violent 1 v 1, 2 v 2 and 3 v 3 contests on "smaller, super-concentrated multiplayer maps." Two of these new maps have been released for free and are playable right now.

This free taste of Face Off could help to move copies of the newly released Collection 2 DLC, which comes with two more Face Off maps, a standard multiplayer arena set in a hotel poised on top of an ancient fortress (why not?), and two co-op spec ops missions.

The first co-op mission, Kill Switch, casts one player as a well situated sniper and the other as a terrified ground soldier who must infiltrate a carrier to set of an EMP bomb. Iron Clad puts one player inside a tank, and the other outside the tank, where they'll be best placed to deliver some powerful moral support from the safety of the Abram's shadow

The pack costs £11.49 / $14.99, which seems even steeper than previous packs given that there are fewer multiplayer maps than usual, and two of them are smaller than ordinary CoD maps. BUT, free maps for everyone! If you were to distil the essence of Face Off mode into a quick series of carefully choreographed moving images designed to shift product, it might look a little bit like this:

2014 Personal Pick — Valkyria Chronicles

TOM Marks' 2014 personal pick
I first played Valkyria Chronicles when it launched on PS3 six years ago and was completely blown away.

Valkyria Chronicles staff pick

Along with our group-selected 2014 Game of the Year Awards, each member of the PC Gamer staff has independently chosen one game to commend as one of 2014's best.

I first played Valkyria Chronicles when it launched on PS3 six years ago and was completely blown away. I'd never played anything quite like it, and I don’t think I’ve played anything like it since. Its core mechanic, turn-based battles with faux real-time fighting, was a genuine gamble as it risked alienating pure-strategy fans, action fans, or both. It wasn't afraid to break rules from either genre to create something new. The plot is also unique, a JRPG set in an imaginary World War II Europe, and I missed it, too.

The moment I started up the PC version, the melody gave me goosebumps. I was surprised that a game I remembered primarily for its unique gameplay had also left an emotional mark, but hearing the opening song felt like coming home. That was amplified when I got to the squad selection screen and recognized characters like they were old friends. I immediately remembered who were my favorites, and who I never used—who I could rely on and who disappointed me. In fact, one of the hardest things I had to do while reviewingit was forcing myself not to use the same people as six years ago and try something new. It felt like breaking up, but I quickly discovered there was a whole different roster to fall in love with.

Valkyria Chronicles Review 15

This isn’t to say that the world is without awkward moments. Honestly, there are a good deal of those moments. Battles can last for almost an hour and a half, so the story pacing compensates with long chunks of plot before and after each fight. The story is engaging but the emotion fluctuates between events like a silly day at the beach and digging through the wreckage of a burned down concentration camp. The massive number of dialogue scenes definitely dragged on me at points, and the flat English voice acting didn’t help any, but the moments where it worked hit hard. There is a true emotional core at the heart of each character, but you might have to use the Japanese voice acting with subtitles to find it.

Regardless, the battles—those moments that aren’t story—are exciting and fun. They are also brutally difficult. Valkyria Chronicles does a good job of ramping up the difficulty level, but I lost a lot of battles before I discovered and developed strategies that worked for me. Movement and positioning is incredibly important, so my strategy was based almost entirely on Snipers and Scouts, the units with the highest range and movement. But that’s not the only way I could have played. Choice of character, class, weapon upgrades, tank upgrades, and even pathing all have implications on the battlefield. I never once felt like I was making a wholly wrong choice, only that I hadn’t refined my strategy enough.

It’s nearly impossible to assign Valkyria Chronicles to a single genre. It combines things that, on paper, should never work together. The gameplay is a mix of turn based and real time strategy. It's a melodramatic JRPG, but it's genuinely moving. It’s challenging and deep, with an immense amount of detail in everything, down to the map screens to the supporting characters. What results is a completely unique strategy game that still turns heads six years after its initial release.

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It's Christmas. Would you like a free game? Of course you would! Thanks to our friends at Playfire, you can get a free Steam keyright now . Follow the link for full details.

Renegade Ops preview

There are moments during Avalanche's raucous action game, Just Cause 2, where it can get quite serene: the explosions have died down and you're floating through the air like a dandelion seed.

Renegade Ops thumbnail

There are moments during Avalanche's raucous action game, Just Cause 2, where it can get quite serene: the explosions have died down and you're floating through the air like a dandelion seed. Ahhhh. There are no relaxing moments in their new download only top-down twin-stick shooter: Renegade Ops, between the explosions are more, bigger eruptions. No 'ahhhh' moments whatsoever. From the moment I spilled off the giant hovercraft in my jeep, the screen was filled with bullets and bangs.

It's a cartoonish battle against super villain Inferno drops General Bryant's troops in a pretty, tropical world (bigger than Oblivion) using the engine that powered Just Cause 2. Avalanche really wants you to use the sticks, so I'm not given the opportunity to try the beloved keyboard and mouse.

One thumbstick controls the vehicle's direction, the other directing a stream of infinite bullets into everything and anything. Additional powers, like an EMP that freezes enemies or missiles, are on the trigger buttons. The first vehicle, a jeep, skids through an overgrown, jungley world. There's a proper heft to it, and I have to fight to keep it going straight, every bump threatens to spin me out. Constant movement is needed to slip between flocks of ammo being sent from the enemies. From cannon fodder infantry to huge missile spewing trucks, I spin my jeep around, circling while arrowing the limitless supply of lead into the targets. It's not easy: the camera hugging the action, the bumpy terrain and the masses of enemies batters you about the head.

Everything explodes: the cage that's holding prisoners blows up, crates full of supplies go kablooy, escaping transport vehicles with kidnap victims kerassshh. There's no unnecessary faffing: you want to open something up, you shoot at it and drive over the reward. Delivering rescued prisoners means driving at a church and veering off at the last minute, basically throwing them in to the welcoming arms of god.

Things get more complicated when objectives layer on top of each other, vying for attention: I'm asked to stop the missile truck from killing a village, but there are still people to rescue. I panic and frantically take my truck off-road as a timer kicks in, bumbling over rutted fields towards the missile spewing truck, flipping my truck several times. I barrel into the little village, driving through buildings, and start circling the missile truck, dropping an EMP and peppering it till if fashooms! No time to rest, back to the church to toss the gathered prisoners into the church.

As all super villains have a backup plan, the game veers out to sea: madman Inferno's preparing a big assault from the comfort of a huge battleship. A helicopter is basically the jeep of the sky: this time in the air, there's less focus on keeping the thing on track, more allowing the bullets to destroy the ship's defenses and emerging warheads. Blatta-blatta-blatta. This feels more like a boss battle, stripping its defences then focussing fire on the warheads and, finally, Inferno himself.

For a first level, it's breathless. I do worry that it could be a bit one note, but then the action isn't quite as mindless as holding the stick down until everything dies.

The layered objectives, secondary weapons and rota of vehicles should make things interesting between bangs.

Modern Warfare 2 designer explains the thinking behind No Russian mission

Modern Warfare 2's No Russian mission asked players to choose to take an passive or active role in an airport civilian massacre.

Modern Warfare 2's No Russian mission asked players to choose to take an passive or active role in an airport civilian massacre. It caused quite an uproar back when it was released, but a lot of time has passed. A legal battle has been fought, a new studio has been formed, and many of the designers who worked on Modern Warfare 2 at Infinity Ward are now working for Respawn Entertainment.

Mohammad Alavi is one of them. The designer responsible for one of Call of Duty 4's most memorable levels, All Ghillied Up, also had a hand in creating Call of Duty's most controversial moment. With the legal NDAs surrounding his attachment to Infinity Ward expired, he's spoken to Matthew S. Burns on Magical Wastelandabout the intent behind No Russian.

"We were trying to do three things" he explains, "sell why Russia would attack the US, make the player have an emotional connection to the bad guy Makarov, and do that in a memorable and engaging way.

"In a first person shooter where you never leave the eyes of the hero, it's really hard to build up the villain and get the player invested in why he's 'bad'."

Alavi describes early versions of the level in which the massacre takes place at the beginning of the level and quickly turns into a shoot out. He mentions that that version "felt cheap and gimmicky. It felt like we were touching on something raw and emotional and then shying away from it just as soon as it became uncomfortable.

“I've read a few reviews that said we should have just shown the massacre in a movie or cast you in the role of a civilian running for his life. Although I completely respect anyone's opinion that it didn't sit well with them, I think either one of those other options would have been a cop out," he says. "[W]atching the airport massacre wouldn't have had the same impact as participating (or not participating) in it. Being a civilian doesn't offer you a choice or make you feel anything other than the fear of dying in a video game, which is so normal it's not even a feeling gamers feel anymore.”

No Russian served a pragmatic storytelling purpose. The player's outrage would be the emotional leverage needed to make Makarov a more weighty villain. As heavy handed as that might seem, Alavi suggests that, from his perspective, getting a strong reaction of any kind from players is a victory. “It isn't really relevant whether that makes you enjoy the entertainment experience even more because you're being naughty (à la Grand Theft Auto) or it engrosses you further into the story and makes you resent your actions. What's relevant is that the level managed to make the player feel anything at all,” he says.

“In the sea of endless bullets you fire off at countless enemies without a moment's hesitation or afterthought, the fact that I got the player to hesitate even for a split second and actually consider his actions before he pulled that trigger– that makes me feel very accomplished.”

Just Cause devs announce Renegade Ops

Avalanche Studios have announced that their next title will be a top down vehicular combat game built in the same engine used to create Just Cause 2.

Renegade Ops

Eurogamersay that it will be getting a digital only release, and will support up to four players in online co-op. You'll play as a unit of commandos sent behind enemy lines to blow up a mad terrorist called inferno. It sounds as though the story will take a back seat to the going-fast-and-exploding-everything action. Collectible vehicle weapons and upgrades will power the vehicle weapons which include gatling guns and magnetic shock waves. The game's set for release this Autumn.

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Our Verdict
Despite a clunky story and technical performance, there's a lot of fun to be found in dashing and dodging through a zombie-filled city.

need to know

What is it? First-person open world zombie survival
Influenced by : The Far Cry and Assassin's Creed series, Left 4 Dead, Mirror's Edge
Price : $60/£40
Release date : Out now
Publisher: Techland
Developer: Techland
Multiplayer: 4 player co-op and competitive modes
Copy protection : Steam
Link: Official Site

Like its hero, the wall-climbing, sewer-spelunking, city-hopping Kyle Crane, Dying Light has its ups and downs and is kind of all over the map. Techland, creator of the Dead Island series, takes elements from a number of games—especially the Far Cry series—and mashes them together in its open world first-person zombie shooter. It's an uneven mix, bookended by a slow start and an exasperating finish, not to mention a few troubling performance issues, but in the middle lies a sweet spot that provides hours of satisfying, zombie-stomping fun.

Kyle Crane, a secret government operative, has been sent to the city of Harran to retrieve critical data about a virus that's turned most of the population into zombies. Crane, after immediately botching his mission and getting bitten, falls in with a selfless group of survivors, contends with a vicious warlord bent on controlling the medicine supply, and takes orders from an agency superior who would prefer to simply napalm the entire mess. Who will Crane ultimately pledge loyalty to? I wonder.

Crane, despite being what I assumed was a top physical specimen, initially can't run for long before slowing and gasping, and can only swing a melee weapon a few times before running out of stamina, which resulted in a slow and awkward first few hours of play. Weapons, at first, are limited to pipes, wrenches, small knives, or sticks of wood, all of which do little damage to zombies and need frequent repair before falling apart completely. The melee combat itself is a bit wonky: sometimes you'll score a staggering hit or grisly decapitation and win your fight instantly. Sometimes you'll just have to spam the mouse until you run out of stamina or your enemy falls. It doesn't feel like precise aiming helps: I've tried very hard to land my strikes perfectly, but the harmless glancing blows and devastating skull-crushers feel like they're randomly determined.


Weaponize yourself

Blueprints can be found or purchased, letting you craft upgrades to electrify pipes, sharpen or poison knives, add nails to a baseball bats, and otherwise beef up your attacks, and better weapons like swords and axes slowly begin to appear as you progress. Flipping through menus to craft gear tends to slow things down a bit, though provided you don't play in marathon stretches like I did, it may not be as tiresome as it eventually felt. It takes hours of play to even get your hands on a gun, and the relief of finally having a firearm somewhat defuses the issue of there being only a couple of pistols, two types of rifles, and a double-barrel shotgun.

Your best weapon is Crane's slowly improving agility coupled with a city perfectly built for climbing and roof-running. Once you get the hang of leaping and climbing and realize that nearly everything in the city that looks like it can be climbed can be climbed, Dying Light opens up and becomes a fun, zombie-infested playground. Techland has done a great job with the running, jumping, climbing, and clambering—zipping up the sides of buildings, sprinting across rooftops, and dodging and dashing through the crowded streets becomes real fun, an instinctive and exciting way to travel.

Skill points are doled out slowly and individually as you play and there's lots to spend them on. The vaulting skill is a useful one: while dashing through the streets you can plant your foot right on a zombie's face and launch yourself over it, leaving it in the dust. A related skill can also stun your targets as you leap off them, so you can land, turn, and bash your wobbling enemy's skull in. A fun, flying, two-footed kick can stagger enemies or knock them off perches, and a sliding kick can shatter a zed's legs. Despite finishing the main story I've still only unlocked about half of the skills available, and uber-skills like stealth kills and the ability to use a grappling hook come very late in the game. The result is a well-paced, gradual increase in skills and a character who markedly improves but never feels like some sort demigod placed on earth to smite zombies.

Dying Light

The complete difference between daytime and nighttime in Harran is remarkable.

Right, zombies! They come in a few flavors. Mostly, they're slow, shambling types, clogging the surface streets and bridges, lurking in buildings and alleys, and occasionally staggering around on rooftops, providing amusement as they flop off ledges or over balconies while mindlessly trying to follow you. There are also specials: huge, durable brutes who swing clubs or hurl hunks of concrete, spitters who barf slime from a distance, bloated blobs who scream and explode, and a handful of freshly-infected citizens who haven't lost their mobility and can still sprint and climb. Distracting them, rather than fighting them, is often the best move; firecrackers will divert zombies for the few important seconds needed to pick a lock (in a Skyrim-style minigame) or force open a door, and the city is littered with other traps like cars rigged to explode and puddles of water that can be electrified. The zombies' attraction to noise is a double-edged sword, of course. Shooting or using grenades is quick and effective, but can draw an overwhelming crowd.

When night falls, the zombie game changes entirely. A new breed of zombie called Volatiles appears, and suddenly Crane is no longer the fastest thing on two legs in Harran. The Volatiles prowl the pitch-black city, and if you wander into their vision cones they pursue you at a lightning-fast pace while screeching to attract other zombies. You can set off traps or distract them while fleeing, but a single stumble usually results in a quick and brutal death. The complete difference between daytime and nighttime in Harran is remarkable, and I always find the approach of night to be genuinely panic-inducing as I hurriedly sprint for the nearest safe zone before the sun goes down. You're occasionally forced to do missions at night, but otherwise you can advance the clock to morning by sleeping in a bed.


Bright frights, big city

Harran itself is peppered with stuff to do, much of it familiar from other open world games. In addition to lengthy story missions, there are multipart side-quests, looting and scavenging expeditions, random encounters with hostile thugs or boss zombies, airdrop recoveries, citizen rescues, hunts for collectibles, securing safehouses, and a few timed challenges. It's all pretty standard open world fare and easily ignored when you're headed to a mission, but if you're just out for a run you'll always find something happening nearby.

As for the story itself, it's a bit of a clunker as Crane, supposedly torn between his loyalties, grapples unconvincingly with his conscience despite very obviously being a complete Boy Scout. Characters are both familiar and forgettable: the reckless kid, the reluctant leader, the soullessly pragmatic government agent, and an assortment of helpless or nefarious NPCs. Of course, there's the evil boss who executes his henchman for minor infractions and taunts you over loudspeakers as you infiltrate his headquarters. At one point, after you slip from his clutches because he wanted to deliver yet another monologue instead of just killing you, he even raises his face to the sky and howls "Craaaaaaane!" Classic.

Considering the formulaic story and the uninteresting characters telling it, I appreciate that Techland let me skip through cutscenes and speed up conversations by tapping the spacebar. That said, Dying Light also contains a series of my personal gaming no-nos. I was stripped of all my carefully collected and crafted weapons and dropped into an deathmatch arena not once but twice . There's no manual or quick saves, only checkpoints, and while they worked reasonably well for most of the game they were mostly absent for the final story mission in a cheap attempt to make the endgame more challenging. A lengthy dream/hallucination sequence, shamelessly ripped from Dishonored's Outsider sequences, slowed my movement to a crawl to forced me to listen to some truly terrible voiceovers. Finally, it made me engage in a stupid QTE-based knife fight with a boss when I had a full load of guns, grenades, and molotov cocktails stuffed in my pants.

performance and settings

Reviewed on : Windows 7, Intel i7 x980 3.33 GHz, 9 GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce GTX 960.
Play it on: Intel i5-4670K 3.4 GHz/AMD FX-8350 4.0 GHz, 8 GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce GTX 780/AMD Radeon R9 290
Variable framerate: Yes
Anti-aliasing: Only on/off
FOV slider: Yes
Misc. gfx options: motion blur / DOF / Ambient Occlusion / Nvidia HBAO+
Remappable controls: Yes for keyboard/mouse, controllers use presets
Gamepad support: Yes

My PC hovers closer to the 'minimum required' end of the specs, and after some very smooth intro missions I was only averaging about 25-35 FPS when turned loose in the city. Turning down my view distance slider helped (and didn't particularly affect the way the game looked other than some occasional late texture pop-ins), and turning off vsync was also necessary. After that, I would generally hover between 50 and 70 FPS, though I regularly experienced sudden framerate dips and drops that didn't seem connected to anything in particular.


Infect your friends

I played a couple hours of co-op, which allows friends to drop in and out of each others' games, team up for missions, engage in competitive challenges, or just run around and bash zombies together. It was fun, though my co-op partner and I both experienced some very heavy lag at various times. I also tried out a couple sessions of the multiplayer Be The Zombie mode, which pits a group of human survivors against a player-controlled uber-zombie who stalks them through the city, but it just feels like a half-baked version of Left 4 Dead.

The lag we experienced was hardly Dying Light’s only technical problem. I experienced framerate dips (see the ‘Performance and Settings’ sidebar), as well as issues in cutscenes. When a scripted scene or a conversation with a character began, the visuals would completely freeze, sometimes for as long as fifteen seconds, while the audio would continue to play. Then the audio would freeze while the visuals struggled to catch up. I eventually found that simply turning off depth of field fixed it, though I have no idea why. I've also seen various reports on forums about the game not being optimized for SLI, to the point that playing with two cards is somehow worse than playing with one. If you're on the fence about buying Dying Light, you may want to hold off to see if patches make any positive changes to the situation.

When it wasn't tripping over its own feet—be it from technical problems or the shambling start and potboiler story—I enjoyed Dying Light. Over the three consecutive days spent playing it almost constantly, I typically came away having had a pretty good time. There are frustrations here, but there’s also an exciting movement system and a healthy if familiar list of activities to engage in.

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Dying Light


Zombies: I bet you can't burn just one.

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Dying Light


Standard zombies are slow on their feet but quick to grab. Also, no sense of personal space.

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Dying Light


An electrified puddle can clear the streets without getting yourself messy.

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Dying Light


Good loot in those police vans, if you can keep those zeds occupied.

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Dying Light


The true test to find out if zombies feel pain.

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Dying Light


Nice to meet you. Now please shut up.

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Dying Light


I'll drop my stick if you'll put down, uh... both of your arms and legs. Fair?

The Verdict

Dying Light

Despite a clunky story and technical performance, there's a lot of fun to be found in dashing and dodging through a zombie-filled city.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR The first PC game Chris owned was Choplifter in 1982, and since then our staff writer has played at least three other games. He has a love/hate relationship with Early Access survival games and an odd fascination with the lives of NPCs.

We recommend By Zergnet

Goodbye video games, hello board games: An interview with Vic Davis

Vic Davis recently announced he was retiring from making digital games after spending the better part of a decade making esoteric self-published indie games.

he was retiring from making digital games after spending the better part of a decade making esoteric self-published indie games. Starting with the expansive Armageddon Empires and the cunning and conniving Solium Infernum , Davis has achieved the impressive task of wrangling Adobe Director into helping him produce his games, helped along by hiring some excellent artists to spruce them up once he's done laying the foundations.

Throughout his career as an independent game developer, Davis only sold his games directly through his own website, forgoing Steam or any other digital distribution service. While this may have contributed to his decision to cease making digital games, it wasn't the only factor.

I talk to Vic about his choice to leave the digital space, as well as what went right and wrong for him and his model as a solo-dev publishing and selling his games all by himself. We also look forward to his new venture, as a board game designer.

Primarily, what was the reasion behind your decision to retire from making digital games? Was it due to the shifting environment for indies, economic difficulty or just because it was getting to be too difficult to actually make games in Adobe Director any more?

It was actually a combination of all three of those factors. The biggest issue though was that when I sat down to code my next game, it was a chore. Yeah, Adobe Director isn't ideal but I could have probably trudged through and made another game. I have a lot of design patterns for UI elements that I could pull out of my tool box....pop up windows, scrolling menus etc. I realized though that I was starting to bend my designs to fit the tools that I had built over the last 10 years. That was sort of a wake up call.

I'm not a great programmer and I also realized that doing good coding work required more passion than I had.  There was a time when I was doing the AI for Armageddon Empires and Solium Infernum that I couldn't wait to get up and start messing around with my code. I had blast tinkering with finite state machines, goal based systems, influence maps and even genetic algorithms. But I guess that I changed sometime along the way.  I'm almost 50 now and silly things like eye strain are becoming an issue.


"I guess that I changed sometime along the way.  I'm almost 50 now and silly things like eye strain are becoming an issue."

I also made some serious mistakes along the way. One was shifting my design from turn based strategy games that involved a hex based board and some type of military conflict to pursuing other genres. This was in part because I had burned out a little bit. My first two projects were each years in the making with hundreds of thousands of lines of code, huge financial risks in investing in the art and project management headaches all over the place. The scope of my first two games suited a 3+ man team and not just me.

So I thought I would make a coffee break game and reduce the stress a bit, but Six Gun Saga was anything but relaxing. I had been playing a lot of board games that centered on multiple uses of the same card so I thought I'd design and build something similar on the computer after another design failed and I had a bunch of art images for a western game. So I jumped into a new genre and then compounded it by making a horror rogue-like game right after that. I can't blame my customers for being confused. In retrospect I should have just taken a yearlong sabbatical and then tried another hex based strategy game. But like I said, I don't think you see many of those being created by just one person for a reason. Like the Machine from The Princess Bride, they will suck years of your life away.

The second big mistake was not trying to jump on Steam right away. I had come from a background where I sold physical products through retailers and I was really certain that this new internet thing was going to mean that I could cut out the middle man. So fueled by my arrogance that the middle men were goners I said some disparaging things about middle men and pushed on to the bitter end with the idea that I could sell just from my website and make a living at this. This turned out to be incorrect. I'd like a Nobel in economics someday for Vic's Law:

The Middle Man will always own the customer and have the last laugh. It's what they do best so don't try and fight it.

Over the past few years we've see n a huge explosion in both the popularity and availability of indie games. Was the increased attention on indie games a benefit to you, or did it become more difficult to stand out from the noise?

I think I was a modestly early indie. But I was in a different space from the clever art games or even Cliffski's simulation games. Things like Rock Paper Shotgun, Penny Arcade, Quarter to Three and other message boards really drove traffic to my website and turned AE into a modest success when it would have otherwise been a complete failure. I even had some nice print coverage. My biggest problem is that I am a huge introvert and I'd much rather design games than run a business. I have to say there are a lot of nice people out there who for whatever weird reason liked my games and were very supportive....both in the games media and just regular customers who posted on gaming forums.

As far as the noise goes, I didn't really even notice it. The space is really crowded in general but there are a lot of niches that are still rather empty with just a few candles still trying to flicker in the vast darkness. Turn based strategy gaming is one of those.

You're moving into board games, itself an industry that's been growing over the past few years. Did that chance of environment make the decision to switch easier? Do you think it's a viable option for other developers?


"My board game is going to be just a few notches up on the scale above a vanity project."

It's growing but I don't think in any way that is going to help me. My board game is going to be just a few notches up on the scale above a vanity project. Now if you are Fantasy Flight or Days of Wonder, you are loving the renaissance that has sprung up in the last couple of years. I chose to try a board game because a one man computer game project needs a coder first and foremost. A board game needs a designer and a project manager at its core. I can't code any more. I think I can do the design and I can bite my lip and muddle through on the project management.

It's definitely much more viable than it used to be. There is a huge array of options now to print and distribute physical products like board games now more so than even 5 years ago. I can even try and disprove Vic's Law again and sell just from a kickstarter or my own website. Probably not the best idea but it's an option.

Along with the increase in indie popularity the past few years has also seen an abundance of game engines rise in popularity. I'm going to assume you considered switching to one of them, so what was it that made you decide that this wasn't an option?

I thought about switching to Unity 5 or so years ago after I finished Solium Infernum but I was already in my spiral of not enjoying the coding. I don't think it would have made a difference really. But if you are a young developer with ambition I would recommend that you try Unity.

Similarly, what made you decide that hiring outside help to aid you in programming your games wasn't the right choice? I'd argue that the success of games like Solium Infernum was despite Director, so your ideas and design is definitely something that should persist outside your programming.


"If you are not going to sleep thinking about what you want to code tomorrow and are excited about it then think about what you are doing and why."

I contracted out for the art and music for all my games. It was a tremendous success and you can see by the art and music in my games that it was top notch. The art and music sells the games as much as the design. The UI design and programming is a net negative. But with a computer game project, the whole thing revolves around the code. Art and Music can have placeholders until the end but the code has to be there and be hammered out over and over every day. I thought about outsourcing but I just couldn't see managing that given my personality and my need to push the projects forward just through the strength of my own will. It's hard to explain but the projects would likely never get done if I didn't take accountability for them and do certain work myself. I didn't want to be a code supervisor either. I did ask around and got some horror stories as well about poor work and missed deliverables. Cost was another issue. It was something I could do myself so I did.

Do you have any advice for single-person developers who want to develop their games with minimum outside help?

Yeah, learn to code. Pick a solid language/environment that looks like it will grow with you. If you are not going to sleep thinking about what you want to code tomorrow and are excited about it (most of the time as some work can be tedious no matter what) then think about what you are doing and why. Develop people skills even if you are an introvert. Don't let things just sit there because you don't have the social energy to respond. Learn to put on the happy face mask and get the work done. Sadly no man is an island, and even if he were, the ocean is teaming with people on jet skis.

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Our Verdict
Still untouchable on the footy frontbut shelf life and that inconsistent 3D engine chip away at its tender achilles.

NEED TO KNOW

What is it? The latest in the venerable series of footie management sims.
Reviewed on: Core i5, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970, 8GB RAM
Play it on: Core i5, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970, 8GB RAM
Copy protection: Steam
Price: £35 / $50
Release date: Out now
Publisher: Sega
Developer: Sports Interactive
Link: Official site

Sports Interactive’s legendary dugout sim has endured some polarising seasons. Critics say its modern form is too complex and sprawling. Fans argue it appears that way because it offers all the depth of being a real manager. Boo-boys decry its UI as impenetrable. Converts insist that everything you need is to hand if you only know where to look. And in pretend football as in real life, forumite squabbling ultimately smothers any attempt at serious discussion. At least until everyone concurs that Robbie Savage is a plum.

Let’s kick off with those repeated criticisms—or are they compliments?—then. The main interface is certainly overwhelming for new or lapsed players. Where once player searches, team selection and vital stats were a cursor-click away, now every screen is a spaghetti junction of words and digits and pie charts, constructed upon a foundation of assumed knowledge, from which all roads seem to reach dead ends. The only way for novices to bed in is by initially palming key tasks, such as training and scouting, off to AI-controlled staff members. They perform these roles satisfactorily, but it’s not ideal.

After mastering the menus—this year it took me two hours, novices are looking at 4-5—you see why ardent fans back ‘their’ game so lustily, and praise the deeper features that weren’t there in the supposed golden years. Back then, transfers and matches were the big time sink; now it’s the tiny decisions made every few seconds which tax the grey matter and cause whole weekends to disappear. Do you start a star player returning from injury, despite your physio warning he’ll only last 30 minutes? Do you bollock an underperforming full-back at half-time, or calmly reassure him he can turn it round? At a press conference, do you fancy QPR or Cardiff to win at the weekend—and if you choose one, will the other use that as dressing room bulletin-board material next time you meet?

Like God himself having a kick-around in the Amazon, all these actions can trigger a domino effect however innocuous they appear. Football Manager is actually something of a misleading title; these days it’s more like Football Micro-Manager. And while handling the minutiae of training ground life is a relatively new, and impressive, feature, developer Sports Interactive has by no means lost track of what got it this far.

Transfer negotiations are devilishly fun. Agree a fee for a player and you’re invited to sit down with his agent to negotiate not only a wage, but clauses such as promotion pay rises and even his fee for being an unused sub. It’s especially amusing to toy with the middle man by upping your target’s salary to slightly more than that requested, then greatly reducing his personal cut. At lower league clubs, such penny pinching plays a vital role in your chances of long-term success—one major signing’s weekly appearance fee might cover the wages of three less-talented squad players. Which do you choose? Why are you lying awake at 2am in the morning pondering this? Because that’s the very essence of Football Manager.

Matchdays, too, are wonderfully elaborate, with press conferences, team talks and intricate tactical options creating the sense that each is a unique occasion. There’s no breezing through weeks of the season in an evening anymore. That might sound like a negative to anyone who’s skipped a few editions, but it’s not once comfortably embedded. Seeing your lads equalise from a whipped cross minutes after you specifically demand that type of delivery is fists-to-the-skies joyous. After a narrow win, I celebrate the positive dressing room reaction to my warm-down words almost as heartily as the goal that secured it.

The 3D engine still doesn’t feel like a true representation of top-level football.

There is a small caveat to this matchday enjoyment. Seven years since its introduction, the 3D engine still doesn’t feel like a true representation of top-level football. It’s passable, sure, but in a series known for excellence in everything it does, ‘passable’ equals disappointing. No one expects it to look like FIFA; the issue is that at least once per game a player will do something completely absurd that immediately shatters the illusion of reality.

Before anyone says ‘but players ignoring instructions is part of being a manager’, I present my tipping point: a home fixture vs MK Dons, 12 games into a promising Middlesbrough career. At 0-1 down my team has been instructed to stick to a narrow 3-1-3-1-2 formation and pump balls into the box. With seconds left, central defender Jonathan Woodgate pops up on the right wing, level with the edge of the penalty area. He has time to cross, yet decides to backtrack, and backtrack, and backtrack. All the way to the halfway line. Where he’s tackled. From there, MK breakaway for a match-sealing second goal. Swears uttered. Walls kicked. Mouse flung across the room.

I’ve since switched my highlight settings to ‘key’—goals, vital saves, rebounds off the woodwork—and am finding the game as addictive as ever; the rest of the time, my imagination brings the text-based commentary to life just as in Championship Manager’s glory days. I’m content with that, but it feels backwards to have improved a game by marginalising a lauded feature.

Football Manager 2016 2

Returning players will be aware that many of the element discussed so far were present in 2015. What’s in FM 2016 for them, then, other than updated squads? Firstly, the option to create your own avatar, in order to roam the touchlines of those 3D stadia. It’s, er, awful. Even with four ways to amend your jawline and 13 separate nose sliders, it’s impossible to make in-game-you look like anything other than a Stone Roses tribute band reject. The idea behind the feature is welcome, but needs significant refinement.

Much better is the seamless integration of analysis tool Prozone. Its inclusion enhances proceedings on both a superficial level—delivering reams of stats from elsewhere in the world via a loading-screen ticker—and hands-on one, enabling you to study any performance in surgical detail. Need to know the distance run by a particular player, exact placement of every single shot, trajectory of all set-pieces and outcome of every mistake before selecting next week’s team? All there, along with dozens of other insights, presented in surprisingly digestible form.

Also new are a useful set-piece editor and the ability to watch highlights packages of AI games. Yet the game suffers from the continuing absence of two innovations made by a contemporary. Out Of The Park Baseball has long enabled users to both play classic leagues, and—crucially—carry over saves from one release to the next. For FM to keep up with its former stablemate—SI actually published it between 2005 and 2007—it really needs to introduce the latter option. This is deeper and more detailed than ever, which only makes it extra galling that your 120-hour save game will be consigned to the Trash folder in 12 months’ time.

The Verdict

Football Manager 2016

Still untouchable on the footy frontbut shelf life and that inconsistent 3D engine chip away at its tender achilles.

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Mortal Kombat X is a great party for one

I'm not very good at fighting games, as was evident when I lost four consecutive rounds to my opponent during a Mortal Kombat X preview earlier this week.

Raiden

I'm not very good at fighting games, as was evident when I lost four consecutive rounds to my opponent during a Mortal Kombat X preview earlier this week. My opponent ruthlessly uppercutted me into the air, shattered my spine in elaborate animations, and Finished Me by pulling my heart out of my chest à la Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, then squeezing the heart and drinking what I imagine was my terribly salty blood.

Still, I like fighting games, and Mortal Kombat in particular, which came into my life at a time when its adolescent obsession with gratuitous, over the top violence matched my own. But I'm only human, and as such prefer winning to losing. That's why I liked Mortal Kombat 9's well-realized story mode, which gave me a way to play for many hours without humiliating myself.

Mortal Kombat X, I'm happy to report, is tailor-made for those who find a lot to enjoy about fighting games, but who may not have what it takes to compete with… well, anyone.

A new way Mortal Kombat X does this is with its online Living Towers. Like the challenge tower in Mortal Kombat 9, each of the Living Towers is a series of fights arranged as challenges with special conditions. Mortal Kombat X's towers, however, are more varied and mercifully shorter.

There are Quick Towers, which you can finish in 15-30 minutes. They're also updated every couple of hours throughout the day, so you'll always see new challenges. The Daily Towers are a little harder and will refresh every 24 hours. Finally, the Premiere Towers, built around special events, holidays, and milestones, are even more challenging, and will last anywhere from a few days to a week.

MKX Kunglao Scorpion

Each level in the tower has some kind of environmental twist—I saw one where bombs were falling from the sky, another where I had to dodge roving laser traps—and an extra condition that will earn you more points. The conditions I saw were focused on winning rounds while using certain moves. These aren't merely fun, almost puzzle-like elements to introduce to a fighting game—they’re also a great way to force and teach a lone player to discover each fighter's movelist. NetherRealm is still a little vague about what exactly you'll be able to spend these points on, but cosmetic changes to characters is one example.

It also sounds like the best rewards will come from Mortal Kombat X's greater, cross-platform multiplayer Faction War mode. Assuming you're online, when you first start Mortal Kombat X you'll be asked to choose one out of five factions associated with groups in the game's fiction: White Lotus, Brotherhood of Shadow, Black Dragon, Special Forces, or Lin Kuei. Your faction will modify the menus' visual themes, and everything you do in the game will earn points for your faction. You can even enter team fights, where five members of your faction fight five simultaneous fights against another faction, and the team with the most wins gets the points.

At the end of every week, the faction with the most points overall will get a reward, which can even include a special, faction-specific Fatality.


Forever alone

All of these rewards and points give Mortal Kombat X the kind of incremental-but-steady progression system that hooked me to Call of Duty for several years. You wouldn't be wrong if you called it a treadmill, but it seems like the kind of system that a fighting game needs to make you feel like you're getting somewhere, even if you're not taking on human rivals.

The fighting itself felt really good, which is to say, it felt almost exactly like Mortal Kombat 9, only prettier. The environments were more detailed. The textures and character models were of a much higher quality. When someone cut off Sub Zero's face, his brain slipped out of his skull, his exposed tongue glistening as it wiggled cluelessly.

Raiden Scorpion LightningHand SnowForest

In terms of innovation in the fighting itself, there are two big updates here. The first is that each character has three variations to its fighting style, which you have to pick before a fight starts. I'd have to spend more time to understand how they differ. Maybe it's the kind of detail that only high-level players will be able to appreciate, but I didn't see the appeal. It seems hard enough to master a character in a fighting game as is, and when I chose Sub Zero's ability to use an ice weapon, I found myself wondering how the variations I didn't pick could have helped me out in any given situation, rather than how the ability I did choose was awesome. In other words, I felt like I was always losing two abilities rather than gaining one.

The other big change is the addition of environmental interactions, pulled over from NetherRealm’s comic-themed Injustice. They’re some of the best I've seen in any fighting game. In a jungle level, I could jump up, press R1 to grab a vine, and swing forward to kick my opponent in the face. In another level, a kind of desert bazaar, I could pick up an innocent bystander and use him like a club to pummel my opponent. The interactive elements can move around, so they're not completely predictable, and they fit into the flow of combat, adding another random element, rather than just an elaborate animation that transitions you from one background to another, which Mortal Kombat has been doing for years.

MKX Kunglao Kano

Mortal Kombat X does find another place to commit the sin of elaborate, non-interactive animations. The special "x-ray" moves—which you charge up a meter for and execute by pushing both triggers at the same time—are some of the most violent and interesting I saw. They're also the longest, which is painfully obvious when the same exact animation repeats. What is cool the first few times is just another thing to wait through a few times later, and this can only become a bigger problem the more you play the game.

Still, Mortal Kombat X looks a single-player dream, and this is before we've even seen the game's story mode. Mortal Kombat 9's, which recreated the events of all the classic Mortal Kombat games, was excellent, and NetherRealm is well aware it was big hit with fans. Add it to all the single player challenges I saw this week, and you get a Mortal Kombat package that appeals to competitive players and those, like myself, who can't compete, but enjoy a good Fatality.

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