Hi-Rez raising funds for Nepal with special Smite chests

The chest costs 400 Gems and contains "rare and exclusive skins" from around the world, including Lucky Baby Fuwa (Cupid), The Sydney Shredder (He Bo), Orbital Strike (Rama), Jaguar Footballer (Xbalanque), Ra’Merica (Ra), and Soldier of Fortune (Ares).

Smitedeveloper Hi-Rez Studios has unveiled the new Nepal Earthquake Relief chest, which it's now selling to raise funds for relief efforts in the earthquake-stricken nation.

The chest costs 400 Gems and contains "rare and exclusive skins" from around the world, including Lucky Baby Fuwa (Cupid), The Sydney Shredder (He Bo), Orbital Strike (Rama), Jaguar Footballer (Xbalanque), Ra’Merica (Ra), and Soldier of Fortune (Ares). For each chest sold, Hi-Rez will donate $2 to the American Red Crossto support humanitarian aid.

"Gems" in Smite are an in-game currency that can be earned by redeeming codes, through in-game promotional offers, and of course by way of real-money purchases. The actual cost of Gems in dollars varies with the amount purchased—buying in bulk is always cheaper—but a pack of 400 carries a regular price of $8. The Nepal Earthquake Relief chest will be available until May 17.

Hi-Rez isn't the only game studio taking steps to raise money for Nepal: In April, Ubisoft's Far Cry team pledged to match donationsto the Canadian Red Cross of up to $100,000 (that effort currently stands at around $70,000 raised), and last week CCP did the same with its latest Plex for Goodcampaign. That effort was actually extended yesterday to May 24 after the country was struck by a second major quake.

GOG's Autumn sale gives out free Mount & Blade and The Witcher 2

GOG's Autumn sale has just launched.

GOG's Autumn sale has just launched. Head here to see their selection, and be tempted by some pretty good deals. For instance, for the next 24 hours you can get Baldur's Gate 1 & 2, Planescape: Torment, Icewind Dale 1 & 2, Neverwinter Nights 1 & 2, and a few other D&D games, all bundled at 80% off. That's an absurd amount of great RPGs.

Or how about Deus Ex for 75% off. Or Mark of the Ninja for 75% off. Or Dreamfall: The Longest Journey for 80% off.

Or you can get Mount & Blade for free. To grab the free offer, head to the GOG front page, and you'll find it about half-way down. The offer runs until 2pm GMT on 14 November.

In addition, there's a free copy of The Witcher 2 available if you collect stamps over the course of the sale. To collect stamps, just click the icon on the Witcher 2 giveaway banner on GOG's front page. From what I can tell, you'll need to do it each day of the sale to claim the free game.

20 Weirdest Adventure Games

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A look back at the weirdest PC adventure games
PC adventure games have seen a much-needed resurgence in the past couple of years, attracting newer audiences and developers who wish to get in on the fun.

have seen a much-needed resurgence in the past couple of years, attracting newer audiences and developers who wish to get in on the fun. With renewed interest in the once-forgotten genre, we're seeing sequels to cult classic, new tales with familiar heroes, and in the case of some newcomers, those who dare to push the boundaries of convention. Going beyond simple detective stories, murder mysteries, and real-world trappings is welcome, and while we have a handful of modern examples doing so, the edgiest games were found in the genre's formative years. Some hardly made sense. Others ended up weirding out or offending and alienating audiences completely. We're celebrating the oddities of twenty of the strangest PC adventure games ever. Let's get weird.

Day of the Tentacle: The final installment of the uproarious Maniac Mansion series followed poindexter Bernard, rock-and-roll Hoagie, and airhead Laverne on a journey through time via "Port-a-Potty." All this, in a bid to keep humanity from being enslaved by an evil purple tentacle. Trademark LucasArts humor and surrealist problem-solving made Day of the Tentacle one of the most bizarre yet wholly entertaining romps out of the entire LucasArts stable.

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The Dark Eye: Edgar Allan Poe meets morbid claymation and locales with a trippy twist in The Dark Eye. This obscure adventure in all its unsettling glory relies on one of the creepiest narrators ever (William S. Burroughs) to advance its plot, snaking its way through some of Poe's most famous literature to advance the plot. For Poe fans or horrorhounds alike, this one is sure to crawl right under your skin and leave its mark.

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Commander Blood: Taking a new approach to the time-tested adventure game, Commander Blood was a hybrid of FMV segments with Muppet-like characters and deep space exploration, right down to intergalactic game shows and amnesiac ship captains. You're tasked with aiding one of the oldest beings in existence in seeing the Big Bang. If that description alone weren't enough to clue you in that this is going to be one spectacular journey, we're not sure what will.

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The Neverhood: A colorful world of clay and strange characters await you in this 1996 epic. Protagonist Klaymen (an elongated yellow humanoid creature) wakes up in a strange new world known as the Neverhood with no memory of having gotten there or why. Though the narrative is fairly run-of-the-mill, what feels disconcerting is the all-claymation world and its decor. It's a visual and aural treat, and criminally underappreciated.

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Full Throttle: You're missing out if your adolescence didn't include jamming with hardened biker Ben of the Polecats, a gritty motorcycle gang. Ben is inadvertently mixed up with some shady customers, a murder, and a plot to turn a shareholder's company into a minivan manufacturer. Plenty of dark humor, sardonic narrative, and some of the oddest combat you'll ever see permeate Full Throttle, the game all about the bonds between bikers and their brethren, and the craziness going on within.

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Bad Mojo: Ever wanted to live life as a cockroach? Bad Mojo makes it possible. After scummy Roger decides to steal a million dollars from a previous employer, a special locket from his deceased mother turns his soul into a cockroach -- to teach him a lesson, of course. As such, the game is played from the perspective of a roach. Cue plenty of challenging environmental puzzles, uncomfortable situations, and all the disgusting parts of Joe's Apartment spliced together into one game.

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Loom: LucasArts adventure games primarily focused on humor and licensed stories to propel them into cult status, but Loom was a departure with a complex fantasy tale. Rather than relying on items and interaction with the environment in order to solve puzzles, it tasked players with learning "drafts," or tunes consisting of four notes to be played via the protagonist's distaff. In this, it provided much-needed new challenges and landscapes not yet seen in adventures prior.

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Orion Burger: Developer Sanctuary Woods had their fair share of peculiar games, and Orion Burger was no exception. Its cartoony aesthetic belied a wacky tale that followed a pet shop employee who has been abducted by aliens. When all hell breaks loose, Wilbur (the employee in question) can fight back against the intergalactic corporation with tricks of his own. Bizarre alien practices, hilarious stereotypes, and cartoony landscapes make Orion Burger an odd one that's worth playing.

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Dark Seed: With a name like H.R. Giger attached to it, you know any project has to be uncomfortable in some aspect. Dark Seed incorporated the famous artist's disturbing imagery to create exercises in psychological horror in which a writer finds himself implanted with an alien embryo. A bizarre journey to the end of the universe unfolds, with the protagonist attempting to stave off the birth of the "Dark Seed," which would end the human race.

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Harvester: Touted as "the most violent adventure game of all time," Harvester runs the gamut of hardcore violence, sexual content, and narrative elements that will make you squirm. It's also one of the most engaging games of the '90s. It may be over-the-top as it revels in its gleeful display of disemboweling, but it's satire of the highest grade, and it's got plenty to keep you coming back...especially when you realize how campy it is.

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Sanitarium: Max Laughton is a mental patient in Sanitarium who has recovered from a horrible car crash that has not only erased his memory, but his identity. As you slowly piece together clues, you'll slowly find yourself questioning what's real and imaginary. The game's startlingly creepy atmosphere is worth the purchase price alone. Grotesque visions, dreamlike sequences, and a chilling narrative make Sanitarium one worth your time.

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Grim Fandango: Famed adventure developer Tim Schafer continued his string of successes with the first 3D LucasArts adventure game, this time surrounding a skeleton named Manny as he explores the Underworld. The overtly Spanish motifs and "day of the dead" inspiration give the game an otherworldly feel, especially its heavy usage of film noir overtones. It remains a classic to this day, and is shortlisted by many as one of the strangest adventure games out there, as well as the best.

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Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller: In the future, criminals can and will be sent to hell to rot for all eternity. Ethical? No. But that doesn't matter to the fascist theocracy known as the Hand of God, which has taken over the United States in the distant year of 2095. Live-action and animated environments/characters converge to follow the tale of this strange dystopian world.

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I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream: This psychological horror adventure shows a world where a sentient computer has all but exterminated humanity, leaving five people. These unfortunates have been tortured for years by the evil computer. In order to triumph over the computer, players must somehow prove that humans are, in fact, better than machines. Each of the five remaining characters carries their own unique brand of suffering, and it's truly a harrowing but disturbing tale.

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The Journeyman Project: Nothing makes for a rousing good time in gaming like time travel. Using a first-person perspective, players witness an alien race's journey to Earth as delegates meet and prepare to invite the newcomers to join the Symbiotry of Peaceful Beings. Unfortunately, things don't go down so easily and what unfolds is one of the trippiest journey's you will ever go on.

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The Secret Island of Dr. Quandary: Being turned into an especially ugly Kewpie doll certainly tops our list of greatest fears. This brilliant exercise in edutainment followed the player on a quest to retrieve their body. While the errands themselves were fairly run-of-the-mill, what made things sufficiently strange were the artwork across the island and the soundtrack. For a children's game back in the early nineties, it breached some rather disconcerting territory.

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The 7th Guest: Pre-rendered 3D cut scenes, status as a "killer app" in the adventure game community, and plenty of hype, The 7th Guest is an eerie example of what could be accomplished with the early adoption of CD drives. While it's a fairly pedestrian story as far as ghost tales go, it's rife with strange puzzles, ghostly images, and a narrator who can't stand you if you screw up too many times.

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Phantasmagoria: A Puzzle of Flesh: For anyone who found Harvester appalling, the sequel to the original and great Phantasmagoria brought with it a slew of more violence and sexual content, running the gamut from force-feeding a woman animal entrails until she dies to plenty of other visceral scenes annotated by particularly bad acting. Famed developer Roberta Williams did it again, and brought all the pain the second time around.

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Total Distortion: Thought you were hot? Guess what! You're not. But you're not dead, you're just reading up on Total Distortion, one of the most metal games out there. In the Distortion Dimension, you battle Guitar Warriors in knock-down, drag-out guitar battles in order to become a successful rock star. Livin' large. With a big house and five cars.

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Eastern Mind: Lost Souls of Tong Nou: Eastern Mind is less of a game than an experience. Rin discovers his soul has been stolen by the titular island of Tong-Nou, and if he can't reclaim it he'll eventually wither away and die. After being given a temporary soul to last him just long enough to restore his own, Rin journeys to the island, which actually ends up being an enormous, disembodied human head.

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Hi-Rez launches Kickstarter campaign to make fun of Kickstarter campaigns

Smite developers Hi-Rez Studios and Todd Harris have started a new Kickstarter campaign .

. They're asking for $50,000,000 to create 'game,' which isn't just a game, but an "experience." Among other things, it'll be "resource based," "2d," and even "drivatar." Ambitious goals.

Backer rewards for the parody campaign include "pixel art portrait of you (limit 1 pixel)" and "you will be able to use your name as the main character of game, via the in-game keyboard."

Kickstarter lists the creator's real name as Andrew Sexton, who we presume is Hi-Rez content marketing lead Andy Sexton. A few Hi-Rez employees have commented in the thread on the Smite subredditand tweeted about the campaign. We've reached out to Hi-Rez for further comment on 'game.'

Thanks for the tip, Rhys.

[Update] Hi-Rez has sent PC Gamer a statement about the parody, copied below:

For a few years now Hi-Rez Studios has created a live action web series called "Minion Has Spawned."

The series is a fake reality show - showing life at Hi-Rez but it is in fact a self-parody.

The show is intended to entertain our community but we also touch on subjects that are topical within the game industry: In past episodes we've alluded to paid live-streamers & youtubers, console wars, overhyped marketing campaigns, and even the Gamergate controversy.

In today's episode we reference Kickstarter and to promote the episode a parody Kickstarter campaign video was posted.

To confirm our position, at Hi-Rez Studios we support Independent Developers and we very much support Crowdfunding using vehicles like Kickstarter. Many successful game projects have been funded via Kickstarter and we ourselves heavily utilize crowdfunding for our esports prize pools.

Per the Minion Has Spawned episodeit is satire and the parody is mainly aimed at ourselves; game developers sometimes take themselves too seriously and can get pretentious and buzzwordy with marketing toward their ambitious goals.

Tropico 3 is free on Humble Bundle, but only today

The Humble Bundle store is a great place to get games for cheap, and it doesn't get much cheaper than free.

The Humble Bundle store is a great place to get games for cheap, and it doesn't get much cheaper than free. The store is currently holding its End of Summer Encore Sale, which is offering lot of great deals as usual, as well as a free copy of the banana republic management sim Tropico 3.

The only thing you'll have to give in return is your email address. If that sounds like a fair trade, you'll want to head over to Humblesoon, as both the Tropico 3 offer and the summer sale at large will end tomorrow at 10 a.m. Pacific.

There are other great deals you can jump on right now, though they're infinitely more expensive than free. Some highlights (click the links to find our reviews):

You can grab these games on sale at the Humble Store.

Stardock announces Ashes of the Singularity, a massive-scale RTS

A little over a year ago we laid our eyes on the new 64-bit, 3D game engine called Nitrous , which developer Oxide Games said is capable of rendering as many as 10,000 individual units simultaneously.

, which developer Oxide Games said is capable of rendering as many as 10,000 individual units simultaneously. At the time it could only be seen in action through the Star Swarmdemo/stress test, but yesterday Oxide and Stardock unveiled the first game built on the engine, Ashes of the Singularity, that promises to bring "an unprecedented scale" to the RTS genre.

The game takes place long after the Singularity, when humanity has moved out among the stars as beings of pure consciousness. Despite that apparent state of enlightenment, an intergalactic war with a sentient AI known as Haalee soon erupts, and now the two sides are locked in a battle for control over not just our galaxy, but all of them.

"This is a galaxy-wide struggle in which each 'battle' wages across the surface of an entire planet," Stardock CEO Brad Wardell said. "The scope of the conflict is unlike anything players have seen before."

Each individual unit in the game will carry its own independent weapon system, each with its own ballistics model and firing individually targeted shots. To make it all manageable, Ashes of the Singularity will enable the creation of "meta-units": groups of individual units that operate as a single, coherent whole. Instead of being conventionally AI-controlled, they "operate under specific, consistent rules," which players can use to create their own individual strategies.

"A meta-unit inherits all the abilities of what is within it. When the player selects this unit, all the special abilities of that unit are instantly accessible. It is not that different from a control group in a traditional RTS, except that each part of a meta-unit is aware of every other unit in its group and they work together in predetermined ways," the FAQexplains. "The argument could be made that a meta-unit is merely a player-designed unit whose components are made up of dozens or hundreds of other units."

The game will feature other conventional RTS elements, like research and base building, and it will be possible to micromanage individual units, although doing so isn't really practical. "A general certainly could order individual soldiers in battle, [but] they would never want to," it states. "They are better off allowing their sergeants run their squad, their lieutenants run their platoon, their captains run their companies and so on. A meta-unit could be described as a custom-made army division—except in Ashes, there is no abstraction."

Two obvious questions leap out: Will the Nitrous engine work as well in an actual game environment as it does in a demo? And can unit management on this scale—without the usual abstractions—be effectively implemented? It sounds potentially very impressive and I'm certainly looking forward to getting my hands on it, but at this point a certain amount of caution is probably called for.

Hi-Rez marks Smite's one year anniversary with a sale

Hi-Rez Studios is celebrating the one year anniversary of the launch of its MOBA Smite with an AMA on Reddit and, more practically, a sale on skins, gems, and the Ultimate God Pack, plus free access to all Gods in the game over the coming weekend.

I say "more practically" because the AMA will focus primarily on the looming launch of Smite on the Xbox One, and odds are that if you're reading this august organ then you're only interested in the PC version. So instead, we'll just eyeball the deals: All pre-launch skins, which is to say those that were released prior to the game's full release, are half-price, and all gem packs will come with bonus gems during the duration of the sale. All Gods will be free to use over the March 27-29 weekend, and players will earn worshippers at twice the normal rate.

Finally, for those who are (or go on to become) big fans, The Ultimate God Pack, which includes access to every God in the game and every God that will be released in the future, is on sale for $20.

Smite, in which players do battle as one of 63 Gods taken from various pantheons both past and present, went live on March 25, 2014 (I suppose that's rather obvious under the circumstances), and we declared it to be actually quite good. It lags far behind League of Legendsand Dota 2, but has managed to carve out what appears to be a fairly stable niche: Hi-Rez says the game now has over seven million players, which should be enough to keep the lights on for awhile.

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Fad check: RGB LEDs in everything (including your games)

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Smite Oceania esports season announced

Following the launch of new Oceanic servers last November, Hi-Rez will host a series of Smite pro league tournaments this year to determine which team in Australia or New Zealand is fit to compete at the World Championships.

pro league tournaments this year to determine which team in Australia or New Zealand is fit to compete at the World Championships. The season will be spread across two splits, culminating in a grand final at PAX Australia this November.

The first split will take place between March and June, and is designed to help find the best teams to form the Oceania Pro League. Events include ladder events, LAN center tournaments and a final online tournament to determine Pro League eligibility. The second split will run July through to November, culminating in the PAX Australia showdown.

"With this being the first pro season for Oceania, we’ve designed the season to be as open as possible to allow new teams to participate and join during the season, while ensuring we find the absolute best team to represent Oceania in the World Championships," Hi-Rez wrote in an announcement today.

Full details on how the tournaments are structured can be found here, or else you can check out the handy diagram below:

Star Wars Battlefront's speeder bikes are fast and deadly (to you)

Vehicles will play a big role in Star Wars Battlefront : X-Wings, TIEs, " hero vehicles ," and yes, the speeder bikes that were so appallingly hazardous to their operators' health in Return of the Jedi.

," and yes, the speeder bikes that were so appallingly hazardous to their operators' health in Return of the Jedi. And as GamesRadar'svideo of speeder bike gameplay so vividly demonstrates, they remain just as they were in the film: Fast, nimble, and just as dangerous to the guy sitting on it as it is to whoever he's chasing.

"But wait!" I hear you say. "Star Wars Battlefront isn't out for almost a week!" That is true, and it's why you're not seeing reviews popping up anywhere just yet. It's available right now, however, to members of EA Access, an early access program that's unfortunately exclusive to the Xbox One. That's why GamesRadar has the footage, and I'm swiping it.

Back to the matter at hand, it's clear that speeder bikes aren't something you're meant to spend very much time on. They appear not entirely unforgiving, as the speeder in this video seems to bounce off at least one tree without any apparent damage midway through the chase, but the wheels come off—figuratively speaking—not too long after. Too fast, too fragile. And now he's gone—but you'll never forget him.

Star Wars Battlefront comes out on November 17.

Black Ops 2's Angolan guerrilla is real, and his family is suing Activision

The family of Jonas Savimbi, founder and leader of the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), are attempting to sue Activision for the late resistance fighter's portrayal in Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 . Yup, for everyone who fell asleep in history class and didn't know, Savimbi was indeed a real person. The suit alleges that Activision and Treyarch portray Savimbi as a "big halfwit

Smite Battle Frost patch ushers in new god Bellona

Smite 's new Battle Frost patch has introduced the first new God of the season in the form of Bellona.

's new Battle Frost patch has introduced the first new God of the season in the form of Bellona. The Warrior class goddess will specialise in physical and melee combat, and is the first God capable of disarming basic enemy attacks via her Scourge ability, so good luck if you're facing her. According to a short dev Q&Aon Bellona's profile page, she'll "shine the most [when] picked against basic attack dependent teams".

In addition to Bellona, the Battle Frost patch ushers in a variety of other changes. There are new skins for Hercules, Scylla and Awilix, as well as an update to Ymir's model. Meanwhile, some changes in the God Roster rotation means Isis, Sin Wukong, Sobek, Anhur and Fenrir are now added to the pool.

The full patch notes, including a long list of tweaks, balance notes and bug fixes, can be perused over here. Check out Bellona in action in the video below:

Star Wars Battlefront's Walker Assault mode to be changed because it's "too tough"

The Star Wars Battlefront beta was a lot of fun, especially once I dove into the Walker Assault mode, a 40-player recreation of the Battle of Hoth.

beta was a lot of fun, especially once I dove into the Walker Assault mode, a 40-player recreation of the Battle of Hoth. (And super -especially when stuff like thishappens.) I couldn't help but notice, however, that the Empire tended to win—a lot—and while that accurately reflects the outcome of the "real" battle in The Empire Strikes Back, quite a number of players weren't happy about it.

The real problem isn't that the Rebellion is almost destined to be defeated, as happened in the movie, but that there's no purpose to the loss. Rebel forces can't claim victory by, say, holding off the Imperial attack long enough for a particular number of transports to escape; the only option is to halt the Imperial invasion outright, which, to be clear, is incredibly hard to do. I was on just two winning Rebel teams during my time with the beta. Every other match was a steady, backward march to doom.

Luckily, EA is aware of the situation, and is working on it. "Nope!" Star Wars Battlefront Community Manager Matthew Everett tweetedto one player, who worried that he was bad at the game. "Its a balancing issue within the Beta." A few days prior to that, Lead Multiplayer Designer Dennis Brännvall tweetedthat the mode is "too tough," adding, "We'll make changes based on the feedback and data."

@Focalin Nope! Its a balancing issue within the Beta. October 13, 2015

Figuring out what works and what doesn't is the point of a beta, of course, and in another tweetBrännvall repeated that EA is "gathering gameplay data from the beta and will balance things" prior to release. Even so, it's good to hear confirmation that the developers are paying attention.

Star Wars Battlefront comes out on November 17.

Thanks, GameSpot.

Here's a mouse that looks like Iron Man's shrunken head

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Smite Oceania esports season announced

Following the launch of new Oceanic servers last November, Hi-Rez will host a series of Smite pro league tournaments this year to determine which team in Australia or New Zealand is fit to compete at the World Championships.

pro league tournaments this year to determine which team in Australia or New Zealand is fit to compete at the World Championships. The season will be spread across two splits, culminating in a grand final at PAX Australia this November.

The first split will take place between March and June, and is designed to help find the best teams to form the Oceania Pro League. Events include ladder events, LAN center tournaments and a final online tournament to determine Pro League eligibility. The second split will run July through to November, culminating in the PAX Australia showdown.

"With this being the first pro season for Oceania, we’ve designed the season to be as open as possible to allow new teams to participate and join during the season, while ensuring we find the absolute best team to represent Oceania in the World Championships," Hi-Rez wrote in an announcement today.

Full details on how the tournaments are structured can be found here, or else you can check out the handy diagram below:

Star Wars Battlefront trailer teases the Battle of Jakku

The desert planet Jakku has featured prominently in promos for the upcoming Star Wars flick The Force Awakens.

has featured prominently in promos for the upcoming Star Wars flick The Force Awakens. You may not recognize the name, but you've almost certainly seen pictures of the Imperial Star Destroyer lying crashed on its surface. That mishap occurred during a major battle between the Empire and the Rebellion that will be replicated in Star Wars Battlefront. And thanks to this new teaser video, we know how it will look.

It is, admittedly, a very brief glance, and it's not actual gameplay, but I like it anyway. One thing has me curious, though: The downed Star Destroyer that appears in The Force Awakens trailers ( The Inflictor, apparently) is already on the ground. So who's this other bonehead augering in?

Star Wars Battlefront comes out on November 17.

Mad Catz's Rat Pro X is insanely customizable (and $200)

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Smite gets big changes for season two

Big changes are coming to the second season of Smite , including new skins, new voice packs, new god rotation, and a cornucopia of gameplay changes.

, including new skins, new voice packs, new god rotation, and a cornucopia of gameplay changes. That's right, like this, only the basket is filled with murderous gods. Season two will also see the debut of a brand new Conquest map featuring improved visuals, balance changes including the replacement of the duo lane blue buff with an attack speed power buff, and new cinematic intros for jungle camps.

Artemis, Janus, and Mercury are all getting new skins—Primal Huntress, Jandroid, and Prizefighter, respectively—while Jungle Beast Xbalanque is being given a visual upgrade, and Rage Bakasura will be a League Reward. The new Artemis, Janus, and Mercury skins will also get new voice packs, as will Rage Bakasura. A number of items have also been added, whilst many existing items have changed, and the gods themselves have undergone various balance tweaks and fixes. And naturally, quite a bit is happening in the realm of "general gameplay" as well.

"There are several changes happening in the Jungle that are designed to increase aggression and the viability of invading, while also better balancing the buff options available to your team. Although there is now more room for activities, the Jungle is a bit more unsafe," Hi-Rez wrote. "The removal of the mana buffs on the Gold Fury side of Conquest focuses more on choice through itemization and team combinations rather than through buffs."

"The addition of the new Attack Speed and In Hand Power Buff empowers gods who prefer Basic Attacking, for those who would rather shoot their enemies down. The harpy camps in the middle of the Conquest map now show up late to the party, and don’t even bring a dessert. They now spawn at the three minute mark instead of at the beginning. The Jungle starts in the beginning of the match are now identical, but it also means your enemies know exactly where you are at the beginning and can punish you for it."

There's a lot more going on than just this, way too much to cover here (seriously, we'd be here all day), so if you're big enough into Smite that this sort of thing matters to you, you're definitely going to want to check out the full Season Two update yourself. Do so at hirezstudios.com.

Release This: Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, The Darkness II ship to retail

Hands-on: Ducky Shine 5 RGB keyboard and gaming mouse

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Smite Pro League takes on a new format for season two

The second season of the Smite Pro League will have teams battling through three separate "Splits"—Spring, Summer, and Fall—after which the top teams in each region will square off in LAN tournaments to determine who will be invited to the 2016 World Championship.

All teams, except those who have already qualified for the Smite World Championships, must take part in the Spring Split Qualifiers in order to earn a shot at the title. The top qualifying teams will make it into the Spring Split, while the rest must duke it out in the Challenger Cup for a chance to take part in the Summer Split.

The first qualifier will take place over February 14-15, with two more following on February 21-22 and February 28-March 1. The Spring Split itself will see the top six teams—two from the Worlds and four from the Qualifiers—battling in best-of-three competitions over a five week period from March 5 to April 5, while the single-elimination Challenger Cup will run simultaneously from March 5 to April 19. Once the Spring Split LAN is wrapped up, teams from the Challenger Cup will face teams from the Spring Split Pro League for relegation into the Summer Split.

There will also be a multi-region LAN event on April 25-26, in which the top two North American and European teams from the Spring Split will face off for "a big chunk of money" as well as a trip to Brazil to compete at XMA-X5 Mega Arena. And finally, there's an event coming up this weekend: The Smite PTS Showdown—Viewer's Choice, featuring both pro and amateur teams dueling on a new map with new items, and which for the first time ever will allow viewers to choose which games are streamed and broadcast.

Details about the Season Two format changes and Spring Split qualifiers are here. More information about the Summer and Fall Splits will be announced as the season progresses.

Microsoft announces its own version of Early Access, with a twist

During Microsoft's E3 2015 press conference, Chris Charla, head of the ID@XBOX program, announced a new initiative that will let players try new games earlier and help shape their development. Xbox Game Preview is designed to let players get early access to upcoming games and, through their feedback, shape how final versions will turn out. By Charla's own admission, this service bears much in common

Black Ops 2 is now the most-wanted Xbox One backwards compatible game

If Xbox fans could add any one game to the Xbox One backwards compatibility list , it would be Call of Duty: Black Ops 2. Treyarch's 2012 shooter has officially outpaced Red Dead Redemption as the most-requested Xbox 360 game on Microsoft's official backwards compatibility survey page, with more than 77,000 votes at the time of this writing. Rockstar's open-world Western game is trailing close behind

Yayz: RaiderZ enters open beta

Shopping for clothes usually doesn't involve slinging fireballs into a hulking chimera the size of three smaller chimeras stacked on each other, but that's RaiderZ for you.

chimeras stacked on each other, but that's RaiderZ for you. Perfect World's monster-hunting MMO tweaks generous grinding demands with a David-vs-Goliath size scale for foes and a gearing philosophy of transporting the still-fresh body parts of your kills to vendors to wear as trophies. Such a mix of mercantile barbarism is what heroes will experience within RaiderZ's open beta, currently underway.

Signing up for the hunt doesn't take long: Register an accounton the official website, download the client, and start swinging. Hey, if we can appreciate RaiderZ's twitchy energyafter foolishly poking a giant wolf in the snout with a stick, imagine what a coordinated attack can accomplish.

Though, appending a "Z" at the end of a title in the hopes it sounds cooler just drives me crayz.

DayZ creator's new game Ion is an online space oddity

DayZ creator Dean Hall is making a new game built on the perils and prosperity of space exploration. Hall announced at Microsoft's E3 press conference that his latest project, Ion, will be one of the first games on Microsoft's early-access style Xbox Game Preview platform. Hall introduced a brief trailer which showed groups of astronauts floating in orbit, seeming to collaborate on bits and pieces

Watch: Knives save the world in this Call of Duty supercut

That old adage gets it wrong: you should always bring a knife to a gunfight. You'd think that pointy melee weapons could never beat out the stopping power of a trusty firearm, but whenever the Call of Duty series thrusts you into a climactic, slow-mo finale, the fate of the free world often rests on some clutch use of your trusty cutter. From machetes to hunting knives, check out the above video to see all the times a sharp blade saved the day when a bullet wouldn't get the job done.

RaiderZ hands-on: magic mixes with Monster Hunter in this energetic MMO

This preview originally appeared in issue 244 of PC Gamer UK.

I dodge-roll sideways, flinging a bolt of ice into the flank of Fleetfoot, the three-tailed alpha wolf I'm battling. I gain a charge of ice magic, speeding up the cast time on my fireball: I aim and let it rip. The wolf turns, coiling back on its haunches, telegraphing its counter-attack.

This time, I hit it with a burst of ice spikes as it charges, step aside, and follow up with a two-hit combo of fiery explosions. I overextend myself, going for a cheeky staff-bash before the wolf retaliates, but I'm too slow: the incoming blow sends me flying backwards.

Playing a mage in an RPG is rarely this energetic. RaiderZ is a combat-heavy MMO that takes after the Monster Hunter series of console RPGs, mixing questing and crafting with lengthy, twitch-based boss fights. Successful hits are determined by your aim rather than a dice roll, and if you can get out of the way of an incoming attack, that's it: you got out of the way.

RaiderZ' approach to combat means that it's possible to eke out a victory – albeit slowly – through skill rather than hard stats. Or at least, that's the promise: in reality, as with Monster Hunter, your chances are much better with superior equipment. Everything you use is crafted out of pieces dropped from monsters, and while the game has regular fetch and kill quests, a lot of your time will be spent working towards your next hat or weapon. Talking to a crafter allows you to request a recipe, which adds an entry to your quest tracker. Mousing over individual ingredients tells you what monsters they drop from, and off you go.

To improve my chances against Fleetfoot, I've spent a good hour and a half murdering smaller wolves to gain enough leather to make a full new suit of armour. I've also killed spiders and run quests to gather the bits to make a new staff. It's undoubtedly a grind. The enjoyable combat makes a big difference, but it's hard not to wish for more high-stakes battling and less busywork. The fact that RaiderZ' biggest encounters are the incentive to keep playing, rather than just a way to earn the next trinket, does seem like progress – and the devs promise some truly huge monsters in the latter parts of the game.

Ultimately, loose alliances of players will go toe-to-toe with colossi that take a good hour to bring down, and success is a case of practice, skill and preparation. For the first ten levels, RaiderZ has a fairly hard class system where you're only able to spend skill points in one of four trees: berserker, cleric, sorcerer and defender. After that, however, you're free to invest in whatever skills you like – be that maxing out your chosen role, or dabbling across several. If it can move past grind-heavy MMO orthodoxy and take full advantage of its combat and monster design, RaiderZ has the potential to be a surprise contender.

Arma 3 release postponed

Arma 3 didn't have much time left to hit 2012, and developer Bohemia Interactive has elected to move back its release window. The military simulation game, which is sharing development with the standalone version of zombie survival mod DayZ , will release sometime in 2013. "We’ve been in the process of implementing changes that will help us innovate as a studio under unexpected circumstances--facing

Logitech's G502 Proteus Core can run at 12,000 dpi: just because you can doesn't mean you should

Logitech's latest mouse, the G502 Proteus Core, arrived recently with the world's first 12,000dpi-capable laser sensor at its heart.

Logitech's latest mouse, the G502 Proteus Core, arrived recently with the world's first 12,000dpi-capable laser sensor at its heart. I've been playing around with it a lot over the last week or so and have been really impressed with the solid little rodent. However, I've not had a good time running the mouse at anything like its top speed.

At 12,000dpi it's just about usable on a high-resolution desktop. I've been running it on a 2560 x 1440 desktop and it's smooth and accurate, though can take a bit of effort hitting small icons. On a scaled-up 4K screen then it's also pretty manageable. But realistically it's not a great experience. You can do it, but I got a lot of mis-hits as I tried to hit web-page buttons at high-resolutions. I dropped down to a 1080p desktop, and quickly started to lose track of the cursor as it zipped around the screen like an excitable cat toy.

Trying to play any game at 12,000dpi is a frustrating, twitchy experience. I know the new laser sensor in the G502 is accurate enough to deliver a smooth experience, but I'm not so convinced the game engines are able to translate that.

Here's the rub though, Logitech don't actually expect you to use the G502 at it's crazy-high maximum dpi setting. The 12,000dpi setting isn't accessible by default (You have to mess with the software suite to unlock it). The top sensitivity setting it ships with is almost half that at 6,400dpi—a far more manageable setting, both on the desktop and in-game. Because the mouse's sensor is capable of such high-end speeds it actually seems a lot more accurate than other sensors lower down the scale.

I'm not massively taken by the design of the G502—I'd be much happier if they'd simply dropped the new Pixart laser sensor into a classic G9 chassis—but I've been really impressed by how well the Proteus Core operates when it's not trying to be clever with silly dpi numbers numbers.

Take on colossal monsters with our RaiderZ alpha key giveaway

Perfect World Entertainment wants you to see the great outdoors—then slay the gigantic monsters that populate the world of RaiderZ.

Perfect World Entertainment wants you to see the great outdoors—then slay the gigantic monsters that populate the world of RaiderZ. This MMO is fashioned after the wildly popular Monster Hunter series, and is definitely one we're keeping our eyes on. But why not play it while you keep tabs on its humongous baddies?

The RaiderZ alpha key comes with a few great perks:

Guaranteed Alpha access Guaranteed Closed Beta access An exclusive armored wolf mount

You'll also get to try out the new Defender fighting style. The shield-wielding method of anti-evil features well-rounded skills allowing for increased monster dicing with a sword or more vitality and defense with a skull-crushing mace. His skills include Strike of Gale, an uppercut that lowers enemy defenses, and Shield Rush, a counter-attack that stuns and immobilizes all sorts of giant-bad things. So what are you waiting for? These monsters aren't going to kill themselves.

To deliver the codes (while they last), we've teamed up with our pals at GamesRadar. Head over to our shared giveaway pageand log into (or create) a GamesRadar account–which quite honestly takes as much time as you just spent reading this sentence. Follow the instructions there, and you'll be well on your way towards tackling monsters that are roughly five stories tall.

Day Z to become standalone product

According to a post on the official Day Z Tumblr , the creator of the game is planning to work with the developers of ARMA 2 to develop the smash hit mod Day Z into a standalone product. “Development and updates of the mod will continue in parallel with the development of the game, so anyone who is playing the mod now will be able to continue to do so," creator Dean "Rocket" Hall wrote in a post on

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Our Verdict
A great gaming mouse, especially for the serious twitch-gamer.

The bizarre-looking Mad Catz R.A.T. is one of my favourite gaming mice of all time. The original R.A.T. 7 took over from my beloved Logitech G9 thanks to its comfortable design, accurate sensor and reassuring weight. So when I heard there was a new, Tournament Edition (TE) R.A.T. design on the way I was intrigued.

I have to admit to being rather disappointed when I first got hold of the TE. Instead of the weighty, solid, metallic hunk of R.A.T. I was expecting, I found a lightweight, black and blue plastic mouse that felt like it had just dropped out of an Asda cracker one desperate Christmas evening.

That disappointment soon evaporated. This new R.A.T. TE may well be an incredibly lightweight laser mouse, but it's one of the most accurate I've ever used. Even though it's crafted entirely of plastic (to make sure it can be used as swiftly as the wrist will allow), it's still the same super-comfortable R.A.T. design that I love. The combination of speed and accuracy is a seriously potent one, and really justifies the TE's ambitions as an esports peripheral.

It's not priced too badly, considering the new 8,200dpi laser sensor inside. At the moment it's around £66 / $80, which is a fair bit more than the sub-£50 Shogun Bros Ballista Mk1 I love so well, but it doesn't get close to the crazy price stickers on some high-end rodents.

The new-fangled Philips Doppler laser sensor is the reason the TE feels so quick. I'm used to seeing Avago ADNS-9800 sensors in top-end laser mice of today, but this new tech feels even more accurate, especially at the top of its dpi-tree at 8,200. I don't even run my Ballista at top speed because it can feel a little twitchy, but I never felt the same with the new R.A.T.. The Doppler has also been designed with a really low lift-off height. When you're throwing your mouse around at high speeds it only operates when you're actually on a surface.

To begin with I thought the TE was another way to market the budget R.A.T. 3 design for a bit more cash, but it is genuinely one of the finest laser mice I've ever used. Personally I'm still sticking with the Shogun Bros Ballista Mk 1 because of the index finger sensor positioning and its cheaper pricing, but it's a mighty close-run thing, thanks to the classic R.A.T. design and the excellent Philips Doppler sensor.

The Verdict

Mad Catz R.A.T. TE mouse

A great gaming mouse, especially for the serious twitch-gamer.

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Cryptic's Neverwinter MMO gets first real trailer, focuses on story

http://youtu.be/HnCF5yNVxhI
Cryptic recently took the wraps off Neverwinter's MMO makeover , but in terms of viewable media, the developer's been rather, er, cryptic.

, but in terms of viewable media, the developer's been rather, er, cryptic. That all ends today, however, as this nice story trailer - complete with its own gruff, grizzled veteran regaling grim tales in the back of a bar - has suddenly appeared on the Internet. If that's not enough, there's also a dragon. And a bridge! Who doesn't love those? Adventure northward - through this precarious morass of words - to see for yourself.

Tiny Speck's unsustainable MMO Glitch closes down

The best zombie games you can play right now

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Neverwinter's Fury of the Feywild release date announced

The first expansion for Cryptic Studios' free to play MMORPG Neverwinter has already been explained in depth , and now we've got a date for when players will be able to jump into the troll-filled lands of the Sun and Moon Elves.

, and now we've got a date for when players will be able to jump into the troll-filled lands of the Sun and Moon Elves. Fury of the Feywild is planned to go live on August 22nd, and will bring additional weapons, items, enemies and rewards to the new zone.

While the Feywild expansion will be free, two purchasable packs will give players access to bonuses, mounts, a new race and a companion. Let's just hope the developers don't spoil this announcement by making the 'Sylph' sidekick a cynically absurd caricature of sexuality designed to make a subset of feckless male players reach into their pocket. Er, for money.

Oh, seriously guys? Let's now hope the game doesn't have any snowy climates to deal with. And that its makers are fine with alienating the hopefully large portion of its audience who'd be in danger of serious injury from the extreme eye-rolling this should cause.

The beautiful irony in SimCity and Diablo 3's Auction House going offline today

On March 18, 2014, two important moments took place in the PC gaming space: Maxis released a patch to enable offline play of SimCity, and Diablo 3’s Auction House closed its digital doors. Blizzard’s giving players a week to gather their unsold items before the little, golden gavel vanishes from the game’s UI altogether, but you’re no longer able to buy or sell items for in-game currency or real money

Call of Duty's zombies was almost shut down before it began

The Call of Duty Zombies mode is such an integral part of the series these days that it's hard to imagine a Treyarch CoD game without it. That wasn't always the case however, as Treyarch lead Mark Lamia told Wil Wheaton in a new episode of the PlayStation-sponsored Conversations With Creators web show. "I probably shouldn't even be here as a studio head because I let this thing happen at a time when

Neverwinter will now be a free-to-play MMO

[bcvideo id="983968576001"]
Cryptic's Neverwinter was announced as a co-op RPG from the creators of Champions Online and Star Trek Online.

was announced as a co-op RPG from the creators of Champions Online and Star Trek Online. Built with a modified version of the Star Trek Online engine and set in the summery but zombie-blighted D&D city of Neverwinter. Eurogamerreport that it will be turned into a free-to-play MMO. All quests, areas and expansions will be free, but you'll be able to pay for pets, fancy clothing items and consumables. The release date has been pushed back to late 2012 to give Cryptic a bit of time to change the way the entire game works.

Cryptic's superhero MMO, Champions Online went free-to-play earlier this year and Star Trek Onlineis set to take the plunge before the year is out. Cryptic was bought up by Perfect World Entertainment this year, a company that specialises in publishing free-to-play MMOs like the recently released Rusty Hearts. Whatever Cryptic make next, expect it to be free to play.

EA's shutting down Maxis Emeryville, home of SimCity and Spore

The studio originally behind SimCity, The Sims, and Spore is shutting down. Electronic Arts has confirmed that it's closing Maxis' Emeryville location and redistributing its portion of the work on The Sims 4 and SimCity to other Maxis branches. The studio has expanded significantly in terms of headcount and geography since it was co-founded by Will Wright in 1987 and acquired by Electronic Arts in

Want to stay connected with long-distance friends? Play Call of Duty Zombies

Finishing school is a bittersweet milestone in life. On one hand, you're finally ready to enter the real world, make your own money, and start paying off the accumulated debt from said education. On the other, all those friends you were hanging around with every day probably won't be around anymore and you'll more than likely lose touch. But that didn't happen to me. I avoided losing my friends and

Dainty Drow play leapfrog in new Neverwinter screens and footage

Neverwinter is a free to play action MMO- NO COME BACK.

Neverwinter is a free to play action MMO- NO COME BACK. There are millions of them around, yes, scratching at our shins for attention like anxious Kobolds. They want nothing more than to entertain us for a few hours and maybe sell us an XP boost every now and then, but you've got to be different to stand out.

Neverwinter's familiar earthy medieval fantasy vibe won't do it, but the smack-tastic combat might. New screens and trailers have popped up over the weekend showing the Cleric, who has mastered all of the vagaries of light, from "punishing light" to "soothing light" and even "daunting light." His encounter powers let him nuke areas for massive damage, and impale enemies with spears of light for "moderate damage." See all that and more in the trailer and screens below.

The first beta testing session took place this weekend, but there are bound to be more. You can sign up for the beta on the Neverwinter site.

Maxis is 'exploring' offline mode for SimCity

SimCity may yet receive an offline mode. The latest iteration of the city management series was slammed for requiring users to play online when it launched in March, but Maxis maintained that an offline mode didn't fit with its vision for the game (after abandoning the argument that server-side calculations made it infeasible). Maxis Emeryville GM Patrick Buechner says the studio has been looking into

Logitech launches G400 mouse

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Road to the IGF: The Astronauts' The Vanishing of Ethan Carter

If you're familiar with the team at Polish developer The Astronauts , the studio's debut game, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter , may seem like a departure.

may seem like a departure. While Ethan Carter is the first game from the studio, core members were founders of People Can Fly (later known as Epic Games Poland), creators of high-octane shooters Painkiller , Bulletstorm , and Gears of War: Judgment.

Ethan Carter , however, is a deliberately-paced, narrative-driven weird fiction mystery game. It's up for IGF's Excellence in Audio award, and also has honorable mentions for Excellence in Visual Art and the Seumas McNally Grand Prize. Adrian Chmielarz, creative director at The Astronauts, answered some questions about Ethan Carter as part of our ongoing Road to the IGF series.

What is your background in making games?

In 1986, our high school agreed to lend a few ZX Spectrums to the students for the weekends, and I was the first in queue. My first couple of weeks with the Speccy were just about discovering and playing games, but right after that phase I got into making my own games. I did everything, from design and coding to graphics and sound.

And then there was a slow linear growth throughout all the years: three studios, 11 published games, and a few unreleased ones, all the way up to now with The Astronauts and The Vanishing of Ethan Carter .

What development tools did you use?

We have used the obvious industry juggernauts like Unreal Engine, Perforce, or Photoshop. We have also used a few smaller tools that made our life so much better or easier, like Total Commander, Hipchat or Wunderlist. But I guess these are fairly obvious, too.

One development tool that is not obvious at all, though, would be this little innocent looking thing called PhotoScan. To a layman, it’s a magical piece of software that, when fed with a couple dozen photos of an object, spits out that object as a game-ready, high-quality 3D fully-textured asset.

Of course, nothing is that simple, so there was a lot of extra work involved when dealing with PhotoScan and photogrammetry, but I hope the end results show that it was all worth it.

How long have you and your team been working on the game?

About a year longer that we have initially assumed, meaning it was two years in total. Luckily, only a part of that was due to the usual inability to plan properly. The “delay” was mostly due to our conscious decision to make the game bigger than what we had originally designed.

How did you come up with the concept?

It was a very odd process, different to how I usually work. It's crazy how many iterations Ethan went through, from a seed idea to “maybe let's make a weird fiction horror game” to the final form. Sometimes during the dev meetings, we would jokingly refer to this or that older idea as something from the 453rd or 711th iteration.

Anyway, I think one of the most important moments of the initial design phase happened when I read Ambrose Bierce’s shorty story titled An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge. I already had the most basic idea for the game in my head but that story made me way more confident about it.

A lot of people approach narrative in video games differently. What was the overarching philosophy for narrative in Ethan Carter ?

The idea was for the player to experience a weird fiction story. The key word being “experience." Not “listen to” or “read," but “experience.” We wanted to achieve that by making sure that we tell the story through gameplay, or vice versa: to have the gameplay tell a story. Basically, to make gameplay and story indistinguishable from each other.

The music and the audio in Ethan Carter work seamlessly with one another, and along with the actual play, gives players a strong sense of place and presence in the game world. How was your team able to achieve that? What should other developers keep in mind when designing audio?

The basic philosophy behind the audio in Ethan is simple: audio is super-incredibly important, period. That’s one thing that developers should always remember, I believe.

Of course, audio needs to support the core idea of the experience, so its use is different for each game. For example, in our case we knew we wanted the player to get lost in the melancholic beauty of the world, so our ambient music uses much more melody than most games. Also, we went for a little more movie-like approach to sound design, and not everything that produces sound in real life actually produces sound in Ethan -- o nly the things important to the story that the player experiences are producing sounds. We didn’t go for realism, but tight and focused immersion.

Ethan Carter skews more toward theme, as opposed to mechanics, compared to your previous games. How much of an adjustment was that?

I almost had to re-learn video games from scratch, and I am not exaggerating. Most of my life I designed with my gut, or, if the actual hard thinking was involved, without any systemic, well-organized knowledge. A couple of indie games I played in 2012 challenged everything I knew or felt, and I went on a journey of self-discovery and reflection. Again, no matter how pretentious that sounds, I am neither kidding nor exaggerating. You can actually see the results of that journey in form of 2012-2014 blog posts on our website.

Have you played any of the other IGF finalists? Any games you've particularly enjoyed?

I played Talos Principle for a couple of hours, it even inspired me to write a Medium analysis. I cannot wait to find some quality time aside for 80 Days , I have heard nothing but wonderful things about it. Same goes for Framed and The Sailor's Dream .

But I admit I never heard about half of the IGF finalists. Which I guess proves the usefulness of the festival. I am already seeing a couple of interesting titles that I would miss otherwise, and that’d be a shame -- not just for me as a designer who should learn from the others, but simply as a gamer too.

SimCity owners getting the offline mode they (thought they) want(ed)

Today, nearly a full year after the game's release, Maxis announced an offline mode for SimCity. That's… actually sort of depressing. Taking what is basically a massively multiplayer, social experience and ripping out its online portion is an extremely regressive move. Sure, naysayers might be shouting told-ya-so's from the rooftops, but it didn't need to be that way. The future of gaming, at least

Black Ops 2 Apocalypse DLC launch trailer

Treyarch has released the launch trailer for the fourth and final Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 DLC drop, Apocalypse . Priced at 1200 Microsoft Points and set for release on Xbox 360 today, the add-on pack offers two new multiplayer maps, two “reimagined fan-favourite” ones from older titles in the series, plus a fresh Zombies level called Origins; full details are posted below. Apocalypse should arrive

Mechwarrior Online studio announces Transverse, a persistent, player-driven sci-fi MMO

Piranha Games did a pretty solid job with Mechwarrior Online , but now the studio is trying its hand at something even more ambitious: Transverse, a flight-based sci-fi MMORPG set in a distant part of the galaxy where humanity has transcended mortality, and the players control everything.

In some ways, Transverse sounds similar to Mechwarrior Online, particularly with regards to combat. "The physically-inspired close range combat will require strategic management of your ship's systems. With each burst of weapons fire, high speed turn, and shield deflection, your ship will expend power and build heat," the game's description states. "Every battle you engage in will play out differently."

But it's the story that ties those battles together that makes Transverse sound so potentially interesting. It takes place in the 24th century in an area of space known as the Fringe, where four factions of humanity vie for supremacy. But years of augmentation and enhancement have created "humans" far different from those on Earth, while the advent of synthetics has rendered mortality irrelevant; now, the people of the Sol system live in a closed, rigid society, while out on the Fringe, the only laws are the rules that each man and woman chooses to live by.

That freedom will extend to the in-game economy as well, as there will be no stores, pre-made mines or manufacturers. Instead, players will have to establish themselves with nothing more than the "humble colonist goods" they're granted when they enter the Transverse, and create and grow the economy themselves, as they see fit.

It all sounds rather EVE Online-like, while the reveal trailer strikes me as a cross between Battlestar Galactica and Firefly, with a dash of Babylon 5 on the narrative side. But that's not a criticism: Original ideas are nice, but a mashup like that—if it's done properly—is something I'd throw money at all day long.

Speaking of which, there is a crowdfunding campaign. Pledges start at $30 for a basic, all-digital package, and go all the way up to $250, which includes all kinds of cool physical stuff like a map of the known universe, a hardcover "making of" book, a pin and a t-shirt.

Transverse is by all appearances an incredibly ambitious project, and that makes it risky—especially since Star Citizenand Elite: Dangerousare already so far along. But the possibility that it could live up to those ambitions makes it worth paying attention to, which I thus urge you to do at TransverseGame.com.

SimCity: Cities of Tomorrow expansion pack coming in November

SimCity mayors will be able to turn their towns into eco-friendly tech havens or cyberpunk dystopias with the Cities of Tomorrow expansion pack. The first expansion for EA and Maxis' latest city-building sim will arrive on PC and Mac on Nov. 12, the companies announced today. The pack will introduce new regions, city specializations, and transportations methods such as mag-lev trains. It will also

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Our Verdict
A quality gaming mouse, with an accurate and smooth-running laser sensor, if a little light on extra features.

The Vengeance range of gaming peripherals has been a great success for manufacturer Corsair, and the update to its impressive wee gaming mouse, the Vengeance M65, is going to do nothing to change that.

Corsair pretty much make everything that goes into putting together a gaming PC these days. In fact, I wouldn't be the least surprised to see them badging up CPUs, motherboards and graphics cards in our Corsair-dominated future. But despite the broadening focus, now encompassing a huge range of components and peripherals, one thing has remained reassuringly constant - an emphasis on quality. So it was with the original Vengeance M60 mouse: a quality gaming rodent, with a 5700 max DPI capability and a rock-solid laser sensor backing it up.

What's changed with this Vengeance M65 then?

As you might expect from the iterative nomenclature, and the fact they're using an identical chassis, there are no radical stylistic additions here. Under the hood, however, Corsair have upgraded the laser sensor, shifting from the Avago LaserStream ADNS-9500 to the ADNS-9800.

That gives the M65 a maximum DPI setting of a relatively massive 8200.

Personally, I love high-sensitivity gaming mice, but with a DPI setting that high I generally find it a little too twitchy. One unexpected loud noise later and I'll find myself facing in a completely different direction on-screen thanks to a slight involuntary jitter of my mouse hand.

So what's the point in shifting over to a mouse with a DPI setting you may never use? Well, it's not just that headline figure that makes a difference - even lower down the DPI scale the improved Avago sensor makes its presence felt.

The translation of movement from your mouse movement to the screen is incredibly smooth, with none of the slight twitchiness I've experienced in using the M60 and M65 mice side-by-side. It's an incredibly accurate mouse, right up there with the best of them.

This is an impressive update to an already impressive mouse, and given that it's hitting the street with the same £50/$70 price-tag of the M60 - and you can pick it up in Stormtrooper white - the Vengeance M65 gets a big thumbs up from me.

It may not come with a huge range of extra buttons (the pricier M95 will cater for those needs), but if you're after a sensitive, well-priced laser gaming rodent the Vengeance M65 is an ideal candidate.

The Verdict

Corsair Vengeance M65 gaming mouse

A quality gaming mouse, with an accurate and smooth-running laser sensor, if a little light on extra features.

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MechWarrior Online announces Clan Collection with $500 gold mechs, UI 2.0 still coming

The free-to-play MechWarrior Online announced that players are now able to pre-purchase mechs from its upcoming Clan Collection , which will be released June 17.

, which will be released June 17. Prices start at $30 for the standard mech collections—going up to $240—and may include different variants, badges and custom titles, premium time, concept art, and other unique content.

The Clan Invasion also offers the Gold Khan Collection, a selection of eight, "limited edition" gold-skinned mechs, each for the bonkers price of $500. The MWO community has several legitimate issues with this, even if we completely ignore the ethical debate about $500, "limited edition," in-game purchases.

For starters, the gold mechs will have a unique bonus module, which players worry goes against Piranha Games' commitment to never make MWO a "pay-to-win" game. These mechs aren't out in the wild yet, so it's too early for us to truly know what kind of effect they will have on balancing, if at all, but this does seem like more than just a cosmetic upgrade.

A more salient point is that this new collection, which is out just in time for the Christmas shopping frenzy, precedes improvements and an expansion that players have been clamoring for since before the game's official launch on September 17.

Chief among these are the UI 2.0 overhaul that has missed its launch target several times since February, and the hotly anticipated Community Warfare expansion. The expansion adds another layer of persistence to MWO, allowing players to join different factions or act alone as mercenaries for hire. MWO creative director Bryan Ekman said faction warfare will add a leveling system and affect multiple areas of the game's economy as well as territory on its Inner Sphere star map. Piranha last said that there's a "strong chance" that UI 2.0 will arrive in January, and that Community Warfare will roll out in stages over the next six months.

Paying $500 for something dubbed "limited," but actually infinitely reproducible, may seem outrageous, but it may be just another sign of the times. It is in no way the only example of such in-game purchases in a free-to-play game, nor is it the most outrageous. Consider the $900 Conqueror Packfor the free-to-play role-playing game Path of Exile, or Star Citizen's $10,000 Wing Commander pack. Mobile and social games have taught us that if players are willing to pay these amounts, developers will continue to oblige them.

The question is how this changes the priorities of a developer and what it means for players who don't want or can't afford these items.

SimCity's always-online never meant as DRM, Gibeau says

EA Labels President Frank Gibeau says DRM had nothing to do with SimCity's always-online requirement. In a GamesIndustry International interview he stressed that the game was conceptualized and built by Maxis as a massively multiplayer experience. "DRM is a failed dead-end strategy; it's not a viable strategy for the gaming business," Gibeau said. "So what we tried to do creatively is build an online

Black Ops 2: Apocalypse DLC announced

Activision and Treyarch have announced the fourth and final Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 DLC pack, Apocalypse. It will feature two brand new multiplayer maps, two “fully reimagined fan-favourite” ones, and a fresh Zombies level called Origins which is teased in the trailer above. The DLC will launch on Xbox 360 on August 27 priced at 1200 Microsoft Points, with other platforms to follow. Origins will

MechWarrior Online World Championship sign-ups are now live

Piranha Games has announced that sign-ups for the $100,000 MechWarrrior Online World Championship are now being taken.

World Championship are now being taken. Regional qualifiers are set to begin in May, followed by regional finals in the fall, and then the Big Show, which will take place on December 3 in Vancouver, at the first-ever “Mech Con.”

Tournament matches will take place within a special “Tournament Build” of the game, which will be a clone of, but separate from, the standard MWO client based on the coming May 17 patch. Existing inventory, mechs, and loadouts will not transfer over; instead, tournament players will be given “large amounts” of in-game currency with which to purchase and customize the mechs they'll use in the tourney. All Standard, Hero, and Champion mechs will be available for use, including all Kodiak variants, with loadout restrictions and guidelines provided prior to the start of the tournament.

Maps, modes, and other details have yet to be announced, but battles will be fought in 8-vs-8 matches of 15 minutes, restricted to first-person view only. Interestingly, Piranha recommended that tournament players not make use of specialized third-party hardware during their matches. “All World Final Matches in Vancouver will be played with identical machines and identical hardware,” it said. “If you rely on a specific mouse or accessory for your Tournament Matches, you will not have the luxury of relying on these items in the World Finals.”

The prize pool “starting point” is $100,000, but will be increased from that mark through purchases of Tournament Supporter Packs, 50 percent of which will be added to the total prize pool. The winning team will take home 60 percent of the total prize pool—minimum $60,000—while the second-place finisher will get 30 percent, and third will get ten percent. Prizes for regional finalists will include in-game currency and content like Mechs, Mech Bays, and Mech Packs.

Sign-up links for the MechWarior Online World Championship, as well as full rules and other relevant details, may be had at mwomercs.com.

SimCity nearing 'all clear' on server issues, Maxis says

SimCity's crippling server issues are on their way out. Maxis general manager Lucy Bradshaw said crashes are down 92 percent from launch as of Sunday night in an Electronic Arts blog post , with almost 8 million hours spent lording over virtual cities so far. New servers, optimizations, and client-side updates are whipping the always-online game into shape, but Bradshaw said a few more elements must

Black Ops 2 Apocalypse DLC preview trailer

Treyarch has released the first gameplay footage of upcoming Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 DLC pack Apocalypse. Announced last week , the shooter’s fourth and final add-on pack will feature two brand new multiplayer maps, two “fully reimagined fan-favourite” ones, and a fresh Zombies level called Origins. Multiplayer map Pod is set in a failed 1970s utopian community in an abandoned cliff side in Taiwan

100,000 up for grabs in the Mechwarrior Online World Championship

$100,000 up for grabs in the Mechwarrior Online World Championship
Piranha Games has announced that the first-ever Mechwarrior Online World Championships will take place next year, with the hot mech-on-mech action set to start in the first quarter of 2016.

The championship will kick off with regional qualifiers in North America, Europe, and Oceania, followed by regional championships for each. The three top units will be flown to an as-yet-undetermined location for a LAN throwdown to determine the ultimate Giant Fighting Robot Driver, and to claim the $100,000 seeded purse that's up for grabs.

The "seeded purse" represents the base prize amount put on the table by Piranha, which could grow significantly depending on future sponsorships, or perhaps through mech skin sales dedicated to supporting the tournament—something similar to how Valve cranks up the Dota 2 International prize pool to ridiculous heightsthrough sales of the Compendium. Whatever the details, the bottom line is that it will be a hefty chunk of money, and the winner will get a hefty chunk of it.

Mechwarrior Online recently went live on Steam, and also (finally) rolled out Community Warfare, which pits the various factions of the Inner Sphere against one another in a persistent universe. Piranha said at the time that more "large updates" are expected in the near future, and we will also presumably being hearing more about the World Championship relatively soon as well.

SimCity starter guide

SimCity is a complex game, and the more you play, the deeper its mechanics get. Keeping a massive city afloat is far different from juggling a few residential blocks. Fortunately, you can do well for yourself by following a few key principles. These tips will help you start and maintain a growing city. As you expand, they become even more crucial. Keep these in mind and pay attention to what's happening