Sizzling Launch Trailer
Modern Warfare 3
Warning: May Be Hot To The Touch!
Battlefield 3 Launch Trailer
DOTA 2 Trailer
Hot Out Of BlizzCon 2011
In-House Review
Might & Magic Heroes VI
Listen up, puny newtlings!When Manastorm arrives, you will no longer be maggots. You will be wizards. And you will be damn good wizards. You will be wizards capable of impaling a man on a two-inch shard of ice. You will summon a ball of God damn fire from the heavens, for the sole purpose of creating a human barbeque. You will crush, burn, slice, freeze, maim, disembowel and decapitate any unfortunate entity in possession of a heartbeat within a three mile radius. You will screw a man in holes he didn't even know he had.
You will be supernatural superagents. Magical majors. Sorcerous soldiers. You. Will. Be. Badass.
So prepare yourselves, ladies: MANASTORM IS COMING.
Differences in capitalisation aside, Blizzard's offering will include free access to the game via a "Starter Edition" similar to the one currently available for StarCraft 2. However, "if you come in through the Starter Edition, there will definitely be some costs". Exactly how these costs will manifest remains to be seen; Sigaty says that they haven't yet talked about exactly how the game will be monetised.
Further information about the game itself includes the news that average game-time has been reduced from 45-90 minutes to 20-30 minutes, with various changes and simplifications taking place that aim to garner greater "accessibility". Apparently, Sigaty felt that "the deep systems in other DOTA games weren't compatible with a fast-paced competitive game." Hm. You can read more about the changes in the Eurogamer article.
Check below for the winning costume from the BlizzCon costume contest, it's totally insane. I can only imagine how many nerds splooged in the general vicinity of that thing. You can grab a look at other costume contest and cosplay pics below, as well as on GeForce.com. There are also a bunch of random images available on the NVIDIA Flickr and their Day One Recap can be found here.
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Scandalously, I've never played a game by Blizzard (aside from extremely occasional and brief forays into their RTS games), but still I'm weirdly compelled to watch it unravel. I'm forever fascinated by these internet-events, even when they don't prescribe themselves specifically in my interest-direction. There's always some sort of endearing, slightly amateurish air to them; it's not TV, spit-shined into a blinding gloss. Nobody really understands how to do things well on the internet because so many variables are introduced and it's such a vicious, untamed beast anyway. It's compelling watching big companies with lots of money and muscle trying to do battle with it in a way that best suits whatever image it is they're trying to create or uphold.
I tuned in for the 90-minute World Of Warcraft presentation, despite my interest in that actually being represented in negative numbers, and stuck around for the StarCraft happenings too.
I've caught various snippets of StarCraft 2 tournaments since the game was released. I'm familiar enough with the format to have developed a genuine fondness for the shoutcasting escapades of Tasteless & Artosis, but the actual game segments are essentially incomprehensible to me due to the fact I haven't really played it (I've developed a weird mental-block about RTS's the way some people do about mathematics).
I understand it well enough when one group of dudes is attacking another group of dudes - I'm accustomed to the generalities of battling to the death - but to me, all the twiddly in-betweeny parts are indistinguishable from random chaos. Instead of monkeys on typewriters, it's Koreans on mechanical keyboards. The annoying thing is, I realise that I won't ever fully understand what it is that compels thousands of people to watch this stuff so intently until the day I actually learn to play the game myself. And that infuriates me beyond measure.
Impotent infuriation aside, here's a clip Artosis' brief transformation into a teenage schoolgirl at the hands of Tasteless. I laugh like an idiot every single time it hits the 00:35 timestamp, so I feel slightly hypocritical in mocking him for it, but fortunately a camera isn't pointed at my face.
By the way, if you didn't catch it live, I highly suggest you scope the Youtubes for footage of the annual Blizzcon Dance Contest, where astounding excellence inadvertently seeped from every awkward pore. Obviously nothing quite matched up to last year's undead male breaking his leg on stage, but I don't think anything ever will.
Orcs Must Die! has some new DLC on the way (October 25th). Artifacts of Power will give you some new weapons and traps to put down those nasty Orcs with. Whether you're busting out the new Floor Scorchers or wielding the Vampiric Gauntlets, it will only cost you $2.49 for the pack. I had a lot of fun with the demo, and have been wanting to try the full game. Maybe they'll offer a bundle? Preview the new tools you'll be gaining in Artifacts of Power below!
Valve, creators of best-selling game franchises (such as Half-Life, Left 4 Dead, Team Fortress, and Counter-Strike) and leading technologies (such as Steam and Source), today announced the second game add-on for the year's highest rated multiplatform game, Portal 2, is in development and targeted for release early next year.
This major update will feature an easy-to-use in-game map editor that will let users design, build and share their own single-player and co-op test chambers with the community, who will be able to view, play and vote on them with a simple click.
Portal 2 was released April 19, and currently holds a Metacritic score of 95%, making it the top-rated multiplatform game of 2011. Its first content update, "Peer Review", came out two weeks ago.
A hilariously mind-bending adventure that challenges you to use wits over weaponry in a funhouse of diabolical science, Portal 2 features expansive single and cooperative multiplayer game modes. For more information on Portal 2 and its downloadable content, please visit http://www.thinkwithportals.com/
That sounds like a pretty cool update to me. What are your thoughts?
Edit: We just got some images too.
Minimum System Requirements
- Operating System: Microsoft Windows XP, Vista or 7
- CPU: Dual-Core CPU 2.4 Ghz
- RAM: 2GB
- Graphics Card: NVIDIA 8800 or ATI 3800 with 512MB of VRAM
- Sound: Microsoft Windows XP/Vista or 7 compatible sound card (100% DirectX 9.0c-compatible)
- DVD-ROM: Quad-speed (4x) DVD-ROM drive
- Hard Drive: 17.5GB free disk space
- Input Devices: 100% Windows XP/Vista or 7 compatible mouse and keyboard
Recommended System Requirements
- Operating System: Microsoft Windows 7
- CPU: Dual-Core CPU 2.5 GHz
- RAM: 4GB
- Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 or ATI Radeon HD 6850 with 768MB+ of VRAM (DirectX 11 compatible)
- Sound: Microsoft Windows XP/Vista or 7 compatible sound card (100% DirectX 9.0c-compatible)
- DVD-ROM: Quad-speed (4x) DVD-ROM drive
- Hard Drive: 17.5 GB free disk space
- Input Devices: 100% Windows XP/Vista or 7 compatible mouse and keyboard or Xbox 360 Controller for Windows
Additionally, Nvidia has provided three new screenshots for the game, which you may view below.
There will be an official release party for Postal 3: Catharsis in Cologne, Germany on the 10th of December. We were told this by Running with scissors CEO Vince Desi, who had just returned from a trip to Moscow. The anarcho-shooter will finally come out in December one month after it appears on the Russian market. Below are the system requirements, which we have known about since March 2011. We are not quite sure if they still meet the current status of the project.Required:Single core CPU with 3 GHz, 1 GB RAM (XP), 2 GB RAM (Vista / 7), GeForce 6600 or Radeon X800 with 128 MB, 7.5 GB hard disk space
Recommended: dual-core CPU with 2.4 GHz, 2 GB RAM (XP), 4 GB RAM (Vista / 7), GeForce 7600 or Radeon X1600
It's also unclear if the console versions will come out simultaneously with the PC versions. This should clear up in the near future.
Thanks to Daniel Boll, gbase.ch's PC Editor, for the heads up.
So, any of you up for more Postal?
NVIDIA is going to be there to gear up BlizzCon. They'll be holding workshops for the WoW nubs that don't know how to use computers yet (ah-ha! ?) and they'll have some uber-PCs playing Blizzard games at the NVIDIA booth for attendees to mess with. Actually that's kind of putting it mildly, since NVIDIA is providing 1,000 GeForce GTX graphics cards to demonstrate the unparalleled experience of playing Blizzard games on a GeForce GTX-equipped PC. You can stop by NVIDIA's BlizzCon page for scoops!
Jimmie Johnson’s Anything With An Engine will allow players to race unconventional vehicles created from the most unlikely of everyday objects such as shopping carts and dumpsters, armed with powerful side rams and front and rear custom weapons. The game introduces an eccentric group of characters – including Hazzard Mower, who uses his souped-up lawnmower to cut down the competition and Megaton, a former military officer who barrels around the track on a high-speed bomb – and features progressively challenging tracks complete with pyrotechnics, hazards, traps and jumps.
The home was featured on MTV Cribs, and it's the famous spot where Garriot himself had to hold off a crazed fan by firing off a warning shot with an Uzi until police could arrive. If the pictures of the home and surroundings aren't enough to get you to open up your bank account, then perhaps a virtual tour will do.
I'd like to think that I'm just about done with the game at this point, now all I have to do is finish off the last four bosses. It's definitely living up to be as difficult if not more difficult than Demon's Souls. I'm not sure I'd want to put myself through this kind of game more than once every 2-3 years though, so hopefully From Software will give me a little bit of a break before releasing a follow-up of any kind.
Since it's the last weekend really before big releases start swarming in try to take it easy, and enjoy the outdoors, because odds are if you're an addict like me then the rest of your year is going to be spent on your butt in front of your monitor / TV. Let's see who can get the most blood clots!
Video of the day - Harrison Ford playing Uncharted 3 for some Japanese advertisement.