PC News

Shogun 2: Total War Gameplay Trailer

Shogun 2 will be the seventh full Total War game, and the first since this years Napoleon: Total War saw great success. The original Shogun: Total War was the first in the Total War series, and the development team at the Creative Assembly have been keen to reiterate that Shogun 2 will return the series to its roots; a full circle, so to speak. This will firstly, and most obviously, see a return to feudal Japan as the setting, and consequently see a slight reduction in terms of scale and the different types of units. Fear not, strategy fans, this reduction should be seen more as a streamlining: the smaller number of units will have far more defined roles on the battlefield.

More Blue Space Lesbians in Mass Effect DLC

The team behind Mass Effect 2 has released a series of downloadable missions that let players fight rogue virtual intelligence, pilot new vehicles, and earn the loyalty of new crew members.  Now they’re finally giving us something we want: More blue space lesbians!  Or “Asari” as Bioware calls them.

No game can have too many blue space lesbians, and the first Mass Effect game was nice enough to give you two chances for girl-on-alien sex.  Mass Effect 2 gave you another pair of Asari, unfortunately one was utterly frigid, and the other had a lethal telepathic venereal disease.  Sure, players who are into girl-on-girl fun could romance a human crewmember, but what about those of us with a case of blueberry fever?

In the upcoming mission pack Lair of the Shadow Broker, players can once again team up with Liara T’Soni, one of the Asari romantic options from the first game.  Liara had a brief appearance in Mass Effect 2, including a short quest, but there was no time for sexual shenanigans.  Hopefully that oversight will be corrected in the new mission pack.

Civilization V News Roundup

There is something about the Civilization games that I just love, maybe it’s the multiple ways to win, the huge tech trees, the fact that it’s turned based so I can just leave it at a drop of a hat or just that it seriously kills a long eight hour coach journey. With Civ V due for release on the 21st of September here is a quick round up of the key changes and features that will be appearing in this latest incarnation.

Everquest 2 Flirts With Free To Play

Seems Sony wants to get more involved in the free to play MMO market. Everquest 2 is launching a free to play model giving players free browser based content. The content is restricted to select areas of EQ2, and is not considered a replacement for the subscription model.

Valve Sorry, Gives Away L4D2

Valve’s anti-cheat software know as VAC, recently banned over 12,000 users(mostly Modern Warfare 2 users) due to a false positive. Now, instead of sweeping the fiasco under the rug, company big chin Gabe Newell personally wrote a letter of apology to all affected by the bug. He also decided to give each affected user a free copy of Left 4 Dead 2. Kudos to Valve and Newell for owning up to the mistake and compensating everyone involved. Here’s the letter, in case you weren’t lucky enough to get your own.

Warhammer 40k: Space Marine Confirmed for PC

THQ announced today that upcoming Third-Person Shooter, Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine, will be released for PC as well as PS3 and Xbox 360. The player will be thrust into the role of Imperial Space Marine inside the vastly dark and depressing 40k universe.

Testing for Star Wars The Old Republic Starts

     Finally, 2 years after the game was announced and one year after Bioware started accepting registration forms for the closed beta, Star Wars: The Old Republic is starting to get into the hands of the first volunteers. According to SWTOR’s official website, the testing will be conducted in several phases. The first waves of testers will be “small” and “focused”, and only open to North America. As release date approaches though, more territories will be open to the closed beta. If you’re interested in getting your hands on this, you can register with the SWTOR website. If you’re already a member, you can go to the Game Testing page and try to get selected, but there are no guarantees. Star Wars: The Old Republic is set for release April 2011

Alien Swarm Free on Steam

The new version of Alien Swarm allows solo-play or online multiplayer to control a squad of grizzled space marines.  Players choose between eight characters, then customize a loadout of weapons and equipment, to engage in top-down shooting action. As players level up they gain access to unlock-able weapons and equipment.

The story and setting should be recognizable to any James Cameron fan: you’ve lost communications with a space colony, and “a Xenomorph may be involved”.  Your marines can weld doors shut, set up auto turrets, and use motion trackers in their fight against the space bugs; it comes a close as possible to being an Aliens game without actually violating trademarks.  It’s all very familiar, but the developers present it so earnestly that it comes across as a loving homage, rather than hackery.

StarCraft II “Ghosts of the Past” Trailer

Dubbed “Ghosts of the Past”, this balls-out-kind-of-campy-but-somehow-kind-of-fitting trailer is the last major signifier that South Korea’s productivity levels will shut down by at least 50% forever and that people will, people who have played StarCraft, somewhere in their lifetime will now get the bloody chance to play its sequel. If you were pretty excited for StarCraft II, you will be really excited for StarCraft II after this trailer. If you’ve no interest in it, claiming the game to be a copy-and-paste job, then, well, you can be grumpy and misanthropic all you want, because the rest of us will be playing StarCraft II.

This trailer covers a lot of ground, going back to Kerrigan being abandoned and Jim Raynor having to live with that. It’s a little unsettling to see Kerrigan a little more… “sexed up” than she was in the first game (Her red braids and her soft green eyes in the original had its own appeal… I, anyway.), but whatever. That’s definitely Kerrigan and that’s definitely a distressed Raynor with some awesome vocabulary, like “OVERDRIVE”. It’s a little silly, but after this long a wait for a sequel, it kind of works. Anyway, enough blabbing. Check it:

“Game Play” Performance Art Show Closes This Week

Do you like video games?  Do you like Performance Art as well?  If you do, the Brick Theater in Brooklyn New York has a Performance Art festival for you.  “Game Play” is running now through Sunday the 25^th, and has a smorgasbord of video game-theme productions.  Over the last week I had the chance to see several of them. 

Theater of the Arcade was written by Jeff Lewoncyk and Directed by Gyda Arber; it consisted of five short plays, each telling the story of a classic video game, but written in the style of a famous playwright.  It was the epitome of absurdist humor. Imagine if you will Asteroids as a tense workplace drama about spaceship pilots in a high-pressure competition right out of Glengarry Glen Ross.  It’s a clever show with inside gags for both gamers and theatre fans, highly recommended for both demographics.