Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Bad news, everyone: Diablo III won’t be gracing your hard drives this year, I’m afraid. Blizzard have announced their joyous but cruel hacker-slasher has slipped to early 2012. No real reason given, but Blizzbozz Mike Morhaime suggests it’s just a matter of wanting to put more dev time into D3. Could it be that the beta has turned up unexpected problems? Or that they’re using the extra time to include an offline mode? No, that’s just my wishful thinking speaking.

Morhaime quote below, anyway.
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[This was written at 11.30am, but our scheduler messed up. Hooray! - Retroactive Ed] I should be at the Eurogamer Expo right now, but instead I’ve been stuck on a train for the last few hours, diverted through the darkest and most obscure reaches of the South-East, because this is crappy old Britain and its greedily-privatised public transport infrastructure is totally capable of efficiently dealing with day-to-day problems. I have a laptop, but the only game on it is Diablo 3. So I won’t be playing that. Hey, DRM? Screw you. Screw you right in the ear.

The battery-sapping miracles of phone tethering allow me to at least bring you this brief missive, which isn’t actually intended to be about my travel gripes – those are a beige alert at best – but instead about an ambitious mod for Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3, which enthusiastically recreates the original, purer Red Alert within this the more recent C&C’s shiny, full-3D engine. Read the rest of this entry »

Size “Zombie Cow” Five Games have (oh, come on, we all know it’s just Dan Marshall)… has just announced that he’s made a special edition of the game that first brought him to fame, Ben There, Dan That (exclamation mark). Explaining it as “George Lucased”, the new version addresses his anally retentive need to go back and fix the past. I may be reading between the lines of his announcement here. But the good news is the new, tidied version, along with the 16-page making of e-booklet, Lowering The Tone, and a new storybook explaining some back history of the characters (they had back history?), is available on a pay-what-you-want basis.

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Still filled up with indignant energy and ready to type “This is not my X-Com!” in response to whatever comes out of 2K? Then you are in luck, because there’s a brand new video about the development of the squad-based UFO-shooter, with a couple of guys from 2K Marin explaining what they are up to. Watch it below! Jonathan Pelling, the project lead, says: “It’s about experiencing the origins of this organization from a really zoomed in and boots-on-the-ground perspective. We really wanted you to feel like what it was like to be one of the squadies in the original game, and not the all-knowing, top-down commander.”

In case you missed it, we also got a 20-minute walkthrough a month back, which showed the game in some serious detail.
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Since I know just how much you lot love playing with cute fluffy animals, I thought I’d better point out this pet creator demo. From The Sims 3 website: “Create a wide variety of unique dogs, cats, and—for the first time ever—horses!” HORSES!? Best of all the animals?

You can download Create A Pet here. This concludes our The Sims 3 Pets coverage for today.

Take this with a pinch of salt, I think, but Techgage is reporting the findings of a recent Nvidia conference call in which the graphics company suggested that PC games revenue will pass that generated by consoles in 2014. THAT MEANS THE PC WILL BE BEST. That’s not format-war. That’s math. Or something.

The blame for this lies with the rapid growth in digital distribution, microtransactions, and the free-but-not sector (as I am now calling it). The report also features a PC performance vs consoles graph (above) which made me laugh with the blatantness of it. Yes, top end PC graphics actually are 900%+ more powerful than console hardware. Thanks, Nvidia.

Minecraft 1.9 is upon us! Well, a pre-release version, at least, so the main client is updating just yet. It seems like only yesterday that the long-awaited 1.8 hit so this is a pleasant surprise, so what does 1.9 do? It bloody well sticks in NPCs is what it does. According to early reports, they don’t actually do very much yet, but we should congratulate them just for existing. Notch has also been tweeting about craftable snowmen, who will actually come to life and hang around with you! There’s a horrible and possibly true rumour that they melt if you take them to warmer climes as well. It’ll be just like when I saw a live stage version of Raymond Briggs’ story and cried for hours at the end. Confirm if this is true so I’ll know never to bond with them. Go download it now!