Rock, Paper, Shotgun

It’s Thursday, there’s nothing particular going on, so let’s all play retro weirdo-treat Chuckie Egg. Yep, I’m so impressionable that I even accidentally convince myself to do things – irrelevantly mentioning the old BBC Micro/Acorn Electron/Spectrum platformer in an earlier post fixed it firmly in my mind, and with crushing inevitability, I found myself Googling for and then playing the strange, difficult tale of a farmer stealing eggs from murderous, ladder-climbing geese. Or ducks. Or chickens. Or whatever they are. In any case, they shouldn’t be able to climb ladders.
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I was operating under the belief that everything was beautiful in Trine 2′s world, whether the rushes growing by a crystal clear pool or the giant mushrooms with a candle’s light casting a glow from their interior. And then they went and showed me a bloody spider. It’s a right horrible one as well, with segmented legs thicker than a bemuscled torso. Thankfully, the other three new screenshots don’t contain anything repulsive, unless you’re particularly offended by beautiful fantasy environments. Are you? Then don’t click on the images below for larger versions or you might be sick all over your keyboard!

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You know how we’re giving away 12,000 beta keys for a weekend of Star Wars: The Old Republic? (There are still a few left, although not many – you need to claim yours before Friday at midnight – go here for all the details.) (Well, not all the details, or there’d be no reason for this post.) We finally have a date for it. It’s the weekend after this one. Things kick off on the 25th Nov, and come to an end on the following Monday, 28th. So there you go.

Some days, there isn’t much news to report. Today is one of those days. The sensible thing would be to go play a few delightful indie games, pen a few more Skyrim misadventures or open my very veins to hold forth about how Chuckie Egg made me, but the sensible thing feels far too involved when I’ve only poisoned my body and mind with one cup of hot, brown caffeinated liquid so far today. So instead, here’s the entirely fabricated news I wish I was writing.

Skyrim patch incoming

Following news that, at 280,000 concurrent players at its peak, Skyrim has broken player count records on Steam (that bit is actually true), Bethesda decide to take the PC entirely seriously again and will release a patch containing a slew of new graphics settings that everyone’s worked out how to do in ini files already. “Sorry,” said a man, “it’s a mystery to us that we didn’t put those options in in the first place too. Yeah, it’s pretty embarrassing that people can make the game look orders of magnitude better with a few quick tweaks in Notepad, isn’t it? I think we were distracted by a cute dog or something. Oh, there’s another one! Look at its floppy ears!”
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Nothing kickstarts a grim Northern day quite like a bit of digital retail news. It’s the stuff that really gets my blood pumping and makes me realise how much I love this land called Interactive Entertaindom. You may remember that Impulse, the download service previously operated by Stardock, was purchased by Gamestop earlier this year. This led to some gnashing of teeth but the ski slopes of Hell remained out of commission.

Now, Sins of a Solar Empire has appeared on Steam, leading me to visibly flinch this morning as if reality had fallen out of joint. It hadn’t. Explanations below.

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If you’ve been looking at your own version of Skyrim, and then seeing the images that likes of DeadEndThrills have been putting out (pinched one from there for the image above, sorry Duncan!) you might be forgiven for wondering how you can push the game beyond its prescribed options. There are ways.
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Not all dungeons require a cross-country trek or a cheeky spot of fast-travel to access. Dungeons of Dredmor was a light but appropriately vicious roguelike which charmed both John and I earlier this year, and creators Gaslamp Games have not left it to fester away on a darkened corner of Steam. As well as a steady trickle of patches, they’ve announced some real-money DLC is incoming, as well as a new patch which, among other things, doubles the number of avatar genders on offer. I did some pretty impressive maths to arrive at that conclusion, let me tell you.
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Paradox and Arrowhead have put out a trailer for the forthcoming Magicka paid-for expansion, The Stars Are Left, and you can see it below. The trailer comes with a huge list of tech improvements that will be applied in the additional (free) update, including the vital “less falling through the floor”, which is a patch note that could be added to any game and receive a thumbs up from us. The tweaks are mostly visual improvements, however, so killing those Lovecraftian monsters – including giant pink spiders – will be less likely to send you insane. Something like that.

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Ask anyone in the street which sport is sorely underrepresented in PC gaming, and they reply, “Handball”. And then you’ll both stare at each other for a beat, and then burst out giggling. Because, see, “hand” and “ball” are both words used for common human anatomical parts, and when you put a “hand” near a “ball”, it can have a sexual connotation, and thus when the two words are closely situated there’s a degree of innuendo* that is inherently amusing. Handball. Snnnnnnnnorrrrrrrt.

Fortunately, that’s come to an end. Both the previous paragraph, and the lack of handball (snigger) games on PC. Because we have IHF Handball Challenge 12.

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