Blackhats Clan

Following the announcement of From Software's fantasy role-playing game Dark Souls for Windows, Namco Bandai revealed some additional details. Previously it was known the PC version, called the Prepare to Die Edition, would include new armor sets, bosses and explorable areas. In an interview with GameSpy, From Software recommended a gamepad to play the PC version and said there won't be much difference visually between the console version and the upcoming PC version.

Along with the Prepare to Die Edition's announcement was the reveal that it would be integrated with Games for Windows Live. According to Namco Bandai's Carlson Choi, that's apparently not a definite thing. Dark Souls was announced for PC in part because of a popular online petition signed by nearly 100,000 fans, and another petition popped up shortly after the announcement requesting GFWL be removed. "Discussion is still going on with the From Software team," Choi told Gamespy when pressed, indicating GFWL may wind up being removed.

Choi mentioned that more may be revealed about the Prepare to Die Edition at E3 2012, which takes place in early June 2012.

mac observer

Apple CEO Tim Cook was spotted at gaming giant Valve’s headquarters in Washington State late last week, an event that has sparked much speculation and claims from unnamed sources. The former include the idea that Apple is interested in buying Valve, while the latter includes the claim that Apple is working with Valve to reinvent living room gaming.

Valve is a large game publisher with titles like Half-Life, Portal, Counter Strike, and Team Fortress in its portfolio. The company also developed the Steam gaming platform that offers an App Store-like way of buying, managing, and playing a variety of games for Mac and Windows.

So, when Tim Cook is reported to be visiting Valve’s HQ, all manner of flags get raised. Apple has a hit and miss history with gaming that’s really mostly miss. Valve cofounder Gabe Newell himself once lamented that nobody at Apple got gaming, for instance.

The release of the App Store for iPhone changed that, at least to some degree. Games are quite popular for both iPhone and iPad, and in recent years Apple has actually bragged that iPhone and iPod touch was the most popular handheld gaming platform on the planet.

the hunter

Status Updates are weekly posts made in the community forum where the team share insights into the development of theHunter.

We continue ironing out the last issues and putting on the extra polish of the new Hirschfelden environment, the Roe Deer and the Wild Boar. We plan to release the game update 12th of April. At the same time we will also make the switch to our new data center with more and better servers.

There will be some downtime the 12th when we do the switch. Exactly how long also depends on your ISP (caching of DNS), but expect about 2-3 hours.

Screenshots

Here are some more screenshots of what is coming...

strong language

pcgamer

Mechs are complex creatures. Their intricacy facilitates this sweet see-sawing between being an engineer and being a pilot—something that really only happens elsewhere in high-fidelity racing games. Fail in the cockpit, and you can retreat to the garage to scrub everything off the drawing board and restart from scratch.

The worry with MechWarrior Online was that this nuance would evaporate because of its business model, or from being in the hands of a developer whose closest experience to making MechWarrior was contributing to a poorly-received Transformers game.

Nope. After seeing the game at GDC, I’m reassured that the minutiae we associate with mechs might finally be paired with the modern technology it deserves.

A cool example (literally, hurr hurr) of this was learning that planet climates will globally affect heat. “You might sacrifice some armor for heat sinks if you’re on a desert planet,” Bryan Ekman, Creative Director at Piranha, told me. “On an ice world, you could run fewer heat sinks, but more lasers. It’s all part of our ‘role warfare’ pillar: players will learn to take different mechs and different configurations into different levels and different scenarios.”

Thermal vision (itself a separate system that you’d install) would also interact with this. If I’m trying to spot a “hot” enemy with a thermal vision mode, their signature will be harder to spot on a desert planet than on an arctic one due to the ambient heat.

Bodies of water interlace with these mechanics, too. Dipping your mechs’ legs into a river would dissipate heat, but only if you’d actually installed heat sinks in your mech’s legs. That’s exactly the sort of fidelity I’m looking for—design that connects what you do in the garage with moment-to-moment tactics, and rewards something like an improvised, tactical skinny dip.

ign

Our recent poll regarding the reasons gamers cite for being turned off by online multiplayer shooters yielded some fairly predictable, but nonetheless enlightening, results.

With over 43,000 votes cast the most popular question was "What's the primary reason you're not interested in playing shooters online?" 43.89% of respondents feel online multiplayer shooters are repetitive and mindless and they prefer rich and engaging single player experiences, and 22.33% claimed they play video games for fun, not for sport, and that they do not feel compelled to compete.

Who needs a story when you have flags?

It's no secret that PC gaming needs a shot in the arm, and if a recent report from The Verge is to be believed, Valve hopes to deliver one with the Steam Box, a console-sized PC that can compete with consoles and the growing popularity of mobile platforms like Android and iOS.

There's still much we don't know about the alleged device and/or platform -- not the least of which is whether or not it actually exists -- but there's certainly reason to consider it as within the realm of possibility. Despite being responsible for some of the biggest franchises in gaming, a large portion of Valve's business is anchored in the success of Steam, its digital distribution client for PC and Mac. In order for the service to grow, PC gaming has to move beyond the enthusiast market. It has to be mainstream and the Steam Box could be Valve's ace in the hole for making that happen.

The concept, murky as it may be, may actually be pretty sound.

verge

Recently there's been chatter that Valve — the company behind the massively popular gaming service Steam — has been considering getting into the hardware business. Specifically, there have been rumors that the company has been toying with the idea of creating a proper set-top console which could potentially pose a threat to the Xbox 360and PlayStation 3. Valve co-founder Gabe Newell even recently told Penny Arcade: "Well, if we have to sell hardware we will."