During the Microsoft E3 press conference, Left 4 Dead 2 was announced. Let me get things straight here, I'm a big fan of Left 4 Dead, in fact I paid cash-money for both the PC and 360 versions, and I've been eagerly anticipating more L4D. Still, I can't help but feel a bit offended that Left 4 Dead 2 is coming out this soon.

When Left 4 Dead was released, it wasn't a complete product. Of the four campaigns included in the game, only two were usable in the versus gameplay mode, the meat and potatoes of a long-lasting Left 4 Dead experience. Since then Valve has remedied that situation with a free content pack, and kudos to them for not taking the low road and charging for what should have been in the game in the first place. The official excuse from Valve as to why the maps were left out at launch was that the versus levels take too long to set up and test. Nevertheless, we are being given a new and hopefully complete game in less than a year? I'm going to have to call shenanigans. Merely seven months ago I was charged a full $60 for an incomplete game, I'm not falling for it again.

As I mentioned in my last post, The Battlefield Heroes Beta can be easily obtained through Fileplanet, and now having played it I'll share some impressions. I've only gotten four or five hours to play with it, but I only started playing at 10:00pm, so the fact that I stayed up till 3:00 in the morning is a testament to how addictive it can be.

I just acquired a key for the Battlefield Heroes Beta via Fileplanet. For those of you who may not have been following its long development, Battlefield Heroes is a browser-based, free-to-play, ad-supported Battlefield-style game with a cartoony aesthetic reminiscent of Team Fortress 2. Check out the official website here for further information.

Apparently all you need to get a key at Fileplanet is an account with them, (at no cost). If you're anywhere as interested in Battlefield Heroes as I am you should immediately create an account at Fileplanet and grab a beta key. I haven't gotten the chance to dive in yet, I'm still downloading the browser plugin to play, (which is basically the whole game), but once I get a couple hours of play in I'll throw down some impressions on it.

Hurray for fictional but cool sounding holidays, they're the new internet rage! Today we're celebrating the release of the free DLC for the insanely popular and enjoyable zombie-shooter Left 4 Dead. The DLC, entitled "Left 4 Dead Survival Pack," includes versus mode versions of the Dead Air and Death Toll campaigns, (which should have been in included in the game to begin with), and a new game mode called 'survival.' Survival will pit a team of survivors against increasingly large and frequent waves of infected with the only goal being to last as long as possible across 12 specialized maps. If you've ever played Horde Mode in Gears of War 2, you know the setup.

The pack runs at about 100Mb and as was mentioned before it is free of charge. If you own L4D on Xbox 360, it's already available for you to download and if you own it on PC, it should be up available sometime later today.

Yesterday, (March 5th), Epic games released a pair of free files for Unreal Tournament 3. The first file is an enormous patch that updates UT3 to version 2.0 and includes enhanced AI, network performance, UI and graphical options. The second file is the Titan expansion pack, which adds two new gametypes, (greed and betrayal), sixteen new maps, two new deployables, three new vehicles, two new characters and a new mutator called "titan" that can allow players to grow to gigantic proportions a wreak havok. Also included with the patch is steam support for 57 new achievements.

The patch and expansion were released for the PC version of Unreal Tournament 3 and are set to be released on the Playstation 3 on an unspecified future date.

Is PC gaming dead? No. Is PC gaming dying? I don't know, but the lineup of quality PC titles set for 2009 makes for a good argument that PC gaming is still alive and will continue to thrive. Here are just a few of the biggest PC titles of '09. (note: Diablo 3 and Dragon Age: Origin are rumored to be recieving console ports)




PC Exclusives
-StarCraft 2
-Dawn of War II
-Diablo 3
-Battlefield Heroes
-Dragon Age: Origin
-Star Wars: The Old Republic
-The Sims 3
-Empire: Total War
-Demigod


Multiplatform games coming to PC
-Bionic Commando
-Wolfenstein
-Ghostbusters
-Rage
-Prototype
-Alpha Protocol
-Alan Wake

It's going to be a good year for PC Gaming.

The fine folks over at CDProjekt who made The Witcher, one of my favorite games of last year, are rolling out their "old school" games website: Good Old Games and if you sign up before September 8, you can get in on an early access beta. Not only are fantastic, classic games available for a mere $5.99 - $9.99, ("less than the cost of a lunch at some lousy diner" as the website reminds us), but the games will all be DRM-free and optimized to run on Windows XP and Windows Vista. If any of you are like me and have run into countless hassles attempting to play classic games on your modern PC, (thank the Maker for ScummVM), you'll appreciate that last point.

Did I mention that the games will include various extras like soundtracks, guides, instruction manuals, artwork, add-ons and bonus packs to make that six to ten dollar price point even more appealing? I didn't? Silly me. Get your arse on over to their website and check it out for yourself, whether you miss the good old days and want to relive them, or you flat out missed the good old days and want to live them for the first time.

Google has just released Google Chrome. Previously Google has already released several other products and services to compete with and undercut Microsoft, (Google Docs, Gmail, Google Talk). Google has also created a mobile development platform called Android.

Who wants to take bets that Google announces a complete PC operating system within the next five years?

I stumbled upon a game online today called Fish Tycoon. The price for a full, legitimate copy of the game is $20. Not only do I have trouble understanding why anyone would pay $20 for this game, I have even more trouble existing in a universe where anyone would pay $20 for Fish Tycoon, yet people take up arms over paying only $15 for Braid or Castle Crashers.



Anyway, when I hear the name "Fish Tycoon," I think of something more along the lines of this...

Today at GamesFest 2008: Seattle, Microsoft announced that the Multiplayer-related features of Games for Windows Live will now be totally free rather than having the tiered price structured with a Silver membership being free and a Gold membership being $49.99. Such features that will now be available for free include voice chat, friend lists, cross platform play, achievements and gamerscores. Microsoft's "About Games for Windows - Live" page has been updated today to reflect this announcement.

Other announcements from Microsoft include the first official word on Direct X 11 and the features it will contain as well as a new marketplace for Games For Windows - Live.

I have three new screenshots for Bethesda's upcoming Fallout 3 for you to enjoy.

I could go on to spend several paragraphs comparing Fallout 3 to various other games or movies such as Oblivion, Stalker or Mad Max. I could wax poetic on the astounding craftsmanship or sheer amount of detail in the environments. Instead, just take a look for yourself. You may want to grab a paper towel first though, you've been warned.

*Take note especially of the amount of detail in the bar scene.

(click for larger view)

















Fallout 3 is scheduled for an October 2008 release on PC, Xbox 360 and Playstation 3.

I, like many gamers, am a fan of Penny-Arcade. Not a huge fan or even a big fan, but I'll admit that I check for new strips a minimum of once a week. One thing I have to give them absolute credit for is rabid devotion to, and love for, videogames. It only makes sense, then, that two guys who so love and understand videogames would pour their sweat, blood and all manner of other bodily fluids into making the best game imaginable. "Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness, Episode One," is the result of their toil and I figured I should at least give the demo a shot.

Unfortunately, my experience has been a bit of a mixed bag; upon installation I tried to run the demo at the default settings and beyond the usual torrent of developer and game logos I was treated to a black screen and no hard-drive activity. Being a long-time PC gamer I've become accustomed to this sort of occurrence and often as not, simply rebooting the system after an installation will help motivate an application or game to work properly. After alt-tabbing out of the blank screen and restarting my system I dropped the graphic settings to a mere 800x600 resolution and started the game up again and sure enough, I slid uninterrupted through the opening sequence into the character creation menu where I was pleased to find that whatever character you create, it looks like Mike Krahulik, (the artist of the two-man Penny Arcade Team), drew it straight onto the screen. In fact, the whole game looks like it came straight from the panels of the comic strip. Krahulik's signature look has been masterfully transferred to the third dimension and what the game lacks in graphical capabilities is made up for with style. This approach is similar to what has been done with the episodic Sam & Max, Team Fortress 2 and the upcoming Battlefield: Heroes, (among others), and one of the results of such a design formula is that the games don't look dated, yet run on a wide variety of systems including PCs long overdue for an upgrade. You might understand why I was shocked when I ran into more performance issues.

The demo ran like it was morbidly obese and just finished lunch at Dairy Queen. I'm talking anywhere from three to ten frames per second. The laptop I'm playing on is by no stretch of the imagination a machine designed for gaming, but I can pull solid framerates on Battlefield 2, Half-Life 2 and Need for Speed: Most Wanted at higher resolutions so I was not expecting this low-tech episodic demo to be a slap in my computer's nonexistent face along the lines of Crysis. For a game such as this to run this poorly at 800 by 600 pixels is absolutely inexcusable, especially when my system meets the recommended, (not minimum), system requirements. I would love to speak right now about the gameplay and the writing and one would hope the great sense of humour but the game just doesn't have quite the same flow when the mouse cursor, (the primary method of controlling the game), is either moving like molasses or jumping across the screen.


Stylistically the game is fantastic, a shame it wouldn't run properly
click image for screenshot






As I said previously, I can't give my impressions on the game when running under ideal conditions. As a guess I'd say that if you are a fan of Penny Arcade, On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness is something you'll want to check out. I would only warn you that if you plan on playing the PC version and you have even the slightest doubt as to whether you can run the game smoothly, you would do well to try the demo before you drop twenty big ones on the full version. Until game companies start listing realistic minimum and recommended system requirements, (which I realize isn't entirely easy with the variety of possible configurations out there), that's the best way to find out if a PC game is right for your rig.

I just moved to Canada and my desktop and Xbox 360 won't be reaching me for another month or so. For the past week my Nintendo DS has been my savior but I have a need for some competitive multiplayer gameplay that the DS just can't give me. As a result, I've been looking for games that will work on my not-so-gaming-friendly laptop and I've found a few, some of which may surprise you. After installing and testing, (and some uninstalling too... darn 60Gb hard drive), many of my mighty collection of PC games, I settled on a lineup that I consider a solid and well-rounded collection for anyone in my position with a relatively cheap laptop with limited hard drive space.

First of all, so you know what I'm working with here are the gaming-relevant specifications for my laptop. It is a year and a half old and cost $640 at purchase:

processor: 1.60 GHz Turion 64 X2 TL-50
memory: 2Gb G.Skill PC2 4200 laptop ram
graphics: Integrated ATI Radeon Xpress 1150, 256 Mb shared memory (steals from system memory)
OS: Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition

The Games

StarCraft: The long-awaited sequel may be just around the corner, but after ten years this game is still as great as it was when it came out and you can still find people playing it online. It's real time strategy that is as deep or shallow as you want it to be and so ridiculously well balanced that the only time I ever cursed a race for being cheap was when I found myself brought to my knees by a massive, well planned zergle rush, (though it was really my fault for not being prepared).

The Orange Box, Counter Strike Source & Day of Defeat Source: I don't know what it is with the Source engine, but my laptop has absolutely no trouble at all throwing down consistently solid framerates with the graphical settings at mid-high with the resolution at my laptop's max, (1280x800). The engine may be three and a half years old but it still looks fantastic and the gameplay in these games is a solid as you can get. Half-Life 2 and Eps 1 & 2 are some of the best single player experiences you can get on a PC, Portal is a great brain-bending diversion for a few hours and DoD:Source, CS:Source and TF2 take online multiplayer and compress, polish and refine it until you get PC gaming diamonds. Oh yeah, you also get Peggle with Orange Box, which has about the highest addictiveness:simplicity ratio ever.

The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind: My favorite open world game of all time and a shining example of what a Western RPG can be. From the moment I stepped off the boat in Seyda Neen and saw the beautiful, open world for me to explore I knew I was playing a game I had never quite experienced before. One of my personal favorite aspects of the game is the extraordinarily varied cultures. Each town has it's own distinct architecture and culture and you never get the impression of cookie cutter game design, quite a feat with a game of Morrowind's size. It doesn't look nearly as good as Oblivion, and you'll notice some unfortunate load times between areas, but those are small complaints over what is an otherwise amazing achievement in game design. The game looked and ran fantastic on my laptop even before I upgraded to 2 Gb of ram and with two expansion packs, it takes a long, long time for this game to get old.

Sam & Max: Season One: If you like adventure games, get this. If you yearn for the good old days of classic Lucasarts Adventures, or even their text-based forebears, get this. Heck, if you have even the slightest sense of humor, get this. The new, episodic Sam & Max is absolutely hi-larious and expertly written. The only downsides are that the episodic nature keeps the season from quite getting the true feel of a grand adventure, and it's also a bit on the easy side, but that doesn't keep it from being terribly entertaining. When you finish it and crave for more Sam & Max you can move on to season two!

Trackmania Nations Forever: A bare, stripped down arcade racer with great graphics, hundreds of courses and the most amazing ranking system I've ever seen, this game easily justifies a full $40 price tag. The catch... it's absolutely free! This one's a no-brainer so do yourself a favor and download it now.

Halo: This one might be a bit controversial, especially among PC gamers, but the original Halo was one of the best games ever made when it came out on the Xbox. Once it was ported to PC it was even better. Not only was the single player campaign a blast with spectacularly designed levels, but the multiplayer was simple, fast paced, and well balanced. I spent many nights playing Halo PC on my computer over the dorm network with the other guys on my floor. There aren't quite as many people playing online as there were about four years ago, but if you can get a game going you'll realize that the gameplay is still as solid as ever. The only downside is the lack of co-op in the single player campaign.

Civilization IV: This is one of the finest strategy experiences ever crafted. An empire-building turn-based strategy game where you start in the bronze age and work your way through history till the twenty-first century. Civ4 takes the previous Civ games and Alpha-Centauris and works them into something more than the sum of their parts. If you aren't a fan of turn-based games this may not be for you, otherwise you owe yourself to play this game. To call it 4X just doesn't do it justice.

Feel free to bash or praise my choices and let me know, what games do you play on your not-gaming-friendly laptop or PC?

**On the other hand, if you are looking to take your laptop gaming experience to the next level, check out our site's reviews of the HP HDX9050 and the Asus G2S, and keep your eye out for other laptop reviews coming soon**