Firaxis have revealed a new video for Civilization V‘s upcoming Brave New World expansion that discusses the new social policy trees of order, autocracy and freedom. Each one has its own unique wonder, and can apparently lead to tanks flattening people. Always good to know!

If you’d like to know more about Brave New World, why not check out our massive recent preview?

As the title of this article so laboriously explains, EA and DICE have released three more Battlefield 4 screenshots from the single-player campaign of the upcoming game (which hits our shores around the end of October). Only one of them is actually hi-res as EA have only been releasing them through Facebook and Twitter, but you’re welcome to enlarge ‘em anyway.

EA are promising we’ll learn more about the multiplayer side of things at E3, so stay tuned.

Source: MP1ST

Who wanta some Wang? I was hoping, just maybe, that iconic line would make it into the just-announced reboot of Shadow Warrior.

It did not. Instead, we were treated to an artsy video with butterflies and classical music that had no relation whatsoever to the original. What a waste.

Last fortnight, I looked at the class action lawsuit over Aliens: Colonial Marines.  Before release, such a big deal was made out of “staying true to the Aliens universe”. Yeah, well. We all know how that turned out.

Clearly, staying true to the spirit of an IP is hard… really hard. Some developers do manage, such as Firaxis’ excellent remake of XCOM. But most will fail miserably, like Aliens: Colonial Marines. It’s time then, to look at what actually ensures these remakes and IP games are actually true to the franchise.

An interested licensor with commercial trademarks is the strongest protection

Trademarks are the strongest level of protection, providing the best way to ensure something stays true to the source.

Games Workshop is notorious for its trademarks, owning everything about Warhammer and every way to mangle “space marines” in the Queen’s English (for the original DOS-version of Space Hulk, they even had Jervis Johnson do the voiceovers).

These trademarks give Games Workshop a lot of control over where and how each trademark is used. While it doesn’t quite explain why Dawn of War 2 ended up as Necromunda in Space, for the most part Games Workshop is both rabid and successful at ensuring its trademarks are used to represent its current revision of the Warhammer universes (and I do mean revision).

When an interested company like Games Workshop does grant permission, their will is enforced by extra bureaucracy during the game’s development. Typically, they will have say in the various development milestones. If a game does not stay true to the source material, the licensor (i.e. Games Workshop) has the power to put it on hold until it does, lest the permissions be revoked.

Gun names are iffy

Earlier this month, EA decided it would no longer seek permission for using the names of guns. Up to this point, publishers have almost universally sought permission from manufacturers to use the real names of guns.

However, licensing of guns is uncertain. This was shown when Colt sued Bushmaster (a rival manufacturer) over the use of the “M4” name. Despite Colt owning the M4 name, and being the actual inventor of the gun, Bushmaster was allowed to keep using the name. It’s for this reason that EA would be going forward with its decision. Gun names just aren’t as protected as assumed ever since Goldeneye 64 renamed the Walther PPK to the PP7.

The first issue is that there is a difference between the gun’s trademark and the military’s designation. For example, the Barrett M82 is the rifle’s trademarked commercial name. M107 is the military designation and is not trademarked. Similarly, even though Colt owns the M4 trademark, the military designation is very close—M4A1.

The second issue is that such widespread use of the M4 has led to the M4A1 (the not trademark) being shortened into the slang term M4 (the trademark) to describe a carbine. When this happens, a trademark is in danger of becoming generic and losing its protection, as happened with M4.

I can’t say for certain whether EA will get away with it, but gun manufacturers won’t be happy. In some cases, licensing fees for guns could approach many thousands of dollars, even as much as five to ten percent of a game’s retail sales.

There’s also the issue that these licensing agreements have in the past given gun manufacturers some creative control over games. Under Barrett’s licensing agreements, for example, you can’t put the M82 in the hands of the non-American bad guys. But with EA leading the way, now we might see all manner of modern-day commies wielding high-powered sniper rifles.

So what happened with Colonial Marines?

So erm… if IP owners can have such control over the direction of a game, what did happen with Colonial Marines? As we’ve heard before, no one bothered to check up on how it was going. Gearbox was too busy with Borderlands, while Sega seemed out of the loop entirely.

This shows an important flipside to licensing. Usually, licensing is maligned, for completely opposite reasons. Movie licensed games are often bad because of the tight deadlines imposed on the game, or the license takes too much money away from the game’s development.

In the case of Aliens: Colonial Marines, however, the problems came from no oversight at all being applied by the owner of the IP. I was unable to find out who this is, but they had a great chance to ensure the game was up to scratch, by writing milestone agreements and checkups into the licensing agreement.

They didn’t, however, and what we got was the final result of their neglect—treating the Aliens IP as an asset to be flogged off rather than ensuring the proper creative development. They, along with Gearbox, and Sega, are to blame for what happened. In the balance of everything, all franchises should be so lucky to have the Emperor’s lawyers dictating the correct way to pronounce speesh marines.

Techland and Ubisoft have released Call of Juarez: Gunslinger into the wild west internet, and have also released the accompanying trailer. It’s a refreshingly honest trailer in a world of marketing spin, and point out that you can buy the game for quite a reasonable price ($17.95 on Steam) and then spend a good amount of time shooting in the faces of your enemies. Alright! Let’s do this, then.

EA’s Chief Technology Officer Rajat Teneja has used a post on LinkedIn to put forward what may prove to be a very unpopular opinion — that the next-gen consoles are already wiping the floor with PC gaming.

“These architectures are a generation ahead of the highest end PC on the market,” he claimed. “Our benchmarks on just the video and audio performance are 8-10 times superior to the current gen.”

Teneja went on to point out that these next-gen consoles allow them to focus the system resources in a more efficient manner.

“The compute capabilities of these platforms and the data transfer speeds we can now bank on, essentially removes any notion of rationing of systems resources for our game engines.”

While it’ll be several years before we see what the next-gen consoles are really capable of, by that time PC gaming will have advanced even further. At that point, perhaps, we can start making relevant comparisons.

Source: GamesIndustry (Thanks James)

Welcome to the Friday Tech Roundup! Contained herein is a weekly dose of some of the best tech news from across the Internet, rounded up for your edification and entertainment. Read on for all the details of the wholesale price of the GTX 780, 3D printed food, and bomb-loving bees.

GeForce GTX 780 early US pricing revealed

TechPowerUp is reporting that US distributor SYNNEX is offering Nvidia’s upcoming GeForce GTX 780 to retailers for US$644.44. After margins are applied by retailers, TPU estimate that the card could be priced anywhere between US$650-700. Once we apply the Australia Tax, it would be safe to guess that the price could end up being more like $750-800 for Australian consumers. The screenshot of the distributor’s site included in the report confirms specifications: CUDA core count of 2,304, 3GB of memory, GPU Boost 2.0 technology, and a very similar design to the GTX TITAN.

Could 3D printed food end world hunger at the cost of world taste?

Last week we saw burgers grown in labs, this week we have 3D printed food. Mechanical engineer Anjan Contractor’s vision is to see every kitchen equipped with a 3D printer, with which the people of the Earth construct for themselves fully customised and nutritionally-appropriate meals, layer by layer. Contractor’s system is based on the RepRap 3D printer, and uses a series of cartridges filled with powders and oils to build meals that are perfectly appropriate to the consumer’s dietary requirements, whether they be elderly, pregnant, sick, or incredibly fit. The powders act as the basic building blocks of food, proteins, carbohydrates, fats, Omega 3, and Calcium, building blocks that we traditionally consume by finding palatable meats and vegetables that contain them.

As the system delivers these building blocks in powder form, palatability is less of a concern, meaning that they could be harvested from algae, grass, seeds, and even insects. The powders have a shelf life of 30 years, which means that Contractor’s system would eliminate food waste if universally used, thanks to the fact that each cartridge would be returned to the store only once it was completely spent. NASA has provided Contractor’s company with a $125,000 grant to build a prototype.

Green screens required to bring Arrested Development cast together for season 4

Netflix announced in January that it would be bringing season 4 of Arrested Development to the service in May 2013. Given the years since season 3, the extremely busy cast has moved on to other projects, and is subsequently very difficult to assemble. To remedy this for the production of Season 4, creator Mitch Hurwitz said in an interview with Rolling Stone that episodes were shot out of order, and that “half of the stuff is on green screen.” For example, a particular conversation between Michael (Jason Bateman) and Lindsay (Portia de Rossi) was filmed separately over the course of four months, with each actor filming their portion of the conversation in front of a green screen. The entire ensemble was able to come together for a single two-day shoot, however. Here’s hoping that the production difficulties necessary to bring together one of television’s most hilariously dysfunctional families only adds to their performance.

The ‘paperless scanner’ makes scanning feel like the future

The combination of two cameras, a small projector, and some clever software is all it has taken for Japan’s technology giant, Fujitsu, to create a digital scanner which allows the user to take snapshots of physical media with little more than the touch of a finger. The user is able to draw a bounding box with their finger around the desired image or block of text on the page, and the device captures it and makes it available for digital manipulation. While this doesn’t differ wildly from the capabilities of a more traditional scanner, the interface is undeniably future-y, with its fanciful projected scanning line, and digital reproduced content flying off the page.

How honeybees learned to stop worrying and love the bomb

Professor Nikola Kezic of Zagreb University in Croatia is working on a method for training the common honeybee to seek out unexploded land mines. Despite the fact that the Balkan wars are long since finished, it is estimated that as many as 90,000 land mines are still randomly dotted around 1200sqkm of Croatian territory. Since the beginning of the Balkan war in 1991, more than 2500 people have died from land mine explosions. Professor Kezic’s theory for the training of the bees is founded in their incredibly fine sense of smell. Honeybees are capable of sniffing out and identifying a wide range of odorants.

In order to harness this, Professor Kezic’s team began introducing TNT particles to captive bees’ food, in the hope that the bees would begin to associate the smell of explosives with their next meal. This was tested by setting up multiple feeding points, some of which were laced with TNT, and letting the bees choose where to feed. More often than not, the bees chose the sugar water seasoned with explosives. The next hurdle for the team to face, according to Kezic, is that while the training of a single bee is relatively simple, “training their colony of thousands becomes a problem.”

When Infinity Ward revealed their new engine for Call of Duty: Ghosts, it turns out that they’re actually running on an overhauled version of the previous Modern Warfare 3 engine.

Speaking with OPM, Infinity Ward’s animation lead Zach Volker clarified that “When we’re talking about a new engine we’re talking about upgrading significant systems within in that engine. We’re not talking about throwing it all away and saying we’re starting from the ground up”.

“It’s impossible to develop a new engine from the ground up in a two year cycle,” he continued. “You would need an army of 200 engineers. So what we do is we say ‘okay what are the things that are significant and that we would say that are encompassing of the engine or its visual quality? Are those being upgraded in a significant way? Alright then, I think that warrants (saying) that we’ve got a new engine on our hands.”

Check out a side-by-side comparison between the two engines below.

Source: OPM, VG247

Dying Light is a new survival horror game on the way from Techland (the developers behind Dead Island) and Warner Bros. Just announced today, the key concept of the title is a “portentous day-night cycle set in a vast open world”.

During the day, players will be required to run around scavenging and gathering supplies, as well as exploring and crafting weapons. At night, however, the population of “infected” (which look a lot like zombies, but we’ll see) leave their hidey-holes and come out to fight, joined by “vicious predators”.

Techland are touting it as a breakthrough only possible thanks to next-gen technology in consoles, but it’s also announced for the PC so I guess that next-gen technology was there all along? Who knew! We’re also promised an innovative free-running system, which sounds delightful. I’ll be keeping an eye on this one — in the meantime, you can cast an eye over the screens below.

Ah, that Brazilian Ratings Board — that leaker of all things confidential and upcoming. A listing has now been spotted for something called FarCry HD, leading many to believe that Ubisoft may be working on a HD re-release of the game.

The listing is only for Xbox 360 and PS3 consoles, so it’s unknown whether or not such a remake would be coming to PC. Fingers crossed, however — Far Cry‘s recent successes with number three and Blood Dragon could be inspiring Ubisoft to push the franchise even harder.

Source: VG247

Although war is generally agreed to be “pretty awful” by everybody who has ever been through it, many video games gloss over that fact –especially when there are bad guys that need killing. Well, Company of Heroes 2 is keen to remind you of the horror of war, even if you’re somewhat detached from it when you’re ordering dozens of tiny little soldier-men to their deaths on a whim.

Enjoy! Or, perhaps, don’t. Company of Heroes 2 lands in Australia on June 26.

No real big surprise here for anybody who has been gaming on a Windows PC for more than a few years, but it’s interesting to hear it said aloud: Microsoft’s Matt Booty has confirmed that the company’s strategy is now to focus on Xbox One games and games that connect across Microsoft’s various multiple platforms.

Microsoft announced at the Xbox One reveal event (get the details here) that the console would have 15 exclusive titles in its first year. However, PC gamers are unlikely to see any of those games. Indeed, Booty described Microsoft’s Windows 8 gaming strategy by saying “we have got everything from very, very casual games, like our very much improved and reimagined Solitaire, all the way to graphically complicated games like The Harvest.”

“When I think about more connected experiences across those platforms, it’s things that show up within that family of devices where we’ve got Xbox Live, like Windows Phone and Windows 8,” said Booty.”Not what you might consider a more traditional desktop PC game.”

It’s important to note that this refers only to Microsoft’s first-party strategy — that is, they’re happy to let other developers continue making games for Windows, but they’ll continue to focus their own efforts on consoles and smartphones.

Source: Shacknews

Even though PlanetSide 2 is an unstoppable free-to-play colossus, for some reason Sony are still charging a subscription fee on the now ten-year-old original game.

All that is set to change however, with Sony’s John Smedley revealing via Twitter that the original game will be moving F2P.

“We did a mass grant of anyone who has ever played PS1 or PS2 with free time in PS1. We weren’t ready to announce it yet because the database grant is still ongoing and won’t be done till tomorrow morning,” he said.

“So please if you didn’t get flagged chill. We are trying to do something cool for everyone, and we were going to tell people when it’s done. But people saw it and others broadcast the info.”

“This also gives us more time to make it F2P. So enjoy starting tomorrow late morning.”

Source: 1,2,3,4,5,6

If you’ve not heard of War for the Overworld then you at least must have heard of Dungeon Keeper — its inspiration, mentor and father figure. Well, War for the Overworld has wrapped up a successful Kickstarter, and is now proudly announcing its entry into the beta testing phase.

Backers of the project on Kickstarter should look out for an email explaining the details soon (if you haven’t already got it). If you didn’t back the project, you can pay $22 to jump in on Steam instantly.

Source: Rock Paper Shotgun

Battlefield 4 has been dated for a European release of November 1st. While this isn’t the official Australian date (we’ll update this story if we hear more), Australian dates are generally identical to those of Europe and the UK.

If you live in the USA of course, you get the game first — it launches there on October 29 so that our American cousins can have three extra days of play time.

There’s no word yet on when any early access or beta periods will be, but you can be sure we’ll let you know (and have our servers up and ready to go).

Source: PC Gamer

EA and Maxis are relentlessly patching SimCity, and they appear to be so excited that each update is considered a major patch — after all 3.0 was only released two weeks ago. I’d probably disagree with their numbering system completely as none of these have really been major patches at all, but hey! It’s your game Maxis, you do your thing.

The patch will include a new region, as well as something called a “Launch Park” to reward “dedicated fans who were early adopters”. There are also a bunch of bug fixes and overall tweaks, including improved response times for fire trucks.

There is, of course, still no mention of an offline mode — so if you were looking for that, I’m afraid you’re out of luck. Check out the full notes below.

• New: SimCity Launch Park, an exclusive new park just for our dedicated fans who were early adopters.
• New: Region: Edgewater Bay. Seven city sites in one cluster around a beautiful bay with one great work site.
• New: Your current server will now be shown in the options menu.
• New: More detailed rollover information on buildings telling player’s if their Sims received happiness from a park or from shopping. Previous to this fix, this information was generic.
• Re-Enabled Feature: Global Market prices now dynamically change during gameplay.
• Re-Enabled Feature: Leaderboards will be active on EU West 3, Pacific 1 and Pacific 2 at the release. We will enable them on additional servers throughout the day.
• Re-Enabled Feature: Region filters are now enabled on all SimCity servers. Players will be able to search for open games by Map Name, Sandbox Mode, and Abandoned Cities.
• Rain Clouds: Fixed an issue where some cities would not have rain clouds to replenish their water table. If you had a city with this issue, you will start seeing clouds again within a game day.
• Fire: Improved response time of fire trucks to fires. Improved the time it takes for a fire signal to reach a fire station.
• Mission updates: Tuned Metals HQ and Community College missions. These were appearing too early, making them difficult to complete. They now appear later in a city’s development.
• Solar Farm Great Work: Reduced fire risk at the Solar Farm Great work. Local fire engines were spending too much time at the Solar Farm.
• Messaging: Improved pre-requisite messaging for Trade Port, Casinos, Smelting Factory and Oil Refinery. It should be clearer on how to unlock these buildings.
• Graphics: Fix for flickering low wealth buildings on NVIDIA graphics cards.
• Education: Fix for an issue some cities experienced where commuting students did not return from a neighbor’s city. This was causing a problem where students would disappear from a city in some cases.
• Tuning: Sims will lose a small amount of happiness if they don’t have a place to shop. Cities without places to shop will see complaints and feel the effect of unhappy Sims. This will emphasize the importance of commercial zones.

Source: EA Forums (Thanks, Mike)

Indie developer and games.on.net community member Sean Edwards has written to us to let us know that the multiplayer update for Lunar Flight is now live.

Lunar Flight, which you can find on Steam, now has two multiplayer modes: mission score and deathmatch. Up to 16 players can take part, and there’s a full integrated server browser and multiplayer leaderboard. Check out the trailer below.

Oculus Rift support is coming next, Sean assures us — so stay tuned.

4A Games and Deep Silver have revealed the details of Metro: Last Light‘s upcoming four DLC packs. The first pack, the Faction Pack, will be out in June and will be single-player content that “expands on the Metro: Last Light universe”. The Chronicles Pack will follow, which is also slated to be single-player content.

Then there’s the Tower Pack, which will provide a “unique solo challenge to Metro veterans”, followed by the Developer Pack, which from the sounds of it is mod tools — it will “give creative players some interesting tools with which to explore the world of Metro”.

These four DLC packs are of course included in the season pass. Season pass holders also get the Abzat, a semi-automatic shotgun with an alternate fire mode that shoots six shells at once.

“Artyom’s story may have been concluded in Metro: Last Light, but there are other characters with stories to tell, some familiar locations that fans of the Metro series wanted to revisit, and some new challenges that 4A wanted to explore,” explained 4A creative director Andrew Prokhorov.

“Since completing the game we have been working on these new stories and hope to release them throughout the summer.”

Ranger Mode, the hardest difficulty level in the game, is not included in the DLC season pass.

Yes, the Steam Database kannot tell a lie — Warner Bros. have konfirmed this morning in a press release that a Komplete Edition of Mortal Kombat will be making its way to PC on July 3.

The Steam version will arrive first, followed by a boxed retail release on August 6. It’s not klear whether or not the retail version will require Steam.

High Voltage Software are handling the port, which will inklude support for both the Mortal Kombat Tournament Edition Fight Stick and regular kontrollers. As this is a Komplete edition, it will inkorporate all of the downloadable kontent, as well as fifteen “Klassic Mortal Kombat Skins” and three “Klassic Fatalities”.

The Komplete Edition was released on konsoles in February 2012.

Source: Press Release

I like to laugh because life is a dynamic experience and it can’t rain all the time. Nor can a man or woman or transgender individual laugh constantly either, because you would edge closer and closer to insanity in the eyes of everyone around you, especially if you were, IDK, at the vet putting the family dog to sleep forever. While I favour giggling over glowering, there are times and places whence a lad such as I need court the grim of drawing breath (please forgive me, I’m reading A Song of Ice and Fire right now and I can’t stop talking like a halberd).

Most films, anime, and books I like are really serious and brutal, or really serious and foreign, or really serious and arthouse, and you get the picture: They’re really serious. I went to see the third Hangover movie last night and only laughed when I myself did a squeaky fart and the row of perfumed media professionals behind me chittered excitedly trying to work out if it had been what they knew in their hearts that it was. Subsequently, most games I like are also really serious.

It’s one of the reasons I enjoy shooters so much. There’s a po-faced sincerity to them that I can really grind on even though sometimes it’s so po-faced it is actually funny. That’s kind of the point: Humour in the face of incredible adversity – oft accidental or incidental – is a VIP. It is the only kind of laughter I will allow into the gamecave during kill time. The Duke Nukems have to wait outside, they’re trying too hard. Please bear witness to this personal highlight:

Now whether that is amusing or not is fairly subjective, I suppose, but it is the candid way in which Jensen articulates the way this woman’s beloved daughter has perished that has made me laugh for one, maybe two weeks. I wake up laughing about it. I know right, you don’t want this life. It is so insensitive and inappropriate it’s glorious.

It might well be the exact kind of thing that happens in that exact situation, were a weary detective answering the queries of a forlorn mother in reality. I absolutely would not laugh at that. No way in hell. I wouldn’t even feel the impulse. That’s horrible, I’m not a 100% monster unless you fail to deliver unto me the Seven Kingdoms that are rightfully mine, dear sister, and wake the drago-

But I’ve realised that these instances in my serious gaming time have shone somewhat of a light over just how ridiculous it can be to be alive. Free from the actuality of bad things going down, there is mirth there that would never be uncovered otherwise. The tragic comedies of Shakesy wished they had have been video games, for their hopeless mission is one now accomplished – tripped over, even – by video games every hour on the hour.

Were it that some might accuse me of cresting a fine lens too close to the sun that lights to entertain and little else, I would opine they have taught me something about myself and the art of coping.

The publisher of Serious Sam 3 and the developer of Hard Reset are teaming up to reboot one of gaming’s most notorious FPS classics: Shadow Warrior, the 1997 game starring “Lo Wang” and being, well… pretty racially insensitive. This one, however, will avoid all of that guff, ditch the multiplayer, and focus on what’s really important: first-person katana combat. Take a look at the (gameplay-free) trailer below.

There’s an interesting interview with Flying Wild Hog about the game over at the PA Report, which you may enjoy.

Activision and Infinity Ward have used the Xbox One reveal event to pull the cover off the new Call of Duty game, Ghosts. It’ll launch as an Xbox One exclusive, which means a delayed PC launch — and this is unfortunate, because one of the biggest selling points of this one is a completely overhauled graphics engine.

One of the biggest features of the new engine is the use of Fast Subdivision, a technique used by places like Pixar to quickly increase the amount of vertices on a model surface in real time. This is supposedly scalable to older console architecture as well, meaning that even the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions of the game should look pretty reasonable.

Ghosts is set in a world damaged by meteor strikes, with the United States (and the world) as we know it apparently considerably changed. Syriana and Traffic writer Stephen Gaghan is behind the script, which should hopefully bode well for a more self-aware and less hoo-rah US-centric storyline. Also, there’s a dog!

There’s no word unfortunately on a PC version just yet, but it is early days — and the PC hasn’t been Call of Duty‘s target market in a long, long time. But nevertheless, feast your eyes upon the trailer below and the four screens.

Ubisoft have released a trailer for Splinter Cell: Blacklist‘s co-operative mode, and it shows an impressive evolution beyond the co-op last seen in Conviction. It also promises fourteen maps, four mission types, and 2-player split-screen action (not for me, but nice to have). Fisher’s partner is Isaac Briggs, a CIA operative who you can see being rescued by Sam in this very early trailer.

The voice shouts orders again. He’s saying to wait 10 seconds for the smoke, then banzai the flag. We’d been pushing up on the objectives for five minutes now, and getting slaughtered by well placed US troops. I was so shaken by incoming artillery that my teeth felt loose in my jaw. I trust that voice — he’s what we call a ‘team player’ and can hopefully rescue success from the maelstrom of our failure so far in this bloody round.

Moments before, I had cautiously stepped around dense foliage to see if there were any pickings on our enemy’s right-flank. Just as I did, a running US trooper crested a nearby rock formation. We both snapped up, knowing the fight wasn’t entirely fair — I could take a single shot from my Arisaka and then had to manually bolt, whereas even with the worst opposing class he’d have an M1 Garand that could pump out multiple shots in quick succession. Just as I started to aim, one of my teammates landed an indirect kill with the new knee-mortar, a ground-plantable grenade launcher, and the hostile trooper’s body was flung into the air on a great gout of blood while his neatly separated limbs framed the scene behind him.

We hear the far-away rumble of artillery fire and then smoke canisters start to smack the tops of the enemy fortifications. As the clouds spread, the voice yells for everyone to banzai. I hold F and then sprint into the cloud along with most of my team, my character unleashing ‘Tenno Heika Banzai’ (‘Long live the Emperor’) from deep within. Just ahead of me is one of our officers, screaming his own madness and brandishing a katana. I think the bullet takes him in the gut because his character suddenly stumbles and then, pantomiming a hundred World War 2 movies, he slowly drops to his knees with his arms lifted at the elbow. Then he falls forward, dead.

It’s nearly impossible to see anything in the smoke cloud, but I keep running until the brown shapes ahead of me resolve into enemy combatants and I end my banzai charge with a sweep of my rifle’s bayonet and insta-kill the poor sap in front of me. The man to his right has hit ‘X’ to hug the wall in front, an emplacement position that gives him an aiming bonus when he pops out — but one that costs him his peripheral view. My bullet is guided by the Emperor and his head pops open to reveal a red mist. I feel a moment of joy followed by a moment of intense heat as the US flamethrower-wielding soldier hoses down the front line. My countrymen and I perish in a beautifully Hollywood-esque gout of liquid fire.

I honestly don’t know why we won that round, or how any round is even scored. Tripwire Interactive’s latest release Red Orchestra 2: Rising Storm demands a lot more of the player than most multiplayer FPS titles, and that includes learning the scoring system — although as expected in a game like this, playing the objective is a good start. If you played RO2‘s first release, 2012′s Heroes of Stalingrad, then you’re fairly well prepared for what Rising Storm brings — but it’s the panache with which it does so that makes this a far superior release.

I’ve fought long and hard in this Pacific theatre of war, and died in many locations. Without exception, this new arena offers far better fighting locations than the last outing. They’re still laid out in shockingly straight lines, but whether it’s the abundance of naturally placed cover or just that it doesn’t look like what gamers are used to from WW2 shooters, the environments here are the best that Tripwire have ever put together. I’ve seen close quarter city-fighting, repelled GI’s at Iwo Jima, and even took part in a night-raid at Guadalcanal and in each ‘map’ it’s the natural layout that makes it feel less like a game (although a quick look at the rectangular map can change that perception slightly).

There are a handful of things to be aware of. Rising Storm is built on Unreal — and not the good Unreal, either. Player and environmental textures can be a bit bland, and despite Tripwire’s excellent handling of particle effects and a keen eye for colour, this doesn’t look like up to the standards of a modern shooter. The good news, of course, is that as a result just about any rig will run it. Movement can be a little stilted with a few of the extra keyboard commands not something that most players will be used to, and even with remapping I’d often find myself accidentally sticking to cover at the worst possible times, or trying to find the right spot to jump over what should be a shallow wall. These movement limitations are minimal and given the slow pace of the game not something that will pop up regularly.

Also, while I’m a big fan of the unlock system, I’m concerned that I’ve already been unable to access any of my new toys, and that my stats aren’t recording properly… and this is exactly what happened with the last title. There are multiple weapon unlocks, as well as add-ons you can mix with existing weapons and what I’ve heard of them sounds great — if only I could have used them during this beta period. Stats aren’t the be-all and end-all of gaming, but if you’re going to put them into your game you should make sure they work and given this is essentially DLC, it’s very concerning that this is still a problem.

The coolest change to the RO2 formula is what the developers are calling ‘asymmetric warfare’. The US clearly have the edge in the weaponry department, so to offset this, the warriors of the Rising Sun have been given a lot of fun toys that really balance things out. Firstly, banzai-charges actually affect suppression; reducing it for the attacking infantry and increasing it on the US troops. Then there’s the already mentioned knee-mortars and katanas, the ability to set your grenades as booby-traps and — my personal favourite — by pulling the pin on a grenade and running into opposing soldiers your glorious suicide does not cost team points but it will cost enemy troops god knows what to their peace of mind.

And when you consider that any purchase of Rising Storm also gives access to all of the content from Heroes of Stalingrad and that it will all come with Steam Workshop integration means… wait, sorry, you didn’t know that bit? That’s right, buying Rising Storm gives you every map from the original release and you’ll be able to play on servers with user-made maps. It looks like Tripwire have put a lot of thought into this latest expansion and how to avoid the empty server wasteland that followed just a few months after HoS.

You can banzai over to Steam, where if you already own Heroes of Stalingrad you’ll receive a discount on Rising Storm — or if you don’t, it’s just $20 for one hell of a good shooter.

To celebrate Diablo III‘s one-year birthday, Blizzard have released an infographic detailing the staggering numbers behind the game.

The image, which you can see below, includes figures such as a total play time of over 2.8 billion hours, spread between 14.5 million unique players, who have collected a total of 648 trillion gold to date.

Take a look below for the full image (click to enlarge).

Source: Battle.net

EA have revealed that Battlefield 4‘s first piece of DLC will be a series of “sprawling” multiplayer maps by the name of ‘China Rising’. The DLC will allow you to “fight for dominance across the vast and majestic Chinese mainland in four massive maps, using all-new vehicles and high-tech military equipment.”

IF you pre-order the game through the official website or through Origin you’ll get China Rising for free, but there’s no word on how much it’ll be otherwise.

This seems like a good time point out our editorial from James explaining why the current practice of DLC needs to stop.

Source: PC Gamer