Much has been said of No Man's Sky's missing giant sand snake, first glimpsed in an early trailer for the game. Much of what's been said is "Hey, where the hell is the giant sandsnake?" because no one, as of yet, has actually seen it in the finished game. Here's a gif of it from the original reveal trailer, to refresh your memory:

While that particular giant sand-dwelling snake is M.I.A. (along with the sand planets themselves, so far), I've managed to find something similar in Early Access survival game Osiris: New Dawn. Or rather, it found me, as you can see below.

James wrote about Osiris: New Dawn recently, notable in that it's being made by a developer who hates survival games. I've spent a couple hours, mostly uneventful ones, wandering around the game's dusty world, pounding on rocks with a hammer to extract minerals, shooting any bug monsters that got too close, and trying to find enough plutonium to build a forge so I could start crafting a decent planetary home for myself.

That's when I wandered into a crater and got eaten by what space scientists would call "a giant goddamn sandworm." As you can see in the gif, I was completely unprepared for this. It's a rare event in a game where I'm carrying a gun around that I don't immediately empty a clip into anything that twitches, because I am a huge 'fraidy cat. But here, I was so completely dumbfounded I simply had no reaction. I didn't even try to run, I just stood there like an idiotic vacuum-sealed collection of calories, the kind giant goddamn sandworms manage sustain their existence with.

I've since been eaten by that worm, and others, several times. I did shoot at one, right in its giant goddamn mouth. It had no effect. I tried to run from the others: that didn't help either. I found a dead one, as you can see above, but when I walked over to build my inflatable habitat in its skeletal mouth (I thought it would be a cool place to live) another sandworm, still in the prime of its life, promptly ate me.

I'll have some more thoughts on Osiris sometime next week, though I'm sure it's clear that my mission is to kill one of those giant goddamn worms somehow.

It s one thing to pull a still from a movie that accurately represents how the final cut will look and feel, but videogames are another matter. Trailers and screenshots are put out well before the game is complete, which means they re inevitably going to need visual band-aids here and there, and communicating everything the game is trying to achieve systems, story, style in a single frame is difficult. Enter the bullshot.To make their games look as good as can be, some publishers pose characters and snap screenshots with a free camera, sometimes even downsampling from high resolutions to reduce aliasing, or using Photoshop to make them pop just a little more. While these marketing screens convey key information and look nice, they can be misleading . We ve gathered a few of the worst offenders in recent years in part because they re funny, but also because it s a practice that should be called out. We d much rather see what a game actually looks like to play, especially when these screenshots appear on a store page. Leave it to us to take the unrealistic screenshots after release, because we love doing it.

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Even our favorite games aren t excused from bullshot shame. The Witcher 3 is a damn good-looking game, but to get shots resembling this quality we had to take them at 3840x2160 which we doubt many players can do at a playable framerate using a mod to enable a free camera and console commands. Also, who the hell is that horse because it sure isn t Roach. Impostor resolution, impostor horse get out of my computer.

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This screen wouldn t be a huge offender if not for the clearly posed gang of pirates. Each has their own stance. I like pointing guy on the far left. What s he trying to do? Buddy, you re at the rear of the pirate pack and all your dudes already know where the assassin you somehow just spotted is. But maybe he s just a stickler for photo balance, a guy who can t help but obey the rule of threes. That s some good AI.

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Racing games tend to be the biggest bullshot culprits. Take Split Second for instance. It s a great looking game most racing games nowadays are but this shot looks like someone just discovered Instagram filters. I love a good filter, but this one turns up the warm colors and vignettes with reckless abandon. Look both ways before you cross the street because it s blurred to hell.

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Gearbox tends to eliminate aliasing by taking the shots at a super high resolution, but to really make their images pop, contrast is turned way up. It makes the comic book stylings much more apparent, especially because detailed textures are used throughout the entire image, no matter how far objects are in the distance. With everything in such clear focus, it makes the image look flat.

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I m not sure what kind of holy light exists just offscreen in every other bullshot, but it s not working well to bring out this central locust s best features. It makes even less sense when you notice that the blinding light is coming from the hole in the ground at the bottom right. Besides the awkward blur and focus muddying half the picture, I can t figure out what s going through that locust s head. Is Marcus holding it up with a light grip on the shoulder? Impressive. Is that shock or rage or is that just how their jaws always are? These are the questions Gears of War 4 needs to answer.

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This one s a toughie. This shot from No Man s Sky isn t touched up, but it uses assets that aren t representative of what the final game produces. In my experience, the creatures look like remixes of a handful of variables and characteristics after 10 or so hours in, and vegetation can t grow that tall without the use of mods. It s not entirely surprising that No Man s Sky is under investigation by the Advertising Standards Authority in the UK, even if players are still enjoying it for what it is.

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The biggest giveaway here (not that you need one) is what I ve dubbed the Holy Mammoth. Before the rise of modern religion, there was the One True Mammoth, from which all bloom lighting emitted. It seems to have blessed the screen with an abundance of golden light, impossibly smooth edges, and perfectly posed figures.

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It s rare to find a racing game screenshot that wasn t taken at some forbidden, transcendent resolution, so I have to hand it to The Crew with this one. That said, this shot is posed beyond reprieve. Four cars, perfectly aligned to frame up nicely and balance out the shot with a lovely airplane cherry up top.

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I won t be too harsh with Crysis since it s still the go-to for good-looking PC games in some respects, but the soldier getting lasered is impossible to ignore. It looks like he s waving hello to the tentacled aliens above, though I suppose his pose is meant to imply he s flying backwards due to the force of the white hot laser blasting a hole in his chest. Either way, Crysis isn t capable of such a believable ragdoll animation, but I suppose a twitching bundle of human appendages doesn t look so good in still life.

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I think future soldiers will be smarter than this. I figured future war would entail guns that can fire from far away and not meeting in the middle of a short corridor for shootouts. Instead, we have two soldiers firing into a stoic mechanical man and another presumably about to kick their head in. My favorite detail? That explosion in the background lost in the shallow focus. While the Black Ops 3 might look this good, it s rarely this nonsensically positioned.

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Here we have another checklist shot trying to show off as many systems and features as possible while still looking pretty. We ve got destructible walls, a shielded player, a shotgun firing, a grenade, some barbed wire in the bottom right, and some pretty detailed textures. Problem is, the final game doesn't look nearly as nice, and while the destruction is fairly granular, it s not to the level of detail expressed in this screen. Look at all those tiny individual perforations. If only.

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I played this scene just over a week ago and it looked great, but not like this. The scene glows an icy blue and the blacks are super deep. Someone turned up the contrast. Also, who s kicking up all that damn dust? It doesn t look natural, like it s being used to balance out the color and weight of the shot.

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There s so much going on in this shot it feels like one of those hidden object pages from Highlights magazine. Let s see, we ve got a three-wheeled buggy thing, a dude with an easily readable expression shooting out the vehicle s side, we can see two bullets in the act of ricocheting off the soldier, a truck in the far right, a building on fire above, some gorgeous snowy mountains in the background, a remote detonator in the player character s hand and it s all in perfect focus. No jagged edges, some nice airbrush effects on the wheels to imply motion. This is an ascendant bullshot. This is art.

I started playing Counter-Strike: Global Offensive when it was in open beta. It was a scary time for a Counter-Strike nerd like me. I had played CS 1.6 (the version before Counter-Strike: Source and Global Offensive) since early 2005. In some ways it felt like the end times. My beloved game that had kept me sane through my years in school was slowly but surely dying.

After a few months of complaining about the details that separated CS:GO from 1.6 (why would they have firebombs in a Counter-Strike game, I cried) a friend of mine suggested that we attend the upcoming Dreamhack Winter event in J nk ping, Sweden. I had never been to a LAN of that size before so I accepted and we put together a team consisting of friends from the 1.6 days, as well as a friend named John that had never played CS before. At all.

If my memory serves me right it was about four months until the event when we started to practice. We had just learned that the bring your own computer tournament was going to serve as a qualifier for a main event that happened to be the first-ever CS:GO Major. After a few nights I must admit that I was ready to give up. John was terrible. A nice guy, but he just couldn t play the game.Then something changed. After a couple of weeks I noticed that John had started to hit his shots, and that he understood the basics of teamplay and positioning. I went to his Steam profile and noticed that he averaged just under ten hours (!) per day.

With a few days left we decided to meet up at a friend s house closer to J nk ping to get some LAN hours under our belt before the tournament. We had so much fun, both in-game and out. It really felt like we were making progress each day.

When we finally got to the venue and set up our computers I started to get nervous. Was this a mistake? I mean we re pretty good, but not that good, right? We signed up for the tournament, went over the strategies in our playbook one last time and then later that same evening it was go time. Our first game was on the map Inferno. We won that game 16-0. Maybe we d make it out of the groups after all?

Fast forward to the next game. We were going to face a British team that had travelled all the way to Sweden for this event. Obviously, they meant business. This time the game was going to be played on Mirage, our strongest map at the time. In the first round we decided to go for a B-split. We took control over mid and then pressured their defenses from two sides. My teammates racked up a few quick kills and we found ourselves in a 5-versus-1 situation. I hid inside the kitchen and managed to remain unseen until the lone counter-terrorist had passed by me.

A second later I had drawn my knife, secured the round and humiliated him at the same time. At that moment I felt like a superstar. I was on top of the world. However, that feeling wouldn t last for long as that was the only round we won in that game. 1-16 was the final score and our dream was crushed. After yet another game we finished second to last in our group and our run in the tournament came to an abrupt end.

That weekend we watched the Major, and when it was time for the grand final you could really feel the hype. The world s best team NiP was going to play the underdogs, Fnatic. A few rounds into the game the crowd started to chant Friberg! Friberg! Friberg! after some great rounds from NiP s Adam friberg Friberg. At that moment I knew that this wasn t the end times. This was the beginning. That s part of the beauty of Counter-Strike: it never truly dies, even if it's come close at times.

Then we got to see the biggest upset in the game s short history up to that point, as Fnatic won the title.

What is CS:GO, really?

You might wonder why I told you that story about our somewhat na ve attempt to qualify for the first Major tournament. For me that s the core of what CS:GO is: it s competition at its purest. You don t have any special abilities. No silly magic, no heat seeking missiles, no nothing. You have a basic arsenal of weapons at your disposal. Apart from that it s just you and your teammates. Your objective is to plant a bomb at one of two bomb sites and make sure the counter-terrorists can t defuse it before it goes off 40 seconds later. If you re on the other side your objective is to prevent the terrorists from doing so.

What truly makes Counter-Strike: Global Offensive unique is the economic system. It s a round based game and in the first round you start with $800 and a basic pistol. That money is just enough for you to get body armor, some grenades or a better pistol. You have to choose wisely. If you win a round you get more money for the next one. At the same time you get bonus cash for consecutive losses. This system adds another layer of strategy to the game. Sometimes you re better off not buying anything at all. Even if that means that you re likely to lose that round it also means you have more money left for future rounds and that ll increase your chances of winning a round and swing the momentum your way.

The simple graphics and clean textures make players easy to spot. It s not like in Battlefield where you can hide in a bush and kill people without getting seen. Because of how accurate the first few bullets are with most weapons, the connection between your hand movements and what happens on the screen is extreme. It s a lot like a hockey player and his stick: easy to learn but takes a lifetime to master.

Aside from your physical dexterity, CS:GO will push your mental capabilities to the test. The number of different strategies you can employ is so great that it s probably close to infinite. I d go so far as to say that CS:GO doesn t have a skill ceiling. It s always possible to get better.

What do you need? 

You need a Steam account and a copy of the game. There are no hidden fees. No DLCs you have to pay for. If you buy the game you gain access to all the content you need to play.

There are however weapon skins that you can buy either from other players through the Steam market or by buying keys to open crates that you get from playing. These skins are entirely optional and you gain no advantage whatsoever by doing so. Apart from looking cool and a potential confidence boost if you re the kind of person that enjoys wearing the fanciest clothes or driving flashy cars.You ll also need time. Like I mentioned earlier, it s easy to learn how to play CS:GO, but it s impossible to fully master. If your goal is to improve you ll have to put in a lot of work. Read guides, watch professionals play and above all else: practice a lot! If you on the other hand want to have fun and play a game every now and then all you need is a little over an hour to spare, and that s really stretching it. Most games end way before the 60 minute mark.

It s also helpful if you re friendly towards teammates and opponents: sadly, there are a lot of people who aren t. Unless you ve played competitive games online in the past you re likely to encounter more obnoxious people in CS:GO than you ve ever had the bad fortune to meet before. Luckily, you have the option to mute people.

Finally I recommend you to get a headset with a microphone. Being able to hear footsteps around you is a big part of the game and being able to use voice chat to communicate enemy positions to your teammates is equally important.

Resources for beginners 

Twitch's CS:GO section is an amazing way to find your favorite players and watch them play the game. Try to learn from them. Why did they position themselves like that, in that situation? There are also an almost infinite number of useful videos on YouTube. Search for things like spray control, flashbangs and smokes. Learn from the more experienced players.

Once you ve picked up the basics you might want to watch pro matches. Not only will they help you improve faster but they re also a great source of entertainment. Especially once you get to know the players and teams. Over at HLTV.org they have detailed schedules where you can find information on when teams are playing. They also provide links to the match streams. Check it out!

Finally, I d also like to recommend the range CS:GO guides I ve written for PC Gamer over the last year. You ll find some neat tricks to use on different maps, how to use grenades and even guides for how to play different roles on a team. All of these the guides can be found below.

Inferno Counter-Terrorist guideInferno Terrorist guideCache Counter-Terrorist guideCache Terrorist guideOverpass Counter-Terrorist guideOverpass Terrorist guideCobblestone Counter-Terrorist guideCobblestone Terrorist guideTrain Counter-Terrorist guideTrain Terrorist guideMirage Counter-Terrorist guideMirage Terrorist guideDust2 Counter-Terrorist guideDust2 Terrorist guideSupport role guideEntry fragger role guideLurker role guideAWPer role guideTeam leader guideSMGs guideSniper rifles guideAssault rifles guidePistols guideWorst weapons guideHE grenades and firebombs guide

There's a lot to talk about with Civilization 6, and the vast majority of it is good talk. After playing over 20 hours of a preview build this past week, I can't see myself wanting to go back to Civ 5 anytime soon. But out of all of the huge changes in Civ 6, the thing I found myself most excited about at the end of the day was its music.

Simply put, it's incredible. It caught my attention right away with the main menu theme. While it's no Baba Yetu from Civ 4, it was good enough that I decided to go digging in the the preview build's source folders to find the raw audio file which was surprisingly easy to do, as it looks like Firaxis is continuing its shining track record of being good to its modders. But when I finally found the file, I was surprised to see it labeled "American Industrial Theme" instead of "Main Menu" or something like that.

[Update: Turns out this song is probably placeholder in the preview build, not the final main theme of the game.]

This made me realize something I hadn't explicitly noticed while playing: every civ has its own unique theme, and that theme has four different variations depending on the era the civ is currently in. As you advance, each civ's music starts gathering more instruments and more layers, but keeps a core melody you can recognize the entire time. And this is for all 20 civs, which means Firaxis produced at least different 80 songs just for theme music.

So I dove back into the source files and went hunting for my favorites. In the video above, I take a deep dive look at the American theme music through all four of its variations, as well as some from France, Norway, and England. These are the raw audio files I'm using (converted to a playable format) so there's no background or ambient noise from the game to muck them up.

Additionally, we've uploaded the audio from the video directly to SoundCloud in case YouTube compresses the songs in any sort of unwanted way. This is fundamentally about the sound, so you are welcome to listen instead of watch right here or with the player below. Either way, grab a pair of good headphones and enjoy!

Climbing the competitive ladder in League of Legends can be difficult and often frustrating at times. We ve all been in situations where ranked games feel like a lost cause, and the element of fun turns to despair and loathing. Going down divisions can be a daunting prospect, especially when you feel you tried your hardest, but sometimes you have to lose to win.

Just like any competitive game or sport, League of Legends requires a high level of skill, communication and most importantly perseverance. Athletes don t become experts in their fields overnight, instead they look at ways of improving their abilities and performance. So what can you do to improve your Elo?

Mastery and mechanical awareness

In order to gain a competitive edge over your opponents you need to master a small pool of champions who you can reliably do well with. It s much harder to be successful if you re playing ten different champions at a time. Instead lower this number to a select few champs and ensure you have a champion you can play effectively for each role. The bigger the champion pool the harder it is to maintain the level of skill and mastery required for each individual. It might be fun to play a diverse amount of champs, but it will be in vain if you can t actually win with them.

Once you ve mastered a few champs you will always be able to perform well no matter what the meta dictates. Picking a champion purely because they re a meta pick means nothing when faced with a player who has taken the time to learn and perfect their skills with their chosen champion. They know their strengths, weaknesses and what to do at each stage of the game, which not only makes them a formidable opponent it also allows them to focus on other core elements needed at high levels of play. In this case less really is more.

Communication

Whether you play League of Legends solo or with a premade five, communication is the key to success in any game. If you re not using Skype or Discord make sure you use your pings or chat function when you need to communicate with those around you. A simple ping to alert your team that your laner is missing or stating that a champion's summoner spell is down can increase the amount of potential kills, as well as prevent them.

Don t be afraid to tell people what you are thinking, let your team know exactly when and where you want to make certain plays. By telling your team when your ultimate is up or on cooldown, and stating whether you can and can t commit to a team fight can greatly reduce any reckless behaviour. This level of basic communication can go a long way in defining your team's overall synergy and effectiveness.

Map awareness

Map awareness is one of things that instantly divides high Elo players from low Elo players. It s a very easy aspect of the game to learn, but it always surprises me the amount of times players forget to report enemy movements or notice a jungler pass by a ward. Good map awareness is the difference between living and dying, so be sure to look at your minimap every few seconds. The minimap not only lets you prevent deaths, it also allows you to keep tabs on where the enemy is likely to be and what objectives they are trying to take. This simple tip remains important regardless of your Elo, so get used to checking your mini map and punish those who don t.

Work on your weaknesses

Fixing your weaknesses is the easiest thing to improve your game. One of the best ways to find these weaknesses is to record your matches. Watching yourself play is a great way to point out glaring failures and shortcomings that you would otherwise miss in the heat of the moment. If you find yourself dying to enemy ganks then prioritise your vision, positioning and overall map awareness.

Maybe you find a particular champion tricky to deal with so watch others play them, look for chinks in their armour, play the champion yourself so you get a better understanding of their mechanics and cooldowns. By making it a habit to work on each individual weakness you will eventually turn these into strengths that you can use against players who don t accept their in-game flaws. No matter your Elo, there is always something that can be improved.

Focus on yourself

League might be a team game, but first you need to focus on yourself and know what your team is capable of before you commit to certain plays or objectives. How you play is important and can help influence the overall quality of play from your teammates. Make a good example and your team will follow up with some amazing plays themselves, play badly and react negatively then expect a lukewarm performance from your teammates.

Learn from your teammate s mistakes and don t let it weigh you down, instead focus on how you can win the next team fight or how you can prevent further mistakes from happening in the future. Maybe you need to create more pressure in your own lane to put the eyes on you, maybe you could provide more vision or split push lanes. Blaming your team will not get you anywhere, but choosing to focus on what you can do to influence the game and your teammates will increase your chances of victory.

Decision making

This is arguably one of the most important skills in League of Legends and can be the difference between getting an Inhibitor, Turret, Baron buff or split pushing lanes. Knowing when to prioritise these objectives is very important to your performance and can have detrimental effects on the outcome of the game. Being able to think several moves ahead of your opponent can make it difficult for them to read you and your team.

This decision making can allow you to bait the enemy team into an orchestrated play that makes them believe they have the upper hand, but in reality they are being pushed into a trap. You only get better at decision making by playing and studying your own games or watching pro players. By analysing these games you ll see what options were available to you at the time and when and where you should be aiming for them.

Dedicate time

No matter what game, sport or hobby you have, if you dedicate enough time to it you will likely see notable improvements. League of Legends is a difficult game to learn and even harder to master, especially at a competitive level. You may remember the first time you logged in and were instantly bombarded with a plethora of champions, items and masteries. The first few games were rough and while the learning curve may have been steep, you persevered.

If you transfer this time and dedication to constantly learning and improving your overall effectiveness in each role you will be rewarded. You re going to have bad games, but each time you play and experiment with certain builds and roles you will also be improving. Eventually, you re overall level of play will become consistent and your win rate will gradually start to increase.

Don’t surrender

Just because you have an option to surrender doesn t always mean you should. The amount of throws and game changing team fights can make the surrender button ruin the chances of a possible win. Yes, it can be hard not to just give up when a game feels completely out of your control, but most games are winnable, even at higher Elo s. If there is a consistent pattern that leads to your team losing engages or maybe you keep getting caught then it s time rethink your options.

Most people who get fed in League become complacent with their new found power and will start making radical plays. Wait for your opponents to make mistakes and work together to capitalise off them. The enemy team will often become increasingly frustrated and anxious about making further mistakes, so keep your play consistent and try to turn the tide of the battle. Also, the more time you spend in game (even if for a loss) gives you further chances to improve your level of play, so don t always take a loss to heart, instead see it as a way of improving yourself.

Abuse enemy tilt  

This is a rather shady approach to winning, but it is proven to work. Before the game starts check your opponent s stats either by heading over to LolKing or OP.GG, this will allow you to see which players are more prone to losing and feeding. Once you ve found the players that are on a losing streak, get your jungler to camp their lanes and watch the tilt begin. This will ultimately remove them from the game out of pure frustration, making it easier for you to secure that all-important victory.

Of course, this tactic will likely be used against you too, so be aware that you could be a potential target. With this knowledge you can also prevent this tactic from affecting your overall performance and use it to your advantage. So if you ve recently been on a losing streak make sure you play safe and ward your half of the map, also notify your team that the enemy jungler is likely to camp you so they can provide the appropriate support. This will prevent the tilt tactic from working against you and waste precious time for the opposing team.

Before we start, let me put this big disclaimer out there: I'm testing preview code, which is incomplete and very likely not fully optimized. Things might change by the time Civilization 6 launches on October 21, though the things I'm about to test are probably not high on the priority list. So, can you run Civilization 6 on a laptop with integrated graphics? The minimum system requirements are pretty tame:

A 1GB discrete GPU from AMD's 5570 class or Nvidia's 450 class? Yeah, just about everything should be at least that fast these days. But what if you're using an older system how do those stack up against a three-year-old laptop? I've got some bad news for you. Even a rather anemic HD 5570 is going to be faster than Intel's HD Graphics 4400, by about 30 percent, though newer laptops with 5th and 6th gen Intel Core parts are probably close to the HD 5570. AMD's APUs should fare better, with the 2013/2014 chips delivering roughly HD 5570 performance.

I don't have all of those parts sitting around for testing, but what I do have is a modern quad-core i7-6700HQ notebook. Sure, it has a beefy graphics card as well, but I set Civ 6 to use the integrated graphics. Intel's HD Graphics 530 in this case is a moderately potent graphics solution, likely better in some ways than an HD 5570, and I wanted to see what it could do.

Let's start with image quality, because that's going to be key. I selected the Medium preset first, created a new game, and was promptly greeted by 15 fps. Nope, that ain't gonna cut it! This is the start of the game, with one settler and one warrior unit on the screen and a bunch of stuff hidden by fog of war. Dropping to the Low preset (which is really minimum quality everything is turned off) helped immensely, giving me a solid 30-35 fps. Here's what those two settings look like:

The drop in image quality is pretty noticeable, but shadows are the only real difference. Everything looks a bit flat without the extra shadowing, but if it means double the framerate and potentially opens the game up to non-gaming laptops, it's not a terrible price to pay. (If you're interested in the other image quality presets, the High and Ultra settings mostly increase the amount of geometry relative to Medium. The jump from Medium to High basically cuts performance in half yet again, give or take, but from High to Ultra is only about a 10 percent dip.)

So, 30-35 fps while zoomed out, but that's at 1920x1080 and only at the start of a new game. Fast forward to 575 BC when there's more going on and performance while zoomed out was noticeably slower around 20 fps but zooming in a bit could get me back above the 30 fps mark. Also, Civilization games aren't about twitch reflexes, so even 20 fps was manageable in a pinch.

In most games, performance for integrated graphics ends up limited by the number of pixels you render, so I figured dropping from 1920x1080 down to 1366x768 would provide another boost to performance. Only rendering half the pixels ought to help, but in this case it didn't seem to matter much I gained maybe 1-2 fps. It looks like the biggest bottleneck with Civ 6 on low-end graphics solutions (especially Intel) is going to be geometry throughput.

What will that mean for other Intel GPUs? None of them are officially supported by the game, and apparently with good reason. If HD 530 only hits 20-30 fps, and that's still relatively early in the game, I suspect the late game on larger maps will absolutely choke lesser graphics chips. I checked another laptop with Intel's HD Graphics 4600 (Haswell) and found framerates in the mid-teens, and on Ultrabooks it would be even lower. On the other hand, the same laptop using a GeForce GT 750M did OK, pushing 30-40 fps.

Update: There's another option for playing Civ6, and that's the strategic view. The problem is that you're left with icons for everything, so figuring out the units can be a bit difficult, but frame rates at least aren't a problem. Intel's HD Graphics 4600 was able to push 80+ fps in strategic view. That doesn't say much about the time between turns, though strategic mode also tends to speed up movement in my limited experience.

It's not the ideal experience, but if you really want to play Civilization 6 on your laptop's integrated graphics, it's possible. You can either stick with the Tiny map size, try not to zoom too far out, and bring a jug of patience, or you can play from the strategic view and forget about all the fancy graphics.

After a slow couple of weeks, it all kicks off this weekend. The best League of Legends players in the world have arrived in the US for Worlds, a reshuffled Dota 2 scene is going to war in China, and there's top-flight CS:GO, StarCraft II, and Overwatch too: not to mention Rocket League, Hearthstone, or the Capcom Pro Tour.

League of Legends: World Championship 2016 Group Stage

The biggest event in the League of Legends calendar is underway. The Worlds group stage began yesterday in Chicago and continues through the weekend, starting at 16:00 PDT/01:00 PDT each day. Be sure to catch the first game on Saturday, when champs SK Telecom T1 take on Cloud9. Find more information and the livestream on LoLesports.

Dota 2: Mars TV 2016 Autumn Playoffs

A great tournament so far, this Mars TV league has been an opportunity to see the freshly-reshuffled Dota 2 scene in action. EG, Newbee, OG and Secret have emerged as the hottest picks coming out of the group stage and will continue to fight for a share of the $250,000 grand prize over the weekend. Play takes place on China Standard Time, so prepare for a few late nights. Saturday's games begin at 19:00 Friday night Pacific time/04:00 CEST. Sunday's games begin at 21:00 Saturday Pacific time/06:00 CEST. Here's the English language stream.

Come for the Dota, stay for the inexplicable ukuleles.

CSGO: ESL One New York 2016

It's finally time for some high-stakes, top-tier CS:GO as the best teams in the world compete for a share of $250,000 in New York. Games start at 10:00 EDT/07:00 PDT/16:00 CEST on both Saturday and Sunday with the semi-finals beginning on the latter. Find the livestream here.

Hearthstone: Asia Pacific Summer Championship

There's another coveted ticket to the 2016 Hearthstone World Championships on the line, with play running today and tomorrow. Games begin at 05:00 CEST each day, which is 20:00 PDT the evening before. HearthPwn has a rundown of the decklists here: surprise surprise, there's a lot of Shaman. Here's the official stream.

StarCraft II: 2016 KeSPA Cup

This week long ontest of world-class StarCraft II concludes with the bracket stage this weekend. Games should start around 17:00 local time on both Sunday and Monday, which is 09:00 CEST/01:00 PDT. The English steam is available via this YouTube channel.

Overwatch: Overwatch Open Grand Final

The biggest prize pot in Overwatch to date $300,000 is on the line tonight as the Overwatch Open reaches its final stages in Atlanta. Play begins at 19.00 PDT this evening, which is 04:00 Saturday morning in Europe. Expect a close-fought match as EnVyUs take on Misfits for the top spot. Here's the livestream.

Rocket League: League Play

There's another weekend of Rocket League ahead as teams in Europe and North America compete at a shot at the prizes on offer in the game's second competitive season, including the $10,000 Mid-Season Classic next weekend. Games run all day in NA on Saturday, followed by Europe on Sunday. The official Rocket League Twitch channel has the livestream.

Capcom Pro Tour: Events in Poland, Indonesia, Brazil

Loads more fighting games this weekend, from Fighting Games Challenge in Poland on Saturday to Abuget Cup in Jakarta and TRETA 2016 in Curitiba both running until Sunday. These are all Ranking events no Premier action this weekend but expect fierce competition as competitors scramble to claim the scant remaining points. Given the geographically dispersed nature of the events you're best off keeping an eye on the Street Fighter V section on Twitch for specific livestreams.

To better understand the potential consequences of the UK's Advertising Standards Authority's investigation into No Man's Sky, we reached out to a number of legal experts proficient in the realm of video game law for their take on the situation. Stephen McArthur, a "Video Game Lawyer" of McArthur Law Firm, Ryan Morrison of Morrison Lee, Jas Purewal of Purewal and Partners LLP, and Tom Buscaglia, The Game Attorney, agreed to lend us their knowledge and explain what this investigation could mean for Hello Games, Valve, and the industry as a whole.

What's the ASA, and what power does it have?

The ASA is an independent authority with the power to issue, but not enforce, sanctions on advertising that breaches the UK Advertising Codes. As such, its judgments are not legally binding, and it is up to the offending company as to whether it follows the ASA's recommendations.

That said, the ASA has proven quite successful in the past, requiring French Connection, the fashion brand behind the FCUK slogan, to submit all its marketing material to the ASA for vetting before it can be displayed, as well as banning an Apple iPhone ad for false claims about the device's internet capabilities.

The key precedents

The law on false advertising in video games is developing fast, particularly over the last few years, Purewal tells us. He points out that many recent cases in the US have been unsuccessful, citing the class action lawsuit against GTA V over the omission of its online mode at launch. In the UK specifically, Purewal notes the ASA has previously ruled on Wolfenstein: The New Order and the Dungeon Keeper mobile game, with the Dungeon Keeper example of most relevance. The ASA determined that the content and features shown in an email ad for the game were misleading due to their being locked behind paid currency, despite the ad emphasising that the game was free. Because it was not clearly stated that the gameplay depicted would require in-app purchases, the ASA deemed EA in breach of the UK Advertising Code, requesting the ad be taken down and for future ads to make clear the differences between free and paid gameplay features.

McArthur mentions a few more examples worth examining in greater detail. Though these are US cases and as such hold no legal sway over the ASA's decision, the similarities between them give us a solid idea of what does and doesn't constitute false advertising.

Aliens: Colonial Marines

The 2013 lawsuit was initially filed against Sega and Gearbox on behalf of all owners of the game, but in 2015 Gearbox was dropped from the suit and the scope of the case was reduced from its class-action status to only representing the two plaintiffs. Sega, meanwhile, was called out by the ASA and admitted that trailers for the game "did not accurately reflect the final content of the game." Consequently, Sega settled for a reported $1.25 million and added disclaimers to its videos advising that the footage pertained to demo versions of the game, rather than the final release.

Killzone: Shadow Fall

A class-action lawsuit against Sony was dismissed in 2015 after a US federal court found that evidence of false advertising was insufficient. The suit alleged that claims of 1080p fidelity in marketing material did not reflect the actual resolution of the running game. Due to Guerrilla Games' technical implementation, however, the difference between what they promised and what they delivered proved too minor to constitute false advertising.

Nvidia GTX 970

The GTX 970 debacle was recently resolved out of court, with Nvidia agreeing to pay out $30 to all purchasers of the graphics card within the U.S. Nvidia has maintained that the nuances of the 970's not-exactly-4GB of VRAM were lost in translation between engineers and marketers, agreeing that promotional material was misleading but insisting that any confusion was unintentional.

The consequences

Of these precedents, both the Killzone and Nvidia cases deal with technical absolutes, claims that are fairly straightforward to prove one way or another. 1080p is a defined standard, and 4GB of GDDR5 is 4GB of GDDR5, not 3.5GB of GDDR5 and 500MB of something slower. False advertising in these cases comes down to hard numbers and clear expectations.

The No Man's Sky claims, though, aren't so easily defined, and that's where Aliens: Colonial Marines serves as the most instructive example. Morrison highlights the fact that the Colonial Marines case was reduced from a class-action suit to one representing only the two plaintiffs, a ruling made due to the difficulty of proving which players had purchased the game based solely on its false advertising, and which had picked it up for other reasons.

It's a similar case for No Man's Sky. Of the claims the ASA is investigating, how many people bought NMS purely on the basis of it having flowing rivers? How many copies were sold on the ability to fly close to the ground? Was the promise of bathing wildlife a deciding factor for a significant chunk of the audience?

Given how impractical it would be to prove any of these claims, it's highly unlikely the ASA will advise any sort of blanket refund or remuneration. Morrison suspects something more along the lines of a strongly-worded warning advising Hello Games to be more mindful with its marketing in the future. Purewal expects much the same, pointing to the settlement between the FTC, Microsoft, and Machinima over paid endorsements on YouTube. "The impact on the consumer is indirect," he says. "They may not see ads in a particular way done again."

As for what the ASA's decision could mean for the US, Purewal notes that "the US federal regulator for advertising (the FTC) or potentially state bodies, are under no obligation one way or the other."

Morrison doubts that it will have much impact, even if the ASA concludes that players have been misled. "Under American law, I don't think they've broken the law," he tells us. Rather, he attributes the frustration and disappointment surrounding No Man's Sky to a misinterpretation of the marketing material. Videos and screenshots depict the ideal planets, the ideal wildlife, the ideal experience and that's not necessarily what everyone's going to get. Procedural generation is inherently unpredictable; no trailer could equally represent 18 quintillion planets' worth of content in just two minutes.

Both Buscaglia and Morrison emphasise the challenge Hello Games faced in capturing the vast possibilities of a procedurally-generated universe in a handful of gameplay clips and screenshots. Because players have effectively no control over what chunk of the universe they will be thrown into, their experiences will all be different; some may enjoy nothing but lush planets full of diverse wildlife, while others may jump from dead world to dead world, never encountering the vibrancy depicted in the promotional trailers. That doesn't make this false advertising, though. Like all marketing material, trailers are designed to show off a game in its best light.

The key distinction here is separating possibility from certainty; it may be unlikely that a player will stumble upon the idyllic worlds teased on the game's Steam page, but provided they do actually exist somewhere in the game, the accusations of false advertising will not float. As Morrison puts it, "Is it a legitimate complaint? Yes. Is it a legitimate legal complaint? No."

Morrison also points out that, in legal terms, any comments made by Sean Murray in interviews or in Reddit AMAs are not considered advertising. Claims made in these forums do not fall under the official marketing umbrella, and as such do not hold up in a legal context. Any hypothetical lawsuit would be limited to the media distributed by Hello Games as a whole.

Buscaglia is less concerned about the possible legal ramifications than he is the message all the outrage sends to other independent developers with ambitions of exploring procedural generation and non-deterministic experiences. "The thing that bothers me most about this sort of thing is the fact it can have a real chilling effect on people pushing the boundaries on procedurally-generated content," he says. "I hate to see people who are willing to push the envelope and try to make something really revolutionary like this get smashed by the people they're doing it for."

McArthur foresees a similar outcome, stating that "the biggest impact here will be that it sends a message to other game companies to be careful about what they put in their trailers and not to oversell their games with unrealistic 'gameplay footage.'"

After restating his belief that Hello Games has neither broken the law nor purposely deceived any of its players, Morrison closes with a piece of advice it's always worth reiterating: "People need to stop pre-ordering games." If you aren't 100-percent confident you know what you're getting, give it a week before handing over your hard-earned cash. Watch Let's Plays. Read the reviews. A little research goes a long way.

If you're into Terraria, you might be aware of Super Terraria World, a standalone mod that morphs Re-Logic's sandbox survival game into a proper RPG, complete with quests, NPCs, skills, and other RPG-y things in a fixed world. If you weren't aware, then you should probably follow this link, before cancelling all your plans for today. Super Terraria World has just been updated to version 1.12a; there's a Patreon campaign and a new, 'official' trailer showing the ambitious mod off.

As explained over on Reddit, 1.12a "brings STW to the current code base of Terraria (1.3.3.2)". It also adds a new friendly NPC, an additional, chilly player-owned world, "leaf particles while using the Magic Leaf", an updated spear ability, revamped Mana regen logic and more. The end goal of the team is for the mod be an MMO, but for now it's single-player only.

No Man s Sky is a unique case of videogame marketing controversy. What it promised was so nebulous a huge procedural universe where who knows what you ll find that expectations had unlimited space to grow into. They could only plummet back to a craggy rock of a planet on release. We just didn t know how hard the landing would be.

But some of what has No Man s Sky under continual fire from players, and now investigation, is predictable videogame marketing backlash. After 10 years of covering videogames, I ve seen game after game fail to align with its gorgeous E3 trailer and expertly composed screenshots. I ve seen games that looked finished at one E3 such as Star Wars 1313 disappear from the next, never to be seen again.

To some degree, this happens just because games change a lot during development, but in other cases, the games we see at E3 never even existed outside of that specific demo. How and when games are shown to the public varies between developers, publishers, and budgets, but for the biggest of them there are some common practices that repeatedly end with a 30 page NeoGAF thread comparing stills from two years ago with the game that released. Here are five reasons everything we see before a big game is released is suspect (and why we don't recommend preordering).

The vertical slice

Vertical slice is an industry buzzword that few marketers use publicly and yet we see them all the time. The term can mean different things depending on the context, but when it comes to games, a vertical slice is a complete demo that showcases all the intended features. A hypothetical vertical slice for, say, Deus Ex: Human Revolution would be one complete level with stealth, combat, enemy AI, dialogue, and so on a segment of the game that reflects the final product, but nothing beyond it.

Ron Gilbert called vertical slices one of the dumbest things the game industry has ever come up with. Critics of building vertical slices too early point out that building a finished level as a starting point actually means building most of the game as a starting point. From a linear, horizontal perspective, one level might be a small portion of the player s experience, but all the elements of that one level HUD design, art and animations, control systems, and so on represent the bulk of development. To focus on a slice first, instead of iterating on a sketch of the full game in a more holistic approach, can lead to obvious problems. What if things that worked in that one demo level don t work in all cases? What if the limitations of that level are pasted onto the rest of the game, homogenizing the whole thing? Shouldn't development be iterative?

But showing a big, untextured prototype with a placeholder HUD to executives and investors isn t necessarily the best way to convince them it s a winner and the same goes for the public. A vertical slice is the first completely realized piece of a game, so it s what screenshots, trailers, and press demos are based on. We see the effects of this all the time at PC Gamer: We ll do an interview with one creative director or another, and they ll talk about all sorts of exciting ideas, but the only screenshots the publisher will provide are from one level that has nothing to do with those ideas. Because that s the only part of the game ready to be seen.

It s unlikely that this one slice is going to stay perfectly static, with the rest of the game built around it to conform. If the vertical slice was created early in development, there s going to be iteration and discarded ideas and new ideas as the whole picture is painted. The vertical slice itself may even be painted over.

When BioShock Infinite was shown in 2011, it hardly represented the complete BioShock Infinite we played. After that slice was built for E3 and shown, the characters changed, the powers changed, the HUD changed, the story changed, and entire scenes were cut. Ken Levine and the team at Irrational learned and discovered new things about Infinite as they went as I think we d want them to. But it means they crunched out something that didn t look quite like the game they d ultimately make.

Bungie s Halo 2 demo at E3 2003 is another prime example. By Bungie s own proud admission, buckets of blood and sweat (and probably a few tears) were poured into making this demo something spectacular. I m not sure any developer today would openly admit that it made employees sleep in the office for days to build an E3 demo that isn t representative of the final game but that s what happened, and it still happens.

If you see a complete-looking game demo shown on stage at E3 or, say, a trailer for a game called Prey 2 in 2012 and then someone in a suit says it ll be out in three years, consider that the level you ve just seen might be the only completed level. Big publishers and developers spend a lot of time developing and refining these presentations, but everything in them is subject to change as the full game is built.

'Downgrades'

Vertical slices can also be visually more impressive than the whole, and this happens often enough to get its own term: downgrading. I m not a fan of the word, because I don t think it helps us to label developers saboteurs of their own games when they addresses technical problems or make artistic changes, especially as we also complain that games aren t optimized enough.

Take The Witcher 3 for example: It s a gorgeous game that runs well, but it wasn t gorgeous in the exact same way it was a year before release, and there was a brief controversy about it. This, again, was because the demo shown at E3 was designed a la carte.

"If you're looking at the development process, we do a certain build for a tradeshow and you pack it, it works, it looks amazing, CD Projekt co-founder Marcin Iwinski told Eurogamer. And you are extremely far away from completing the game. Then you put it in the open world, regardless of the platform, and it's like, 'Oh shit, it doesn't really work.' We've already showed it, now we have to make it work. And then we try to make it work on a huge scale. This is the nature of games development."

The Witcher 3 was still a great game, though, so the whole thing seems a bit frivolous now. If we don t give work-in-progress footage a little flexibility, we re saying that developers aren t allowed to make new decisions after releasing a trailer, which isn t realistic. There are also changing hardware specs to consider.

But I don t think we ought to let them off the hook completely. Another example comes from The Division s E3 2013 trailer, and prior to that with Watch Dogs. These weren't drastic changes, but they're symptom of those E3 demo grinds, and I m skeptical that CD Projekt and Ubisoft were both totally unaware that they d have to scale back the graphics in the real games. Bungie certainly knew what it was doing with Halo 2.

At the very least, we re due an explanation when it happens. Most things that are advertised to us are advertised after they re already done a Heineken always tastes like a Heineken (water with some bubbly piss in it) so games are somewhat unique in that they re advertised while still being brewed. I can forgive a game that undergoes slight discoloration, so long as we know about it before it s released. In general, don t trust big reveal trailers to look like the games they re promoting, especially if the release date is still a ways off.

Target footage

The other thing to look out for are videos labeled target footage. Target footage is the precursor to a vertical slice, an artist s rendering of what a game could look like. There may not be any game systems driving target footage at all. It can just be an animation showing how a game is supposed to look and play, and may have been made during pre-production as a sort of visual design document, as this Assassin s Creed 3 target footage was.

Often target footage is used internally by developers and publishers as a clear example of a game s vision it isn't typically 'marketing,' but I've put it here because sometimes it s shown or leaked to the public. If you see anything labeled target footage, consider it a nice idea for a videogame and nothing more.

Bullshots

When a developer wants to show off their game, sometimes they take some nice-looking screenshots and send them out to press and put them on their website, and that s it. But when big marketing budgets are involved, people can be hired just to take screenshots. They use tools to unlock a free camera, manipulate time, and downsample from ultra high resolutions. This is how you see Geralt on a perfectly posed horse, looking crisper than a starched shirt. We lovingly call these 'bullshots.'

Every developer is trying to make their game look good when they take screenshots, but heavy supersampling and compositing elements in Photoshop crosses a line for me. I m not accusing CD Projekt of all that necessarily the screen above is just an example of some obvious manipulation.

This happens a lot, in part I think because bullshots have an endearing quality that affords them an oh, you guys attitude. It s funny to see a publisher try to pass off an obviously manipulated screen, as if we weren t going to notice its perfect composition and total lack of aliasing. But if it s unclear, as much as we think bullshots are funny, we hate receiving them. We never want to run a preview full of screenshots that obviously aren't achievable through regular play, and we call it out when those are the only screens we have. Thankfully, this is happening less and less, with more publishers allowing us to take our own screenshots or video directly from preview builds of their games (which, of course, may still look better than the final build) or releasing closed betas.

To be clear, we love the screenshotting community, which uses the same techniques to turn game worlds into photographic subjects, and we celebrate it every week in our Pixel Boost column. But those independently created, ultra high-res Photoshop-manipulated screenshots aren t used to sell the game, and the artists who create them usually tell us how they achieved the look. It isn t the same as putting an absurdly good-looking screenshot on a Steam store page without mentioning the game was running at 5 fps when it was taken.

Press demos

Imagine jumping into the middle of an open world shooter with no introduction to its rules or systems or even what its HUD looks like. That s how I experienced Homefront: The Revolution for 15 minutes on a crowded PAX show floor last year. I had an inventory full of guns and gadgets I d never used, a motorcycle I hadn t learned this game s specific modeling of, a UI I d never seen before, goals I had no context for, enemies I d never encountered, and an Xbox controller, which I hate using for FPSes.

It s the wonderful world of hands-on previews, which I think are valuable (and I would say that) but are naturally flawed impressions of games. It s a previewer s job to quickly identify what they think is interesting, working, broken, fun, troubling, or exciting about a game, and when a preview is done well we get a clear picture of a game s goals, its strengths and weaknesses, causes for skepticism, and reasons to care. But previews always come with the caveat that we re only seeing what a developer has chosen to show us, and are colored by the circumstances of the demo. I d guess that very few started playing the PC version of Homefront by plugging in an Xbox controller and loading up a mid-game save while surrounded by thousands of people on a convention showfloor.

Sometimes public and press demos are different from the actual game, which can be intentional. In Shaun s preview of Dishonored 2, for instance, he notes that the difficulty was tweaked to account for lack of experience. Arkane wanted press to get through the entire demo despite necessarily being newcomers, and designed the experience to be as positive as possible. That doesn t invalidate Shaun s thoughts he came away with observations largely unrelated to difficulty but it does mean we don t really know what Dishonored 2 is like to play.

Even if a demo is consistent with the actual game, it s of course an incomplete experience. Back in March, Chris wrote a hands-on preview of No Man s Sky, in which he describes everything you can do in the game: wandering a planet, mining resources, fighting space pirates, visiting a space station. He played an accurate vertical slice for 30 minutes. Had he seen No Man s Sky s horizontal, he would ve seen that same slice repeated to infinity, varied just enough to encourage exploration but not enough to be as compelling as we d hoped and that s what he described in his review.

The questions Chris asked in that preview were on point. For instance: The procedural generation guarantees you'll never see the exact same thing twice, but does that really mean the things you see will be interesting? But because he d only seen the vertical, they were unanswered questions, and they remained that way until No Man s Sky released.

Earlier and later access

For our part, we should always ask questions and be skeptical (without being cynical, I d hope) of advertising, never taking it at face value. It s advertising, so of course they re trying to make their games look as good as they can, and of course Daniel Craig doesn't drink Heineken. No one does.

Games are different from other media: really fundamental changes can take place over the course of development, and we have to allow for some of that. (In my opinion, we should really chill out about changes to grass rendering quality.) But there s a line, of course, that exists somewhere between choreographing a nice screenshot and releasing the notoriously misrepresented Aliens: Colonial Marines. When the latter happens, we should absolutely call it out and make it loudly clear we don t want that crap.

Publishers are listening and the industry is reacting. Look at how many games now release in Early Access, all their flaws and missing pieces on display this was not a model five or so years ago, except in a few cases like Minecraft, and now it s a major pillar of PC development. Look as well at publishers such as Bethesda, which announced Fallout 4 just a couple months before releasing it. Meanwhile, EA and BioWare have only just shown us gameplay footage from Mass Effect: Andromeda, and that s out early next year. Some publishers still subscribe to the classic multi-year videogame press cycle announcement, teaser trailer, first look preview, cinematic trailer, hands-on preview, gameplay trailer, another trailer, second hands-on preview, launch trailer, reviews but it s less and less the standard.

The solution has either been to show us everything up front from the start blemishes and all or to hide games out of sight until they re complete or nearly complete. Part of the deal when it comes to avoiding game marketing that doesn't match the final product is that we get less information about games we re looking forward to, and fewer big E3 surprise reveals.