Sleeping Dogs
Sleeping Dogs 15


Sleeping Dogs took a strange trip before it hit retail shelves and digital download services. It started out as another entry in the True Crime series before Activision cancelled it in 2011. Then, Square Enix picked it up and re-branded it as a new game with developer United Front Games. Sleeping Dogs released in August 2012 with overall positive reviews, and now United Front Games is teasing a successor.

Today, the developer announced that it is working on "another game based in the Sleeping Dogs universe" and referenced a trademark registration dubbed Triad Wars—players will recall that Sleeping Dogs starred an undercover cop named Wei Shen who infiltrated the Hong Kong Triads.

This comes after the consistently bad news that publisher Square Enix has dripped out over the course of 2013. The publisher partially blamed Sleeping Dogs for its poor financial year, despite it selling near two million units and Tomb Raider and Hitman: Absolution selling over 3.5 million units. All three of those games also enjoyed varying levels of critical success and were no doubt expensive as hell.

The trademark page mentions mobile phones, but it's likely that Square Enix is just preventing infringement across all platforms. After all, Sleeping Dogs was a technical behemoth on PC . We won't know until 2014 since United Front has pledged no new info until then. Maybe it is a full-fledged sequel. Or maybe it's a MOBA. Either way, it could sell 4 million copies and Square Enix might still call it a failure.
Sleeping Dogs - PC Gamer
Podcast Header Blank


Almost all of the team converge for the final episode of the PC Gamer UK podcast. Chris, Graham, Rich, Tom and Phil discuss a great many indie games, Company of Heroes 2, Sleeping Dogs, and answer your questions from Twitter. Join us for one last wild tangent.

Our US team will continue to produce their podcast, so this isn't the end of PC Gamer in audio form - but it is goodbye from us. As I say at the end of the episode, I've loved doing this and I've appreciated hearing from everybody who enjoyed the cast over the year I've been running it. We're looking into alternatives, and if you follow us on Twitter we'll hopefully have something for you soon.

Graham - @Gonnas
Chris - @CThursten
Rich - @richmcc
Tom - @pcgludo
Phil - @octaeder

You can download the MP3 directly if you like, and find all of our prior episodes on iTunes. Here's the YouTube version.

Show notes

Rich's moustache is briefly visible in this Vine.
Rich's Company of Heroes 2 review.
Chris has been playing Imscared, and also recommends Hide.
That Creepypasta Morrowind story. Warning! It's spooooooky.
Zafehouse Diaries, a game that - to be fair - should have been called Zafehouze DiarZ.
Nope, I've still got no idea where Rich's Wagner metaphor was going.
I got the URL for our new Planetside 2 website entirely wrong. It's pcgps2.enjin.com.
Slave of God, Increpare's clubbing sim.
My open letter to the internet regarding the Half-Life 3 joke.
The Saints Row 4 E3 trailer.
...and that's that. Thanks for listening, for sending us questions, and for sticking with us over 93 episodes. I've had the time of my life. Nobody puts podcat in the corner.
Dota 2
Zafehouse diaries


The weekend is so near I can almost taste it. Here in Britland the sky is a blank grey texture, devoid of depth - a rubbish skybox. Beholden to the circadian law of Fridays, we'll no doubt retreat from that sky to the soft, warm glow of a pub and then run home to play some videogames. But which ones? The sky will no doubt have opened by then, drumming summer rain into our window panes. A cup of tea and an adventure game might suit, or a round or two of Civilization, perhaps. Here's a round-up of the games we're planning to install, and a question: what will you play this weekend? Let's chat.

Graham has just moved flat, which means learning how to play games without an internet connection to download/activate them. It's surprisingly difficult these days. His solution - put Open Transport Tycoon Deluxe onto a memory stick and spend the weekend weaving roads and railways into beautiful, efficient tapestries of traffic. It's free, so if you fancy doing something similar you can grab the latest build from the Open TTD site.



Phil is going to try Zafehouse: Diaries, a game about managing a group of survivors through an apocalypse via the interface of a grimy, bloodstained logbook. Your team have a degree of autonomy, which means they'll wander around your infested stronghold, chatting to each other, tinkering with things and almost certainly splitting up and getting eaten a lot. Zafehouse promises detailed simulation without relentless micromanagement, something that plays like a work of interactive fiction but with a more complex engine behind it. Hopefully Phil will discover exactly what a "Zafehouse" is so he can tell us on Monday.



Rich has spent the afternoon dipping into Rogue Legacy, a side-scrolling dynastic roguelike that lets you take charge of the next tier of your hero's family tree when they die. Your offspring have various genetic conditions that can dramatically alter their perception of the dungeon. A warrior afflicted with chronic vertigo will have to play the whole game upside down, for example. I imagine Rich will have clocked up hundreds of deaths by the time we return on Monday.



Chris is determined to play something that isn't Dota 2 this weekend. Will he succeed? Well, he's got Sleeping Dogs to finish and Receiver to experiment with. The first is an entertaining, gung-ho crime adventure set in Hong Kong, the second is an exciting little shooter born out of a seven-day game jam. Considering that we've been shooting things in games since games were invented, very few have played with the idea of the gun as a complex piece of machinery. In Receiver you must manually attend to your firearm, using different button presses to free the clip and plop round in one by one. The result is a tense shooter that turns the FPS into a tactile challenge of your memory and finger dexterity. Highly recommended.



I can't buy a win in Company of Heroes 2 at the moment, so I'll spend the weekend scowling over cold cups of tea learning to play, and then probably giving up and replaying the first two chapters of Kentucky Route Zero, a serene, surreal and beautiful episodic game that I'd describe as a "redneck Murakami adventure" if I had to cram the experience into a reductive three-word phrase. And I do, because it's so very nearly the weekend, and somewhere out there there's a Company of Heroes 2 trampling with my name on it.



You can catch up with our writers' progress, and their many tangential observations via Twitter. That's us, but what about you? Catching up on blockbusters past? Playing experimental indie games, or dipping into the latest releases?
Sleeping Dogs - PC Gamer
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In this bumper-length episode Graham, Rich and Chris discuss E3, the Oculus Rift, new Wolfenstein, The Evil Within and your questions from Twitter. If you like tangents, this episode is basically Christmas.

You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes as well as downloading the MP3 directly. There's also a YouTube version.

To ask a question in a future episode, follow PC Gamer on Twitter. On the day of recording we'll invite people to ping us their quandries.

You can also follow us as individuals:

Chris - @cthursten
Graham - @gonnas
Rich - @richmcc

Show notes

All of our E3 coverage can be found on the relevent tag page.
Episode 90, in which Tom Senior breaks free of the bonds of decency in order to describe EVR.
Tom's Sleeping Dogs review.
That horror game we totally forgot the name of is Darkwood.
Rich Cobbett on the Doom novels.
Football Manager Ruined My Life, a book.
PC Gamer
Tomb Raider - fire


After a disastrous financial year, in which Square Enix not only failed to make their expected profits, but were hit instead with by massive financial loss, the company's senior executive managing director Yosuke Matsuda has been looking at Kickstarter as a possible guide to improving "asset turnover". Which isn't to say they'll attempt to raise $100,000,000 for a Tomb Raider sequel via the crowd-funding site. ($110,000,000 stretch goal: add some proper tombs.) Instead, Matsuda wants Square Enix to interact with its customers at an earlier stage.

"One could go as far as to say that in today's times, making customers wait for years with little to no information is being dishonest to them," Matsuda said, in an earnings call two weeks ago. "We're no longer in an age where customers are left in the dark until a product is completed. We need to shift to a business model where we frequently interact with our customers for our products that are in‐development and/or prior to being sold, have our customers understand games under development, and finally make sure we develop games that meet their expectations."

"There is a crowdfunding website called 'Kickstarter,'" he continued, "which does not only serve as a method of financing for developers, but I believe should also be seen as a way to unite marketing and development together by allowing us to interact with customers while a game is in development."

Matsuda also pointed to Steam's Greenlight and Early Access initiatives as ways in which game makers are communicating with their community:

"Valve's Steam Greenlight and Early Access, are also very interesting, in that they raise the frequency by which we interact with customers, increasing their engagement and reflecting customer needs. We are also looking at what initiatives are possible from this perspective. What should we present to our customers before a game is finished, how can our customers enjoy this, and how do we connect this to profitability, is something we are thinking about implementing, and which can improve our asset turnover in the process."

Traditionally these services have been used by smaller developers, with smaller communities, making direct engagement a more manageable prospect. How Square Enix would scale these ideas out onto a much larger scale remains to be seen. But more openness and interaction from the publisher surely can't be a bad thing.

Thanks, GamesIndustry.
Sleeping Dogs
Tomb Raider - fire


Square Enix's incoming president, Yosuke Matsuda, has started sharpening the axe of financial viability after the "extraordinary loss" of this last financial year. In a Square Enix Holdings briefing session, translated by Siliconera, Matsuda announces plans to review all elements of the business, with a view to focusing its direction on "what makes us successful".

"After having succeeded the important role as the president, I plan on reviewing all Square Enix duties, business and assets on a zero-based budgeting standpoint," Matsuda says. "Due to the radical change of environment, I’d like to fundamentally review what works and what doesn't work for our company, then cast all of our resources towards extending what makes us successful and thoroughly squeezing out what doesn't.

"As far as a concrete plan on what to expect from us, I will further explain it on another briefing session in the near future, so I kindly ask for your patience. Thank you for your support."

While Matsuda isn't due to step into the role until June, Square Enix have already begun to restructure. In a statement to Polygon, senior director of PR Reilly Brennan announced, "We can confirm that Square Enix's Los Angeles office has eliminated a number of positions as part of the corporate restructuring announced last week. This is an unfortunate situation and we are offering assistance and severance packages to any employees affected by this, we want to thank them for their hard work and sincerely wish them well in the future." This is in addition to the LA office lay-offs made back in December.

How SE's development studios will be affected by Matsuda's review is unclear, but sales figures suggest a change may be due. Tomb Raider, Hitman: Absolution and Sleeping Dogs all failed to meet expectations, despite Tomb Raider experiencing a record launch week for the series.
Sleeping Dogs
Tomb Raider Windy Ledge


Square Enix have announced the resignation of their CEO, Yoichi Wada, following an earnings forecast that predicts the company will experience "extraordinary loss" this financial year. According to their consolidated results report, the company had expected to make profits of 3.5 billion yen (approx. £24.5 million) before the end of the financial year, this March 31st. That didn't happen. Instead, Square Enix is now expected to report a loss of 13 billion yen (approx. £91 million).

According to the report, "The Company forecasts that actual business results from its Digital Entertainment Segment substantially fall below its plan primarily due to slow sales of major console game titles in North American and European markets." Detailed sales breakdowns aren't available, but while some of the low earnings will be from the Japanese console-only side of the business, no doubt their Western studios, recently responsible for Hitman: Absolution, Sleeping Dogs and Tomb Raider, have also underperformed.

In addition to Wada's resignation, to be replaced by former company president Yosuke Matsuda, Square Enix are also planning a major restructure in "development policy, organizational structure, some business models, and others." What the means in real terms - especially for upcoming projects like Eidos Montreal's Thief - remains to be seen.

Thanks, Polygon.
BioShock™
BioShock Infinite


As it typically does for a major game launch, Nvidia has updated its GeForce card drivers to 314.22 for boosts in performance and stability. It claims recent titans BioShock Infinite and Tomb Raider both get a significant bump in frames-per-second, with the former increasing by 41 percent and the latter by an astonishing 71 percent.

Nvidia's article provides benchmark results and pretty green graph bars to scrutinize. Though the company's test hardware was an Intel i7-3960X and a GTX 680—a beefy setup most definitely on the high-end of priciness—Nvidia says the improvements apply to most other cards in the GTX family.

Other frame gains include an extra 30 percent for Civilization 5, 22 percent for Sniper Elite V2, and 12 percent for Sleeping Dogs. Smaller boosts are given to Batman: Arkham City, Battlefield 3, Borderlands 2, Black Ops 2, and Skyrim. Really, if you're playing nearly any graphics-heavy game from the past few years, and you're a GeForce user, pick up the drivers on the official website or through the useful GeForce Experience tool. It's green across the board.
Dead Space (2008)
pcg port authority


Broken menus, wonky mouse controls, single figure framerates - this is the familiar story of PC gaming prowess held back by consoles. We understand why it happens: console-land was where the majority of sales were, and thus the focus of development. But that reasoning has never seemed, well, reasonable: a trashy console port can knock a chunk off your Metacritic rating, sour a huge potential audience against you forever and lose you loads of sales on a platform that can be extremely lucrative if only you know how to approach it.

It's really not that hard or expensive. After all, a pair of talented modders managed to make Dark Souls' PC version immeasurably better within the space of an evening, and while devs might not want to spend resources making hi-res assets just for PC, there's plenty of really basic stuff that can be done to not totally fuck up a game. Which, given the amount of time, love and money spent on these creations, is surely something that would please the developers and publishers as much as their beleaguered PC audience.

We've thrown together a list of tips, common foibles and fixes - add your own in the comments!

On release, Binary Domain defaulted to gamepad inputs which could only be changed by running a separate settings program. Gnnngggn.

Accessible settings
PC configurations are as many and varied as the gamers that own them. A PC game has to account for this with its range of settings. Have these options accessible in-game, and don't require the player to drop back to the main menu to change them. Definitely don't put them in a separate trainer which forces you to restart the entire damn game. (Hi there, Binary Domain.)

Resolution
For the love of Baal, let us change the resolution. And definitely let us change the resolution before embarking on a lengthy unskippable opening cinematic in enforced default shatto-vision. (I’m looking at you, Max Payne 3 - or trying to, anyway.) Better still, autodetect the native resolution!

Key-bindings
Let us at them. Particularly if, for whatever reason, you've decided to give charge of your keyboard inputs to someone who has never actually seen or used a keyboard before. How do you reach the main menu in Binary Domain? Oh, that’s right, it’s Enter. Of course. Then, when in the menus, you press space to select and F to go back. Obviously, in-game, F is the interact key - except when interact is space. Argh. Incidentally, Enter is not the PC's equivalent of the gamepad's A button - it's the furthest you can get from both hands in normal FPS control mode. So don't make it the compulsory key to dismiss pop-up messages.

Gamepads
Some games are designed for and best suit a gamepad. That's cool. But for games which might easily be controlled by either a gamepad or a traditional PC set-up, please autodetect which system is currently under use. Most games seem pretty good at this now, but there are still some stragglers.

Framerate
Let those framerates soar free into the vast open skies of PC gaming wonderment. Also, let us fiddle with things like V-sync - with the vast array of PC hardware set-ups possible it is unlikely you will have guessed how to best optimise your game's performance for any one PC. Why wreck your hard work with dropped or torn frames when you could just trust players to tweak the game to perfection.

FOV sliders, particularly in singleplayer games, should be a given.

Field of View
PC gamers typically sit closer to their screens than console gamers and this changes the effect of a limited FOV. Unless you are setting out specifically to discomfit and sicken the player, offering the ability to adjust FOV will only make people like you. You do want to be liked, right?

Alt-tab
If your game cannot do this, you are probably going to Hell, where you'll be forced to troubleshoot for irascible Windows ME users for the rest of eternity. Sorry about that.

Menus
PCs typically come equipped with a mouse - the perfect device with which to gaily skip through menus. Please make use of it. Do not make us scroll through a gazillion options when a single click would do. Relatedly, make your menus pay attention to where the cursor actually IS. Console ports, like many carnivorous predators, seem to only sense movement. So you often see the wrong menu option highlighted and have to wiggle the cursor a bit to make it notice where you're actually pointing.

Mouse support
Mice are not thumbsticks. This should be quickly apparent from their different shape. Do not duplicate the analogue stick deadzone with your mouse acceleration. (Got that, Dead Space?) Also do not impose momentum on mouse movements. My world stops spinning when my mouse stops, not a few seconds later, Syndicate. And don't use autotargeting systems based on the assumption that there are 8 degrees in a circle.

Sleeping Dogs was a port done right. It also featured a man urinating into a toilet full of sick. A rare game indeed.

Social media integration
No.

Games for Windows Live
Don’t do it. You may think that we PC gamers object to GfwL because we are a prickly bunch who resent having to install yet another wedge of corporate molestation replete with its own superfluous achievements system, fragmentary friends-lists, cross-promotional guff, easily lost log-in details and so on - particularly when we are already so well served by Steam. All that might be true of Origin or uPlay, but it doesn’t come close to describing the genuine horror of GfwL, which remains one of the most ill-conceived and poorly executed pieces of software it is possible to install on your PC. It’s hideously designed, hugely unergonomic, painfully slow, intrusive and prone to complete failure in every single aspect of its operation. It’s just unbelievably terrible.

DRM
Piracy sucks. We know. However, the solution should never be to periodically lose players' saves, punt them to desktop mid-game or prevent them from playing the game altogether.

Hi-res textures
Now, we’re not asking you to create an entirely new assets pipeline for the PC alone, but in many instances textures are created first at high resolution then scaled down to fit onto the itty-bitty consoles. You can make use of those on PC, you know.

Post-release patches
We salute your ongoing commitment to PC gamers by releasing fixes after launch. But don't leave it until then to make your game playable. Don't leave it until launch day, even. There are good business reasons for this: reviewers will be playing your undercooked code; you'll burn your earliest purchasers and most loyal customers; you'll lose momentum building a community among players (particularly key if your game has an online component); people will be more likely to pirate your game if they think it's not worth the risk of an actual purchase.

Any more? Add them in the comments.
Sleeping Dogs
AMD bundle


Want a free copy of Hitman: Absolution, Far Cry 3 and Sleeping Dogs? As part of its Gaming Evolved program of working with game devs, AMD is bundling up free copies of some of the most exciting titles of the coming holiday season with its current generation of graphics cards. If you buy any AMD card, from any add-in board manufacturer at all, the participating etailer/retailer will include a voucher for a free copy of the relevant games.

Participating etailers are as follows:


Overclockers
DABS
Scan
Aria
CCL
eBuyer
Novatech
DinoPC


Every card will also come with a 20% discount on Medal of Honour: Warfighter. It might not be the first game you'd stretch open your wallet for this holiday season, but that discount looks a bit tastier once you've crossed Far Cry 3 and Hitman off your shopping list.

Here’s a handy chart so you can tell which cards will get you which games. Bless AMD for its ambitious bundling of Hitman: Absolution with CrossFire pairings of its HD 7800 and HD 7700 series of cards.



Sadly, if you’re just buying a single HD 7870 (awesome price/performance right now, people!) then you’re only eligible for the Medal of Brothers in Warfighting Duty discount and a copy of Far Cry 3.

So yeah, free games. Nom. What is almost as nommy though is extra free performance from your existing graphics card. To that end AMD is also pushing out a beta of its latest Catalyst driver, version 12.11 and it’s promising some significant performance gains in a number of titles.

In Battlefield 3 it’s looking at 30-40% improvements over the last 12.8 Catalyst drivers. It claims that these performance improvements are down to the fact that its current range of cards carrying the Graphics Core Next architecture represent a brand new direction for its driver team and it’s still finding different ways to unlock latent potential in the chips themselves.

Still, with AMD’s cards being the top price/performance options out there already any extra speed we can squeeze out of our GPUs is always welcome. I’ll be testing the step up in performance later in the week, so stay tuned!
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