Okay, so it's not the moment you've all been waiting for—that's the full release of GTA 5 PC, and is still two weeks away. It is, however, the moment before the moment you've all been waiting for. After a flood of PC screenshots followed a river of PC screenshots followed a trickle of PC screenshots, it's finally time for the GTA 5 PC trailer.

Well that was exciting. It's GTA V running faster than its ever run before. The game will run at 60 frames-per-second on PC, assuming you've got the hardware to make that happen. Why not check, but taking a look at the PC version's official system requirements.

There's only a few weeks to wait now. GTA 5 PC comes out on April 14, worldwide.

There's a new update for Nosgoth, Square Enix's free-to-play human-vs-vampire PvP battler. This time, the fighting's spread to a new location—the vampire-controlled forges and workshops of The Crucible. It's part gothic, part industrial, and all full of angry people trying to kill you.

Here's a video preview of the new map:

Also in update 4.0, a new skin. The "Evolved Skin" is unlocked for the Deceiver on reaching level 25 with the class. It was designed by Legacy of Kain artist Daniel Cabuco, and looks like this:

Nosgoth is available to play now, for free, in Steam Early Access.

GOG continues to operate as if not being a dick to your customers is a sound business practice. Their new scheme, the "DRM-free initiative," is a small thing right now, but has the potential to become important for those people who want to continue to play the games that they own.

Essentially, owners of any retail, boxed game included in the initiative can 'reclaim' that game; gaining a free copy of GOG's DRM-free version. Right now it's limited to worldwide copies of the STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl, STALKER: Clear Sky and STALKER: Call of Pripyat, as well as Russian copies of Mount & Blade: Warband, Mount & Blade: With Fire and Sword and Eador: Genesis.

To test, I grabbed the GameSpy activation code from my Steam copy of Call of Pripyat and entered it into GOG's new "Reclaim" page. As promised, the DRM-free version was added to my GOG account, complete with the bonus extras. (Although, to be clear, the purpose of the initiative isn't to drive people away from Steam, but rather to help those with boxed copies to ditch the now non-functional Gamespy DRM still present in their retail version.)

"We're doing our best to add more games," writes GOG. "Stay tuned for future updates and announcements as soon as we know more."

We ve teamed up with HP to offer two lucky readers the chance to win one of two HP Omen laptops, worth 1299 by entering the competition below. The HP Omen packs the power of a desktop PC into a laptop, offering a mighty NVIDIA GeForce GTX 860M GPU with 4GB of DDR5 memory, along with 8GB of RAM.

If you re looking to play Alien: Isolation or Dragon Age on long train journeys, the Omen will give you kick-ass performance on the go—the kind you d usually associate with your PC at home. The HP Omen also comes with a high-performance 256GB Solid State Drive, and a shiny 15.6 inch screen to make the games in your Steam library look their very best. You can find out more about this high-end PC at the official site here.

With two HP Omen laptops up for grabs, just answer enter your email address in the box below.

This is a UK-only competition, and as such, entries outside of the UK will not be counted. Full terms and conditions can be found here.

"Bad news," someone at Visceral presumably said to a soon-to-be-crestfallen team of developers, "couch is OP." And there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth, and the nerf was made.

You may remember Hardline's sofa as an Easter egg found on Hotwire mode's Dust Bowl map. It can seat up to four people, and displays the kill message "MERICA" when it drives over other players. Clearly it was doing this a lot, as the game's first patch has now reduced its health and massively decreased its repair rate.

Also in the patch, a number of balance tweaks and bug fixes. You can see the full patch notes below.

Gameplay Changes

• Conquest tickets increased (CQL 999, CQS 600)
• Greatly decreased nearby bullet impact flinch; your aimpoint will not shift from rounds striking the environment near you
• Fixed some issues with FLIR/IRNV 
• RPG reduced to 1 ammo from back of cars, with smaller explosion radius overall thus requiring more skill to use effectively
• TDM friendzones have been adjusted for better spawning
• Rescue / Crosshair exploit where players could skip the round start time by hitting START or ESC has been fixed 
• Couch health reduced and repair rate decreased to a miniscule amount, making the Couch the one-off it was intended 
• Player should no longer Quickmatch into servers with unsupported numbers of players 
• K10: Reduce max damage to 33 and min damage to 8 
• Saiga and PTR: reduce recoil to bring more in line with Cop faction DMRs 
• HCAR and HK51: reduce recoil to bring more in line with SCAR-H and SA-58 
• .410 Jury: Increase damage per pellet to become more effective 
• FMG-9: increase damage per round to 25 and push out falloff start range to make these weapons more effective 
• Battlerifle min damage increased to 25 across the board
• AKM min damage reduced to 24 

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a server crash in Rescue 
• Increased the character limit in the MapList to support up to 150 maps in a rotation 
• You can now set the time limit to 0 and it disables the time limit instead of instantly ending the round in Blood Money 
• Various fixes for server crashes with rental servers (multiple issues addressed) 
• Fix for the timer in Conquest freezing when the user set the time limit higher than 800 
• Fix for MP squad join issue where after the squad leader gets disconnected, a new leader cannot kick members or disband 
• Fix for the patch awarded in released game for reaching Rank 10 in the Beta 
• Fix for Derailed Levolution where players were teleported to origin of Point B and killed in some circumstances 
• Fix for crash if the UI is disabled in the .cfg file 
• Fix for Bloodmoney exploit in HH where players could access the money pile through the floor/roof 
• Fix on XB1 for players using invite/join on friend after Quickmatching 
• Fix for the Uzi's weapon license cost, setting it to the correct value of $50,000 
• Fix for X360 players being unable to invite friends while playing Rescue 
• Fix for a rare crash in the Customize screen 
• All platforms, miscellaneous low frequency crash fixes

Thanks, Eurogamer.

It should be a happy day for Dark Souls 2 fans—that is, if any enthusiastic explorer of a bleak, punishing world can understand a concept like "happy". Dark Souls 2: Scholar of the First Sin is out, bringing DirectX 11 support, new enemy placements, tougher enemies, and new items and armour.

Cool, right? Except all of that costs 20/$30 to upgrade to. ( 12/$20 if you own all the DLC as well.)

Here's the launch trailer:

If you're yet to buy DS2, the new version is a great package. For those looking to upgrade, it's a steep price. Not only that, but saves and other features won't transfer across to the new version.

"Online play, saves and achievements between these two versions are incompatible," explains a note on the Steam page for the original version. "Purchasing one version will not get you access to the other version."

Dark Souls 2: Scholar of the First Sin comes bundled with all three DLC packs. It costs 30/$40 for those not looking to upgrade.

Minecraft is great if you just want to wander around beautifully random procedurally generated worlds, and it s even better if you want to build, say, a meticulous imagining of Middle-earth. It s a notoriously complicated game beneath the surface though, so Future Publishing Australia has just launched the debut issue of The Builder s Guide to Minecraft, a bi-monthly magazine dedicated to the gamechanging phenomenon.

On sale now, the first issue is $8.95 and features everything from advanced mining advice, through to how to tackle the game s subterranean Ender Dragon. Available in all good newsagents as well as Big W and Target, the mag also features collectible posters.

We ve lovingly put together this first issue of the Builder s Guide as huge fans of the game, editor Paul Taylor said. Whether you re starting out or you ve been building since Notch threw the first block out into the ether, there s loads of hints, tips and guides to improve your game.

The Builder s Guide to Minecraft is out now.

As Tyler and I recently "argued", there are a lot of new survival games out there in Early Access. Most aren't great, and in their not-yet-finished states are often buggy affairs with a lot of missing parts. Still, there's usually some enjoyment to be found in even the earliest of Early Access survival games, be it a couple of enjoyable features, some interesting ideas, or perhaps just some entertaining activities, such as bashing yourself in the face with a rock you keep holstered in your own butt.

Asteroids: Outpost, another Early Access survival FPS, doesn't seem to have any of those bright spots lurking amongst its space rubble. After finding a server and picking a spot for a base, you're tasked with gathering ore, which comes from the constant barrage of very, very slowly falling meteorites. In fact, I'm not sure barrage is the right word. Do you typically have to wait for a barrage?

Your base has a turret, which auto-fires to keep these meteorites from destroying your new home, but a meteorite shot by an auto-turret does not produce ore. Nor is ore produced by a meteorite that is allowed to crash to the ground. Ore is only produced by you manually firing your turret. So, that's what you do. You sit in your turret and shoot dozens and dozens of meteorites as they slowly tumble from the sky.

You're not done shooting rocks! To gather the ore, you leave your base, run to the chunks of ore you've shot down, and shoot them again, this time with one of two mining guns. These guns run out of ammo quickly, and you run out of oxygen quickly, so you have to make several trips back to your base to recharge.

Once you've shot rocks and then shot them again, and then gone back and shot more rocks and then shot more rocks again, you can build new prefabricated modules for your station. You can also visit the Ore Exchange terminal in your base, which sounds like a place to sell the types of ore you don't need and buy the types of ore you do need. It's not, though: you can only sell ore, and use the resulting cash to upgrade your spacesuit or vehicle. So, if you need 550 iron ore, you're gonna have to shoot it all yourself, even if you have a ton of gold ore you don't need.

What else is there to do? Well, I visited someone else's base. They weren't home, and even though their force field door did nothing to stop me from entering their base, I couldn't recharge my oxygen so I suffocated in there. I also died from being hit on the head by a meteorite. And, I spent a good long while trying to collect enough ore for a vehicle pad, so I could drive a car around.

Unfortunately, Asteroids: Outpost completely crashes when you alt-tab out, which I kept doing because I do that a lot, and I kept forgetting not to. Also, I was trying to repair my base with a repair tool and wound up deleting part of it, and when I tried to replace it, instead of walls it just had orange sparkles.

Then I thought... you know what? If I have to shoot any more rocks and then shoot them again, I think I'm going to cry. Then I quit. Well, I tried to. I probably should have just alt-tabbed.

Such was the demand for our previous Heroes of the Storm beta giveaway, that Blizzard has kindly offered us an additional 1500 keys for Australian readers. The process is the same as last time: provide your email in the widget below, and if you're successful you'll get an email this coming Tuesday (7/4) with your beta key. 

The key is activated in Battle.net, so if you don't already have an account you'd best be setting one up. To reiterate, the key will only work for Australian and New Zealand residents.

While you wait, check out this recent PAX interview with Heroes of the Storm game director Dustin Browder, or peruse this idiots guide.

Arma 3 just got real. More realer. Incrementally more realismistic than it was just hours ago.

Three prominent Arma 3 modding teams are merging to create the next iteration of Advanced Combat Environment, ACE3, a close-to-comprehensive rework of Arma 3 s systems and features. ACE has been a mainstay of hardcore Arma for years, it s essentially the platform that groups like Shack Tactical use as the foundation for their serious fun style of play.

I asked ShackTac founder Dslyecxi what excited him about the ACE3 announcement, and he rattled off: Consolidation of talent, open-source, modular, top devs, that sort of thing. I have confidence they'll deliver a quality product. Given the history of stuff like Black Mesa, any uber-ambitious modding project gives us a bit of pause even as we applaud its lofty goals. ACE s track record is excellent, though. And despite the long feature list, the way its announcement is tempered with focus is encouraging. We are devoted to NOT reinventing the wheel, finding the best solutions, and bringing them to one place, while also fostering a development environment that promotes stability and performance, developer NouberNou writes on the Arma 3 official forums.

Noubernou says that ACE3 s initial release goals will be made playable following Bohemia s release of the Arma 3 Marksmen DLC. Below, a list of planned features from the team.

Core features

• Completely new 3D Interaction/Action System
• Performance and reliability framework
• Focus on modularity and customization
• New flexible client and server settings & configuration
• Improved medical system with various levels (Basic/Advanced) focus on gameplay/realism
• Proper & consistent network synced weather
• Wind and Weather Advanced Ballistics
• Captivity System
• Explosives System including different trigger types
• Map screen improvements, marker placement and map tools
• Advanced missile guidance and laser designation

Additional features

• Carrying and dragging
• Realistic names for vehicles and weapons
• Realistic ballistics/FCS calculated in C/C++ extensions
• Backblast and overpressure simulation
• A fire control system for armored vehicles and helicopters
• Disposable launchers
• Realistic G-forces
• Vehicle Locking
• Realistic Night and Thermal vision modes
• Magazine repacking
• Realistic weapon heating
• Combat deafness simulation
• Improved Ragdoll Physics
• Improved interactions for AARs and ammo bearers
• Adjustable sniper scopes
• No Idle Animation with lowered weapon
• No talking player Avatar
• Jumping over obstacles, climbing over walls and cutting down fences
• Vector, MicroDAGR and Kestrel devices