Codemasters have taken Dirt 3 [official site] to the valet service, clearing out almost four years of crisp packets, newspapers, melted ice lolly goop, dried mud, travel sweet tins, and Games for Windows – Live guff. In what turned out not be a hilarious April Fool’s prank, yesterday they released a version of their racing game with GFWL cut out and Steamworks boshed in.

Folks should be able to add GFWL copies to their Steam library, and as a nice bonus everyone who owned it will receive the Complete Edition that includes seven DLC packs.

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Humbly I present to you, our bundle of readers, this week’s Humble Weekly Bundle. It concerns seven games from venerable Brit publisher Codemasters, which are on average Quite Good. Racing! Man-shooting! Very sweary man-shooting! Imp-herding! An ARPG I’ve never played! More racing! More imp-herding! (more…)

UPDATE: Oh dear, turns out to be some mobile thing. BETRAYAL.>

The DIRT and GRID games have all been jolly good, accessible fun, but I know a certain contingent of Metal Box Moving At High Speed fans have long rued Codemasters’ retreat from traditional rally games – specifically the once-ubiquitous Colin McRae Rally series. Looks as though mud’n'hatchback fans might be due to have all their Christmases come at once, as the CEO of Codemasters has announced plans to visit all their houses, tie them to a kitchen chair and force-feed them 85 whole turkeys, 340 roast potatoes and 21 pints of gravy each. After that, he might even confirm that there will indeed be a new McRae Rally game, as today’s viral teasing has heavily implied. (more…)

Mr Craig Lager of GamingDaily fame takes to the podium to present a two-part guide to getting started in – and ultimately mastering – racing games. You can do it!>

“You’re not braking to slow down here, you’re braking to put weight at the front of the car so it’s easier to turn in” – my driving instructor shouts to be heard over the Lotus’s engine. “Pull it in here. No, more! I want to feel it rumbling over the curb”. I’m driving a Lotus Exige around a short circuit at Silverstone – part of a track day I got invited to. Earlier I’d taken a Megane touring car around, and next they were putting me in a Ferrari 430 and at some point on this day, something clicked and I wanted to race cars forever.

I‘ve always liked racing games, sure. I played the popular stuff where you can happily fling a car around a track with the expectation of winning if not on the first go, then at least in a couple of tries – but that day opened my eyes. Racing isn’t about burying the accelerator as much as possible and power-sliding around corners.

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Where can racing games go? How can they push boundaries and the same time provide us with the speed and competition we crave? The genre is already offering some clues about what it might be able to do, aside from improving graphics, realism, or going online, or doing anything else purely technical. The future of racing games is going to depend on designers doing interesting things, and fortunately for us some studios are doing just that.

Let’s take a look… (more…)

News that an eyebrow-raising 3 million Steam activation codes for natty racing title DIRT 3 had been leaked online broke earlier today, and now has an official oh-dear air to it as a result of confirmation from AMD that, yes, the codes were intended for vouchers that shipped with their Radeon graphics cards and yes, a database file containing them was purloined by bad eggs. I’m sure no-one at AMD or DIRT 3 publisher Codemasters is terribly calm right now, but at least it doesn’t appear to be the case that either of their sites or servers were directly hacked. (more…)

What a funny world we live in. A world where $5 DLCs for a PC game must be purchased from their Xbox.com site. It’s a bit of a shame that something like that should be buried there, but the Codemasters.com URL now redirects to Facebook, so I suppose that’s not any more of an appropriate location to sell DLCs for a rather good racing game from, is it?

So what’s the download in question? Why it’s the X Games Asia pack for Dirt 3, a game which I thought was great. Something tells me I won’t be playing this particular set of tracks, however. You can check out if it tantalises your track-buds via the trailer, below.
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According to Codemasters, players have spent 292 years playing Dirt 3, neatly pre-dating the invention of the internal combustion engine. To add on a couple of centuries, here’s the first fully-fledged chunk of content for Codemaster’s superb rally racer, improving on the rather typical showing of extra cars already available. Centring on the Monte Carlo Rally, you can expect snow and tarmac courses through the Alps, changing it up some from faffing around a disused ironworks in Michigan.

The DLC should be available for purchase in the GFWL Marketplace soon is out now for £6.75, and a trailer for Monte Carlo is after the jump.

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Quite a lot of mod news this week, apparently, even though there’s very little for you to actually play. There’s a long-awaited update from Jurrassic Life, as well as plenty of other gubbins related to Half-Life 2, Crysis, Stalker: Clear Sky, Portal 2 and Dirt 3. That’s a lot of games! Read on to find out what’s what.
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Dirt 3 slid neatly into its release spot on Tuesday, before accelerating its way onto my hard-drive. Ah, driving metaphors. That’s enough of those. Let me tell you Wot I Think.>
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