Okay, an apology. I used the word "action" in the headline, which may be a little misleading. This is an upcoming multiplayer mod for Euro Truck Simulator 2, after all. At no point does anything explode. Foreign drug dealers don't speed past in convertibles, shooting up the side of each cab with AK47s. We don't even see a heroic figure in a leather jacket jumping between each truck. Instead, a few friends take to the virtual roads of Europe, sharing the perverse sense of belonging that comes with being in a convoy. And sticking to the speed limit.



It's still early in the mod's development, but the eventual plan sounds extremely exciting. Again, exciting is a relative term.

"ETS2MP is an upcoming mod for the game Euro Truck Simulator allowing you to participate in convoys with people from all over the world on our Global Servers! Make new friends as you venture around Europe ensuring that you stick to the time limits or your company might get a fine! Trucking could never be more real with the use of a CB Radio to communicate with the others around you, however don't forget mistakes can cost you! Also within ETS2MP's global servers there will be extra custom maps available for you to drive too such as the 'Meeting Point' created especially for special events."

You can track the mod's progress over at ModDB, or at the ETS2MP site.

And if all that failed to get you in the mood, maybe this will help.

Written by Angus Morrison

For a cathartic two minutes of destruction, SCS Software, developers of Euro Truck Simulator 2, have released a video of cars being dropped from great big cranes. The profits from the Halloween Paint Job Pack have been reinvested, allowing the team to spend a day crashing, smashing and otherwise invalidating their insurance to capture new audio for ETS2. A likely story.



Quite when the new audio will be making it into the game is anyone’s guess, but SCS have hinted that there is more to come. In the coming weeks, the hearty song of a V8 engine might accompany the music of metal.

Thanks, RPS!

Bundles are so 2012. Okay, they're still pretty 2013 too, and the Humble Bundle organisers are planning to run both them and the Weekly Sale offers in future. Now, though, they've expanded their Humble enterprise to include a permanent store front, from which you can buy a selection of indie and indie-ish games. To celebrate the store's launch, they're running a sale that knocks 50-75% off the entirety of the (currently small) catalogue. More deals - and therefore more games - are scheduled to appear over the next few days.

It's an attractive page, and laudable for its clarity - instantly showing you exactly what formats are available for each game. Buying a game works a lot like buying a Humble Bundle, with each purchase providing a link to a page full of download options that can be claimed by your central Humble account. The one difference is that the prices are set, as is the distribution of your cash. 10% of the stores profits go to charity, although currently, the only causes being supported are Child's Play, the EFF, American Red Cross, World Land Trust, and Charity: Water.

Head over to The Humble Store now for a selection of pretty great games at pretty cheap prices. Even better, all prices are in dollars, which - at least for us in the UK - will likely mean a further saving after currency conversion. Personal recommendations from the current crop include The Swapper, Rogue Legacy, and the almighty Euro Truck Simulator 2. I should also praise Gunpoint, but as it was created by our former Section Editor, I am entirely too biased on this. These specific deals will run until 7pm GMT.

Games come either as Steam keys, DRM free downloads, or both, so be sure to check what you're getting if you have a particular beef with either distribution style.

News of a Euro Truck Simulator 2 expansion shipped out a few weeks ago. It took a while to get here, though: arriving on the back of a lorry pocked with dents, it's many fines and tickets flapping about the windscreen. Having played the game, I sympathise. Now that it's here we can delve into info about the game's first DLC, Going East, which adds a number of Eastern European cities to the game.

That means one thing: tanks!



Not playable tanks, of course. Fun fact: tanks are not trucks.

The DLC promises thirteen additional cities, spanning Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia. It's a big increase to the available land mass, even if it would be nice to see some other parts of the game, such as available cargo types, get a boost too.

SCS do suggest that more DLC is planned for the future. "Once this is all done," they write, "the DLC team will be facing the big question - what next? Another territory expansion?" The smiley face afterwards would suggest that yes, that is a safe bet.

The developers previously announced that they're planning to patch Oculus Rift support into the game. Personally, I'm hoping for Razer Hydra support too. Then we'd really get to live a true simulation of the truck driving lifestyle:

Accurate road-rage modelling? Well, I can dream.

Going East will be released on 20th September. If you're not sure why I've dedicated hundreds of words and a silly photoshop to a game about driving on motorways, you should really check out our review.

Steam is a distribution platform that thinks "because it's a Tuesday" is a good reason to cheapen up some games. As such, it's only to be expected that bigger milestones are an excuse for even bigger sales. Reasons like "because it's a Friday," or "because Greenlight is a year old". It's the latter that's cause for some series discounts, with an Anniversary event that flays up to 75% off some titles that have made it through the digital pageant.

Fifty Greenlight titles have been discounted, including great games like Euro Truck Simulator 2, Papers Please, Receiver, Rogue Legacy, Kentucky Route Zero, Surgeon Simulator 2013, and Euro Truck Simulator 2.

Did I mention that you could get Euro Truck Simulator 2 for 66% off? I did? Okay then.

Since its introduction, Greenlight has sparked controversy and criticism, but it's hard not to look at the list and - however grudgingly - admit that it's done some good. There are some genuinely great, and often interesting games being approved, and it's heartening to see them find a home inside Steam. Yes, there's also Dragon's Lair, but I guess there's no accounting for taste.

There are definitely flaws to the system, too, most notably that it isn't very transparent. Other factors are seemingly as important as votes, and the approval process can often appear arbitrary. Even Gabe Newell has spoken critically about the process, although an alternative has yet to surface. Still, with the recent bulk approval of 100 games, it seems the bottleneck is starting to be resolved.

To reminisce on its one year anniversary, has Greenlight had much impact on your Steam purchases?

This week, Cory ruins the space-time continuum by moving playlists to the front of the show, while Evan, Tyler, and T.J. look on in horror. We read some real live listener emails, and discuss the concept of mundanity in games. And yes, we discuss Euro Truck Simulator 2... on a US-based podcast!

Watch everything you thought you knew about reality writhe and die in PC Gamer Podcast 358 - Oh, the Mundanity!

@elahti (Evan Lahti)
@tyler_wilde (Tyler Wilde)
@demiurge (Cory Banks)
@AsaTJ (Grand Moff Hafer)
@belsaas (Erik Belsaas, podcast producer)

The day has finally come my fellow truckers-in-training. After working for months to keep our left turns from wreaking havoc during the morning commute, we’ve finally received a massive update to Euro Truck Simulator 2 that sharpens some of the game’s rougher edges.

Most of the update’s fixes aren’t anything out of the ordinary. You have your optimization of memory pool usage, the game now pauses when you activate the Steam overlay and the animations of some mobility-disabled pedestrians have been fixed.

The update also corrects some things you wouldn’t normally see in a simulation of our world, such as rain pouring through bridges, an incorrect version of the border separating France and Belgium, and a marked lack of tollbooths.

My favorite part of the update, however, is the ability to deactivate the game’s speed limiter in the options menu. I don’t know if this means we can get some European trucks traveling at supersonic speeds, but it would it would certainly be a boon for the shipping industry. Just watch out for those roundabouts. I hear turns can get quite tricky after you’ve broken the sound barrier.

From the god of the simulation genre comes the latest in astounding, lifelike approximations of human endurance. No, I'm not talking about SimCity's infrastructural dramas. You won't be messing around with the direction of poop flow; instead you'll be dealing with drama-riddled matters of urgency, such as cleaning green goo off a factory floor to the satisfaction of health and safety inspectors. Yep—it's Chemical Spillage Simulation!

Chemical Spillage Simulation today appeared in the extensive catalogue of Excalibur Publishing, the same brilliant minds who backed up Euro Truck Simulator 2. You're the newest member of the Special Chemical Disaster Prevention unit—with a fluoro hazard suit, various tools, and even a robot at your disposal, you're going to ensure that livestock within a few hundred miles of the chemical plant never sprout extra limbs. You world-saver, you!

Like its truck-commanding brother, it sounds as though Chemical Spillage Simulation will also be heavily mission-based, with your career propelled through minor chemical clean-ups to battles with radiation and even factory fires.

The chemical spill-thrills are scheduled for a June release, and can be preordered through Excalibur's website.

My most favorite of sims just got even more realistic! We're not talking about toytown SimCity or ArmA 3's eagle-eye tactical simulation here, oh no. We're talking about the most mundane of what life has to offer times a hundred, thanks to the ultra-clarity of an Oculus Rift headset. We're talking about something that's human, dramatic, believable. You guessed it — we're talking about Euro Truck Simulator 2!

The high-scoring goods-delivery sim has been undergoing Oculus Rift experiments the past few days, according to developer SCS Software's blog. "Looking around the cabin freely is incredible," they say. "It almost feels like being in there!"

The blog post insists that the experience can't really be recreated with a screenshot, but I don't know — if you embiggen the above image, cross your eyes, and pretend it's a Magic Eye illusion, you can kind of almost see Doritos crumbs crushed into the seams of the seat cushion. Also, that 3D effect isn't half bad. This is actually a super-cool application of the Oculus Rift, in my opinion—as someone who's been known to mod games to be more realistically boring, I'm pretty excited to hit the country roads with nothing more than myself, a reality-enhancing headset, and a truckful of produce to deliver.

To coincide with IGF, PAX, GDC, OMG and WTF, Steam have slung up one of their impromptu sales, discounting tons of indie games to ensure that our libraries continue to heave under the sheer weight of unplayed games. How nice of them. I hope you've hidden your wallet after last time, because there are some cracking deals to be had, including Super Hexagon, Binding of Isaac and Terraria for silly money.

There's no countdown, so I'm assuming the many games on sale are going to stay the same price until the sale ends on March 29th (the 'Featured' games will likely rotate day by day, without offering any additional savings). There's a lot of games going cheap - more than is evident from the main page - so be sure to poke around for the ones you're interested in. Here are few of the better offers:

FTL - £3.49 (50% off)
Hotline Miami - £3.49 (50% off)
To The Moon - £2.79 (60% off)
Amnesia: The Dark Descent - £3.24 (75% off)
Miasmata - £5.99 (50% off)
Lone Survivor - £3.39 (50% off)
The Blackwell Bundle - £3.74 (75% off)
Retro City Rampage - £3.99 (67% off)
Ultratron, which came out like yesterday - £3.49 (50% off)
Euro Truck Simulator 2 - £12.49 (50% off)