Those lucky subscribers already know because they've heard the pleasing sound of an issue of PC Gamer UK sliding through their letterboxes, but the remainder of you will be delighted to discover that our latest issue hits shelves today. Read on to discover its secrets...


Yes, it might have released back in 2003, but the seminal MMORPG EVE Online has been evolving ever since. We sent Rich to Iceland so he could catch up on the latest from developers CCP. Turns out they’ve been busy and still have a five-year plan of concepts and mechanics that they’re yet to implement. That’s a half a decade of content folks, all deciphered by Rich’s brain, using words.

But don’t fret if you have no interest in space, or MMOs. We still love you. We've got our hands on the most exciting games coming to PC and written hands-on previews just for you: Crysis 2, Total War: Shogun, Guild Wars 2, Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Batman: Arkham City all feature.

Then there's our Game Of The Year Awards. 2010 proved the PC's strength and diversity. We reward PC Gaming's new classics over 18 pages. You might be surprised at some of the choices too.

Onto the reviews; recently described by a reader as “simply astonishing”. This month you’ll get our verdicts on Call of Duty: Black Ops, Need For Speed Hot Pursuit, Deathspank and more.

In our Extra Life section, Jaz searches for a wooden leg in Arcania: Gothic 4, Tom writes a letter to God after taking Supreme Commander to the next level, and Craig feels the true stress of a Football Manager. We take a look back at League Of Legends in Update and suck all the replay value out of Star Trek: 25th Anniversary.

You can buy the magazine and have it delivered with free postage right here, but if you're the kind of person who likes getting things early, for minimum of effort, why not subscribe?

A new update has been updated with a long list of fixes aimed at getting the game to run faster, as well as cleaning up a the connection problems some players are still having.

The patch consists of a long list of technical updates, but the main highlights include performance improvements on dual core systems, and fixes for stuttering that some players were experiencing when loading new sections of a map. There patch also cleans up a number of map glitches and usefully squashes a few exploits like a "fix for infinite supply drop exploit".

The full patch notes are listed on Steam. The game should update itself automatically the next time you play.

If Lego Star Wars, Lego Batman, Lego Indiana Jones and Lego Harry Potter have taught us anything, it's that everything is funnier in Lego. It turns out that Call of Duty: Black Ops is no different. A Lego fan has animated a round of elimination deathmatch, giving us an idea of what a Lego: Black Ops game might look like. You'll find comedy Lego violence embedded below.

For more great call of Duty: Black Ops videos check out our pick of the funniest Black Ops kills, and the excellent Call of Duty: Black Ops Mythbusters video.

Some recent forum posts have revealed Treyarch's plans to fine tune the sniper file and knife attacks, hoping to address complaints that sniper rifles are too weak, and knife lunge is too powerful. The changes will hit in the next Call of Duty: Black Ops update, and you can read about them below.

These are the planned changes for sniper rifles, as announced by Treyarch developer Vahn on the Call of Duty: Black Ops forums:

Increased headshot multipliers for sniper rifles. Sniper rifles with suppressors equipped will now always be ensured one-shot kill headshots.
Subtle increase in sniper rifle accuracy when scoping in.

 
Treyarch caused some controversy when they removed the ability to quickscope with a sniper rifle, and admit that it has weakened the weapon as a choice. Vahn says “we stopped Quick Scoping for the most part. We mostly invalidated a sniper winning a battle with a Shotgun or SMG at close range. This was the goal. However, this has come at a pretty large cost to sniping in general.” Beyond the changes listed above, there are more tweaks planned to fine tune the sway of the scope when aiming, but these will come in later updates.

As for the knife, Vahn had this to say.

“We’ve made some changes to the knife tunables that will be available in the next game update.

We are not currently planning to remove the lunge, make the knife a 2 hit kill in the front, or make you pull it out to use it. These are all good community suggestions that are appropriate for a future game that has a Barebones or Pure version.

That said, after thinking about a bit more, it seemed reasonable that we could do additional (and larger) experiments on the lunge and swipe ranges and see how they play out.”

Fore more Call of Duty: Black Ops goodness, check out the Call of Duty: Black Ops Mythbusters video, and our pick of the eight funniest Call of Duty: Black Ops kills.

Treyarch have posted a huge list of all the issues they're working on fixing in Call of Duty: Black Ops.

The list includes many updates that should improve performance, and fixes a few bugs and holes in the game's multiplayer maps, squashing a few cheeky exploits in the process. There's no mention of exactly when the updates will be implemented, but Treyarch do assure that "there will be many more to come". The full patch list can be found on the Call of Duty: Black Ops forums.

Ever wondered if Care Package helicopters can crash into each other? is it possible to leap over a launched RPG? Can you shoot a Valkyrie missile out of the air? The answer to all these questions and more lie in the excellent Call of Duty Mythbusters video series, embedded below.


The video was made by Defend The House. If you have a Call of Duty: Black Ops myth that you want busted, you can submit suggestions via the comments on their site, or via the Defend the House YouTube Channel. The first collection of myths get put to the test in the video below, with some surprising and spectacular results.



To see what we thought of Call of Duty: Black Ops, check out our review of it.

A few months back, when asked what his one wish would be for his company, Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick said “I would have Call of Duty be an online subscription service tomorrow,” which understandably had gamers worried that Call of Duty's multiplayer modes might come with an added monthly fee in future. Activision have spoken out today to firmly put an end to those rumours.
Speaking to IndustryGamers, Activision CEO Eric Hirshberg said “are we going to be charging for multiplayer? The answer is no,” adding that “the experience you have out of the box, connecting with the online community to play Call of Duty is absolutely integral to the experience and we’ll never charge for that. It’s not going to be something we’ll attempt to monetize; it’s part of the package.”

He continues, saying “there are certainly a lot of behavioral shifts towards long-standing online relationships… But at the end of the day, all I’m trying to get across is I can unequivocally say we will never, ever charge for the multiplayer.”

It would be hard for Activision to deny it more strongly than that. For more Call of Duty multiplayer goodness, check out our pick of the funniest Call of Duty: Black Ops kills, and a guide to the best killing spots in Call of Duty: Black Op's many varied maps.

Tim, Tom and Craig unite to talk about what Tim thinks of Diablo 3 now that he's played it, what the best class is, and how the multiplayer works. We also share our greivances with Black Ops, how Inception would make a good game, and why Spy Party is so terrifying to play.

Download the MP3, subscribe, or find our older podcasts here.

We were less than impressed with Call of Duty: Black Ops, and being hit with bad framerates, stuttering and other glitches didn't exactly improve our mood. Luckily, there are ways of whipping it into shape without having to wait for another patch to come along. Here's our guide to CODBLOPS bliss.




Clean Up Your System
CODBLOPS is a very system intensive game, so before even firing it up, make sure it has as many resources available as you can throw at it. Shut down any apps like BitTorrent, web browsers, instant messaging tools, Skype type tools and music apps - all of these soak up memory and/or bandwidth that CODBLOPS will want to use. If your antivirus software has a Gaming Mode, remember to switch it on before starting the game. It's also worth running the Windows Disk Defragmenter application to make sure your drive is properly organised. Finally, double-check that you're using the latest drivers for your graphics card. If you're using AMD (ATI) drivers, Steam can update them for you. Nvidia users, go here.

If you're only playing the single-player campaign, try running Steam in Offline Mode. For multiplayer, make sure CODBLOPS gets all the bandwidth by right-clicking on 'Call of Duty: Black Ops - Multiplayer' in your Library, selecting Properties, and unticking 'Enable Steam Community In-Game'.
Perfection Through Performance Settings


As tempting as it is to make your PC sweat, if you're having performance issues, it's worth sacrificing a bit of graphical fidelity. The obvious temptation is to lower the resolution, but we'd avoid that unless you absolutely have to. Your monitor is designed to work at a specific resolution, and the performance boost of stepping it down usually isn't worth the loss of picture quality. Instead, tone down the effects. Switch Anti-Aliasing to either 2x or off, turn anisotropic filtering down, and switch Shadows off entirely. These are by far the biggest performance drains. If you need a little more speed, set Texture Filtering to just Bilinear.

Even if you don't plan to play like this (and trust us, it will look hideous), there's a reason to strip things down - to see if there's a more fundamental problem with your system. If not, or once you've fixed it with a later tip, you can crank them back up again and see CODBLOPS the way it was meant to be.
Download This


You can tweak many features via console commands and the built-in settings, but this app from Steam forums user DustinEwan is much easier. Load in your configuration file and the most troublesome graphical effects can be switched off with a single mouse-click. This includes Glow, which shouldn't be a problem for the engine but apparently is, Depth of Field, which blurs the screen past a certain distance and can be a major problem if your graphics card is only just up to running CODBLOPS, and smaller details like whether VSync is on or off. As with all tweaking, it's best to switch one off at a time to see the full effect: we recommend going Glow, Depth of Field, Distortion, then Blur. If nothing helps, it's time to...
Get Your Hands Dirty
When settings screens fail, it's time to go for the nuclear option: the Console. To access this in Multiplayer, fire up the game, go into the Options and activate it under the Game options. Press the ` or ~ key to bring it down and get ready to start tweaking. In Single Player... you're out of luck. For some reason, it's been removed since launch. Hopefully it'll be put back in eventually.

These are all tweaks that people have reported as working for them online, although none of them seem to work for everyone. Try them, see what happens, report your success in the Comments thread below.

/cg_drawfps 1

A good one to enter first. This shows you your FPS count, making it more easier to tell when the various tweaks and console commands you try are actually having a consistent impact.

/stoprecord

Didn't show any improvement on our test rig, but other people claim it helps with the stuttering.

/com_maxfps 100

Locks the maximum FPS rate, hopefully making performance more consistent, if not faster.

/snaps 30
/cl_maxpackets 100
/rate 3000

Determines how many updates are sent to the server.
Any More?
Have you found a tip that helped you out? Still suffering from performance issues even with the graphics dialed back to 1996? Share your problems and solutions in the Comments thread. We'll update this post with the most hopeful ones. If none of them help... there's always hope for a proper patch. Right?

The best bit of Black Ops is its online play, and the worst bit of that is getting shot in the back of the head by someone hiding in a spot you didn't know you could get to. Now that Treyarch have improved the freezes and lag for many of us (it's fine on my machine now), it'd be nice to be the guy doing the back-of-the-head shooting rather than the back-of-the-head getting-shot-in.

Enter redditor Haggle, who's been putting together a great series of clips that show you where to climb, run and jump to get to some of Black Ops' most inaccessible and surprising places. Some of these jumps also show you alternate routes to sniper holes, so you can surprise the camping twat on a ten kill rampage by bursting in through the window and throwing a tomahawk into his spine. Here are the most useful jumps on six maps.

Crisis


Grid


WMD


Cracked


Firing Range


Summit


If these have been any use to you, drop by Haggle's Reddit submission and upvote it. And for anyone who missed it, earlier today we did a round-up of the funniest, silliest and most ridiculous kills people have got in Black Ops so far. God bless Theatre Mode.