Bohemia Interactive are launching this year's community awards to reward the best and brightest modders for its military sims, ARMA and ARMA 2, including Operation Arrowhead and other expansions. If you've enjoyed playing the missions and mods offered up by the ARMA community, here's your chance to vote for the best.

Voting is now open and you can make your nominations on the official ARMA 2 site. Voting will close on January 31st and the winners will be announced in March. Here are the categories you can vote for.

Best MOD/Addon Of The Year 2010
Best Mission/Campaign Of The Year 2010
Best Website Of The Year 2010
Best Member Of The Year 2010
Best Video Of The Year 2010

 
For more on ARMA 2, check out our review of the latest expansion, Private Military Company, or see Evan take out a tank with a sniper rifle.

Stardock today announced that they have hired Jon Shafer, the Lead Designer on Civilization V, and that he will be working on saving the troubled Elemental: War of Magic before starting up his own project within the company. Stardock have also hired fantasy and science fiction author Dave Stern to work on storytelling across all of Stardock's games.

Jon Shafer recently parted ways with Firaxis after finishing work on Civilization V, and will be joining Stardock to help out with the game's rehabilitiation and future expansions. After that he's set to start his own stand alone project, of which no details have yet been announced.

Dave Stern may be familiar to many as the author of several Star Trek books, and the man behind novelisations of Tomb Raider and the Blair Witch Project. He'll be casting a writer's eye over the storytelling in Stardock's projects, starting with Elemental: War of Magic

This is pretty great news for Elemental, which recently received it's first major update since launch, and is still being heavily worked on behind the scenes as Stardock try and overcome the game's disappointing release. For more information check out our Elemental: War of Magic review, and our updated impressions collected after patch 1.1.

Cops and robbers MMO APB is due to be reborn this year as a free to play title at the hands of GamersFirst, who bought the game from the ailing Realtime Worlds last year. They've just announced that a closed beta for APB: Reloaded will be kicking off in February.

The announcements were made on the APB: Reloaded Twitter feed, and revealed that the closed beta for the game is just weeks away. A further message promised that details on how to enter the beta will be released later on this week. We'll let you know the details as soon as they're posted.

For more on GamersFirst's plans to relaunch APB, check out our interview with GamersFirst CTO and COO Bjorn Book-Larsson, or check out the official APB reloaded blog for news on how the relaunch is progressing.

When I first started playing Minecraft a few months ago, I played with a rule: if I die, I have to delete the entire world. Now I'm trying to get to hell and back. The diary starts here, and new entries currently go up weekly on Wednesdays.


< Day 18


Day 20 >

 
World 10, deaths 9



In case merely being in hell was too pleasant, I am in a pit, in a sea of lava, in hell. I got to this island by walking backwards into thin air and laying a bridge beneath me as I went, but the floating Ghasts of this dimension smashed it with fireballs and knocked me off. The stretch I've got to cross to get to dry land is even bigger than the one that nearly killed me, so I poke a hole through the rock to check just how big, and do some risk analysis in my head.



No.

That's what my calculations come out as. I'm not doing it. It's a miracle I made it to this halfway house without dying. Now that I know how dangerous bridge-moonwalking actually is with this many flying jellyfish around, the prospect of doing it for even longer with no safe haven between here and dry land is just stupid. I'll just take one of my, er, other options.

I can't dig any further down, because I'll hit the lava sea. I can't build up, because I'm surrounded by Ghasts and there's nowhere safe to go on this island. I can't go across because it would mean bridge moonwalking under fire again.

But wait - maybe I can go up? The nether world is a giant cave, and the roof is made of diggable rock. Building a vertical column beneath your feet is much faster than constructing a bridge as you walk, and once I hit the roof I could dig into it to hide from the Ghasts.



It didn't sound like history's sanest idea, but there wasn't a safer option. I dug around my little pit, hollowing out the small island I was on to gather as much rock as possible to slap down beneath my feet as I went. Then... well, whatever its flaws, my plan wasn't complex. Jump up, look down, place blocks.

The moment I hit open air, the Ghasts scream. It sounds like a pet shop going through a meatgrinder. By the time I've placed five blocks, the first four are obliterated by a fireball smashing into the ground where I started. At ten metres, I lose metres six through nine. I'm fifteen metres up when a shot hits the ground I'm actually standing on, sending me plummeting back to the tenth with a jolt. That's where I am when the first one hits me in the face.

The whole column is gone now, and it couldn't save me if it wasn't - the blast knocks me clean off it and slamming back down to the island. I scramble around the dark rock looking for my hole to hide in, and catch the edge of another blast. I don't have time to look, I break my cardinal rule and dig directly down. The ground gives way, and I drop into the large cave I dug out when I was collecting rock.

I'm almost dead, and my only hope of escape just got demolished. Hope you guys had a good new year, because I spent it in a pit eating ham and crying.

Next: I take the only way out.

A humorous discovery: as it turns out, some of those hyper-literal descriptions of objectionable content that the ESRB publishes about the games it's rating are ridiculous. Logan's tweet yesterday sparked a minor meme in the office, during which we compiled a list of the oddest blurbs-about-bad-stuff penned by the ESRB. If you've found any others, do share.

Don't get me wrong--we're glad to have an independent, non-tyrannical body rating our games--it's just silly to read someone describe your outfit in Mass Effect 2 as a "future-blouse" when the lore-nerd in us wants to utter the word "Clearly..." while re-centering our glasses on our nose and correcting them for using a non-canonical term.



“In one scene, Nancy Drew is threatened at gunpoint and pistol whipped by a man.”
Nancy Drew: Secrets Can Kill

“Story elements are told through video clips that can include women in outfits exposing their cleavage. Dialogue contains mild profanity (e.g., "hell" and "bastards" ) as well as derogatory remarks towards Russian troops.”
Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3

“Players engage in quests to gain experience and skills, and use axes, swords, guns to battle enemies in frenetic hand-to-hand combat. Characters grunt or cry out in pain when hit, and collapse to the ground when defeated. Some missions require villains to fight police officers to advance the storyline.”
DC Universe Online

“Some characters are depicted in a suggestive manner: a reptilian female with four breasts exposes deep cleavage; a humanoid with black squares running across her chest is strewn on the ground; and a hermaphrodite character nurses an eager baby by squeezing a breast-shaped pouch.”
Zeno Clash

“In some scenes, the agent draws his gun and fires at some gnomes; however, the gnomes are magical and are not harmed.”
Puzzle Agent

“…The central characters also beat up elves off screen amid the sound of screaming. In a couple of scenes, blood is briefly depicted: characters find a note written in blood; an elf-vampire hiccups as a drop of blood falls from its mouth."
Sam & Max: The Devil’s Playhouse - Episode 2: The Tomb of Sammun-Mak

"Certain species occasionally throw-up food."
Spore

"Players' soldiers use machine guns, grenades, mobile tanks, lasers, and aircraft to kill enemy units. Artillery fire is depicted with realistic sound effects, including battle cries and yells from injured characters; explosions occur frequently, and can be large and detailed. Aliens and soldiers are sometimes depicted bursting into small splashes of blood; gibbing effects and small body parts can also be seen strewn on battlefields; and a few cutscenes may depict small pools of blood around characters, or alien blood spurting across the screen."
StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty

"One mission requires players to steal a bag of weed from a specific location and give it to a character who replies, 'you high as a kite or what?'"
Far Cry 2

"The dialogue contains numerous jokes and comments that reference sexual acts, venereal diseases, and having sex with one's mother."
Bulletstorm

"Dialogue between various characters references suicidal houseplants, bed-wetting, nose-picking, and current affairs in 'Poopslavkia.'"
Strong Bad Episode 2: Strong Badia the Free

"As players groom, play with, and ride their horses, they can progress through a storyline that contains speculation about a secret romance."
Riding Academy 2

"Players can also choose to have 'romantic encounters' with the alien/human henchmen characters; this involves watching a guided cutscene in which two characters flirt, kiss, and/or embrace: clothed alien/human characters may prop a partner on top of a space console, clear away the clutter from a bed-slab, unzip a future-blouse, or just talk it out."
Mass Effect 2

"The game includes several references to alcohol and sexual behavior; for example, 'This man's appetite for wine, women and song know few bounds,' 'If a man wakes up with a hangover and the memory of a warm woman, it may ease the shock of joining the army,' and 'Sodomy: never, Sir, and damn your eyes!' Other text-based references include 'Pickled in Rum,' 'Gin-soaked Reprobate,' and 'I am drunk.' The game contains several references to 'whores' and 'harlots,' and includes a soldier's remark about 'a man who knows how to shoot his load' on the battlefield."
Napoleon: Total War

"One cutscene depicts a man and a woman wearing translucent, flesh-toned bodysuits as they flee from danger. The digitized lighting effects, the glow from their futuristic suits, obscure most of the details, though outlines of breasts and buttocks are partially discernable (i.e., not definitively nudity)."
Assassin’s Creed 2

"During the course of the game, players will encounter male and female prostitutes: the screen fades to black as suggestive dialogue is heard in the background (e.g., 'Nice charlies, too! Give them a shake for the Ben-man, will ya?'); there is also an extended sequence suggesting (no depiction) sexual activity with a robot.'"
Fallout: New Vegas

"A girl stomps and dances on a character named Dr. Fetus, causing puffs of blood to appear. The game also contains an instance of bathroom humor: after a toilet gets flushed, a brown character, Brownie, emerges and emits flatulence."
Super Meat Boy

"The sound of laser gunfire is prominent; characters stagger back when hit, then lie face down when defeated (though some characters get right back up and others disappear after a short period)…players are able to adjust the bust size of certain female characters to exaggerated proportions. Dialogue/text may also contain mildy suggestive phrases such as 'I'll be your guide to . . . pleasures of the body' and "the pleasure goddess of Rixx.'"
Star Trek Online

"Character dialogue covers a wide range of topics and can include references to suggestive behavior (e.g., 'he beds her stable boys and anyone else she can lay hands on while her husband is away,' 'leaving a string of love-sick women and cuckolded husbands in my wake,' and 'my prowess in the art of the bedchamber, in which I must confess a modest degree of skill.')."
Mount & Blade: Warband

"Players are occasionally required to identify and track traces of whiskey/tobacco."
Batman: Arkham Asylum

“…During one lengthy scene, Wallace’s tea bag accidentally lands on his female neighbor’s chest, resulting in an awkward exchange about where the tea bag is…”
Wallace & Gromit Episode 1: Fright of the Bumble Bees (Thanks, Capt`n Gin-o-Cola.)

Who's hungry for some juicy meat? We've got three Steam download keys for Team Meat's hilariously difficult, Editor's Choice award-winning platformer Super Meat Boy to hand out to carnivorous gamers. Click the grinning meat to find out how to win!

Update: Contest over! Congratulations to Leo Holland, Tom Johnson and Philip Flick, and thanks to everybody for entering.




Just send us an email at Contests@pcgamer.com with "Juicy Meat" in the subject line (one entry per person). We'll randomly draw winners at 5pm Pacific time (GMT-8) today!

Call of Duty: Black Ops has been torrented more than four million times, easily enough to make it the most pirated game of 2010 ahead of runners up Battlefield: Bad Company 2 and Mafia 2.

TorrentFreak made the announcement, gathering the figures from public BitTorrent trackers to create a list of the top five most pirated PC games of the year. The list is as follows.

1. Call of Duty: Black Ops - 4 270 000
2. Battlefield: Bad Company 2 - 3 960 000
3. Mafia 2 - 3 5550 000
4. Mass Effect 2 - 3 240 000
5. Starcraft 2 - 3 120 000

 
Call of Duty: Black Ops takes the dubious honour of following last year's most torrented game, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. TorrentFreak report that piracy numbers are up slightly from last year's front runners. The Call of Duty: Black Ops piracy figures are still dwarfed by the game's success at retail, with Activision having announced that they've already made one billion dollars from worldwide sales.

Ever since Microsoft showed their motion sensing controller that lets you use your body to control games, many of us entertained ideas of a Minority Report style future in which we could command our operating systems with casual flaps of our hands, or use frantic waves to martial troops in a strategy game. What we got was a tiger stroking game and some dancing.

Thankfully it wasn't long before hackers had cracked the system and started adapting it to work on the PC. The latest hack adds motion support to Ubisoft's recent strategy game, RUSE. below you'll find a video of the technology in action

As brilliant as this is, it still doesn't look as efficient as a mouse, but the precision with which the player's movements are tracked is pretty impressive. Would you play a strategy game using Kinect?

A recent update to the Team Fortress 2 beta gives players the ability to test out their weapons they've created for the game as Valve reveal plans to introduce more tools that will make it easier for players to contribute their own items.

User contributed items and weapons have made up a significant amount of the new items that have been added to TF2 over the past few months. Most notably, the Polycount Pack added a host of items and earned community members a nice wad of cash. Understandably, many players have been hoping to replicate their success. Many are hard at work creating their own items for the game, but have been forced to resort to hacks and workarounds in order to see their items in action. With some help from the recently added AI controlled bots, Valve have introduced map that will let players test their new models.

Full details on how the new system can be found on the Team Fortress 2 blog. Valve also mention that they're planning to release more tools in future to make creating new weapons easier. For more information on creating and submitting new items, check out the official Team Fortress 2 Contribute! page.

Indiana Jones and the Fountain of Youth is a fan made Indiana Jones adventure game inspired by the Lucasarts classic, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. The game features new artwork, it's own soundtrack and a new adventure in which Indie must get his hands on the elusive fountain before the Nazis. If you fancy some classic retro adventure gaming an updated version of the demo has just been released. Read on for more details.

The trial can be downloaded now from the Indiana Jones and the Fountain of Youth site. The demo sends Indie to the tropical island of Bimini as he picks up the trail of the fountain. The game was made entirely using the free Adventure Game Studio software, and was created by a team of nine Fate of Atlantis fans, who started the project in 2003 and are still working hard on getting the whole game finished. Hopefully they'll be finished sooner rather than later, a brand new Indiana Jones adventure game can only be a good thing.