Auto Club Revolution is a new free to play racing sim aimed at car lovers interested in "owning, customising, driving, racing, and most importantly, enjoying cars online." It's being handled by verteran dev Eutechnyx, who have been making racing games for the past 14 years. They say that the game will include "single player and multiplayer modes, drafting (slipstreaming), drifting, a fully-featured HUD, a suite of assists and much more."

The closed beta will kick off later this month. You can sign up here. More details and screenshots follow.

On the beta itself, Product Manager Jason Collins said "we’ll be inviting more people in gradually, so if you’ve joined the waiting list but don’t receive a key straight away don’t worry, as everyone who registers their interest will get a chance to join testing well before the start of open beta.”

Auto Club Revolution will let players tune and upgrade their cars and test them in single player time trials and leaderboards. There's also a 'fair play' system designed to warn and penalise griefers. Find out more about the game on the Auto Club Revolution site. It looks a little bit like this:

Previously we brought you the news that League of Legends will be dividing its European servers into EU West, and EU East and Nordic blocks. This decision has caused some controversy (and a lot of Cold War jokes) from European fans of the game, upset that they will be unable to play with their friends across the East/West divide. Speaking to Eurogamer, Riot Games defended their decision.

"Extensive research" was done into at least "a dozen" alternatives before the decision was made, said the developer. They admit that "this is not a perfect solution," but say it's "by far the best way to offer a consistently stable service and a great player experience in a short time frame."

Mirko Gozzo, managing director of Riot Games Dublin office spoke about the thinking behind the split: "Before making this decision we took a very hard look at how people were making friends playing League of Legends. From our research – and this was very surprising to us – statistically, Scandinavian summoners have more friends in Eastern Europe. We considered a wide variety of scenarios when planning for this split, and this was the solution that preserved the greatest number of friend connections in Europe."

When asked about whether the smaller servers would result in more people speaking their own language, Gozzo responded: "Actually, if you’re having a look at the split, we have more than ten different countries in each platform. There is no real reason for people to start speaking only their own language during matches from one day to the other if they’re playing with summoners from another country. We really believe the same existing pattern will apply after the split: players will ask what nationalities you’re from, and will adapt based on that. Of course, if you, as a Polish person, join a team with other Polish players, you’ll probably speak Polish!"

Riot games have also offered one free server transfer to anyone who would prefer to play on the other side of the border.

If you really want to perform surgery without a licence, grab some sharp kitchen knives, a soundproofed cellar and a lot of chloroform. A life sentence is preferable to the medical malpractice of this terrible surgery sim.

There’s no story: just ailments, like a broken leg or tonsils, for you to mechanically slice and dice. Operating is just clicking, pointing and dragging as instructed by your frankly impertinent assistant. She barks an order at you for every action, from the hernia repair to the appendectomy. It makes it not only pretty impossible to mess up, but conversely hard to experiment and have some fun. She won’t even let you carve ‘I heart knives’ into your patient’s stomach, or make intestine balloon animals. It’s all forceps and disinfectant, spray and clamps.



Funnily enough she’s not very helpful about the trickiest bit: fiddling with your patients’ drip and anaesthesia to keep them from crashing and ruining all your hard work. Maybe if I just repeated the tedious tutorial on that particular topic to the patient they’d go numb and pass out from sheer boredom?

Once you learn to manage the vital signs, cutting people open and sewing them up again turns out to be sort of satisfying, even if all you have to do is drag and click. There’s a ghoulish delight to pulling out a varicose vein like a bit of red spaghetti, and performing the cataract operation is more upsetting than any horror game in the past five years. But just as I was starting to think I had judged this too harshly, it flat-lined. A mere eight operations means this is over in an hour. It’s more Holby City than ER.

Sometimes a trailer can make you want to jump right in and explore the world. This video of the Andoran mod for Oblivion, spotted by Redditor SolInvictus, is one of those trailers. The voiceover is in Russian, but you don't have to speak the language to see what the modders are going for. It's a darker, grittier take on Oblivion with new cities, factions and creatures. The remarkable new architecture and strange environments have a whiff of Morrowind about them, but the engine upgrades make it look more like Skyrim.

The Andoran mod site is down for now, so it's hard to get hold of precise details, but we'll provide a link and more info as soon as it's available. Viewed alongside yesterday's amazing GTA IV overhaul, it's been a good week so far for ambitious mods.

Word reaches us from RPS that Twisted Pixel’s upcoming Xbox Live title, Ms. Splosion Man may be on its way to PC. RPS say that it appeared very briefly as a listing on Steam, but was swiftly pulled and replaced with the less explosive “ValveTestApp105420.”

Ms. Splosion Man is a platformer in which you get around by blowing yourself up. Nearby enemies are eradicated by the explosions and the percussive force of each blast can propel you to otherwise unreachable ledges. The follow up to Splosion Man will now let you fire your exploding character out of exploding cannons to maximise the amount of explosions you'll be causing per second. Unlike the first game, there will be levels set outside of the laboratory in which Splosion Man and Ms. Splosion Man were created.

Twisted Pixel’s first release, The Maw, was released on the PC along with Microsoft’s big black box, since then their games have only been released via Xbox Live. It would be great to see Twisted Pixel return to releasing on the PC, and Ms. Splosion Man could be a good way to return to the fold.

CVG have noticed that the official Gamescom website lists Valve in the strategy section. This very strongly suggests that we'll see DOTA2 in Cologne next month as the Dota follow-up is the only strategy game Valve are known to be working on at the moment. We anticipated this when we first heard Valve would be attending the show, but it's still very exciting. We'll get to see whether the recently leaked DOTA 2 patch notes are correct.

Of course it's possible that Valve aren't showing off DOTA 2, but instead revealing a mystery strategy game, but that seems unlikely. Whatever they're showing though it's definitely not going to be Half Life: Episode 3, not that that ever stops the perpetual rumours.

4X galaxy conquering game Star Ruler now has a demo available ahead of its upcoming September retail release. Star Ruler has a procedurally generated 3D galaxy that can spawn up to 10,000 star systems into your game. With numerous research and diplomatic routes at your disposal, there are nearly limitless possibilites to explore. Just be careful not to go space-mad.

Upon the release of the retail version, Blind Mind are planning a massive update that will add new features for owners of the digital version of the game. You can grab the demo from the here. The game's currently available on Steam, too, and is currently on sale at 66% off.

With the Fifa 11 'season' winding down in preparation for Fifa 12 EA sports have put up some of their favourite user uploaded goals of the game. As we told you before EA claim Fifa 12 will get the full list of features on PC next year, so we look forward to seeing a lot more of these coming from PC gamers.

The first English language demo of ‘eco-thriller adventure’ game A New Beginning has been made available. From German developers Daedalic Entertainment, A New Beginning puts you in the shoes of Fay, one of small group of humans left alive on Earth in the year 2500. With the planet ravaged by climate change Fay is sent back in time to try to steer humanity from a path to disaster.

The demo features the prologue and parts of the first chapter of the game. The point and click adventure game picked up three trophies at the German Developer Awards, including Best Story and Best Soundtrack. You can download the demo from Strategy Informer or Worth Playing.

Whoever said games can’t teach us anything about the environment clearly hasn’t played this.

According to the latest Old Republic trailer, picked up by CVG, Bounty Hunters train by standing in a great big circle and shooting each other with deadly, deadly rockets. The video above shows the progression of the class through its two branching subclasses, the Powertech and the Mercenary. Both are able to unleash heavy ordenance, and the Mercenary appears to KO a Rancor-sized creature by flying up to it in a jetpack and punching it on the nose. Who'd be a boring old Jedi after seeing that? We recently spent 17 hours with a Bounty Hunter, he was not a great conversationalist. For more, check out our Star Wars: The Old Republic impressions from this year's E3 conference.