When that controversial Modern Warfare 3 scene was leaked, I was less offended by the subject matter and more obsessed with counting the number of black cabs and red buses crammed into the brief scene. Now Games Radar have gone one further, meticulously categorising the huge volume of stereotypical British markers present in the picture. Did you spot them all readers? Play along at home.

Check inside for a flag waving, patriotic collection of PC Gaming news.


Product reviews talk about Modern Warfare 3's tactical nuke replacement. It doesn't end the game, but it does kill the entire enemy team and give you double xp.
Introversion talk to RockPaperShotgun about what happened to Subversion.
Bohemia Interactive talk to VG247 about their FADE anti-piracy tech.
Massively say The Old Republic is sending out a new wave of beta invites.
VG247 say 1 million characters have been created on the Saints Row 3 initiation station.

 
Well, fess up readers, how many did you get?

On the surface it looks like not much has changed in the yearly updated world of Pro Evolution Soccer, but a lack of big new tournaments or flashy features masks the huge work that’s gone into improving the football itself.

After the rigmarole of picking a team (mostly unlicensed, so you get the real Manchester United, but Aston Villa are West Midlands Village) you’re on the pitch, ready to guide your team to victory.

Attacking players have more of a pulse this year. Instead of tottering level with the ball carrier waiting to be marked out, they’re far more inclined to take a run behind enemy lines, dashing down the wings and even making the occasional slanted run in the middle of the pitch.



Gone are the days when you’d stand outside the opposition’s box with one foot on the ball, shouting at your men to sodding do something, only to be kneecapped by the sliding boot of a defender moments later. If your men are starting to loiter, you can command one to start running with a quick point and click of the right stick (play with a joypad, people!). It’s an essential move that bypasses occasional AI lethargy and gives you much more precise control.

But all that new attacking movement can leave defenders stuck in the mud. For the most part they’re sensible, but their refusal to dive in for a necessary crunching tackle means that a pressing team can get away with too much. On one occasion a simple clearance from a corner reached my pacey young striker, Gabby Agbonlahor. I’d caught the opposition on the counterattack and Gabby had the entire pitch to run into. The two Liverpool central defenders had taken up sensible positions, and dutifully dashed in to sandwich my lone striker as he powered towards the box. They ran alongside him for a full ten metres without delivering so much as a shifty elbow. I scored an easy goal when I should have ended up in the dirt at the halfway line.



No surprise, then, that matches in PES 2012 tend to be high-scoring affairs, but it’s forgivable given how much better the football feels this time around. Everything is faster and more precise. While FIFA’s trick stick has players performing ever more convoluted manoeuvres, PES is about passing and team movement. Matches are far more lively and competitive as a result.

It would be wrong to point to one big factor as the reason behind PES’s revival. It’s the result of a number of incremental improvements on the pitch. Players are more responsive on the ball, a tricky attacker feels different to a lumbering defender, the animations are more convincing, the crowds noisier and attacking play is enormously improved.

PES still struggles to offer anything its monolithic competitor FIFA can’t do with more polish, but 2012 is an incisive diagonal run in the right direction. If only the defenders were a little braver.

A massive parcel arrived at PC game HQ recently. What could it contain? Why only a glorious angel man figure from Might and Magic Heroes VI! (It's the one on the left) This lovingly modelled figurine of the Archangel Micheal will make the perfect nerdy centrepiece for your mantle. You can see a little bit more about it on the Might and Magic Heroes VI website.

Would you like to win this magnificent statue readers? Check inside for details of how to win.

Here's a closer look, without Rich's incessant photobombing.



I've been enjoying the game design challenges in previous competitions, so here's another.

Design me a game about angels. It can be any genre or theme, so long as it involves angels in some way, however minor.

The funniest, cleverest, most creative or just which ever one I like most will receive this tiny winged man in the post. Winners will be chosen on friday, keep an eye on this week's winners to see if you've won. This competition is open to European readers only I'm afraid.

Good luck everyone!

There are two instances in which you’re likely to see a footballer somersault on the pitch. The first is if he’s scored a goal and communicates his joy through the medium of gymnastics, the second is if his legs have just been taken out by a defender and he communicates that he no longer has the ball through the medium of flying and screaming. Both instances are simulated spectacularly in FIFA 12.

For the first time in many seasons, this year’s edition of FIFA on PC is identical to its console cousins – the same engine, animations and online modes that console players have come to expect, as well as the new defensive controls and an ‘Impact Engine’ designed to render player collisions with devastating accuracy.

The Impact Engine is great, mostly. When players collide, either in a tackle or a shoulder-to-shoulder tussle for the ball, the procedural physics system will take into account both players’ physiques and simulate the precise result. In big tackles, this means sprawling falls, in possession battles it leads to some slightly cuddly wrestling, and in mismatches the smaller man is comically flattened.



It simulates the physicality of the sport with more realism than any other football game before it, but can occasionally be a bit too exuberant. Players off the ball who accidentally cross paths can find themselves locked in a panicky tumble of limbs. Watching footballers fall over is inherently funny, though, and the layer of unpredictability the Impact Engine adds is well worth the occasional mad moment.

The defensive overhaul is more controversial. Defenders can now ‘jockey’ attacking players, strafing in front of them with a wide stance waiting for the right moment to tackle. Most defensive encounters are about standing off the opponent, shielding areas of the pitch and blocking sneaky through balls. This is what defending is like in real football, of course, but it’s a change of pace from the close harassment and tackles of FIFA’s previous years.

This will likely prove unpopular with some players, but if you’re looking for an accurate simulation of the sometimes ponderous ebb and flow of a real football match, then FIFA 12 comes close. Occasionally teams will mark each other into oblivion, and there will be nil-nil draws – but that’s the game, and breaking through and scoring that elusive goal can feel more difficult than ever in the face of an organised and patient defence.



Until now, football games have simulated a kind of hyper-football, packed full of overhead kicks, snaking runs and raking tackles. FIFA 12 makes the brave decision to slow the game down and bring the action closer to the real sport.

It’s all the more annoying, then, to come across the small but infuriating problems that have dogged FIFA for years. A running player can be so happy to be selected that they drop off the pace – a calamity if they’re shadowing a flying striker on the way into the box. Player selection in general can still be a bit of a gamble, and free kicks and crossing can feel like a dark art.

But on the whole, it’s superb. The sensation of motion and momentum when a team breaks is incredible, and FIFA taps into the strange cocktail of agonising frustration and explosive joy that is football, and does it better than any other sports sim on PC.

 
Game director Todd Howard has already mentioned that Skyrim will have unlimited dragons, now he's said to Wired that there will be infinite quests, too.

There's a series of scripted quest lines, of course, which will follow the main plot and a number of subplots like those belonging to Skyrim's various guilds and The Dark Brotherhood, but once you've completed these, Howard says that the Radiant storytelling system will continue to generate tasks. These can involve stealing gems for the thieves guild, or assassinating NPCs for the Dark Brotherhood.

“The vibe of the game is that it’s something that you can play forever,” Howard said to Wired.

Howard says that these randomly generated quests are designed to lead players into interesting parts of the world they haven't visited before. Even major quests will have randomised components that will send players to unvisited areas.

“The world is probably the one thing that sets apart from other games,” he said. “It feels really real for what it is … It’s just fun to explore.”

He adds that Bethesda have learned a lot from Fallout 3, where they challenged themselves to fill a blasted wasteland with dozens of interesting tidbits and unique areas to discover.

The infinite quests are sure to boost the projected amount of potential play time from "300 hours" to "the end of time", which is going to do terrible things to our productivity when Skyrim unlocks on Friday. You can pre-load Skyrim right now on Steam and Direct2Drive.

http://youtu.be/Q9m48jiVWL4

The tricksy Shaco is the latest League of Legends hero to receive the character spotlight treatment. With abilities like his cloaking powers, and an invisible supply of invisible jack in the box turrets, he'll be a lot more popular among allies than his unfortunate victims.

The new spotlight video delivers a typically in-depth analysis of Shaco's strengths and weaknesses, and describes his levelling potential and jungling prowess in exquisite detail. If you have no idea what the narrator is talking about, but find yourself strangely intrigued, you can play League of Legends for free to find out more. You can sign up and download the client from the League of Legends site.

http://youtu.be/5LU67L8Wv9g

LA Noire was released yesterday in the US and will come out this Friday in Europe, letting us all step into the shoes of 1940s detective Cole Phelps. You start out as a humble cop, but your talent for shouting at people until they break down in tears soon puts you in line for promotion, and it's not long before you're careering about town, accidentally running people over and occasionally solving the odd crime.

It's been out for months on consoles, but is arriving on PC with higher resolutions and 3D support, if your monitor's up for it. All of the DLC that came out after console release is bundled in there as well. See some of the fantastic facial animation tech in action in the PC launch trailer above. It's the first Rockstar game to come over to PC since GTA 4. Still no word on a Red Dead Redemption port, though.

In case we'd forgotten how mind numbingly huge Call of Duty is, last night's Activision earnings call dropped some massive sales figures to jog our memories. Activision CEO Eric Hirshberg announced that Modern Warfare 3 "drove the largest day one shipments in our history and in the industry's history."

That follows the fact that "Pre-orders for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 outpaced pre-orders for Call of Duty: Black Ops by a wide margin, setting a new industry record in making it the most pre-ordered game of all time."

The continued success of Black Ops is even more surprising. On the same call, Activision last night revealed that they've 20 million Black Ops expansion packs, at £11.50 each. That's a cool £230 million in sales. "The revenues generated from map packs alone would make it the third largest console title of the year," said Hirshberg.

Activision announce that they made $148 million this year between July and September, up from $51 million last year. There was no mention in the conference call of enormous money hats or swimming pools filled with gold bullion, but Activision did announce that they plan to make more money next year, with even more map packs for Modern Warfare 3. Now I have to go and grab a cup of tea and stop trying to imagine what $148 million looks like in dollar bill form.

http://youtu.be/uC-FSEdPW-c

All of the trailers for Assassin's Creed Revelations have so far concentrated on Ezio and Altair's interweaving story. There is an important third character that has been left out, the city of Constantinople itself. It has all the right ingredients for an Assassin's Creed city, rival rebellious factions, a clash of cultures, power struggles at the top and a sense of simmering social unrest.

More importantly, it'll also have lots of convenient poles, sturdy hanging flower baskets and an insensible number of minarets to climb. I was bouncing around Rome's crumbling Colosseum in Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood last night, and it looks as though Ubisoft have significantly improved on the level of detail in their architecture for Revelations. It's out at the start of December after a bit of a delay on PC, filling in the gap between Batman: Arkham City and Star Wars: The Old Republic quite nicely.

After all this time, still nothing compares to that opening sprint. One car, purring on the starting block, becomes a swarm of 20 when the countdown hits zero. Latticed tyre tracks. Wheels clipping through bumpers clipping through bonnets. A turn is coming: easy left into easy right, then an exit into a suicidal drop. Three degrees off and you’ll fluff the angle for the jump at the end. But you’ve trained for this – and so, as the others make their mistakes, you glide dead-bang into the tunnel. Into the mouth of a mountain.

Come to mention it, nothing really compares to the middle of a TrackMania race, either, when everyone’s thinking that, yes, this is the lap they get it right. Or indeed the end, when some naughty terrain ensures that no one crosses the finish line forwards, horizontal, or at the same altitude as their windscreen.

If you’ve played the series before, you’ll know this isn’t quite how it works. A typical ‘race’ doesn’t end at the finish, but rather somewhere in the melee of often disastrous, constantly resetting, occasionally awesome time trial attempts. Everyone in a session races with and around one another – through one another – but only ever against the clock. They learn from their own mistakes, and from others that send cars bouncing off the approaching scenery. And, boy, do they bounce.



Playing the game accounts for one third of TrackMania. The other parts are creating (tracks, cars, music, minigames, general Eurotrash oddness) and sharing (via in-game personal storefronts, forums, YouTube, wherever). It’s been this way for eight years now, and the numbers involved are massive. Today, however, the one that really matters is the creating.

What does it mean when a game that’s been updated plenty of times already decides to call itself a sequel? If you ask Nadeo, it means the start of a new adventure. Season two, episode one. TrackMania 2: Canyon includes just a single terrain type, a single car/handling model, and a single ‘pure’ racing mode. No platforms or puzzles. No cities, islands, or stadium. The changes are seemingly few, but in a game of degrees and milliseconds they can feel huge.

The handling is no longer that of a toy racer. The new car is heavier, throatier, and it drifts big-time. Unlike the first game’s vehicles, it has no air-brake. That means greater surrender to the science that kicks in when, after all that panicked steering, you finally hit a jump. The tracks feel more natural, the cars animal. Is it better? Try ‘different’, like Stunt Car Racer meets Daytona.



The Canyon, for a place made of pluggable building blocks, is magnificent. A Scalextric of the gods: bored into mountains, soaring over lakes, twisting against rhyme, reason, and gravity beneath a Segablue sky. And the light: baked into the rock, lost in the cracks, gluing it all together and bringing it to life. It’s a static environment, too, which means that it’s all precalculated by the track editor. Result: you don’t need godlike hardware to play it, even in the new splitscreen mode.

As you can tell, I get rather high on TrackMania. It appeals to my inner geek with all its outward-facing technology. If I want to take a screenshot, I can spend hours on the camera angle alone, or on adjusting the replay timeline of every car. Then I can impose – heavens – 100x antialiasing on the scene. I can pretend to know what ‘GPU/CPU synchro’ really means. I can take longer making a movie about driving in circles than it took to make Inception. I can build and paint cars and then make myself some Planets, the game’s new virtual currency. I can build a casino to waste them in, or a bank to lend them to someone else. And a digital bailiff to go smash that person’s fingers? Probably! I can – which is to say I could – script all kinds of marvellous things. If only someone would show me how.



Ah yes, the comedown. Being a ‘community-driven’ game by a studio so small it could barely populate a race, TM2 has no manual. Not quite, anyway. Not yet. Instead it has a wiki, designed to silence the abject what-the-fuckery from newcomers on the forums – but it raises more questions than it answers. Grilled about the lack of documentation, a studio spokesman posted: “No one at Nadeo knows every feature of the game. We are about twenty people, adding sometimes more than five or six features a day (like keyboard shortcuts, buttons, player page options, new dialogue boxes, maniahome...). I don’t know a single thing about the Media Tracker, and nobody else than me knows the whereabouts of the ManiaScript.”

This is the candour people love about Nadeo – even when, as happened recently, a power cut in France made most of the game temporarily unplayable. The angry and confused were then told by its second-line support people, the community elders themselves, that they should wait in silence or discover the rest of the game. Build a car, edit a replay, or toy with the slightly-improved track editor. Which is fine if you’re a veteran, or have a decent grasp on the game’s sprawl of user-developed content.



But what if you don’t? Sure, the track editor is simple in principle, but it can seem anything but when nothing you select or do conjures a tooltip, warning, or log entry of any kind. It gives you the right number of tools and blocks to ‘get it’ quickly, then get inventive and build tracks like the official ones. But it’s far from painless when it fails to identify what you’re trying to do (drive a road through a cliff, maybe), or even hazard a guess. An entire layer of things we take for granted is missing from this toolset, requiring players follow an online paper trail of variously handy tutorials.

Part of the problem is that Nadeo are so active in their community – married to it, effectively – that they think the game is spoken for. A major change as to how official time trials work, for instance – you have to get the gold medal time in practice first, then wait five minutes between attempts – was left a mystery for new players. Also, as with older games in the series, large portions of its ‘interface’ are just jumps to websites and forums. Others might prefer the term: ‘massive bloody holes where the user interface should be’.

Don’t get me wrong: TrackMania 2 is a beautiful, heart-stopping, narcotic racing game. Its readiness to just sit there as operating system furniture, idling in the background before roaring to the fore, is a credit both to its engine and its design. To the PC, no less. Better still is how it has embraced different control schemes – the drift mechanics favour braking with Ctrl, or tweaking the deadzone on a 360 pad – while keeping the playing field level. And, for all that will be said about the changes to the handling, there’s always TrackMania United Forever. The TM community is huge, and no stranger to divided loyalties. Why be frightened of change?



I’ve built tracks and made ‘paks’. I could tell you just what speed of footage creates just what kind of motion blur, and the advantage of using a Hermite-interpolated custom camera. I am a proud TrackManiac. But this game is not for everyone, and I’ll even go one further: after all this time – with the name of one of the world’s biggest publishers splashed across cars and tracks – I’m not sure it’s enough.

Maybe Nadeo have some strange Peter Pan complex. Maybe Ubisoft have some strange ‘what the hell have we gotten ourselves into?’ complex. Whatever the reason, TrackMania should have been ready at launch. Obviously there’s a whole lot more to come, but basics like the interface should have been immaculate, or at the very least presentable. It should have had tutorials, pop-ups, tooltips – the works – springing from every mode and button, not sitting on someone’s esoteric fan site. It should have been bug-free and user-friendly, yet its editors are quirky at best. It should be conquering the world.

Review by Duncan Harris.