Mojang have just released a new Minecraft 0.9 pre-release build, which is incredibly close to the final Minecraft 1.0 release, and even includes the boss fight. "Please help us test the ender fight in multiplayer as much as possible. :)" tweets Notch. Mojang dev Jens Bergensten tweeted a link to the latest pre-release build, which you can grab here.

Minecon will celebrate the release of Minecraft 1.0 next week. Mojang are almost ready. "Left to do: The new sounds, fixing bugs from this prerelease, some minor polishing. And we'll do that on Sunday," says Notch. "We're getting closer..." says Jens.

Activision have released sales info gathered from North America and UK retail outlets, revealing that Modern Warfare 3 sold in excess of $400 million on day one. An estimated 6.5 million copies were shifted at retail alone. Those numbers beat last year's record set by Call of Duty: Black Ops, which sold a mere $360 million on day one. Modern Warfare 2 must have barely even been trying when it sold $310 million on its first day back in 2009.

Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick says that the year on year sales of the last few Call of Duty titles puts the series ahead of the biggest film franchises of the last few decades. “Other than Call of Duty, there has never been another entertainment franchise that has set opening day records three years in a row. Life-to-date sales for the Call of Duty franchise exceed worldwide theatrical box office for “Star Wars” and “Lord of the Rings,” he says.

“Call of Duty is more than a game. It’s become a major part of the pop cultural landscape," says Activision CEO Eric Hirshberg.

You can find out what we think about that particular slice of the pop cultural landscape in our Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 review. Are you one of the 6.5 million? How are you finding MW3?

 
If you've read our Limbo review, you'll know how much we enjoyed the macabre platformer. That makes it all the nicer to report that it has sold one million copies worldwide. The developers, PlayDead, say that they've used the profits to buy back control of the company from early investors and are now focusing on developing their next game.

"With the success that LIMBO has achieved, we felt this was the ideal time to fully regain our independence,” said CEO Dino Patti. “We are grateful to everyone who supported us over the past few years, and look forward to forging new partnerships that will both let us reach new heights as a studio and give our director, Arnt Jensen, room to grow creatively.”

Limbo's available now on Steam, and is heading to Macs before the end of the year.

Graphics chip vendor NVIDIA saw its share price rise overnight after a conference call yesterday evening in which it discussed its third quarter results with analysts. The company says it took in a massive $1.07billion in the three months to October 30th, beating analysts expectations by a small margin.

While a lot of the talk in the call was about the company's booming tablet processor business, where it's Tegra 2 and forthcoming Tegra 3 dominate Android manufacturers' designed, desktop hardware sales were above expectations. Notebook graphics sales were – surprisingly – down but the company says that thanks to Battlefield 3, Call of Duty: MW3 and Star Wars: The Old Republic (funny they didn't mention Skyrim...), there's been an increase in demand from gamers for upgrades over and above the seasonal norm.

Of course, it also helps that a lot of new PCs were sold to first time buyers in China and other emerging markets, but things are looking good for a company which many had thought would be threatened by the ubiquity of hybrid CPU/GPUs. Interim Chief Financial Officer Karen Burns made a point of the fact that growth in discrete card sales has more than compensated for loss of business in integrated chips.

With rumours starting to appear that the company is hoping to have it's next GeForce revision – codenamed Kepler – in shops in time for Christmas it could be a very happy new year for executive bonuses in Santa Clara.

That's all she wrote ladies and gentlemen, the fat lady has sung. I'm closing the curtain on two weeks of massive giveaways and declaring the winners of all four of our currently running competitions.

So if you entered into the competitions for the Cyborg Rat, the Steelseries keyboards, Battlefield 3 or the Might and Magic figure, check inside to see if you've been successful.

Cyborg Rat and Vindictus Cash



We offered you a brand new Cyborg R.A.T. 7 albino gaming mouse, a set of Cyborg ambX gaming lights and a bunch of Vindictus cash, asking you to design an over the top PC gaming peripheral to enter. There were some fantastic entries in this one, and I'm sad I can't give you all a prize, but only two could win:

First prize went to Chumbaniya and his 'helping hand' which performs a gentlemenly handshake with your opponent, bringing respect back into the gaming arena, quite so! He who wins the mouse, lights and 10,000 NX cash, congratulations!

Second prize goes to SilentViolence for his APE Automatic Performance Enhancer, which sends hordes of monkeys in front of your guns to boost your kill/death ration and convince you all your expensive perepherals are worthwhile. He wins 10,000 NX cash to spend in Vindictus. Well done sir!

If you've won, send a message to our Competitions inbox on the forums with your Address (in the case of NAME) and Vindictus username, and we'll see you money debited into your account.

Steelseries and Runes of Magic giveaway



We gave away a bundle of Steelseries and Runes of Magic goodies, asking you how you'd use keyboard shortcuts in the real world. I learnt a lot of new shortcuts judging this one:

First prize went to Pynkfloyd, who plans to bash F8 on startup to enter safe mode. I can only assume he believes in re-incarnation, or he's already missed his shot. Thankfully he wasn't too late to win a Steelseries Shift Keyboard with MMO Accessory, a Steelseries Siberia headset and a Runes of Magic Mousemat.

Second place was fraznn23 who planned to use Ctl B to stand out from the crowd. He gets a all of the above, minus the headset.

Meanwhile runners up Zulu, ChickenMcFail, and penzziz win a Runes of Magic mousemat each.

Winners could send a message to our Competitions inbox with their name and address so that we can mail you your prizes.

Battlefield 3 gaming lights giveaway



EA gave us a copy of Battlefield 3, a set of , a set of Cyborg ambX gaming lights and a copy of the Battlefield 3 novel by Andy McNab to give away. In return we asked you to tell design us a battlefield to fight on.

A few people suggested turning the ongoing Battlefield and Call of Duty rivalry into a map, but RedTop89's attempt, which sees players capturing retail outlets in order to generate sales from their fans was the most imaginative attempt.

Just drop us a line at the Competitions inbox with your address and we'll put your prizes in the post.

Might and Magic Heroes VI figurine giveaway



We got an enormous angel figurine for Might and Magic Heroes VI, so we decided to give it away to you guys! We asked you to design us a game about angels, and your imaginations ran wild.

There can only be one winner however, and that winner was Southpaw, whose arty game 'Free Will' sees you as an Angel sent to judge crimes on earth, facing the moral choice whether or not to use your powers to interfere with the freedom of mortals.

Congratulations Southpaw! Send your name and address to our Competitions inbox and we'll send you massive prize.

That's a wrap folks, if you didn't win, unlucky. We'll be launching far more competitions in the coming weeks, so keep your eyes peeled and your wits sharp.

Skyrim's been out for less than a day, but fans have already gone through the .ini files looking for useful tweaks and fixes to the most common crashes and UI annoyances. We've compiled a selection of tweaks below from the Skyrim tweak thread on Reddit, the Skyrim forums and Tweak Guides

These fixes will let you disable mouse smoothing, customise your field of view, disable Vsync and correct a problem that causes crashes to desktop from the main menu screen just after you start the game. There are also a few .ini tweaks that make Skyrim look better.

Disable mouse smoothing
Go to your Steam Directory, then steamapps, common, skyrim and select Skyrim again. Create a backup of the SkyrimPrefs.ini file. Open the file, then scroll down to where it says and find bMouseAcceleration=1. Change to bMouseAcceleration=0. Save, exit, and play This fix and the two below are from Skyrim Reddit, and are credited to "Dead man posting" on the Something Awful Forums.

Change field of view
Head to My Documents, select My Games, select Skyrim and then Skyrim again, then create a backup of the skyrim.ini file. Scroll down to in the file and add fdefaultfov=XX (where XX is the field of view you want). Then save and exit.

Fix common crash to desktop problem
Access the Sound menu from the Control panel. In the playback tab, right click on speakers and select properties. Select the advanced tab on the new screen and select 24 bit, 44100Hz (Studio Quality) from the drop down menu. This fixed crashes for Owen last night.

Disable Vsync
Access the SkyrimPrefs.ini again and add iPresentInterval=0 to the bottom of the section. This can improve a sluggish framerate and eliminate instances of mouse lag. Thanks to Tweak Guides for this one.

Graphical tweaks
Curate on the Bethesda forums has highlighted a number of interesting variables in the SkyrimPrefs.ini file. Change the digit at the end of each line to 1 to turn the feature on, 0 to turn it off. Don't forget to create a backup of the SkyrimPrefs.ini file just in case.

Interesting variables are as follows, in order of appearance in the .ini and showing their default settings.
bDoDepthOfField=1
bTreesReceiveShadows=0
bDrawLandShadows=0
bShowFloatingQuestMarkers=1
bShowQuestMarkers=1
bShowCompass=1
bMouseAcceleration=1
fAutosaveEveryXMins=15.0000

Redditor Ryz also suggests changing iWaterReflectHeight=512 and iWaterReflectWidth=512 to 1024 and adding the following text to the SkyrimPrefs.ini to improve the quality of water reflections.

bUseWaterReflectionBlur=1
bReflectExplosions=1
iWaterBlurAmount=4
bAutoWaterSilhouetteReflections=0
bForceHighDetailReflections=1

Here's a before and after shot from Ryz, showing the effects of the self shadowing and water reflection tweaks. The extra shadowing gives Skyrim's trees a lot more depth.





This is just the early rush of tweaks, many more will come to light as players get to grips with Skyrim's files. We can expect a ton of mods, too. Got any favourite tweaks of your own? Share them in the comments.

DICE have been talking about the balance changes they're considering for the next Battlefield 3 patch. Battlefieldo have spotted a couple of tweets from DICE's Alan Kertz showing before and after shots of the planned nerf to every Battlefield 3 player's worst enemy, the tactical flashlight.

The lamp attachment can be added to machine guns and pistols, and currently has the capability to blind a man at ten metres in broad daylight. Kertz told the Don't Revive Me Bro community podcast that DICE will be making some changes. The intensity of the flashlight's blinding effect will stay the same, but it will be effective at shorter range. See the before and after shots below.

Kertz also says that DICE are also considering changes to the effectiveness of mobile AA guns. Their damage output is less of a problem than the projectiles' effects on jet and chopper trajectories. It's thought that the storm of anti-air ordenance can too easily throw airborne vehicles off course.

In addition, DICE are aware that the inability to repair jets puts them at a distinct disadvantage over other vehicles. Choppers can land and be repaired by engies from within, but landing a jet is a far harder task. Short of strapping engineers to the wings of each jet, it's hard to see how DICE will get around this without giving planes a limited self-repair ability.

If you're playing Battlefield 3, don't forget that you can join us on our lovely servers. Search for PC Gamer in Battlelog to find us. What balance changes would you make to Battlefield 3?

http://youtu.be/EYxqKef8QyI

Saints Row: The Third is only a few days away from wreaking unbridled havoc on your home, so view this new trailer as a victory lap. Off a skyscraper. Onto a fighter jet. Sure, Rico from Just Cause did it first, but that just raises a more important issue: Why don't all games let us hop atop jets and travel in style? Watch the above trailer. Now imagine any other game. Feels empty, right? I rest my case.

While you're at it, enter to win a custom-painted Saints Row PC!

http://youtu.be/3g9xRCxWWd0

Given that Battlefield 3 and Skyrim and Modern Warfare 3 and all your hopes and dreams are hitting right this very second, it's easy to get caught up in the moment. There are, however, other games coming in the future. And not just any future, but the kind with jetpacks - which is, of course, the best kind. My proof? Well, this incredible new Firefall trailer, for one. Sure, it's mostly standard 'splodey death from above (and every other conceivable direction), but it's making both my long-dormant WoW and Tribes addictions flare up something fierce. So long, Life!

Another day, another MMO goes free-to-play. Sony Online Entertainment continues its transition away from the subscription model by doing away with EverQuest II's traditional subscription-only servers, starting in early December.

In a letter to fans, executive producer Dave Georgeson outlined why EQ2 is going F2P, and what the new payment structure will be.

EQ2 already had a free-to-play version called EQ2: Extended, but with this change Extended and traditional EQ2 will merge, putting an end to user complaints about the divided community. Georgeson explains: "We believe the key to meeting your expectations is to provide more flexibility and to deliver what you want when you want it, whether it’s basic game content, full subscription access to the game, or something in-between. So in early December we’re going to change things to be 'Free to Play. Your Way.'"

What that means is best explained by this handy chart, but here are the takeaways:

Gold membership will cost $15 per month and provide full access to all races and classes, as well as seven character slots. Basically, it's the same deal subscribers have now.
Silver membership costs $5 per month. Silver members are limited to four characters, and may only gain spells up to the Expert tier.
Free member are limited to two characters and Adept-tier spells.
Both Silver and Free users are limited to four races and eight classes, and have restrictions on the equipment grades they may access.

So, sort of free-to-play, but there is a lot of convenience and flexibility that comes with paying.