It seems likely that some of you will not be aware of ’90s classic Marathon, which was one of those obscure-yet-influential games in the history of the shooter. It was one of the things Bungie did before they really made hay with the Halo games. Anyway, fans have continued the series, as well as powered a number of other games, with an open-source engine-creating effort called Aleph One, and that project recently hit a big old milestone, v1.0. This means it’s a good time to download one of the games related to the project if you are looking for some retro FPS adventures. Needless to say there are Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux versions.

Prep your nose because it is in for one almighty workout. I’m not talking about sending anyone to the Christmas party of a major investment bank, I am instead alerting you to Lineage II’s abolition of subscription payments. The MMO which Tarantino and Rodriguez paid such mixed and seemingly irrelevant homage to is now yours to try for a total cost of no pennies and only three decades of your life. The Goddess of Destruction add-on provides plenty of new content for existing players as well, details of which are scattered around here. NCsoft trumpet that no content is hidden behind paywalls but shortly go on to blither that the usual premium items will allow for speedy progression.

While it doesn’t appear to have a personality to match the mad brilliance of Jamestown, recently released Solar Wings is a handsome SHMUPPY thing in its own right. Cheery waves of enemies, colourful bullets fanning across the screen and a co-op mode are all enough to tickle my fancy. Is it my imagination or are we seeing more of these on PC in recent times? It could simply be that I’ve started paying more attention to them, upon realising that I’m capable of lasting for more than five seconds amidst the scrambled madness on the screen. Turns out not every pack of bullets wants to create a tightly patterned hell for me. Available now for £1.99/€2.49, the developers reckon they’ll have a demo to offer soon. Look to the land below for a trailer.

(more…)

The latest Eve expansion switches on today, and includes a bunch of things that should please Eve players, such as new battlercruisers, and pretties such as new nebulae, and ephemera such as new captain’s quarters, and VITAL visual tweaks such as new engine trails. The most amazing thing, however, is the concept of slowing down time to deal with big fleet fights. I’ve no idea if that will work, but it’s the cleverest solution to the lag problem I’ve seen offered so far.

Thumping great spaceship battle trailer below. (more…)

The Glitch blog announced: “Two months ago we launched Glitch to the world. Now we’re unlaunching it.” The problem is, apparently, that it’s just not fun enough. The team explain: “making radical changes to core game mechanics is something that’s a lot harder to do while the front doors are open and we have to focus on scaling to support growth, stability and providing the quality of service we aim to achieve for the live game. Going back to beta will let us make the changes that need to be made. And so we’re “unlaunching” — and going back to beta.” These things are always complicated, but hopefully the quirky 2D MMO can survive this and be the game it was supposed to be.

Read our review of the launched game here.

Skyrim has now patched on PC, after the 360 and PS3 saw their version of 1.2 appear earlier in the week. But is it good news? 1.1 managed to break lots of the patches modders had created to fix so many of the tiresome issues Bethesda had left in the epic game, which didn’t win favour. And then today the news broke that the console patch had had some rather unfortunate side effects. Like all defensive buffs no longer working, and the dragons flying backward. No, really. So below you can see what’s meant to be in 1.2 – including a fix for that daft audio crash, mouse improvements, and at flipping last Esc backs out of menus – and then you can let us know if you’ve seen anything strange since the update.

Oh, and dead bodies will no longer show up to your wedding.

(more…)

If you were lucky enough to receive a Counter-Strike: Global Offensive beta invite (and we weren’t) then you’ll be pleased to learn the beta has just begun. We don’t care, because we don’t have an invite, so it’s pretty irrelevant to us. The beta, that arrived via Valve Time a touch late, will scale up (when perhaps we’ll be invited, maybe), aiming for a release “early 2012″. Which could mean any time between now and the eventual entropic destruction of the universe. Apparently it’s only a teeny weeny bit of the game, so doesn’t even require a pre-load for excited people who are able to play it, which we aren’t.

On seeing the news that there was to be a golf game made with the CryEngine3, my heart went a-pitter-pat. I’ve never been a golf game player, beyond the utterly wonderful Mario Advance Golf for the GBA (WHY NO SEQUEL, NINTENDO? WHYYYYYYYY?!), so it’s not like I’m craving playing this generation’s Links. It’s just, well, I’m craving looking> at this generation’s Links, I think. Remember when that game came out, with its confusion of photographs and videoed humans made of seventeen pixels? It was like looking at real golf, if you squinted to the point of closing your eyes and imaging real life golf. And while the sport holds no interest for me, I still find it utterly calming, that expanse of green, the satisfaction of seeing the ball fall in the hole… Imagine it. And carry on imagining, because the enigmatically named Tour Golf Online (crappy Facebook page instead of real website, unfortunately) seems to think all the detail should be far, far in the distance.

(more…)

What? What?> It can’t really be just me who thinks of A-ha’s finest hour whenever Bohemia’s Take On Helicopters is mentioned, can it? Hmmph. Perhaps I can break the association by writing about the chopper sim’s new demo, which is out now. At 3.6GB it’s faintly monstrous, but the contents sound highly generous. You should take it on, take it on. It’ll be gone, in a day or twooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.

(It won’t be gone in a day or two). Full contents and moving images below. (more…)

Seems like the Activision bossman thinks that Electronic Arts aren’t going to be printing spacebucks with their forthcoming Star Wars MMO, and said as much to his investors. As reported over here by Reuters, Kotick poured scepticism onto the up and coming MMO, saying: “Lucas is going to be the principal beneficiary of the success of Star Wars. We’ve been in business with Lucas for a long time and the economics will always accrue to the benefit of Lucas, so I don’t really understand how the economics work for Electronic Arts.” He went on to say “”If you look at the history of the people investing in an MMO and achieving success, it’s a small number.” And his company are, of course, one of that number, and must be a little nervous about possibly losing subscribers to the enormous Star Wars project. EA, meanwhile, claim that SWTOR will be a success if it hits just 500k subscribers, a figure that looks to be well within their reach.