Renegade Ops just received a new campaign map called Coldstrike, and another slice of DLC that adds two new charactes. Coldstrike adds three new story missions in which you drive into new snowy locations and explode them until there is nothing left to be exploded. Expect hordes of new enemies, including low flying attack drones and "monstrous Golems." It's available now on Steam for £2.99 / $4.99.

The Reinforcement Pack is a separate download that adds two new heroes, Blazemo and Crystal. Crystal's special ability throws up a huge defensive bubble that can protect allies huddled beneath it. Blazemo prefers to use his special weapon, The Incinerator, to destroy everything in an all-consuming spiral of flame. That's also on Steam for £1.79 / $2.99. The new characters will have to work hard to beat the antlion attacks off their silent co-worker, Gordon Freeman.

Get a peek at the new DLC packs in the screenshots below. The snowy ones are from Coldstrike, the rest show the two new vehicles.

He's not a Sith Lord, he's a Cosmic Knight. Champions Online's archetypes offer players who don't play a subscription fee pre-defined builds to level with. This one is called The Unleashed, and is described as a "Militant Monk," an "Eldritch Warrior" and a "Mysterious Visitor," albeit one you're not likely to let into your house. He specialises in close range chopping with his lightsa- swords.

Champions Online is free to play, you can download the client from Champions Online site and Steam. In other news, Star Wars: The Old Republic is nearly fully operational. Bioware are set to throw the giant "ON" switch today, launching the game worldwide. You can join us on the Nightmare Lands server in Europe, and on the Crucible Pits in the US.

It takes plenty of patience to make it to the end of a multiplayer game of Civilization 5, patience often stretched to breaking point by de-syncing games and ponderous AI turns. A new patch has arrived for Civilization 5 brings "significant improvements to general multiplayer stability" and does something fancy to the AI move caching, "improving turn-times significantly."

Out-of-sync errors should be less frequent and the UI has been updated letting players see details of a game before jumping into lobbies. On the downside, Firaxis have plugged a few loopholes. In a move sure to be welcomed by the confused citizens, we'll no longer be able to trade cities back and forth to heal them and "generate endless City Strikes." Aw. Here are the full patch notes, from Steam.

Multiplayer

Significant improvements to general multiplayer stability.
Significant improvements to Hot-Join stability.
Multiplayer now using the same AI move caching as single player, improving turn-times significantly.
Lobby improvements: We now display game details in the lobby list (players in each game, map size, map type, DLC required, etc.).
Host can now kick players from the staging room when loading a save (if a player cannot return to a game, the game can now be continued by the rest of the players).
Found and corrected additional causes of Out-of-Sync.
Exploit: Corrected an exploit that allowed players on the same team to trade cities back and forth to auto-heal it.
Exploit: Corrected an exploit that allowed players on the same team to trade cities back and forth to generate endless City Strikes.
Exploit: Corrected an exploit that allowed a player to “lag” the UI to gain multiple free techs.

 
UI

Change “Load Game” save sorting to be “Last Modified” by default.

 
Bugs

When scrapping a unit, make sure any “cargo” units are scrapped as well.
When a unit is destroyed that is carrying another unit, make sure to kill both (missiles sometimes lingered).
Corrected a bug that was causing eliminated Civ’s to not generate notifications correctly.
Changed notification language for when a Research or Trade deal is cancelled due to the AI running out of funds to pay for it (per-turn deal), or are eliminated. It was currently displaying a “because of war” notification which is incorrect.
Corrected an issue that could cause unhappiness from city count and number of specialists to become incorrect over the course of a long game.
Changed Frigate obsolete tech to Combustion.
Fixed Korean science building exploit.
Fixed a problem with City Strike that gave the user the impression that they could not end their turn, when in reality, city strike was still active.
Crash: Fixed a crash that could occur in hot-seat when exiting to the main menu.
Crash: Fixed a crash that could occur when a unit was eliminated by standing too close to a Citadel.

 

For a man solely dedicated to bringing vigilante justice to the criminals of the world, Batman spends a lot of his time coming up with new outfits. As a thank you to everyone who bought the game, Rocksteady are releasing the Batman Incorporated alternative skin for Batman: Arkham City, and have released a cheat code that will let everyone unlock another skin normally awarded for completing the story. Commenter Jexx points out that there's a free challenge map on offer, too, containing Jokers Carnival, the Iceberg VIP Lounge and the Batcave. Here's how you can get hold of them.

You can download the Batman Incorporated skin for free now on the XBox Live PC store. The challenge maps are here. To unlock the other alternative skin, load up your save profile, head to the main menu and enter the following:

Left, Left, Down, Down, Left, Left, Right, Up, Up, Down.

If you hear a musical cue, you'll know it's worked. If you hunger for more alternative outfits, you can buy a skin pack with seven new looks. None of them are sporting santa hats though, sadly.

Hey, wait, didn't we just get done shaking off the cruel shackles of poverty after the last one of these things? Oh well, unnecessary luxuries like roofs, walls, and food are largely inconsequential in the face of really great videogame deals. And man, if day one's deals are any indication, this will be quite the hall-decking holiday haul. I mean, using my patented Raving Lunatic advocate scale, Portal 2 at $7.49 is a "BUY IT," Just Cause 2 at $4.99 is a "Buyitbuyitbuyit," and Orcs Must Die at $3.74 is a "".

The holiday sale's also hosting a meta game that involves collecting coal. Basically, if you complete daily objectives, you'll walk away with free games. But if you commit the naughtiest act of all - failure - you'll receive a lump of coal. That coal, however, can be used to enter the Epic Holiday Giveaway. And if you win? Well, you'll find every game on Steam waiting under your virtual tree. So then, make with the indiscriminate purchasing. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to fish my beggar's clothes out of the dumpster. And probably some days-old pizza. May as well get a head start.

Tyler, Chris A., Lucas, and Greg discuss the first days of The Old Republic, the last days of Star Wars: Galaxies, and wrap-up 2011 with fond gaming memories and a desperate need for USB coffee warmers and other junk people wrap in paper this time of year.

PC Gamer US Podcast 299: A Galaxy Torn

Have a question, comment, complaint or observation? Leave a voicemail: 1-877-404-1337 ext 724 or email the mp3 to pcgamerpodcast@gmail.com.

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Jryy nera'g lbh whfg gur png'f cnwnznf? Frr lbh va 2012!

Making an indie game, publishing it and then selling your soul to EA for £1 million is the new get-rich-quick scheme. But how exactly does one make an indie game? Our video-camera-faced-chums over at CVG have asked just that to Bristol-based developers Red Wasp Design, whose intriguing turn-based strategy RPG Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land is due out early next year.

The first part of the interview, above, covers how the three of them work together as a team and how they stay motivated (clue: they stay motivated with money). Talking about their vision for the game, Tomas Rawlings, the game designer, says, “They talk about the Angry Birds, they say you just have to make an Angry Birds but with lizards and cats instead. It just doesn’t work like that, you have to have a vision for what you see as a great game. And you just hope that enough people agree with you that that’s a vision for a great game.”

Parts two and three follow after the break.

In part two, Red Wasp Design talk about the intricacies of creating a game based on the classic pen-and-paper roleplayer Call of Cthulhu.




Finally, the Red Wasp gang discuss how they’re going to deploy their game on multiple platforms.

Remember the lacklustre performance of AMD's much vaunted new Bulldozer CPU architecture? Turns out the difficult launch and grilling the chip got in reviews may not have been entirely down to the limits of the hardware.

Launched as the AMD FX brand a month or so ago, Bulldozer performance was behind what most pundits were hoping for. Apparently, some of that is due to Windows not supporting new features that Bulldozer introduced. And now there's a patch that should help.

According to the patch release notes, the Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT) scheduling feature of Bulldozer isn't compatible with Windows threading logic. Which may have been hampering AMD's comparative performance in multithreaded tasks.

Bulldozer differs significantly from previous CPU designs in that it shares more resources between processing pipelines than traditional chips. For example, each 'core' of a Bulldozer chip has two integer processing units, and a single floating point unit. Thanks to this, AMD counts each 'Bulldozer module' as two traditional cores, so a three module chip is marketed as six core, four as eight and so on. Clearly things are a bit more complex than that both in terms of software as well as the hardware design.

In order to get hold of the patch, you'll have to apply it manually from here – it won't be appearing in Windows' auto-update for the time being. It actually appeared on Friday evening (UK time) after the office shut up – so if anyone's had chance to use it and discovered favourable results, please do let me know about it in the comments below. For various reasons, we've still not been able to get hold of a Bulldozer sample to review in the labs, so can't honestly report on what difference this patch makes. I'm not sure that improved scheduling will help many game frates, but it might well help.

Could Battlefield 2143 be in the works? The hints DICE have left in Back to Karkand are small, but they've been known to use similarly cryptic methods before. Of course that means those little toy dinosaurs must be a hint too! We can only assume they're actually planning to bring us the pictured DLC pack after all. The people have spoken. Dinosaurs must be added.

Check inside for a selection of dino-lovin', PC gaming news.


Bioware tell Eurogamer they're taking queues in The Old Republic 'seriously'.
Massively spot a new archetype for Champions Online, The Unleashed, who is totally not a Sith.
Joystiq say Gamefly have launched the public beta of their new PC rental client.
DSO gaming say Square Enix has told members no personal data was lost when their website was hacked.
CVG have spoken to an analyst who believes 1 million people are already playing The Old Republic ahead of tomorrow's launch.

 
Would you like to see Battlefield 2143 readers? Or would you prefer the series to stick with the present day?

“Free-to-play” used to mean just that, but now it seems that it’s becoming “Remortgage-to-play”. First, DarkOrbit releases a $1,000 item and sells 2,000 of them. Now EA’s Need for Speed World sells a $100 car, according to GameSpot.

The pricey car in question is a Koenigsegg CCX “Elite” Edition. It heads up Need for Speed World’s “Premium Elite” collection, which is targeted exclusively at people with more money than sense. The car is reduced to "just" $75 at the moment, but even for that price you could pick up Race On ($19) and GRID ($15) on Steam - both of which feature the Koenigsegg CCX - and still have $41 left over to buy a cheapo steering wheel.

On the whole the free-to-play model does seem to be working, but these costly items make it look like developers and publishers are taking advantage of an audience willing to pay exorbitant amounts for fairly rudimentary power-ups. A report in the Daily Mail is sure to follow shortly.