It would of course be a little cheeky to include my own short room-escape game, Masked, in a list about the week's best free PC games. So I won't. Instead, I'll hope you click on that link, and spend the space talking about quests for coffee, strange rhythm-action ideas, a game that's a bit like Uplink only different, and the chance to clean up a puddle of pee! Always fun. Read on for this week's picks.



Cherry's Quest for Coffee

Maddoxic. Download it from the developer's website.

I think we can all empathise with the situation our poor protagonist faces in Cherry's Quest for Coffee, a short but sweet Adventure Game Studio effort. The world is in the midst of a battle against a coffee crisis - the crisis being that there's none left - but poor Cherry simply can't get through her day without it. Never mind the fact that she's perfectly able to go through all sorts of escapades to get hold of some.

Straight-forward in both its presentation and its difficulty, Cherry's Quest for Coffee nevertheless uses this style to its advantage, soundtracked by midi elevator music and constructed of colourful pixel art. Its low level of entry also means you can sit back and enjoy the silliness of the storytelling for the most part, instead of getting bogged down with obtuse puzzles.

Cadance

Agent 1729. Grab it from GameJolt.



A curious take on the rhythm-action genre, Cadance tasks you with destroying alien ships as they fly towards you from four different angles. To do so, you've to point your laser in the right direction and fire it - but, of course, there's a musical twist.

Every time you press a button, it must be in time with the music. If you drop a beat, the game instead plays a horrible sound, and disobeys your command.

To make things even more complicated, all the controls are mapped to number keys 1 to 5. Pressing each number moves your laser to the appropriate position, and pressing it again fires the laser. It's surprising how much of a difference is made by mapping your buttons in this sort of sequential fashion. We're thoroughly trained, it seems, to think of our keyboard controls in terms of physical space.

Hacknet

Orann. Download it from IndieDB.



A terminal-based indie hacking game, Hacknet currently sits in alpha status, but that doesn't mean it's insubstantial. Already there's both a singleplayer and a multiplayer component, and the bones of something quite lovely are clear to see.

It's a little like a geekier version of Uplink - hacking with more perceived depth and complexity, but perhaps less of the swish and sleek style for which Introversion became known. The singleplayer game tells the story of a recently deceased hacker and an emerging conspiracy surrounding his death, while multiplayer pits you against another hacker as you try to thwart their efforts.

It seems there are still a few holes and glitches to be found, but for an alpha that's hardly surprising. Whether this will be developed into a fuller version of Hacknet, or a more expansive but different game, is something the dev's still deciding on - but what's here is already worth a look.

Ed Watts: Bar Runner

Gameboy. Grab it from the AGS site.



Lastly this week there's another Adventure Game Studio effort. This short game puts you in the increasingly filthy shoes of a man applying for a job in a pub. For someone whose first tasks are to collect glasses and excise a puddle of urine from the toilet floor, the eponymous Ed Watts looks unfeasibly snug (just look at that stance and that face!).

The game's cute, though, with pleasant chiptune music and a simple but effective graphical style that sits nicely with the game's sense of humour. Its characters are likeable, the puzzles smart. A fun little diversion.

Market analysts at Jon Peddie Research have published their latest quarterly figures for graphics card shipments, and concluded that sales of discrete add-in graphics cards were down 3.5% in the last three months of 2011 compared to the same period of 2010.

It's not all bad news though. Overall sales of graphics processors, including Intel's Sandy Bridge hybrid CPUs and AMD's Fusion APUs, were up by 8.9% to 124million units compared to the previous year, apparently. Sales of PCs in general rose by around 1.8% by the same metric.

The big winner as far as graphics go was Intel, with a 7% rise in market share. That's no doubt due to the fact that a lot of laptops can rely on semi-decent on-processor graphics now, however, and possibly even tied in to the launch of Ultrabooks – although I don't think many of those sold in the run up to Christmas. AMD got hammered in notebooks as a result, bit apparently put on 44.8% more desktop sales to make up for it – not a bad achievement at all. Even NVIDIA's poor performance, down 7%, can be attributed to the fact that it's pulled out of the integrated graphics market, according to JPR. As hybrid chips get better, however, that doesn't bode well for NVIDIA in the future.

Generally speaking, though, there's quite a bit in the report to smile about. PC sales are up, and high end boards still seem to be selling well. The interesting stat comes in the middle of the release, talking about numbers of graphics processors per PC. “The average has grown from 115% in 2001 to almost 150% GPUs per PC,” says the report, which means there's an awful lot of PC and laptop buyers who aren't settling for Sandy Bridge or Fusion graphics still, and want the extra performance of a discrete card.

It's next quarter's sales figures which will be really interesting, though. With AMD's HD7000 series launching so late in the year, it's possible people held off upgrading before Christmas.

Is day-one DLC (like Mass Effect 3's "From Ashes") a crime against gamer-manity, or simply an unoffensive, optional bonus? When are developers "allowed" to stop updating a game like Terraria and step away? Evan, Tyler, Logan, Josh and Gavin tackle these topics on this week's episode. In beta talk, Josh and Gavin also give a generous account of what they did and didn't like about the Guild Wars 2 beta; Evan and Logan reflect on the multiplayer and single-player Mass Effect 3 beta.

PC Gamer US Podcast 306: Downloadable Spinal Cords

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Every week, Richard Cobbett rolls the dice to bring you an obscure slice of gaming history, from lost gems to weapons grade atrocities. This week, a game-to-movie conversion that definitely didn't get its own line of Happy Meal toys. Still, can't be worse than Lara Croft: The Cradle of Life.

Since 1996, Lara Croft has been one of the most recognisable faces... not to mention certain other body parts... of the games industry. Movies like this were inevitable. We all know they exist. But what sexy horrors hide behind their weak puns and obvious gimmickry? Time to find out...



Porn parodies are nothing new, and almost every big Hollywood movie gets at least one - usually with awful punny names like The Bare Witch Project, A Clockwork Orgy, or something bland, like Star Trek XXX: A Porn Parody. Why is the 'parody' bit so important? Put simply, it offers at least some measure of legal defence that other shameless rip-offs don't get, regardless of how much they actually takes the piss instead of just putting a few joke names amongst some cheap cosplay sex scenes.

Games on the other hand don't get many - at least outside of Japan, where... don't ask. They do happen in the west though, with titles ranging from Left 4 Head to Whorelore (originally World of Whorecraft, but Blizzard stamped down on that pretty fast) and - ugh - Call of Booty: Modern Whorefare. Classy.

Tomb Raider unsurprisingly has more than most, from Erotic Raider, which is apparently a rebranded parody of The Mummy, to something called Jewel Raider: Tomb Raper. How unpleasant. There's also a short video clip of someone dressed as Lara on a bus that goes round the web every year or so, notable mostly for the fact that she's apparently wearing her T-Shirt over a rucksack, and a brand new one out this month simply called Tomb Raider XXX. I could link to some of these, but obviously I'm not going to. Instead, enjoy this YouTube friendly clip of Ron Jeremy in "Super Hornio Bros".

http://youtu.be/3lbQd2bd1Z0

Womb Raider is probably the most infamous though, mostly because it uses one of the pun names that has haunted the series ever since it was released. How it compares to its competitors, I neither know nor care. They may offer amazing, exciting and hilarious spins on their source material, but I doubt it.

How does it do as erotica? Personally speaking, I spent the majority of this DVD (requested from Lovefilm, along with Citizen Kane, The Sound of Music and a documentary on whelk farming to distract whoever packs the discs) fast-forwarding through the sex scenes or idly reading my Kindle between plot sections. I suppose that if you get turned on by bored naked ladies rubbing each others' squidgy bits until their contractual obligation to do so comes to an end, this movie has you covered.

If not, it's a long hour and a half.



There is a story here though - and a surprisingly ambitious one for a film being shot on a budget of 'whatever we found down the back of the sofa'. It tries to be a globe-spanning action movie for starters, with some semblance of a plot connecting its 'action' sequences. There's even a hilarious Making Of video on the DVD where the crew earnestly discuss the shooting process as if this was an actual movie rather than a shameless attempt to piggy-back on a famous name with the power of lesbian sex.

"It's about a girl who's trying to fulfil her father's dream, basically," explains one guy, apparently somewhat misinformed. "When you shoot a film like this, you're not just shooting this film - you're living it," adds the director. "You're going on the experience that the characters are going on."

Really? I doubt that. Neither has the right equipment, for starters. And I don't mean a camera.



The 'experience' kicks off in a small Californian town-house masquerading as somewhere in a film that can afford proper locations. Lara Croft... sorry, wait... "Cara Loft" lies on top of a bed with zebra print pillows, under a mosquito net, in a room that clearly has electrical lighting but is still lit with regular candles in Blatant Disregard For Safety. She unenthusiastically plays with herself in ways that none of the games have offered a control scheme for, but which mostly looks like she's having a bad dream that someone stole her genitals and keeps feeling the need to reach down and check everything's okay.

About five minutes or so of that later, a female thief breaks into her room through the open window with a look that seems to say "Get on with it, woman, I've got five more heists to do tonight!" She's dressed all in black, if you don't count the torrent of bright ginger hair pouring down her back, and wastes no time raiding Cara's jewellery box for what looks like an incredibly cheap necklace.

But then!

"Lights!" commands Cara, rising up and pointing her guns at the thief, and also a couple of pistols.



"Whoever said diamonds are forever must obviously have kept theirs in a safe," intones Cara, in a dreadful attempt at a posh English accent. The thief counters by pulling a flick-knife and holding it up to a statue on the nearest table, before remembering that - ideally - it helps for hostages to be alive.

"Diamonds can also be a girl's best friend," she growls back in a... French, maybe... accent, pulling off her balaclava to reveal that she has a face underneath the impressive amount of hair. "My name iz Milla. And if I had wanted to, I could have ztolen ze necklace and killed you in your zleep."

The two banter for a bit with excruciating ADR dubbing, before Milla explains her presence.

"I am not a theef. I am juzt a mezzenger."

"What kind of messenger wears black, scales balconies and carries a Special Forces knife?"

"I work for Scrotus."

...excuse me?

"Dr. Scrotus?" asks Cara. "The archeologist turned ancient art-collector?"

Time-out. First, if this movie wanted to save itself, the correct response would have been "No, Bob Scrotus, the insurance salesman from Kennebunkport." But it doesn't. Instead, not only is the identifying factor of a man called "Scrotus" that he's an art-collector, he turns out to be the only person in this movie with a porny joke name. Would it have killed them to think up a spin on an actual character from the game series instead of... that? Jacqueline Natal, maybe? Pierre DuEveryone? Sophia Lay?

Oooh, I know. Wanker von Croy!



"He was friends with your father, Lord Loft."

"My father's dead."

"I know," Milla tells her, handing over a card. "Tha mezzage. Dr. Scrotus wanted me to give thiz to you."

The card is an invitation to Dr. Scrotus' house at 7PM the next day - the kind of thing usually best sent through the post instead of by a thief in the night, but then with a name like Dr. Scrotus it's not as though he has to worry about accidentally slipping into villainy or anything. Cara unsurprisingly blows her off. But first, she refuses the invitation on the grounds that she has yoga tomorrow."

"Yoga... will not tell you how your father died."

Unfair. He was pretty straight about it last time someone asked. "Anger, fear, aggression; the dark side of the Force are they. Easily they flow, quick to join you in a fight. If once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will, as it did Obi-Wan's apprentice."

Milla promises that Scrotus will make it worth her time, joining her on the bed and pawing at her face. Cara gets a look in her eyes that can best be described as "well, here we go, I guess..." Cara moves in for a kiss anyway, but they end up rubbing cheeks instead, then trying the kissing thing again and getting locked in a kind of duel where both try to bite off each other's top lip. It has all the sentiment of an unsigned Christmas card at Easter and is about as sexy as a beetroot smoothie.



A few minutes and one bland song later, Milla slips off like a thief in the night. Cara watches her go, and sadly digs a small locket out from under her pillow and takes a few moments to bask in post-coital afterglow by being stared at by a grinning picture of her father that seems to be saying "Attagirl!" His gaze is so hypnotic, she's still fixated by it several hours and one scene transition later. As, it appears, is the director, who lingers on it for about a minute - occasionally cutting away to show that while Cara isn't exactly filling Lara's bra, she can at least pull off the trademark ponytail well enough.

The eye-moistening sadness is soon broken by the arrival of Lara's irritating, innocent, blonde-dyed assistant Dillon. He serves two roles in the movie - to go "Bwah?!" at anything sexy happening, in a way that really makes you wish they'd been able to afford flesh-eating tigers in this movie, and help provide clumsy exposition. Clumsy exposition like...

"You really miss your father, Lord Loft. Don't you?"

"Yes. I suppose I do."

"It's terrible how he vanished without a trace. Wasn't he searching for some ancient artifact?"

"Yes. Three of them."

Cara smiles, changing the subject back to herself. She's decided to take the evil Dr. Scrotus on his offer, and decided that it's only polite to show up to his stately... small house... wearing something 'naughty'. This turns out to be a tight-fitting, movement restricting silver dress - actually making the real Lara's habit of running around the Andes in a crop-top and shorts seem almost sane. Just to complete the fashion disaster, she couples this with a pair of incredibly heavy looking combat boots. Dillon sighs as he watches her ass waddle down the side of a house that they're trying to pretend is Dr. Scrotus' palatial mansion, and pulls out a Gameboy that bloops and bleeps exactly like a real Gameboy doesn't.



At the front door Cara is met by an underwear-clad girl called Natasha. They exchange some polite banter, Cara not saying "Do you think you're taking Casual Friday a bit far?" and Natasha not replying "Do you not think that when your nipples are poking through your dress, it's time to go up a size or so to avoid chafing?" The movie tries to give this a bit of a sexual undercurrent, though the best it can really offer is an equally unspoken "So, we'll be pretending to have sex later, right?" followed by "Yep."

Pleasantries over, Cara is led into the living room of the great Dr. Scrotus and...



Oh, god. Scrotus is a gravel-voiced bald man with the world's fakest beard and moustache combination, a gravelly voice that sounds like it's taking a break from yelling "Next time, Gadget!" and - at least later on - bright gold eyeshadow, just in case anyone on Earth is still taking him seriously.

The two chat, and Scrotus tells Cara that he was the one who accidentally - BWAH HA HA - sent her father to his death. They were searching for three sacred 'wombs', and it's something of a relief to find out that the title refers to these small idols scattered around the world. It may be a painful attempt to squeeze a pun out of the title, but at least it's not quite as gynecological as it sounded.

"The power they have to give man the ability to create life is only a myth," Cara tells him.

"Everything... is myth..." growls Scrotus. "Until... proven fact..."

"Fact is, nobody knows where the three sacred wombs are. You have nothing I want."

She makes to leave, but Natasha blocks the path with her breasts and also the rest of her body. Scrotus dramatically draws a katana... and uses it to pass over a map in a tube. This incredibly detailed map proves to pinpoint the exact location of the three sacred wombs. It's practically GPS.



One quick scene-setting trip to the side of a fence next to one of the many airports that a film like this was never going to have the budget to actually film inside (and featuring a hilarious moment that looks like there's a police car running over to intercept the film crew in case they're terrorists - which wouldn't be the first time a Lara has gotten in trouble with the law...) it's off to Arabia for the first womb.



Cara immediately demonstrates her survival training and instinct for self-preservation by going in search of the womb on foot. In the middle of the desert. Wearing high-heeled combat boots, shorts and a T-Shirt, and exactly one small water canteen. Boiling in the sun, she opts to cool off by taking off her shirt and slinging it over her shoulder, then ditching her bra not long afterwards - presumably to avoid any unsightly tan-lines in her upcoming weeks of second-degree sunburn.

Hours of wandering later, she's still lost in the desert - though dressed again, in a victory for common sense, if not fanservice. She compensates by finally opening her one single canteen of water... and pouring the whole thing out over her face and cleavage. Idiot! Stupidity is not sexy!

Unsure of where to go next, she damply sits back to meditate. "Father always did say to trust my instincts," she announces with a smile, and climbs up onto the highest rock in the area to strip naked... except for her combat boots for some reason... and have another shower. Cara, I'm fairly sure that's not what your father had in mind. If he did though, it would explain a lot about the locket thing.

While this flagrant waste of water goes on, we see that Natasha has followed her to Arabia and is hiding in the shadows, turning the impromptu show into a private hands-on experience. All this poses many questions, though honestly the biggest one is: why would anyone pack shampoo to rub over themselves in a desert survival kit? Things like this really take you out of the narrative. I'm just saying.



Cara finally tracks down her target - a nomadic prince who guards the first womb - and slips inside by seemingly suffocating one of his belly dancing concubines and stealing what passes for her clothes. Our heroine! Inside, she slips him a mickey that she just happened to have packed along with her shampoo, but gets caught before it has a chance to kick in. Maybe she should have brought guns instead.

The prince turns out to be a master of subtle communication - managing to convey both 'strip her' and 'commence lesbian sex' with what sounds to the untrained ear like the same clap. Cue another five minutes of bored stares and random skin rubbing, in which the three girls run out of things to do so quickly, at one point Cara resorts to licking someone's leg. The prince watches with an expression that starts out saying "I'm not sure what you think you just did, but I'll go with it for now..." but which soon morphs into something closer to "You know what, this is actually quite dull. Oh, how I wish we could play Dungeons and Dragons. I'd be a High Elf mage called Trixiebelle and I would know all the spells."

Finally, he falls asleep. Cara grins in victory, but politely finishes off the other girls before getting back to the story. She produces a lockpick from her discarded clothes, then rushes over to give the Prince's treasure chest the same amount of attention he just gave hers. Hurrah! One McGuffin down.



"Africa" is hilarious. It's clearly a Californian dirt road in the hills, turned into African savannah by shamelessly splicing in stock footage of rhinos, tigers and other animals every time Cara glances out of her jeep. Unfortunately, the good times can't last. Barely a minute later, the jeep grinds to a halt on a hill and she has to get out to fix it. This doesn't seem too tricky - just a case of adding more water to the engine. The only catch is that it's too hot to touch, forcing her to take off her T-Shirt, use it to protect her hand as she opens it up, then spend the rest of the rough ride bouncing around topless.

Oh, except that she's wearing thick leather gloves.

Honestly, it's like they don't even care about plot holes...



Cara soon meets up with Dillon, who passes the 'Eyes Up Here' test with flying colours, even when she poses in front of him to show off her 'native look'. As she puts on a spare T-Shirt that he conveniently had waiting, he tells her that the co-ordinates for the next womb are just a short walk away.

"Excellent," announces Cara. "According to Dr. Scrotus' map, the second womb idol is buried in a holy mud pit guarded by an ancient Zulu warrior."

Eh, sounds plausible.

"Aren't Zulu warriors extinct?" asks Dillon, failing history. But it turns out that there's a little more to it than that. Specifically, this "Zulu" warrior is immortal, so there's at least a 5% chance that Cara will have to think up some non-lesbian sex method for dealing with what is at least potentially a him.

They take a boat down the river, followed by hacking their way through the 'jungle' with a 'machete' while more animal sounds play. There isn't enough undergrowth in California to make this walk in the woods look like the darkest jungle, so mostly she's swinging at exactly nothing - but it kinda works. She even gets to keep her clothes on for a couple of minutes, which almost counts as a plot twist!



Soon enough though, the duo sense the "Zulu" warrior chasing them and are forced to run - pausing only to run into one of the worst Indiana Jones shout-outs ever committed to film - with one of them tumbling messily into the oozing, sticky caress of the sacred mud pit. Can you guess which one?

Nope, it's Dillon.

Also, it's not exactly 'mud'. Or a 'pit'. But 'small hole we dug this morning and then poured mucky water into when we got bored of that' probably didn't sound as sexy when writing the script.



Cara unloads both of her guns at the "Zulu" warrior, before realising that this isn't a Tomb Raider game where mystical ammunition elves will sneak in and leave shotgun shells in the depths of ancient tombs. Out of bullets, she runs to Dillon with the "Zulu" in hot pursuit - only to find that, it's a pretty young woman. What were the odds of that, eh? 1 in 1, or slightly better? I never was much good at maths.

"I am the protector of the idol, and have been for a thousand years," the "Zulu" tells her. Cara shrugs this off and tells Dillon to go back home while she 'plays in the mud'.



The two square off and fight unenthusiastically around the watery bidet, but Cara is quickly outmatched. Pushed to the ground, a hand round her throat, she lashes out with the ultimate attack... a quick smooch. The "Zulu" is so stunned by this, and from the look of it, the film so disappointed with its mud pit, that they drop the fight entirely in favour of what can only be described as a lesbian mind meld. For the next few minutes, they sit around and engage in spiritual making out in another dimension of the soul or something, only to finally wake up and discover that it's now the middle of the night.

At which point Natasha shows up and just shoots the "Zulu". Immortal warrior, my ass.



For no particularly good reason, the two put this random murder aside to go in search of the third and final womb in Tibet - a fairly nice, hilly looking area of Probably California. Guided by a monk, and pausing for Natasha to take a bite of Dillon's banana because comedy, they track it to a cave behind a particularly drippy waterfall. If this sounds abrupt, it's because not much happens.



For some reason, Cara decides that she and Natasha need to strip off and dress in flappy ceremonial robes to go inside. In theory, it's something to do with putting aside worldly things. In practice, it's because neither gets anything to hold them shut as they crawl through the tight rock corridors. This looks fairly unpleasant, and with lots of grazing and cutting potential. If only clothes had been popularised as a way to protect against harm instead of just cover up shameful naughty bits...

"Are you sure you're prepared for what you might find?" Dillon asks nervously.

"Absolutely," says Cara, knowing that the odds of it turning out to be random lesbian sex are roughly 99% and rising. She hands Dillon the two already collected wombs for safekeeping, and she and Natasha head in to face their destiny armed with only a couple of oddly phallic looking glowsticks.



The final womb is in a cave, guarded by a conveniently invisible barrier and two gold-painted statues of naked women wielding swords and wearing... smiling unicorn masks? Okay. Whatever.

Natasha eagerly reaches for the prize, but that only activates the guards. They creep up behind, swords ready to strike, and in one case, breasts twitching oddly and horns... erect.

"Only those true of heart and soul can pass to take the idol," says the first.

"Those not worthy shall perish by our hands," adds the other.

And how do you prove worthiness? Charitable works? Devotion to the teachings of-

"You must offer yourselves entirely. Offer your bodies. Please us. Please us or die.

Of course. Cara and Natasha exchange glances that could be anything from "Again?" to "If they're really statues, this is seriously going to chafe, isn't it?" and "Do you think they'll use their horns?" Enthusiastic as a poison taster, Cara drops her robe and thinks of England. Natasha on the other hand hangs back to have a me-party for a while, before noticing that she can just take the damn idol and run away with it.

So she does. And that is officially the Smartest Moment In The Film.

Cara finally notices and runs out, leaving her ceremonial robe behind. Outside, Dillon is missing, as are the wombs and apparently all her belongings. She stands naked and defeated on the edge of the mountain and screams her enemy's cursed name in anger, in fury, in desperation, and in the sudden realisation that Captain James T. Kirk was lucky as hell to have a nemesis called "Khan".



Just doesn't work, does it?


Back at the Scrot Cave, Dr. Scrotus thanks his lucky stars that Cara was too stupid to stash any of the wombs somewhere safer than her rucksack, or simply smash one of them to prevent their power being abused. His goons slap Dillon a bit while he gloats about his vague new power and demands Natasha entertain them both with stories of exactly how much she made Cara cry before killing her.

"Like a baby pig," Natasha lies, smart enough to realise that maybe simply leaving her stark naked in the middle of Tibet wasn't in fact enough of a prank to impress the boss. Or possibly she just feels bad about the whole 'handed the world over to a supervillain' thing. Either works, really.



About five femtoseconds later however, Cara shows up with both pistols firing. For about three seconds. Then she runs out of ammo. Which she only brought two clips of. Again. Tomb Raider combat has always been pretty dreadful, so I guess this is accurate. Still, it's a whole new low for gunplay....



Out of ammo, Scrotus' guards cackle and level their guns for the final kill. But! At the last second! A shot rings out from the darkness as Natasha shoots first, then quietly hands Cara her gun.

You know, it strikes me that Natasha is a ridiculously more efficient agent than Cara ever gets to be. She's fast enough to reach two of the three idols about as quickly as the star, and Cara only does that because Scrotus tells her exactly where to look in the first place. Twice, she takes out armed assailants in a single hit, and at no point in the entire story is she ever caught with her pants down either literally or metaphorically. Sure, she works for the villain, but you've got to give credit where it's due....

Oh, and speaking of the villain...

"Stay back!" Scrotus growls. "The idols are mine!"

"You killed my father. The power of creation should not be left in the hands of a murderer."

She fires at almost point blank range and Scrotus falls back with a scream. No bullethole, of course, so she might have missed completely and he just didn't want her to feel bad about the fact, but we can probably assume that he's dead. Cara doesn't bother checking. She just picks up the idols and heads off for a final shot of 'you worked for the villain and stabbed me in the back and kidnapped my friend and also that was my favourite bra you stole in Tibet but I guess we're okay now' sex. Which is the 37th best kind of sex, between 'for the chance to win a Microsoft Zune' and 'because the cat is watching'.



Well, that was a dreadful, dreadful movie. Despite being a 'parody', there are maybe four or five jokes scattered throughout the entire thing, and most of them both unintentional and in the Making Of documentary. Definite fail there. It's also deeply, deeply unsexy, with exactly no emotion or passion to speak of. As for the story? Words seem pointless, so let's just write it off with the sound 'Pfffffffft.'

On the other hand, The Cradle Of Life was a worthless pile of crap too, and that one cost an estimated $90,000,000 to inflict on the world. Imagine how many orphans could have been fed with that money. Think of how many people were forced to sit through the whole thing because walking out of the cinema would have been a waste of an afternoon. At least Womb Raider was low budget, and aimed at a market that could have been done with it in five minutes. Two, if they got started during the copyright warning.

So yes. Womb Raider. Awful, obviously but still a better experience than The Cradle of Life, if only in the same way that root canal surgery will always be less fun than merely finding a hair in your soup. Even if you then look up to see an oily, bald chef standing in the kitchen. Reaching into his pants.

And taking a good long scratch.

If you're going to succeed in the awfully-crowded F2P FPS market, you're going to have to find a way to set yourself apart. Aeria Games' latest run-'n'-gun, Repulse, has all the usual modes we've come to expect: Deathmatch, CTF, infection (known here as Invasion), and objective-based maps. But the game's movement abilities are what really stand out. And we're here to help you start playing in style, right from the get-go, without setting foot in the item shop. We're giving away 2,000 codes for a sweet item-bundle, but hurry—these firearms are on a first-come, first-serve basis.

You've got three acrobatic aerial moves at your disposal—wall jumps let you bounce around like the Prince of Persia, dodges feel straight out of Unreal Tournament 2004, and the boost jump simply launches you halfway across the room in the blink of an eye, almost like a fool-proof rocket jump. If stealth is more your thing, the Sniper class can cloak himself, letting you take potshots 'til the cows come home. These are the kind of mobility options we wanted from games like Brink—only this game won't cost you a cent.

GamesRadar has done us the kindness of hosting the codes; hop over to their giveaway page and log into (or create) a GamesRadar account. Follow the instructions there, then get ready to flaunt your bitchin' Chameleon combat armor and gold-plated railgun.

Update: We ran out, but then the lovely guys at Hi-Rez gave us 1000 more! They won't last long.

Tribes: Ascend is now in open beta (so go play, seriously), and in celebration of the wide release, Hi-Rez has graciously provided us with 1000 codes redeemable for the new Soldier Utility Pack (worth 240 GP), which can be upgraded to grant Soldiers an additional grenade slot, increased health, and faster running.



To deliver the codes (while they last), we've teamed up with our friends at GamesRadar. Head over to their giveaway page and log into (or create) a GamesRadar account--once you're logged in, the code will appear on the page. Then, if you're not already in the beta, head to www.tribesascend.com to join, and redeem your code from the "Extras" menu in the game.

Happy skiing!

Guilds are the bread and butter of social activity in any MMO, and running one yourself can be quite the tall order. But ArenaNet's got your back—Guild Wars 2 is making it easier with a few new mechanics that allow guild leaders to reward their members when they group up. We took a look at all the guild features and pulled out the more interesting improvements over the original Guild Wars.

Look for our other Guild Wars 2 Beta videos this weekend and next week on PC Gamer.com

We recently mentioned Bioware's plan to send Mass Effect 3 to space and back by attaching copies to weather balloons and sending them into the stratosphere. According to the Mass Effect 3 in space page the first couple of balloons have been launched, but they've hit a bit of a snag, and by snag I mean tree.

A tweet from the Mass Effect twitter feed mentioned the problem, adding that this team of onlookers are "...currently trying to knock it loose with a baseball attached to string. Some just went to Santa Cruz for gear." Since then they appear to have gotten into some sort of fight with the tree in question. "It's foliage is foiling our plans!" they say.

An auspicious start for an ambitious campaign, It's going even worse than our initial predictions for the fate of those copies of Mass Effect 3. You can track the progress of each balloon using GPS on the Mass Effect 3 site.

How things change. A few years ago the words "free to play" used to strike fear in my naive mind. I'd think of exploits, affluent winners and infinite credit card debt. No more. Now I associate free to play with a game I can play... for free. It's a payment model that Hi Rez studios controversially adopted for Tribes: Ascend, the competitive team-based shooter that's just gone into open beta.

Executive Producer Todd Harris has the payment model to thank for the boost in the player base of their previous MMO-shooter, Global Agenda: "Just before going free-to-play, we had a very generous free trial, but by changing it from a free trial to free-to-play, we increased the number of people who download and play dramatically. That was a good learning for us... we thought we did an effective job making the game free-to-play, but not pay-to-win and the community tended to agree with us."

The community are right. After a few hours in Tribes: Ascend, it's obvious that Hi Rez' priority isn't in milking players dry via microtransactions. "Going into Tribes Ascend we wanted a big group to try it," says Todd. We wanted it to be competitive in terms of the PvP and in not being pay-to-win. We wanted to put more of our resources into the development of the game versus the marketing of the game. Free-to-play lets people try the game first."

It also means that Hi Rez could spend less on marketing, and more on development. "We don’t have to convince them with television ads to plop down fifty bucks ahead of time, we’d rather rely on word of mouth and a free download to let people try it for themselves."



It was probably a daunting prospect. After all, it's easy to piss off a Tribes veteran. Early feedback from the community prompted Hi-Rez to lower the amount of hitscan weapons and even redefine the class system entirely. As a result, the community appreciated the tweaks and got back on board. Todd seems proud of Hi Rez's open attitude.

In fact, he says very few games can afford to exist in a vacuum: "I think gamers are fairly cynical when it comes to advertising and marketing. They want to be shown and not told. They’re very hands on and sceptical, and they should be, because there’s so much product out there and so many choices. So I think there’ll continue to be a handful of franchises with the name recognition and the known IP to host blockbuster events; those are kind of fun to celebrate, but they’re the minority."

The latest issue of PC Gamer comes with a beta code for Tribes: Ascend and 350 gold - enough to unlock a specialist class, or pimp out one of you existing ones. Subscribe, or grab your copy of the March issue.

After regaining the composure I lost to the spooks of The Secret World’s opening sequence, I was given a new, leveled-up character to play through a portion set in Al-Merayah, Egypt during my trip to Funcom's studio last week. This is an open world zone players should encounter about 60 hours in that really shows off the game’s distinct real-world-with-a-wicked-twist setting.

Our characters were given pre-built loadouts of abilities and skills, with 180 skill points (used to increase general aptitude with specific weapons) and 60 ability points (used to purchase passive and active abilities, with almost 600 to pick from). You gain three skill points and one ability point every time your XP fills up, so this would be the rough equivalent of a level 60 character. Every character can wield two weapons at a time (activating an ability auto-swaps you to that weapon) and I opted to go up-close-and-personal with a massive two-handed hammer and a small sickle.

For my abilities, the dev team set me up with a straight-forward build that let me stab, smash, and knock down everyone I encountered. And there were plenty of baddies in the sands just begging for a beating.



Sizing up the city
Once again, I was blown away by the intricate design of the zone, which housed a wide range of locales: modern cities with complex architecture, ancient ruins, and ember-filled canyons with falling stars and flaming palm trees. The zone shows off Funcom's impressive ability to build a complex world that balances the realistic (insurgents working against an entrenched military force, bomb threats in the city), the totally out-there (magical beasts, cultists raising an ancient god, huge elemental monsters, and the somewhere-in-between (a mummy weapons broker with impeccable manners and a classy suit).

I honestly couldn’t tell you what the first quest I got in the zone was, because I spent the first 10-15 minutes exploring the city of Al-Merayah, ducking into every building I could and doing my best Ezio impression while I scaled buildings to try and reach hidden areas. The city is absolutely massive, as is the whole zone, with a lot of attention paid to small details that make you want to peer around every corner. A lot of games have open worlds that you want to explore, but the thing about TSW is that I felt like I was being rewarded for doing so.

In one random room tucked away off the beaten path, I received the option to eavesdrop on a nearby table. I ducked behind the trellace and listened in as a cinematic showed me two men arguing about an arrangement that’d been made to support the local insurgency. I learned about a plan underway to assault two guard posts soon, so I snuck out and rushed to defend them. It was a standard kill-the-waves-of-progressively-more-difficult-bad-guys quest, but I felt like I had earned it.

Later in the day, I uncovered a bomb tucked away on the backside of a building and was given a quest to find 10 bombs planted all over the city before they detonated. The key here is that there aren’t giant exclamation points on your minimap that scream at you to take a quest—in fact, I imagine many players won't even notice the bombs at all. If you’re not paying attention and looking at the world around you, you’ll end up missing one of the area's cooler quests.



Punishing quests
Ragnar Tørnquist, the game’s creative director, hates how questing works in most MMOs. He looks slightly disgusted as he describes how most people grab 10-15 quests and run in a big loop completing them while watching TV. So he came up with a forceful solution: you can only have three quests at a time: one of each of the game’s quest types—Story (the main narrative everyone has at all times), main (bigger quests that involve action or investigation), and item (which revolve around finding items or moving items, like the bomb quest I mentioned).

The restriction is meant to force players to focus on the task at hand, and make them consider the gravity of what they’re doing, rather than grabbing a ton of quests and clicking anything in the world that sparkles without even knowing which quest it relates to (here’s looking at you, World of Warcraft). And it succeeds at that: I was always aware of the details around my current quest and why I was doing what I was doing. It also meant that quests didn’t need to be placed in centralized hubs—since the design wasn’t for you to have them all at once, it was okay to spread them out across the entire zone. Different players will explore the zone in totally different ways, picking different starting quests that will lead them in opposite directions.

In theory, that sounds great, but the three-quest restriction was downright obnoxious while I was playing. The vast majority of the times that I uncovered one of those discoverable quests I was gushing about earlier, I couldn’t accept it without dropping another quest I was working on. I either had to mentally note its location so I could try to remember to run back there after I finished my current item quest (not gonna happen with my crappy memory), or sigh and hope I get lucky enough to stumble on it again. Thankfully, Tørnquist told me that the dev team agrees that the limit on quests is too tight, and they'll be allowing players to pick up more than one item quest (the exact number isn't decided yet), although the other two categories will remain capped at one each.



And God help you if you have trouble solving a particular quest—which you will, because investigation missions are designed to stump you. They’re one of TSW’s most unique and interesting aspects, requiring you to look at images, listen to sound clips, solve riddles, and search for clues in the world around you in order to figure out what to do.

One quest I picked up early on told me to find the cultist gathering place in or near the city. That was it. No waypoint or Wowhead link, just “go find it.” Okay, I’m an intelligent guy (or so I thought)—I can figure this out. Thirty minutes later, it was revealed to me that no, in fact, I couldn’t. I had entered every building in the city, followed the conveniently-labeled “suspicious villagers” to the sewer entrance they were walking to (which wasn’t their hideout apparently), and tried yelling at the computer for answers. Nothing worked.

I gave up and went to work on my story mission, but that stubborn quest that had me stumped now rendered one-third of my quest slots unusable. Sure, I could abandon it, but then the terrorist cultists win, and I wasn't about to let that happen on my watch.



I learn to not be so dumb
The other quests I did around the world were usually very entertaining. I battled giant scorpions, crushed flame spirits, ransacked ruins for ancient tablets, cleared out a hotel overrun by mutants, and all sorts of other Indiana-Jones-of-the-weird sorts of activities. The stories were all pretty good, putting some fun twists on modern-day Egypt. And—it begs repeating—the settings were spectacular. The overrun hotel was particularly fun to run around in, with hulking monsters huddling around overturned generators, and smashed tables with littered food setting the scene for a palm-tree resort gone wrong. Most were standard kill or collect quests, with the most out-of-the-box being a you’re-getting-hotter-or-colder hunt that sent me running around the zone in search of relics.

As I was stumbling about a suburb of Al-Merayah, waiting for the sonar beeps for the aforementioned quest to quicken, I stumbled across another “suspicious cultist,” this one leaving out of a different city gate as the others I’d followed earlier. I ignored my brain’s cries of “fool me once, cultist, shame on you; fool me twenty times, shame on me” and followed her out the city. Lo and behold, this one went straight to their hangout: a sliver-sized crevice in the side of a cliff underneath the bridge outside town.



So many emotions poured over me at that moment: anger, relief, bewilderment, embarrassment, outrage. I know part of my problem with this quest is my fault—having only found one stream of the suspicious cultists leaving the city—but in my play session, I also encountered two other quests with very vague or misleading instructions. In one, I was tailing a guy through the city with the instruction to “find his location.” He got spooked and ducked into a building. I spent ten minutes trying to find my way into this locked-up building before giving up. It wasn’t until I started working on a different quest that, by complete chance, I triggered a cinematic that completes that "find his location" quest. Somehow he'd teleported to a tiny hallway in the corner of the city, nowhere near the building he'd originally ducked into.

That said, I love the concept of these investigation missions. A lot of gamers are sick of having their hand held through every quest, and want to be given more challenging tasks that force them to actually think and reason, not just follow giant arrows on the map pointing to objectives. Some may even love the incredibly perplexing quests that press your patience, cognitive skills, and tolerance for random guessing to their limits. One particular quest I saw other players encounter (but I never found) was particularly awesome, having players look through old images and hieroglyphics to solve a riddle. There's an in-game browser that you can launch at any time to do research on real-world myths and legends, which will be helpful (and no doubt required) to solving some of these investigation missions.



Investigation missions that require real investigation: awesome! But I hope Funcom tones down the elements that require random guessing—those quests only left me feeling frustrated and confused. I asked Tørnquist if he wanted the missions to be as difficult as I found them. He smiled and told me he was tired of MMOs being too easy—he wants The Secret World to really challenge players.

If you do get stumped on a quest, I'm sure there'll be plenty of players willing to offer tips and advice in the chat, though. So you shouldn't get as stuck as I did if you're willing to ask for help once the servers start filling up.

In today's posts I've gone over a lot of what I liked and didn't like about The Secret World, but in Monday's post I finally get into my absolutely favorite parts of this game: TSW’s brilliantly-open skills system and fast-paced dungeons with cool twists.