Who would've thought slapping a half-naked Norn around would earn you a skill point, or that you could turn invisible just by logging into Guild Wars 2? Josh and Gavin join forces to help you discover these and 18 other fun facts about the wonderful world of GW2's beta. Also, see why Josh should never, ever be allowed to play in the snow with your children.

DISCLAIMER: Everything on this list is based on the beta event weekend held on February 18. Some of the things discussed may change before the final game is released.

Hooray for mediocrity! Few things feel better than having an average performance acknowledged in a live esports environment. There's no greater thrill than being told that "the thing you're doing is going okay. Well done for maintaining an acceptable standard in spite of all assumptions to the contrary." That's a feeling worth taking a spinfusor disc to the face for, as we discovered during our Tribes: Ascend show match last week. We put the show down videos up earlier today.

Elsewhere, a few big numbers have been flying about. TEN MILLION. That's how many dollars Hawken devs, Adhesive games, now have to make their mech-blasting multiplayer arena shooter amazing. ONE MILLION. That's how many players eagerly tried to grab a place in the upcoming Guild Wars 2 beta sessions. FOUR POINT FIVE BILLION. The number of humans probably eradicated during the Reaper invasion of Earth in today's Mass Effect 3 trailer

Plenty more has been happening of course. I've mashed today's PC gaming news into a funnel and distributed them below with all the care of a cake decorator decorating a cake with a list of PC gaming news links. Read on for games at the Smithsonian, a big gun in Planetside 2, CCP on Eve and Dust 514 and Bioware on Mass Effect MMO possibilities.


Over on Reddit games, a man builds a SNES PC.
Bioware's Dr. Greg Zeschuk and Dr. Ray Muzyka chat to PAR about the challenges of launching TOR and the possibilities of a Mass Effect MMO.
DSO mention that Dungeons of Dreadmor devs, Gaslamp have offered to take over Terraria update duties after Re-Logic announced they were moving on.
How much would it cost to buy every piece of Mass Effect 3 merchandise, including controllers and keyboards at launch? $870, according to Destructoid.
Massively take a look at how Guild Wars 2 crafting will work.
RPS chat to CCP about Eve Online and Dust 514.
Facebook gaming is in decline, say MCV.
Planetside 2 will have big guns. Watch a man draw one really fast in this video.
The Smithsonian are running a gaming art exhibit.
Bioware talk to Kotaku about bringing a "compelling narrative" to C&C: Generals 2.

 
A PC inside a SNES that plays SNES games but is somehow still a PC, what madness is this?

If you took advantage of the 48 hour Guild Wars 2 beta sign-up window last week, don't be too disappointed if you don't receive an invite soon. ArenaNet say that more than a million contenders jumped in and signed up for a chance to be among the first so explore Tyria. At peak moments, 4000 people every minute were applying, and that was between short periods of downtime when the website's server buckled under the condensed pile-on.

It's probably fair to say, then, that many of us are quite excited about Guild Wars 2 this year. There's much to be excited about, including the promise of 300 player, three-way server vs. server warfare in Guild Wars 2's massive PvP zones and the dynamic quest system that offers you quests on the fly as you explore Tyria's zones. We spent some time with the beta recently, and had a go at answering all of your questions about Guild Wars 2.

"AAAEEEEEEEEEEeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.” A high-pitched sound was echoing through our Ventrilo server at 20:55 last Thursday. Rich was our sniper. Rich was nervous. Rich was making noises.

A few weeks ago we got a mail from Hi-Rez asking us if we’d like to participate in a Tribes Ascend showcase match against OnRPG and MMOHut. We accepted the challenge. The match was streamed live by LevelUpTV and commentated by top Tribes shoutcaster Ziggy Orzeszek and Hi-Rez eSports and Competitive manager Bart Koenigsberg.

To see Tribes: Ascend in its hyper-competitive e-sport glory, you’ll need to watch a set of pros in action. However, if you’re interested in watching the UK staff face off against some less experienced players, click away. Thanks to everyone involved for organising the match, and to OnRPG and MMOHut for being such good sports. As Graham (who fulfilled his infiltrator role admirably) mentioned on Twitter after the game, “We won via careful planning, hard work, and, um, having played it before, unlike our opponents.”

Don’t forget that Tribes is now in open beta. If you like what you see, visit the official site and download the client. You've got nothing to lose apart from your bandwidth.

Match 1


Match 2


Match 3

The promising multiplayer arena mech shooter, Hawken has just received quite a windfall in the form of $10 million of funding from Meteor Entertainment, a pretty massive investment for a debut game of a small studio. VentureBeat indicate that Meteor is backed by Benchmark Capital and FirstMark Capital, the same investors that funded Riot Games' League of Legends.

LoL boasts one of the smartest free-to-play systems in the industry at the moment and Hawken devs, Adhesive Games, have already said that the mech shooter will get by on micro transactions that will "allow greater customization and more weapon variety." Venture Beat are hoping that Hawken can capture massive audiences in the same way as League of Legends, despite the difference in genre.

“You can disrupt the business with a free-to-play title," FirstMark Capital managing director told VentureBeat. "Gamers are willing to pay via virtual goods to do that. League of Legends is a fantastic title, but it is just one game and one genre that has blown up. We think it’s possible to produce very high quality games that have huge audiences that are willing to pay."

“It’s a phenomenon akin to other incumbent areas like music, TV, film, and newspapers, where the internet is disrupting both business models and consumption patterns. We have seen it happen again and again. The internet levels the playing field,” he added.

Hawken's chalked in for release on December 12, but there will be a few rounds of beta testing before then. You can sign up for a place in the beta and find out more about the game on the Hawken site.

Fall of the Samurai's new steamboats explode as you might expect when you consider the racks of torpedoes stored within those mighty hulls. The new steam ships and sturdy ironclads of the era are just a few of the powerful new weapons that standalone Shogun 2 expansion Fall of the Samurai brings to Japan. It's set 300 years after the events of Shogun 2, at a time of rapid modernisation triggered by the arrival of boisterous Western traders from America, Britain and France. The rising number of foreign troops and advanced technology would grow to infuriate the traditionalist samurai classes leading to unrest and eventually, full-scale uprising.

As leader of a pro-imperial or pro-shogunate faction, you'll have to deal with these rebellions, ideally by using the devastating new gatling guns. Plonk one on a hill in front of a unit of swordsmen, halve the game speed and you'll get something akin to the final scenes of The Last Samurai. A fitting way to crush one's enemies. Fall of the Samurai is due to drop on March 23, check out our Fall of the Samurai preview for a detailed overview.

It's getting quite hard to keep up with all of the changes Blizzard have been making to Diablo 3 recently. Rune stones are now rune skills, companion pets are gone and entire character attributes have disappeared as Blizzard trim the fat ahead of D3's planned spring release.

If you're not on the beta, you can get to grips with the new, streamlined systems right now using the updated Diablo 3 skill calculator. It incorporates the new rune system and shows how skills will be divvied up into a left click attack, a right click attack and a series of separate action bar abilities. If you want to see some of those skills in action, a post on the Diablo 3 blog has videos and stats for a bunch of brand new ones that haven't made it into the beta yet.

The blog post lists precise stats and runestone variants for each skill, but which is the best? The Witch Doctor's acid cloud attack summons a demonic head to vomit green goo onto enemies, which is nice, but it surely can't beat the Wizard's flaming hydra, which can be upgraded to a "Mammoth Hydra" that "breathes a river of flame at nearby enemies." There's no picture, but I'm visualising a giant, woolly dragon.

The Wizard looks pretty spectacular at the moment, though the classic meteor ability could be a bit more punchy. The Barbarian also looks like great fun. The rag doll physics and impressive levels of gore make his least showy blows feel meaty and devastating. The Overpower ability is one of the simplest on the list, but the crunch of that impact is deeply satisfying. Which one's your favourite?

The latest Star Wars: The Old Republic Q&A has turned up a couple of useful additions Bioware are planning for patch 1.2, including unlockable emotes tied to the Legacy system, faster travel options for high level planets and new endgame crafting features for all professions.

One of the major annoyances for high level crafters is the fact that that top level PvE and PvP gear is superior to the best buildable items. Bioware say that this is going to be addressed in next month's update.

"We are adding endgame crafting for all professions. This includes augment crafting, the ability to crit-craft custom (orange) gear with augment slots, new endgame schematics, new color crystals, expanded and improved research and reverse engineering and much more," they say.

TOR's 1.2 update will contain four pages of patch notes devoted to crafting alone. When the patch lands we'll be able to "extract base-mods from purple items," letting players take top level base mods out of endgame gear and place them in any customisable set of orange armour. Essentially, if you don't like the look of a piece of TOR endgame gear you can use crafting skills to rip out the stat-boosting mods and plug them into a more stylish suit. Set bonuses will carry over, too.

Patch 1.2 will add extra emotes that can be unlocked using the Legacy system including a "special dance" that will allow you to bust moves in perfect sync with your companion. Bioware have previously mentioned that legacy can also be used to unlock extra race options for different classes.

The patch will also provide the option to skip the annoying orbital stations that act as interim locations between some planetary surfaces and your ship. "We'll be adding an option for players to go directly to their ships from the surface shuttles as opposed to having them run through the Orbital Station to their airlocks," say Bioware. They're also considering allowing speeders in spaceports, but that hasn't been decided yet.

The ships themselves aren't likely to change in a hurry, however. The number of carefully choreographed cutscenes tied to each vessel's interior makes it very, very difficult for Bioware to add new ships, or allow for any changes to each boat's internal design. "We will probably look at addressing this instead by providing a greater sense of ship customization at some point well in the future," they say. That'll likely mean external customisation such as decals or alternative paint jobs rather than entirely new ships.

Update 1.2 is set to arrive sometime next month. It'll also add support for multiple specs, a new Warzone and more. You can submit a question to the TOR devs ahead of next week's Q&A on the Bioware forums.

Notch is currently busy "streaming development of something that probably never will be released at all," which seems a shame, because it's a lovely little Team Fortress 2 RTS. You can watch Noch magically turning numbers and letters into scenes of TF2's eight classes fragging each other in the livestream box above. Don't worry, "Herp Derp Herp Fortress" is only a working title for now. You can suggest some alternative names in the live chat happening alongside the stream on Notch's Twitch TV channel.

The Earth is under threat. A fleet of Mass Effect 3 trailers are poised above the Earth ready to descend and convert us all into Mass Effect obsessed husks. It's already happened to Chris. He doesn't sleep anymore. He talks about Mass Effect, goes home, plugs into the mains to recharge and then returns to talk about Mass Effect some more. Only the game's release on March 6 (US)/March 9 (EU) will silence him, until then we've sat him front of the live action trailer above, which looks to have been leaked ahead of its TV debut on VG247. It's a bit like last week's Mass Effect 3 CGI trailer, except this one has more crying people, and shocking scenes of bridge destruction.