The huge 1.5GB Battlefield 3 PC patch has arrived, bringing tons of balance changes, bug fixes and new, paid-for "shortcut boxes." These will let players pay to get hold of unlocks like weapons, attachments and vehicle add-ons without having to level up.

According to the Battlefield blog, the bundles are supposed to be available on Origin now, though they don't seem to on there yet here in the UK. When the collection does go live, it'll include a Kit Shortcut bundle that "immediately unlocks all items unique to the four playable classes," a Vehicle Shortcut Bundle that unlocks all items for all vehicles, and the "Ultimate Bundle" which unlocks "all items from all other available shortcut packs," which is basically everything.

Each class kit can be unlocked separately, as well. The Battlefield site has a rundown of the prices for each kit. A class kit costs £5.49 / $6.99, the Ultimate bundle costs £31.99 / $39.99, eight pounds less than the full game.

There's plenty of good stuff in the patch notes, including improved minimaps, cleaner vaulting, faster movement from prone to standing, vehicle horns and dozens and dozens of tweaks to weapon balance, but it's overshadowed somewhat by these shortcut kits, which will be infuriating to players who have put in the many hours needed to unlock that gear.

Of course, new players who haven't played many games won't have a clue how to use some of Battlefield 3's more complex gadgets, so these microtransactions probably won't upset the balance of the game too much. But still, grrrr. What do you think?

Prime World's warring factions are much like the symbol for yin and yang. Though they fight for different causes, they share quite a bit in common—especially when it comes to heroes. Not every hero is a unique snowflake like the Artiste or the Inventor; some have two distinct forms, with identical abilities but contrasting personalities and origins. Today, we'll be taking a look at five heroes with two separate incarnations each: one for the steampunk, forward-thinking Imperium, and another on the side of the nature-loving, holistic Keepers. Woah—these colors are blowing my mind, man!


Mountain Man / Quarrier
Who's got two giant fists and likes to smash people's faces in with them? This guy. As a tank with some decent damage skills, it's up to the Mountain Man to throw his weight around and put the hurt on anyone who's picking on his more-fragile teammates. Even walking around can contribute—his Giant Stomp slows enemies with each ground-quaking step, letting him get in close to nail a Shockwave that'll spike enemies into the air from the feet up. If things are getting crazy, he can use his Landslide to stun and knock back nearby enemies, or use Stone Man like a turtle retracting into his shell, becoming invincible at the cost of not being able to move. Stone Man will also create Native Terrain around the Mountain Man's location, which greatly buffs abilities for himself and other heroes.


Archer / Amazon
It's official: every MOBA needs a high-dps lady-archer who's accessible to newbies and deadly in the hands of a pro. The Archer's first step towards battlefield domination starts with New Position, letting her dash quickly to the perfect vantage point in a fight. This is where she can rain down a Flurry of Blows, firing a volley of arrows that deal crippling magic and physical damage. And runners will have nowhere to hide: her ultimate Decisive Shot automatically targets whichever hero has the lowest health in a huge radius, then snipes them with a weakling-seeking arrow. Makes me think of the last pitiful kid running for his life in that snowball scene from Elf.


Fire Fox / Flame Tail
Much to our dismay, this foxy caster is not sponsored by or affiliated with Mozilla. This caster can regen her health simply by casting spells, thanks to her Soul Harmony passive, while she deals bonus damage if she's learned Playing with Fire. Wind and Sparks is her go-to nuke spell, hurling an ember-filled gust at her target. You can slip out of trouble with the misdirection of Fox Trick, leaving a decoy in the fight while you sneak away unseen. Her magic damage DPS kit is rounded out by Flame-tailed, where she'll launch fiery orbs into the air that burn off target's heads like mortar shots.


Pied Piper / Rat Master
Josh loves this rodent-herding weirdo, and I think I'm starting to understand why. Using his enchanted flute, the Pied Piper commands rats to do his bidding—which usually involves swarming the enemy's vulnerable feet to a thousand small bites with Rat Eruption, or stealing Prime from other heroes with the conniving Rat Rogues, who'll seek out enemies and make their pockets a bit lighter. He can also amass his minion forces with the Call of the Flute, which will hypnotize soldiers (and even heroes, however briefly) to be his unwilling servants. I guess MOBA heroes don't listen to much music, because the Piper's ultimate, Charming Melody, stuns everyone within earshot before automatically enslaving enemy soldiers.


Lightning Master / Storm Thrower
Hey look, it's that hoverboard dude from Quake 3 Arena! Like any lightbringer worth his voltage, the Lightning Master can zap targets with a pulsating Lightning Bolt, or line up a multikill with the room-clearing powers of Chain Lightning. Enemies wearing non-conductive rubber? No problem—just hurl your skull-shattering Thunder Hammer at their heads, then laugh as they stand there, dazed or stunned. Opponents will think twice before pursuing the Lightning Master, thanks to Overload, which leaves an electrical trail behind him as he runs away. And Rage of the Skies takes a page from Zeus' book, striking every enemy hero on the map with a bolt of body-charring electricity. That'll teach 'em to play out in the rain.

The "two heroes, same skill set" angle can be a bit confusing at first, but it's awesome to see a different aesthetic on opposing heroes, even if they play exactly the same. Nival will be continuing to roll out new heroes on the Prime World website; check back here to see what we think of them.

Speaking to Joystiq, SimCity Lead designer Stone Librande has revealed that the new SimCity will be an "internet-dependent experience." You'll need to stay connected to the net through Origin if you want to keep playing. He cited SimCity's multiplayer features, like the global economy that will let players sell excess resources on a massive connected market, as the reason for the always-online requirement.

Though SimCity will maintain its connection through Origin, we won't have to buy it through EA's digital store. SimCity will be available to buy through other digital distributors, and at retail, but that's small comfort for those with unreliable internet connections. As we've seen with Ubisoft, you can have the most stable connection in the world and still be at the whim to server switches and meltdowns at the developer/publisher end.

A tweet from DICE community manager Daniel Matros says that we'll be getting the humongous Battlefield 3 patch tomorrow. "Coming in hot we will go into maintenance mode from 9-11:30 CET," he says. The comprehensive update will affect almost every aspect of the game, from weapon balance to UI bits like the minimap, it'll even add an improved command rose with extra contextual options to help players communicate more efficiently when driving vehicles.

The patch will also fix a ton of bugs, hopefully removing some of the niggling problems that we've been putting up with since Battlefield 3 was released back in October.

Matros says that there are "more details coming on the blog," which will hopefully have news on whether the PC will get the unlock packs that were added to the PS3 edition yesterday. These shortcut packs can be bought to unlock guns and gadgets for each infantry class and vehicles, saving the large amounts of time it'd take to unlock them through Battlefield 3's levelling system.

We learned recently that the massive patch could have been delivered in increments earlier on PC if it wasn't for the lengthy certification process patches need to go through to get onto consoles. It's been a bit of a wait, but it's finally almost here. Given the number of tweaks, BF3 should feel quite different once it's landed.

It's not a PC game as such, but it does involve your PC and there's an element of competition, here's something to occupy a few hours of free time between now and the end of May. Take those sharp powers of observation and image analysis you've honed through play and put them to some sort of productive use.

Join the hunt for Hubble's Hidden Treasures. You can help to find new galactic objects, make some of those of colourful 'artists impressions' pictures of nebula that grace box art and maybe win an iPad too. Not bad for what is, to all intents and appearances, a browser based game. It'll help kill time until the next Mass Effect 3 DLC comes out.

The problem facing NASA and ESA, who jointly run the Hubble program, is that the telescope has taken literally millions of shots over 22 years in orbit. As a result, only a relative handful have actually been scrutinised by scientists. A couple of years ago, Hubble teamed up with the crowdsourced extra-terrestrial identification project Galaxy Zoo to put some of the unseen pictures up in front of human eyes. The problem that remains that not all of the radiowave snapshots have been processed into visual images.

With its latest initiative, the organisation is encouraging hobbiest astronomers to access its raw data and use professional tools to process it into useful pictures. It's upping the incentive to do so by offering an iPad to the person who finds and creates the most illuminating image.

There's two competitions running concurrently. The more straightforward one is for those with more limited astronomical knowledge and photo editing powers. All you have to do is enter the Hubble Legacy Archive, find a dataset and use a simple online picture editor to turn it into a 'photograph' like the ones you see on the cover of science books about space. Post the result to Hubble's Flickr group, and you can win an iPod Touch.

The second competition is a bit more challenging, and involves downloading the same data as a FITS file and then using a photo editing package like PhotoShop or Gimp to turn it into one of those cover shots. The best will be shown off on spacetelescope.org, and the very best will win an iPad.

Neither option is quite as newbie friendly as Galaxy Zoo though, and if you're fresh to astronomy there's a chance you'll probably fail at the point where the system requires you to know what object it is you're looking for before you look for it - although fond memories of Elite might help here. Give it a go - if nothing else, it's still a small insight into the more mundane parts of the lives of rock star scientists Dr Brian Cox or Brian May.

DUST 514 is a free-to-play first-person shooter from CCP, creators of EVE Online. PC players will get to set up contracts for PS3 players to complete. You'll even get to lay down orbital strikes on the console kids. Watch footage of the awe-inspiring first hit here.

But CCP haven't confirmed that Dust 514 is coming to PC... yet. This confuses me. Our rigs are meaty enough to pull off their target footage in real-time, and we already know how free-to-play mechanics work. Is it coincidence that PS3 Dust 514 has mouse and keyboard support, possibly making any future ports easier to manage? Or that it's uses the PC-compatible Unreal Engine? Also: what do the two mystery pillars that popped up during CCP's keynote represent?



My take? We'll be playing DUST 514 a year after it lands on PS3. The pillars? They're even more intriguing. But don't take my word for it: I spent last week pestering all the CCP folk I could find. You can watch the results up there.

The Financial Times report that Minecraft creators, Mojang, have filed their finances in Sweden, declaring $80 million in revenue. With interest, taxation and depreciation deducted, that's $13.5 million on profit in the 15 months since players were able to buy the first alpha build of Minecraft back in October 2010. Just imagine the number of Choc Ices you could buy with that.

Unsurprisingly, Minecraft's creator, Notch, is the main shareholder of the company. The FT say that his $3.7 million dividend has been shared with the rest of Mojang. Minecraft is the only game they've released so far, though they're publishing Cobalt, and are currently working on their fantasy card trading game, Scrolls. Notch has also started work on something new, an open world space trading game inspired by Elite and Firefly. We'll have to wait and see if Mojang can strike gold twice, but adding FIREFLY to ELITE in my brain is setting off some pretty good mental fireworks.

Legend of Grimrock is an indie dungeon crawler inspired by classic RPGs like Eye of the Beholder and Ultima Underworld. You play as a party of four exiles who must turn 90 degrees left, 90 degrees right and sometimes move forwards to escape the infested catacombs of Mount Grimrock. It's full of traps, ancient prisons, ancient enemies and horrible crawly things ready to bite your face off. Expect to encounter lots of puzzles, traps and treasure as you fight through the mountain.

The grid movement system can seem a little odd if you've never played old-school crawlers like Dungeon Master, but it allows for a lot of precision and strategy in combat. You can customise the race, class and abilities of your four exiles and upgrade their equipment with spells and weapons you find in the catacombs. It looks like Almost Human have done a great job creating a fast, elegant recreation of this classic exploration format in a modern 3D engine.

Legend of Grimrock is due out on April 11 on though the Grimrock site, Steam and GOG. It's available to pre-order now at 20% off.