I doubt we’ll be hearing too much more about yesterday’s Uplay drama, given the security hole appears to have been safely plugged before any malevolent souls could take advantage of it. Ubisoft have passed further comment on the issue as they saw it, however, claiming an exploit that allowed a vast amount of access to Uplay users’ PCs was the result of a “coding error” and that their online infrastructure/shop/DRM did not include a rootkit. (more…)

RussianUkrainian blogger and marketing man Sergey Galyonkin – who tipped off the closure of the STALKER 2 project earlier this year – has claimed that Bethesda now have the rights to make a publish a STALKER game. They apparently do not> have rights to the extended universe. GSC owner Sergei Grigorovich has not sold the brand, but apparently Bethesda could now make a game based on the property with their own technology. We’ll report more on this as we get it.

This follows on from the closure of STALKER 2 earlier in the year, an event which culminated in Ukrainian spin-off studios such as Survarium devs, Vostok.

We’ve contacted Bethesda for a statement. UPDATE: Currently they are saying “No comment.”

We could have waited until it hit 1 million for the sake of the bigger headline, I suppose. But I wanted to say something: the success of zombie mod Day Z couldn’t have been predicted. It was a one off. A outlier. It’s one of those rare and beautiful times when a game design experiment explodes into a phenomenon. No one can plan for that to happen, not really. But I can predict one thing: the companies that do not support modding will never> have a zombie mod sell hundreds of thousands of extra copies of their game.

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Truly impressive mod projects make me want to defy physics. For example, try as I might, I cannot – even with the assistance of a truly formidable thesaurus – recreate the pure magic of an authentic standing ovation in post form. And yet, that’s what the legions of folks who’ve spent five years continuously tidying up each and every inch of Morrowind deserve. Meanwhile, Morrowind Overhaul 2.0 was quite the looker, but I want to frame Overhaul 3.0‘s trailer and hang in it on my wall – something that’s also probably outside the orc-and-elf-free realm of possibility. Even bare walls and pin-drop silence, however, won’t dampen my excitement for really pretty videogame snow>. I mean, just look at that stuff. Well, go on now. Do it.

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The past few weeks have seen us take a whirlwind tour of Firefall‘s massive summer milestone update, and it’s been quite a ride. Laughter, tears, happiness, and muscular men with jetpacks have all flown freely in equal measure – but mostly, it’s wrapped day-to-day life in a warm blanket of stability>. Empires may fall, stars might blink out of existence, and The Hobbit will definitely >get hacked into three still-quivering chunks, but at least a reliable stream of Firefall videos gave our tiny, insular world some semblance of order. Today, however, the Recon battleframe’s here to deliver us back into the arms of cruel uncertainty with the final video in the class series – which, I suppose, is pretty fitting, given that the Recon seems to exist for the sole purpose of ruining everyone’s day.

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Dear Esther‘s brilliantly amorphous plot made me feel like I’d hit my head and – for the same reason that television’s left me deathly afraid of light flicks on the forehead or especially hard rainfall – acquired horribly debilitating amnesia. That, however, is probably where the similarities between Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs and Dear Esther end, so thechineseroom’s also giving its more experimental spirit room to breathe with Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture. It is, of course, about the end of the world – as these things so often are. But this is far from typical videogame pre/post/postmodern apocalypse fare.

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It’s not that difficult to “enhance” something. Recently, I “enhanced” my cereal experience by pouring milk into it. In the world of PC gaming, however, “enhanced” is a holy and sacred word. The Witcher 1 and 2′s Enhanced Editions, for instance, were the equivalent of sending my cereal bowl sailing into a nearby forest, flying in an Iron Chef, and telling him to make whatever his heart desired – so long as it included over 100 courses. Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition, meanwhile, appears to be taking a similar approach. And now, Beamdog’s announced a cherry for the proverbial cereal and ice cream and filet mignon sundae: cross-platform multiplayer.

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It may come as something of a surprise to you that you aren’t waging futuristic war on a massive scale while listening to “Ride of the Valkyries” right now. Speaking personally, it’s a thought that crosses my mind every day. Thing is, it’s actually not a minor form of mania today, as PlanetSide 2′s beta was supposed to have touched down by now. It is, however, nowhere to be found, and there’s a very good reason for that: a last-second delay – albeit, a pretty minor one.

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And lo did the two RPS Hivemind nodes who would always be picked first in any alphabetical order-based selection process gather to discuss Paradox/Ino-Co Plus’ turn-based, Master of Magic-esque strategy game Warlock: Master of the Arcane. Adam and Alec spaketh words at each other. Occasionally, they even listened to each other. To what end? Not a soul doth know. Here are those words.>

Alec: WARLOCK: MASTER OF THE ARCANE is a turn-based strategy game about fantasy kingdoms at war that came out a little while back, but is one of those increasingly rare cases where more than one of us have played it. You’ve played tons of it, right?

Adam:Tons. If you could actually measure it as a weight or mass it would be like a spoonful of Mercury, or whichever that planet is. The one that the Flaming Lips sang about.

Alec: I think they sing about all of them, all the time, in quadraphonic sound. (more…)

The original Tiny Barbarian was a splendid little platformer, with secrets to discover and monsters to be barbaric toward. Based on The Frost Giant’s Daughter, an original Conan story, it was lovely and free. StarQuail are working on a semi-sequel, Tiny Barbarian DX, and it looks even more lovely and there’s no indication that it will be any less free. Barbarians riding on top of animonsters immediately reminds me of Golden Axe and the way that arrows are chopped out of the air immediately reminds me of awesome, so I’m now referring to Tiny Barbarian DX as Awesome Axe. Or Golden Awesome, but that sounds like a rubbish wrestler or the most incredible apple ever grown. Video below.

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