This preview originally appeared in issue 244 of PC Gamer UK. Written by Phil Iwaniuk.

When you think Star Wars, your mind doesn’t wander to Episode 1’s sandy race tracks or federation vessels full of bickering politicians. No, you go straight to the Mos Eisley cantina scene. It was the wrong side of town, set to a swing jazz background. It was where we saw what Han Solo was all about, and as such it was the birthplace of all our bounty hunter fantasies. It’s also the chief inspiration for Star Wars 1313. Out with the Jedi, in with gun-slinging space-pirates who shoot first then realise there is no ‘later’.

“It has been liberating,” says creative director Dominic Robilliard. “I love every aspect of Star Wars, but being able to investigate something that’s always been in the background but that you’ve never really spent any time in is just awesome.” Robilliard’s mum forgot to hit record during Episode IV: A New Hope until that cantina scene, so the universe literally begins there for him.

He’s also keen to avoid overindulging player’s force power fantasies this time, stripping his game back to a simple but focused combination of cover shooting and platforming. The eponymous Level 1313 of Coruscant, a skyless nether-world populated by deadbeats, mercenaries and gangsters, is the perfect venue to host that game, says Robilliard: “It’s that kind of vibe, this criminal underworld that produced people like Han Solo and Jabba – and I think that the type of thing we’re going for.”



Star Wars 1313’s mechanics won’t win any innovation awards, but the slickness of its execution is going to win it a lot of friends. In cutscenes, the player character and his bounty hunter boss convey a level of subtlety in their facial expressions that make other game protagonists look like homemade sock puppets.

When you’re in control, your character’s fluidity of movement looks startling. Enemies overact like they do in the movies, but look similarly convincing.

That animation quality is a result of the studio’s collaboration with Industrial Light & Magic, a CGI and special effects house with a hoard of Academy Awards to rival James Cameron’s. ILM created the special effects for all the Star Wars movies, and just about every other visually impressive movie to date. Jurassic Park? ILM. Terminator 2? Yup. The Abyss. Tick.

And now it’s working on Star Wars 1313, lending its expertise on everything from facial animation to light sources, engine trails to holographic elevator controls.



To create that elevator visual, ILM found the guys who created the original hologram effects in Episodes IV-VI, who work at LucasFilm Animation in the same building as ILM and LucasArts. They discovered that the effects were achieved by looping VHS footage over and over, and found a way to recreate it.

That expertise elevates this game beyond LA Noire’s facial focus and into more impressive territory. Regardless of the game’s eventual quality, ILM’s involvement is important, and could be the beginning of some considerable line-blurring between the film and games industries.

But there’s not that much of it yet – only the short scenes I’m being shown. To prove what we’re looking at is in-engine, real-time rendering, the devs indulge in a bit of Blade Runner-style zoom and rotate while they’re showing it off to us in their San Francisco HQ. As the player character and his boss bundle a Trandoshan onto the elevator and descend to 1313, the devs stop and zoom in to examine every one of the pores on their faces. It isn’t flattering, but it’s a powerful demonstration of the detail in each inch of game.



As art director Dave Smith explains, that extreme fidelity brings a unique challenge: “We have to build the things digitally as if we’d actually built them for real.” He points to a battered storage crate: “This is a metal crate with a layer of undercoat on it, then another layer of paint, then a treatment finish.” A crate.

With all possible resources being spent on visual fidelity, it’s perhaps understandable that what little there is to see is mechanically conservative. Those fancy crates are for ducking behind, shooting around, and the demo ends with some Uncharted-style leaping between exploding platforms. It’s the kind of demo that makes you wonder what Clint Hocking, the designer of Far Cry 2 and lover of open, emergent worlds, was working on before he left LucasArts to join Valve earlier this year.

Star Wars 1313 wants to set a new benchmark for in-game animation when it arrives at the tail end of 2013. It might do that, but the cost might come at the expense of player freedom.

And at expense to your wallet. The build we saw kept a steady 30fps... running on a rig with three Nvidia GTX 680s inside. There’s years of optimisation to come, but expect this to be the first of a new wave of games to finally challenge your PC.

In an interview with MCV, Ubisoft’s Stephanie Perotti discusses the potential to sell more than just Ubisoft games on the newly relaunched Uplay store. The new store includes social features, the ability to purchase DLC content by completing Achievements, and everything else you'd expect - and unlike most of Ubisoft's recent work, it doesn't take a month to get to the PC shelves.

But would you want to make it your shop of choice?

At the moment, there's not much to separate it from Steam - some prices are lower, but browsing around, most seem to be about the same. Uplay is integrated into the games themselves. The most notable part is that while Steam and Origin are both primarily desktop based, Ubisoft is going for a wider service - 'rewards' and 'actions' combining across games and devices.



This actually has some interesting potential, especially for third parties. Open up the the Driver San Francisco page for instance and you can see things you can do to earn Uplay points, and things to spend them on wherever you are. On the PC, you might earn 10 points for starting Assassin's Creed 2, which can then be spent to buy a new car in the Xbox 360 version of Driver: San Francisco or add them to points elsewhere for a bonus mission in Anno 2070. That's fine when it's Ubisoft's games, but imagine opening it up. Finish a demo to get enough points to unlock something in a game you're already playing? The only thing stopping that being a definition of win/win is that there's three sides involved.

That said, Ubisoft doesn't exactly have the greatest reputation on the PC right now, even after dropping its controversial (to be clear, this is the polite way of saying 'hideous, abhorrent, worthless and crap') always-on DRM, and it's not as though the other heavy hitters aren't invested in their own stores. No doubt they'd be willing to let Ubisoft sell their non-premium games, much as they do with Steam. Wrapping those games up into services that would integrate Ubisoft into the experience and make Uplay something other than another basically identical window to buy games from... that's a trickier sell.

We'll find out more about Ubisoft's plans soon enough, which will hopefully be a bit more than 'really, really hope people want to buy Watch Dogs from us', but there's no arguing they don't have an uphill struggle ahead if they want to make this work out and get their customers on board. Which, presumably, they do. The alternative would be pretty odd, all things considered.

Developers Liquid Flower Games might play up the Minecraft and Portal similarities on the Qbeh homepage, but I think that's doing their serene puzzle-FPS a disservice. (And besides, if the game resembles anything, it's Toxic Games' Q.U.B.E.) Available now for free on Desura, Qbeh tasks you with traversing a series of short stages, solving problems by planting blocks in the environment. In that sense alone it's a bit like Minecraft, while the perspective and white-washed walls can be traced directly back to Portal.

The video below (taken from an earlier build) suggests the game has an ambient, abstract character all of its own, however, so if you have a slot in your heart for one more cube-based puzzle game, Qbeh just might fit right in.

Gratuitous Tank Battles is the result of experimentation with the tower defence genre, yielding a strategy game where you attack as much as entrench. Experimentation with units means players can make their own machines and turn them on their foes. And experimentation with AI means the computer can use your creations against you in an endless arms race of tanks, mechs and laser-toting Tommies.

Fittingly for a world where the Great War never ended, very few units will make it through: hundreds will die in a pointless bloodbath to gain just a few inches of ground. But GTB’s fields of death are thrilling to die on, over and over again. The key is asymmetry. Playing a map as the defender gives you a traditional tower defence game, where you plop down turrets and defensive forces to try to stem the incoming tide. Attacking is more like the ‘reverse’ tower defence of Anomaly: Warzone Earth – you decide the order and routes of your units in the hope of breaking through the cyber-Kaiser’s defences.



But what really makes both sides of this top-down strategiser stand out is the unit customisation. Much like Positech’s previous game, Gratuitous Space Battles, you build your own units. Pick a hull and add whatever weapons, armour and engines you desire. Trenches full of riflemen giving you trouble? Put together a heavily armoured flamethrower tank to smoke them out.

But there’s a catch: any unit you design can also be used by the game’s superb, adaptive AI. So that flame tank you treasured as an attacker is now a rolling fortress on the defence. A long-range laser turret will fry an enemy before he gets close, but next time out you’ll have to deploy some heavily shielded mecha-men to take it down. You’re forced into a continual arms race with yourself and, in keeping with the WW1 theme, one you can never quite win.

The campaign is a little on the short side with only a handful of official maps available, but you can browse an abundance of user-made missions. Budding Field Marshalls can edit maps and upload their forces online, custom units and all, for anyone to defend against. The ease with which these challenges can be shared and downloaded extends your playtime immeasurably.



More problematic is the game’s tendency to crash faster than a biplane over Belgium. Starting or finishing a map, as well as saving and deleting units, can potentially result in a short sharp trip to your desktop. You’ll rarely lose any significant progress this way, but it still makes for a frustrating experience.

But these are minor issues that continuous updates will fix, and they don’t take the shine off an otherwise excellent game. Gratuitous Tank Battles is both challenging and strategic, and the clever use of AI and customisation results in a successful bout of experimentation.

When my school's IT manager persuaded the headmaster that the original SimCity was an educational tool, it instantly transformed the computer room from a deserted hall to a place of rowdy productivity. Playing the new SimCity, all these years later, inevitably triggers something of a flashback – but, to my surprise, not immediately to the original game.

The first games I think of are The Sims and Spore. The former because of the colour palette and the way that SimCity's population behaves – you can track them as they move around, from where they live to where they work and relax, and so on. Everyone in the city, whether the mayor, quest-givers or just the incidental pop-ups, speaks Simlish.

The latter comes from the way that the buildings and interface pop into existence – particularly in the “design-your-own-facility” section of the Glass Box engine. When you go into the build mode, the surrounding landscape is stripped away to reveal the underlying structures of the game, dressed up in a clean, white style. Here you can customise the buildings – for example, a city dump might get an extra incinerator or a trash dump, while a power station might get some extra generators, and an ambulance station might get extra garages or treatment clinics.



The real beauty of the game, which Glass Box ties into, is in the data layers. What Maxis has created here is a ridiculously deep simulation with a family-friendly face polished to the nth degree. Everytime you select one of the building tools, an overlay pops up, telling you how you're doing in particular areas. This overlay is dynamic and always beautifully designed – the team told me that their inspiration was from Google's Infographics.

Here's a particularly cool example. I built a power plant on the East of my city, pumping out coal fumes. I'd turned the plant off to save money earlier, halving the bill of running it. All the factories nearby lost power and started panicking, closing down and so on.

Turning it back on was an experience. First, the workers leave their houses and drive to the plant. Once they'd arrived, and I selected it, I could see the blobs of power moving out along the power lines. In the air pollution overlay, a cloud started growing over the plant, being pushed eastwards by the wind. Soon, the factories lit up and their pollution started drifting that way too. This was merely the prevailing wind – the wind direction can change – but it was obvious to me that building residential or commerical zones to the East of this area was a very bad idea. Unless you were going for the "most sick population challenge."



Similarly, placing your sewage outlet next to your groundwater tower is a bad idea – and one that can be tracked through the overlays. With the sewage overlay, you can track the blobs of crap moving towards the outlet. Switching to the water overlay, you can see the clear blue water getting polluted then pumped out to the city's homes. This causes people to fall ill and then lose their jobs – I'm certain there are overlays to show both of those too. So incorrect placement of a water tower can destroy your city's economy.

I pushed the demo section as hard as I could, driving towards a population boom, building more roads and laying out commerical, industrial and residential plots along them rapidly. The city exploded and areas that were well-supplied with resources, in desirable areas (again, another overlay) got more attractive looking, changing from shotgun shacks to the timberframe houses of the US suburbs, to the apartment blocks of downtown.

I'm aware that this sounds overly positive; but there are elements that I'm not sure about yet. The Sim City World aspect of the game. The Citylog aspect of this, replicating Battlelog, tracks your friends progress. The citylog also tracks everyone's statistics, telling you how you're doing and who's the leader amongst (deep breath) pollution, simoleons, mayor rating, education, health, greeness, sickness, crime, oil, ore, coal, and tourism. As far as I can tell, you can form regions with friends and then undertake challenges, individually or as a region; these might be to reach a certain population. This seems to be replicating the sadly-broken Cities XL exactly; if they can get it to work, that's wonderful, but we feel obliged to have a note of caution.



Our demo ended after thirty minutes with a bang, not a whimper. On all the screens around the demo area, warnings flashed up. A meteor strike was incoming! As always, the civil authorities are hopeless in such a situation, so I just had to watch as my carefully built city was levelled by an absolute storm of meterorites - with the fire and police services rushing out into the doomed city, trying to hose down the burning buildings as the world ended around them.

There have been quite a few Swedish games in the last few years, from the arty Blueberry Garden to the... The Ball. With the Swedish Indie Pack, you can get 10 games just £10.99 - a saving of £49.41. And now to get through the full list without making a single cheap pop-culture reference.

This is going to be quite a challenge, isn't it?



The Indie Pack kicks off with Blueberry Garden - a very laid-back experience that's a little bit interactive fairytale and a lot of living world. Next up is Bob Came In Pieces, in which a crashed alien has to explore a strange new world and build a ship capable of escaping. After that, it's the slightly confused-about-its-own-existence Dwarfs?! which is about dwarves doing dwarf things - mostly of the mining and building underground bases variety. It's not exactly Dwarf Fortress, but it is at least easier to play.



Puzzle game Hamilton's Great Adventure comes next, with many levels of exploration and puzzle solving. Harvest: Massive Encounter then jumps to full-on RTS as you do the commanding and conquering thing - apparently with a 'unique style of resource management and exploration'.



Lead and Gold: Gangs Of The Wild West takes the action into the third-person, who is probably very unhappy about that, as you have gunfights and multiplayer shooting in the Old West. Just as action packed, but rather more cuddly, then comes Noitu Love 2: Devolution, the first side-scroller about the political intricacies of handing down power from a centralised government to regional bodies.




Heading back to the land of the cerebral, "Doctor Entertainment" prescribes multiple levels of Puzzle Dimension - a quest to roll around a world collecting sunflowers for some reason, before leaping through a portal for more brain-teasers. Following in its heels, Saira adds a little platforming to those puzzles, along with a funky graphical style. Finally, The Ball is about a big ball that you push around to solve problems, winning many points for accuracy in game titling and simultaneously explaining why most games go a little further afield. The Ball: Revelations? That would have worked.

Ten games. £10.99. You have another 35 hours or so if you wish to partake. And we're done! With no tawdry jokes at all! Thankfully, there was nothing post-apocalyptic that would lend itself to a "The Ghoul With The Dragon Tattoo" joke, a lack of punny names means Ikea'd you not and we got through the whole thing without one single borking mention of the third greatest of all the Muppe-



...damn it. So close! Sorry, Sweden.

IndieGameStand launches on the 26th, and while it's not quite the 'new way to buy indie games' it claims (it still involves the transfer of money in exchange for goods, as opposed to letting you wash the developer's car or something), it could be a cool new site. A new game every 96 hours, sold on a Pay What You Want basis. Many games will come with Steam codes, but none with extra DRM.

Anyone who signs up before the launch will also get a freebie...



It's called Chester, and while I've not played it, I'm told it's decent. It costs nothing but a sign-up to get hold of for the next couple of weeks though, so you have nothing to lose but your memory of what password you typed in. Hint: try 'password'. Double-bluff those evil criminal scum!

All games sold on the site are, as said, Pay What You Want, with 10% of the price going to a charity of the developer's choice. You can sign up the old fashioned way, or via Facebook.

As spotted by Rock Paper Shotgun, the new Steam beta adds more than just Big Picture mode. The feature everyone's not so much been crying out for as screaming "WHY, WHY, WHY IS THIS NOT HERE?!" has finally arrived - the ability to install a game to any drive you like.

Yes, there have been ways around this, but it's insane that they've been required and this has been a constant thorn in many a Steam user's side. If you buy an SSD especially, space on your main drive is at a premium. Now though, there's an official way around it... if you do just a little fiddling.

To begin, download the new Beta - go to Steam/Settings, and under Beta Participation, opt-in to the latest. Restart Steam and let it update. Now, right-click on your Steam shortcut and amend it to:

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\Steam.exe" -dev

or simply adding -dev after the 'steam.exe' if you have it set up differently. This will add a new option to your Steam window's main options called Console. Click this, ignore the main window, and just type:

install_folder_ui

A new window will pop up.



Click Add Install Folder and pick one on your other drive. And that's it!

At least, for the moment. Not every game will give you the option to install it where you please - for example, fans of the hit platformer 'Granny In Paradise' will still have to take that 10MB hit on their primary drive. The 20GB of Arkham City: Very Good Game Though Not Game Of The Year Edition however can go wherever you like. That sound you can hear is your SSD sighing.

Hopefully the next proper version of Steam will simply bake this into its main options though, because as handy as this option is, it's ridiculous that it's hidden behind a console. Things like Big Picture mode are dandy, but basic functionality first, please, Valve. And also Half-Life 3, if you're listening.

Incidentally, was anyone else disappointed that Big Picture mode didn't look like this?



Just me then. Okay...

Rest in peace Sean Smith, known to EVE players as Vile Rat, a senior figure who held many of the strings that made the game's universe dance. Smith, a US state department official, was killed yesterday during an attack on the US consulate in the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi.

The BBC say it's believed the consulate was stormed in retaliation to a US-produced film considered insulting to the Prophet Muhammad.

Smith had been a long-time player of EVE, a senior figure in Something Awful's notorious Goonfleet and an on-and-off member of the game's player-elected Council. Fellow EVE godfather, The Mittani, paid tribute to his friend in a moving blog post which sheds light on just how important Smith had been to the EVE community.

"Sean was a great guy," writes The Mittani, "and he was a goddamned master at this game we all play, even though a lot of people may not realize how significant an influence he had. It seems kind of trivial to praise a husband, father, and overall badass for his skills in an internet spaceship game but that's how most of us know him, so there you go."

Our heartfelt condolences go out to Smith's family, and all those who flew with him. The universe won't be the same.

Meet Gaige. She's a Vault Hunter on the backwater planet of Pandora. She likes the color red. She thinks the word "Mechromancer" carries secondary definition involving lonely robot matchmaking. She travels with a hulking hunk of metal affectionately named "Death Trap." And she's the first previously announced (and briefly controversial) post-launch DLC coming on October 16 for Borderlands 2.

Gearbox posted a short announcement of the Mechromancer's details earlier today on its official website. Those who pre-order Borderlands 2 receive Gaige for free as a bonus, but she's also purchasable as a standalone download for $10. Gaige joins the Gunzerker, Commando, Siren, and Assassin classes in jamming zillions of randomly generated guns onto Handsome Jack's hilariously huge chin when Borderlands 2 releases September 18.