Fans of action RPGs have been spoiled silly over the last couple of weeks, but if you have any free time between Torchlight II and Borderlands 2 sessions – I mean, you are wasting around eight hours on sleep – you might want to keep an eye on Flare. The 0.16 alpha version of the ambitious open source RPG has just been added to Desura, with number 0.17 expected on the morrow.

Either one will grant you hours of isometric exploration and monster-stabbing, for the low, low price of absolutely nothing. The game is expected to move into beta in 2013, but there's already a lot of bang for your no bucks, even if Flare is a little rough around the edges.

The game's built on its own open source engine, so there's a hell of a lot of potential here when it comes to the art of modding – in fact, there's already one total conversion in the works. You can get Flare through Desura or the official website, and see a video of the game in action below.

If you're interested in developing programs to work with the Oculus Rift, or just want to thrust your eyeballs into its dark embrace at the earliest possible opportunity, The Verge report that dev kit pre-orders are now available from the Oculus site. The prototype unit will come with an SDK so you can start tinkering straight away. "January 2013" is the expected delivery date.

The ramshackle prototype version that's been shown at E3 and Gamescom wowed pretty much everyone who put it on. Here's a video of Owen having a go. It's one of the few scenarios in which you'd forgive a chap for having to ward off demonic imps mid-sentence without the involvement of powerful hallucinogenics.



The Oculus Rift has swiftly picked up its march towards a full commercial release with a bit of help from Kickstarter. John Carmack has been a vocal advocate of the tech since E3, and it's been demoed with Doom 3 so far. Indie free to play mech combat game, Hawken, will also work with the goggles. In fact, there will be a special VR headset HUD to make the cockpit you're piloting from seem even more real.

Check out our video interview with Oculus Rift developer, Palmer Luckey for some insight into how the headset works, and why it's different from previous attempts at portable VR tech.

Here's the sort of trailer I like to see. A couple of minutes of straightforward in-game footage. If you play Grid 2, it will look like this. There's no dubstep, crash cuts, sparks or explosions, just some cars racing around pre-alpha builds of a pair of tracks. The Californian coast track features a Boss Mustang and a classic Mustang Mach 1. The Chicago race features a Camaro SS, Z06 Corvette and another Boss Mustang, which are excellent cars as far as I know, but when it comes to cars I don't know much. Allow me to distract you with some raw, unedited footage of Grid 2 while I flee on a scooter.

Expect to see lots more of Battlelog in the coming years. EA have bought ESN the company who built Battlefield 3's browser based stat tracking/social network/game launcher site. Gamasutra highlight a statement from the company suggesting that they'll be hunkering down with DICE for a while to "focus all of its energy on DICE, Battlelog and the Battlefield series."

The move dovetails nicely with EA's determination to add an online component to every game they ship, whether that be a multiplayer mode, or a series of apps and social services that exist in parallel with each game. Need for Speed's autolog system is another example. EA's Frank Gibeau recently pointed out that “today, all of our games include online applications and digital services that make them live 24/7/365.”

Battlelog's stat tracking tech works well, but it's still a clunky, shoddy way to get into a game, especially if you're trying to do it with a squad of friends. Backing out of the game with every server switch is also a pain. Hopefully the version that ships with Battlefield 4 next year will deliver a much smoother experience.

The third update for The Secret World is now live, adding two new missions and laying the groundwork for a series of Halloween events starting at the end of October. These will introduce a new villain called the Cat God, a walking cat in a nice hat with a mission to install scratching posts on every corner and run out every catnip dealer in town. If only that was his plan, but this is the Secret World. His intentions will be a lot more nefarious. Funcom say that "tricks, treats, cool new costumes and special pets" await for those brave enough to complete the event.

The new missions are playable right now. "The Binding" takes place in Egypt and promises to challenge "even the most hardened puzzle solvers." The Carpathian Fangs hosts a new action mission called "Dogs of War" which will pit werewolves against their bitter enemies, the vampires. The update also adds a full set of Lairs missions, and there's more in store in the coming weeks. "you should also look forward new outfits available in the in-game store and a completely new awesome pet with a jet pack on its back," Funcom say.

Find out more about the latest update on the Secret World site. You can find the full patch notes on The Cat God update page. If you're tempted to jump in, sign up for The Secret World free trial on the right hand side of the Secret World front page and devour our verdict in our Secret World review.

AMD has released more details about its upcoming Trinity desktop APUs today, showing off a bit more information about how the new Piledriver cores work and their estimated performance. Today's announcement excludes the desktop FX line, but gives us more of an idea of how competitive they'll be against Intel's Ivy Bridge.

Trinity was launched for laptops earlier in the year, so today's announcement is about updating the rest of the APU line to the new architecture.

The Trinty line up combines either one or two Piledriver cores (which means two or four x86 integer execution cores) in the A10, A8, A6 and A4 ranges of processors that are listed there in decreasing order of power. The CPU part of the chip is still Piledriver and not the recently revealed Steamroller architecture that will take over next year, but it's still a decent looking upgrade on earlier Llano chips.

The graphics part, meanwhile, has been redesigned to include parts of the HD7000 desktop board technology along with HD6000-series pipelines. It's still not Graphics Core Next, but I've been impressed in the past at the results possible from pairing a last gen A10 desktop chip with a low end graphics card for a budget Crossfire rig too – for about £120 you can get reasonable mid-range framerates for a second PC.

According to Tom's Hardware, one of the few sites that's had review samples of the A10 already – they make it around 10-20% faster than the outgoing Llano APU in a best case scenario and silly numbers better than a Core i3 at 1920x1080. While that sounds impressive, it's still not enough without a second GPU for fluid gaming in most newer games - although I'm itching to run some Black Mesa benchmarks on it personally.



The thing that intrigues me more than anything, however, is that AMD has re-introduced a very old fashioned idea with Trinity, that of the RAM disk. For those who are younger than – say – 35, a RAM disk is a virtual hard drive which takes a portion of your system memory and makes it appear in Windows Explorer as a new hard drive. We used to use them back when PCs were young and running games off a 5.4inch floppy was tough, but they've been of fairly niche interest for high performance computing since then. The advantages are that its theoretically faster than the best SSDs, and given the price of RAM it makes sense to set one up. Obviously, though, a RAM disk is stored on volatile memory so is lost when you power down and has to either be restored from a temporary image on boot or it starts fresh.

In other words, it's not a space you'd use to install games into, but as a cache it could be a smart rival for Intel's SRT. We should be able to test this out in time for the APU's on sale date, which AMD says is next week.

With Far Cry 3, Ubisoft appear to be delivering a positively psychedelic take on the modern shooter. But just what kind of rig will you need to do justice to the experience of setting fire to a Komodo dragon while under the influence of hallucinogenic mushrooms?

Ubisoft have confirmed a November 29 release for Far Cry 3 in Australia and Europe, while the US will have to wait until December 4.

Have a look at this Far Cry 3 survival guide to see why we're excited.

Minimum Specs

- DirectX9c graphics card with 512MB Video RAM Dual core CPU 4GB Memory

Example minimum 1 (NVidia/Intel)

- NVidia GTX8800

- Intel Core2 Duo E6700

Example minimum 2 (AMD)

- AMD Radeon HD2900

- AMD Athlon64 X2 6000+

Recommended Specs

- DirectX11 graphics card with 1024MB Video RAM Quad core CPU 4GB Memory

Example recommended 1 (NVidia/Intel)

- NVidia GTX480

- Intel Core i3-530

Example recommended 2 (AMD)

- AMD Radeon HD5770

- AMD Phenom II X2 565

High Performance Specs

- Latest DirectX11 graphics card

- Latest quad core CPU

- 8GB Memory

Example high performance (NVidia/Intel)

- NVidia GTX680

- Intel Core i7-2600K

Example high performance (AMD)

- AMD Radeon HD7970

- AMD Bulldozer FX4150

Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 is getting an expanded co-op mode called "Tranzit" that'll send four survivors on a zombie road trip across the US. As one of those survivors you'll get to bus from place to place, mounting heroic stands against the zombie army at each location. IGN mention "buildables" that con be constructed to furnish you with new weapons, or open up extra areas, which are probably full of more zombies.

The latest Black Ops 2 zombies trailer shows a fuel stop, a diner, a farmhouse reminiscent of Left 4 Dead's Blood Harvest finale, a power station and a town center blighted by lava pools. Zombies AND lava? It's the doompocalypse alright. You'll find the video stamped into the page below.

Parts of the video show a tiny snippet of someone shooting zombies of the roof of the bus in first person, suggesting that we'll have to defend against legions of zombie marathon runners as the bust travels between locations.

As well as "Tranzit" there will be a versus mode that will put two four-player teams into the zombie apocalypse and encourage them to compete for zombie kills without killing each other. There will be a more traditional survival zombie mode for fans of Treyarch's previous efforts.

Treyarch could probably spin zombies into a separate release if they wanted to. It's been a fan favourite since its cheeky first appearance in World at War. Is the zombie mode your favourite part of Treyarch's CoD games, or just a fun distraction?

Tomorrow Corporation has confirmed that its new game, Little Inferno, will get a November release for PC, coinciding with the arrival of Nintendo's latest toy computer, for which it is a launch title. That means November the 18th if the current plans hold. It should be available for download from the Tomorrow Corporation site, Steam and possibly a few other stores, depending on negotiations. But what will the game actually involve?

Little Inferno's action remains something of a mystery, though it sounds like it might be some sort of physics stacker. It'll involve a fireplace - we have deduced that much - and the ability to feed the flames with a ready supply of flammable objects, including “logs, screaming robots, credit cards, batteries, exploding fish, unstable nuclear devices, and tiny galaxies.” This must be a new definition of the world 'tiny' I'd not previously encountered - although I suppose everything's relative. There's a new gameplay trailer in the works, and more updates to come, but for now, here's the last, rather enigmatic, trailer to stoke your interest.

Any guesses how it will work?

Today's serving of collection of news croutons is best paired with a baby spinach, bullets, and blasters. On the menu: Far Cry 3 system specs and a trailer, a Guild Wars 2 patch, dead people lusting for your flesh in Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, Rift's nose-tweak to Pandaria, and more.

Far Cry 3's system requirements includes one-time online activation instead of a persistent connection. Neat. Even better: Islands drive people insane. Wait, that might actually not be better on second thought.
Let's hope your windmills keep up with the shred-tastic music in Call of Duty: Black Ops 2's zombie mode reveal trailer.
The Secret World Issue #3--"The Cat God"--resumes Funcom's fast-paced update schedule with two new missions and a new load of Lairs.
Every pre-order for Rift: Storm Legion until October 3 donates $1 to the Pandas International charity. Cheeky, Trion--but clever.
Hearts of Iron III: Their Finest Hour's release trailer still doesn't explain how a heart entirely made of iron would work.
The latest Guild Wars 2 patch fixed up dungeon loot vendors and adjusted the difficulty of some story fixes, among numerous squashed bugs.
Patch 1.4 for Star Wars: The Old Republic zapped in from hyperspace this morning with a brand new Operation, planet, and obligatory loot.
The $60 Mass Effect Trilogy releases November 6 and packages the entirety of Shepard's saga in an appropriately sleek box.
"The poultry has been planted."