If the promise of an old school turn-based RPG by the creators of Sierra's Quest for Glory sounds appealing to you, then you'll rejoice at the news that Hero-U: Rogue to Redemption has reached its $400,000 Kickstarter funding goal, rendering its completion a dead certainty.

Developed by two of Quest for Glory's lead designers - Lori and Cory Cole - you still have the opportunity to help fund it via PayPal, with several stretch goals announced including a Companion Meep (described as a "Tamagotchi-like pet that you need to feed, groom and be nice to") for $500,000, voice acting for $600,000 and French, Italian, German and Spanish localisation for $700,000.

 

Planetside 2 is here. Are you interested in going to war alongside the European PC Gamer community? If so, then read on for details of our plans so far.

We're currently planning to make our start on the Miller server, as that's where many PlanetSide 1 veterans are headed as well as our valued friends/bitter enemies at Rock, Paper, Shotgun. We'll be setting up an official PC Gamer outfit as part of the Terran Republic faction, led - in the early days at least - by Rich. You can find the latest details on this forum, which should include an up-to-date list of the officers to contact in-game for an invite within the next few days.

A note on our choice of faction. We know that many of you will be unwilling to abandon you favourite side, and there was talk during beta of setting up a number of splinter outfits for those wanting to dress up as purple power rangers or roll around listening to dreadful rawk. For the time being, we'd rather concentrate on building our community in one place rather than split it from the get-go. If you absolutely must play Vanu, why not join RPS and express your distaste for our lifestyle decisions by shooting silly pew-pew lasers at us? We won't mind. We're magnanimous like that. Also, we've got a tank with two guns.

From the "people are still talking about this?" files today comes an interview by The Guardian with Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser that touched upon Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas' Hot Coffee scandal. The ensuing media scrutiny and negative pressure wound up "draining and upsetting" company members facing "a tough time" keeping relationships with the press civil.

"The massive social decay that we were supposed to induce hasn't happened," Houser said. "So, in that regard, a lot of those debates that used to go on, they're not such a big deal now. We never felt that we were being attacked for the content, we were being attacked for the medium, which felt a little unfair. If all of this stuff had been put into a book or a movie, people wouldn't have blinked an eye. And there are far bigger issues to worry about in society than this."

Hackers rooting among San Andreas' files unearthed an abandoned yet mostly intact minigame where main character CJ would have sex with his girlfriend at the prompting of certain...er, "movement" commands. The resulting outcry involved the Federal Trade Commission investigating Houser and the rest of Rockstar's staff. The ordeal was recently documented in detail in a book by David Kushner titled Jacked: The Outlaw Story of Grand Theft Auto. Kushner is also the author of the excellent Masters of Doom.

While Rockstar may simply be biding its time until the appropriate moment to unleash its fomented armageddon of entropy, its current efforts on Grand Theft Auto V look extremely promising, though a PC version lingers in uncomfortable "consideration" territory for now.

If a syringe containing the distilled souls of Dragonball Z's Hercule Satan, Team Fortress 2's Saxton Hale, and Hulk Hogan was injected into someone's arm, you'd get Mr. Torgue. If you asked Mr. Torgue what his favorite kind of explosion is, he'd respond with "YES." If a vault hunter asked him for directions to the newest uncovered vault, he'd throw his horns in the direction of his freshly launched Campaign of Carnage DLC for Borderlands 2. And then blow it up with the grenades his hand was holding.

In his newly excavated Badass Crater of Badassitude, Mr. Torgue offers a new storyline, quests, bosses, weapons, and cameos from equally unstable characters such as Moxxi and Tiny Tina. In case you play for three minutes without seeing a single explosion, an arena-style Loot-splosion event tosses shiny gear your way on the displaced air of—you guessed it—explosions. As Mr. Torgue himself would eloquently state, "IF YOU'RE NOT PICKING GIBLETS OUT OF YOUR TEETH, IT WASN'T A REAL KILL."

Mr. Torgue's Campaign of Carnage is now available for download for $10 on Steam. Our critical opinion is forthcoming, assuming it remains unexploded.

Got Hitman: Absolution, video capturing capability, and the desire to be $1000 richer? You can make use of those strangely-related criteria by heading over to GamrRank, a meta-achievement/playtime tracking social media platform. The service is offering one grand to the best Hitman video involving a dead body and your name spelled on a surface with bullet holes—just like so many of my home movies. The video above explains the finer points.

You have two weeks to get your entry in. Second place nets you $500, and third will take home $250. Some Hitman swag is also available for honorable mentions. If you have a GamrRank account, you can check out this page to accept the challenge.

When the Portuguese first landed upon Japan's shores in 1543, they stroked their handlebar mustaches and said, "You know, that whole honorable swordsman thing is working well for you, but what you really need is our brand of GUNshido." They then shot the word "PORTUGAL" into the side of the Emperor's palace. My history recollection is probably incredibly inaccurate by now, but still, guns remain the central theme for the November 30 release of the Otomo Clan DLC for Total War: Shogun 2. You'll get a new playable faction with five armed unit types, extra buildings, and special traits.

The Otomo Clan high-fived Portugal's trade deals early on during Japan's feudal fracas, and it nabs a number of assets following the basic military doctrine of "take anything and add a gun to it." The Otomo Donderbuss Cavalry, for example, masters the art of firing the shotgun-like Donderbuss rifle on horseback. The Otomo Matchlock Samurai combines fearsome swordsmanship with rifle-fire volleys range, because handing samurai another method of dealing swift death is both overkill and freaking awesome.

The Portuguese Tercos (which I read as "Portuguese Tacos" at first glance) and Otomo Matchlock Ashigaru supplement the samurai as long-range riflemen. On sea, the Otomo Matchlock Kobaya harnesses "Christian fervor" for more accurate shots during marine operations. I guess I missed the Bible passage granting dead-eye divinity.

Cash-strapped warlords can also lease off a single building slot per city to the Portuguese for a lump payment burst of funds towards rapid troop buildup. As for traits, the Otomo Clan provides appropriate bonuses to pumping out the firepower:

Can recruit cheaper gunpowder units (-10 percent)
Missionary actions are cheaper (-15 percent)
Improved conversion to clan religion (+2)
Faster import of Matchlock Ashigaru units (-3)


Steam is offering a 10 percent discount on pre-purchases, so head over to the DLC's store page for more info.

Team Liquid recently caught up with StarCraft 2 lead designer Dustin Browder at the Blizzard World Championships in Shanghai. Over the course of the 30 minute interview, Browder revealed his team's plans to address the current balance and metagame issues in Wings of Liberty and the upcoming Heart of the Swarm expansion. You can check out the video above, or if you're in a hurry, we've tl;dr'd the main points into a paraphrased list, organized by race, below.

General

The community is calling for big changes, but Blizzard is continuing to take a conservative approach to balancing. The devs worry that sweeping changes could throw off the existing, fairly balanced win ratios that exist in most match-ups just to fix some very specific issues that only affect portions of the very high-end metagame.
Heart of the Swarm should open up greater variety in map design by correcting issues with some match-ups forcing certain builds or making certain attack timings indefensible without specific chokes.
The devs aren't afraid to nerf units out of the competitive metagame (as they did with WoL Reapers) if they are too hard to balance, or if they make certain match-ups boring or predictable.
The design of the new HotS units is mostly finalized at this point, and the team is focusing on changes to existing WoL units to create a balanced metagame for the expansion.

Zerg

Blizzard is considering making psionic units immune to Fungal Growth, a spell largely seen as the biggest balance issue in the game right now. This would allow Ghosts and High Templar to effectively counter Infestor play.
Neural Parasite will probably be removed altogether. It's rarely used, and it's too powerful in the few weird cases in which it is used.

Protoss

The Mothership was never meant to be a unit that plays a role at the high-end competitive level. It will likely be getting a redesign in HotS to put it back in the category of a "just for fun" novelty.

Terran

Blizzard recognizes there is a significant skill gap and playstyle difference between general Terran players and top-level Korean Terran players, and would like to see this gap shrink.
Seeker Missiles and Thor Shoulder Cannons might be seeing a buff in HotS. Blizzard doesn't want the Shoulder Cannons' appeal to be their ability to stun, as they feel there are enough stuns in the game already, but they want Thors to be good at something aside from countering Mutalisks.
Medivacs may be getting a buff as well, and late game static defenses may be nerfed as top-level players have become so skilled at shutting down the once dominant Terran drop play.

A Kickstarter has gone live for Thorvalla, a new "old school" computer RPG being created by Planescape: Torment producer Guido Henkel. Set in a Norse-influenced fantasy universe where people tame and ride dragons, the project follows in the footsteps of some other Black Isle alumni that did pretty well for themselves with Project Eternity. Henkel is asking for a million dollars, slightly less than the original goal that Obsidian thoroughly crushed, but details on the game are currently very scarce.

As PC Gamer's resident certified Viking and Medieval Gaming Beat Reporter, I'd love to be overflowing with excitement about this. But at the moment there isn't a lot to go on. We have a map, detailed below, some very early concept art, and a bit of fiction that introduces your character as a hardy, northern, dragon-owning explorer who will begin the game by getting into a fight with the sea and losing.

The ingredients for Viking wonder are half-there, but it remains to be seen whether Henkel and co. can raise their not unsubstantial funding goal without a big, recognizable name like Obsidian behind them. How many million-dollar, crowdfunded, old school RPGs can the market support? A fellow Kickstarter in that category from Brenda Brathwaite (Wizardry) and Tom Hall (Commander Keen, DOOM) was cancelled last month after it failed to attract enough attention—primarily, I think, due to an underwhelming amount of details on what the game actually was.



Thorvalla's reward tiers are fairly typical, with the high-end allowing you to design a monster or an NPC in the game. The project is tentatively slated for an August 2014 release. If you find yourself called, you can chip in to launch the longship here.

The year is 20XX. Over-reliance on mysterious "cloud storage" and catastrophic "Y2X" software failures have devastated the world's supply of PC games. You can only choose five games to preserve. What's at stake? Oh, just the fate of PC gaming and ten dollars. Yep, that's (mostly) right: drop by GOG this week and you can liberate five DRM-free games from their servers for only $10 (around £6).

There are 20 games to choose from, including the likes of Resonance, Gemini Rue, Torchlight, and Trine, and a combination of the most expensive nets $60 in savings. It's the perfect opportunity to be a hero and save great games for future generations, who will laugh at our local hard drives until the digital apocalypse brings their networks crashing down.

And this is just the beginning: every year in the US we spend a certain Thursday eating large birds, then the subsequent Friday spending billions of dollars to adjust retail outlets' yearly earnings reports. It's weird, I know, but we do benefit with big discounts. Rumor has it that Steam's Autumn Sale starts tomorrow, so prepare to trample their servers as well.

Something about the word "ultra" immediately evokes a reverent silence. Not only does it share the first letter of one of my most favorite words ("undulant"), it's also an adjectival call to stand up and pay attention wherever it appears. PlanetSide 2 is out today, and soldiers the world over are pouring into Auraxia's resource-laden continents as I type. One particular fan celebrated the release with a gameplay video showcasing the deadly beauty of PlanetSide 2's massive battles on ultra graphics. Ultra cool.

Author Crypski's hardware setup allows for some strong eye-splosions—he rocks an 4.5GHz Intel i7 3770k, an EVGA GTX 670, and 8GB DDR3 RAM. For those of us with less royal rigs, though, we've found PlanetSide 2 to offer pretty well-scaled-yet-stunning visuals on older hardware, though the game tends to chug a bit during the densest firefights.

Another note: Crypski's video removes the HUD for both vehicle and soldier sections, so expect slightly more screen clutter of ammo counts and flashing red "YOU'RE DEAD" health bars if jump into the fray today.