Sapphire has just announced a new family of ickle PCs based on AMD’s latest Trinity APU. They’re also claiming that the new Edge VS series will represent a ‘revolution even for gamers’ thanks to its combination of high performance and portable, lounge-friendly form-factor.

We’re used to seeing Sapphire’s Edge PCs with APU tech inside, but traditionally they’d been running the weaker E-series chips. This VS series is promising the full A-series chips. Wassat? Well, the A-series chips house proper desktop CPU components as well as a decent, last-gen, Radeon graphics core at its heart.

The Edge VS 8 is the top-end choice right now, with an A8 APU - probably the 1.6GHz quad-core A8-4555M - doing all the grunt work inside that tiny, armoured chassis. It’s Radeon HD 7600G graphics core is a slightly clocked down version of the GPU in the top A10 series.

That should mean you’ll be able to get some decent gaming frame rates at 720p resolutions on your tele-box if you cut back the settings and post-processing effects a little. That should make for a neat little companion with Steam’s Big Picture Mode in your lounge. And with just 10% of the power draw of a normal desktop PC your electricity bill’s barely even going to notice it.

The standard versions come with 4GB RAM and a standard HDD installed, but there will be customisation options available so that you can jam in an SSD or another few gig of RAM up to 16GB.

The only snag at the moment is that it’s shipped without a Microsoft OS, so you’ll need to get creative with an external DVD drive or get your Windows install on a USB stick if you want to get in on the teeny gaming action.

I’ve got my review unit on order and will be stuffing Steam onto it as soon as I’ve got a spare second to get benchmarking.

Arenanet studio design director, Chris Whiteside, has posted about the variable Lost Shores event that introduced new dungeons and lands to Guild Wars 2 recently. The event used a monstrous invasion storyline to transport players to new high level lands populated by four legged crab creatures. Lost Shores culminated in a boss fight with a colossal crab beast that took hours to beat and stretched Guild Wars 2's servers to their limit.

"A lot of players really enjoyed the trailblazing aspect of unveiling the new Southsun Cove map, specifically the feeling of discovery and being part of the land grab," wrote Whiteside in a blog update spotted by PCGamesN, but added "we’re also aware that there were certain aspects of the event that could have worked better than they did, and thanks to your excellent feedback we’ll be working toward strengthening this type of content moving forward."

Speaking of those future additions, Whiteside delivered a bullet-pointed list of priorities for future updates, which includes a rebalance of GW2's existing dungeons, more varied creatures, adding more activities to the new Southsun Cove zone. List ahoy:


Revamping all of our existing dungeons (Story and Explorable versions) through rebalance and overhauled encounters.
Adding new dungeons to the Fractal of the Mists.
Adding more variation to creatures, enhancing our open world scaling system, as well as evolving many events and experiences across Tyria.
Fixing and improving existing content throughout the game, and better tying it into the overall sense of player progression within Guild Wars 2.
Building on the Southsun Cove’s persistent content.
Adding new Guild content and Guild progression features.
Continuing to evolve PvP into an E-sport as outlined here: https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/structured-pvp-iceberg/
Adding brand new content to World vs. World as well as adding new reward progression.
Continuing to build upon the story and adventures of Guild Wars 2.

 

The next installment in the Hitman series is being developed by a new studio at Square Enix Montreal. It's a trade-off that Absolution director Tore Blystad likens to the one between Call of Duty's major studios. “It’s like with Treyarch and Infinity Ward,” Blystad told OPM. “You have an IP that has been developed. They will feed off each other, as well as somethings that stand out. I think with these big franchises it takes a long time to develop just one game. If you can, work a little bit in parallel at least and help each other out”.

Blystad implies that there's a trick to allowing a new studio to bring their own flavour to a series, without mangling its signature mechanics. "We’ve been talking about these similarities to some of the big movie franchise like Aliens, where everyone’s doing it their own way," he explained. "Every time someone gets their hands on a franchise they do something different. So rather than doing the same thing again you get another take on the character from a fresh perspective.

“There’s a lot of these problems you encounter with these sort of productions, some of them are really fundamental problems, or they have a big effect on the game – like how you do a mechanic for instance. If you change a mechanic too much then the whole gameplay will be modified”.

IO are staying in touch with Square Enix Montreal to stop the series going too far astray. “There are talks between us and of course it has to be somewhat in sync but it’s the first time you could say Hitman has gone out of the house,” Blystad added. “Luckily it’s with someone we know. Some of the key developers came from IO and have been working on previous games so it’s not like it’s in completely new hands."

It could be said that Hitman has already gone astray with introduction of Absolution, which takes a step away from the big sandbox missions that made the series great. Find out how in our Hitman: Absolution review.

Now that AMD has finally released the rest of its new Piledriver line-up into the wild, I've been able to spend a little quality time with the six-core FX-6300 - a CPU that I think offers a sweet-spot in terms of price/performance metrics.

It’s a decent little chip at stock speeds, and in raw CPU computational terms its six cores comprehensively out-play the i3-3225, Intel's similarly-priced dual-core Ivy Bridge chip, thanks to the extra multi-threading performance on offer. Intel’s dominance in the gaming sphere is evident, however: the FX-63000 doesn't compete with the dual-core Intel chip in my Batman: Arkham City or Shogun 2 CPU tests.

Until you get busy with the overclocking that is. Then it's a very, very different story.

The Intel chip is locked down for marketing reasons - so it doesn’t cannibalise any i5 sales - but the AMD chip can be clocked to within an inch of its life. With little effort, I was able to squeeze a stable 5GHz overclock out of this mid-range chip - and a 1.5GHz clockspeed boost is nothing to be sniffed at.

With that sort of performance it’s actually encroaching on the territory of the i5-3570K, and all for around £70 less than the Intel chip. Now, I’m not recommending anyone rethink their purchase of an i5 for their rig build, but if you’re on a tight budget for your PC then working a little magic with the overclocking wand could save you some pennies.

Martin's steed got stuck in quicksand and couldn't extract itself during our review of Call of Duty: Black Ops 2. According to the latest patch notes posted on the CoD forums, spotted by Strategy Informer, the problem has been fixed. The update also boosts CoD's field of view allowance to 90 degrees, good news for anyone experiencing the strange tunnel vision queasiness that those tight FOV settings can cause.

Performance has also been smoothed out for those with four or more CPU cores, server matchmaking has been improved and "connection interrupted" multiplayer errors fixed. Patch notes below.

November 21, 2012 Update for Singleplayer, Multiplayer, and Zombies


Max FOV increased to 90
Fix: Horse falling through the world in Afghanistan when playing on some CPUs with 4 or more cores
Fix: RC-XD and the AGR sinking into the map in MP when playing on some CPUs with 4 or more cores
General performance improvements in SP, MP, and ZM for CPUs with 4 or more cores
Fix: crash when a 7th player tries to join a 6 player league lobby
Improved dedicated server matchmaking
Fix: some cases of "Connection Interrupted" in MP while loading into a match

 

More than anything, Paradis Perdus (Lost Paradises) reminds me of this episode of Community (yes, I'm going to shoehorn Community references into everything now), but in game terms the first point of reference is probably Proteus. Both games feature a serene, somewhat abstract environment, but here it's one you despoil with every step. You can either play the game, and ruin it, or stay well away for the good of the world itself.

As game designer/programmer Sergey Mohov puts it, "the game is about not belonging. You are the bad guy, you are killing everything you touch. The world you are in is beautiful and green, but the moment you get into it, you start infecting everything, and the world starts decaying, until it eventually ceases to exist. You can choose to exit the world, and then it will heal itself, but then you don’t get to enjoy it of course, because you're not there any more."

You can download a trial alpha version here for Windows or Mac, and I recommend you do, because along with being a beautiful game it's also a rather sad one. Looking back as I was exploring the peaceful environment, I noticed that my trail had left a brown stain on an otherwise verdant world. The music began to warp, as the ecosystem fell apart thanks to the mere presence of a human being. (And then I fell through said world and into the nothingness below - but hey, they're not called alpha versions for nothing.)

I'll be keeping an eye on Paradis Perdus as it develops, but I may limit future interaction to poking at it from the sidelines with a big stick, so I don't accidentally transform it into a Fallout-style wasteland. However, if you feel like paving paradise by putting up a parking lot, play the demo or give the following video a watch.

The $100 submission fee for Steam's Greenlight system was briefly slashed in half as part of the Steam Autumn sale. Indie Games noticed the sudden price drop, which was reversed hours later. Maybe someone pulled the wrong lever at Valve HQ, or the Steam team pressed "undo" in the face of consternation from indie devs like Probability 0 creator, Alexander Martin, who only recently tossed the full hundred bucks into Greenlight's charity bucket. "$100 was already a number they picked out of thin air" he told IG, "but it seems pointless to set up a gatekeeper if it's going to back off for no particular reason."

The Greenlight fee was originally introduced to discourage joke entries and the sort of weird offensive sludge that appears if you invite the entire internet to post pictures and descriptions on an open service. The donations all go to charity, but there was some controversy concerning the amount. There is probably a sweet spot somewhere between $10 and $100 that would deter pranksters without breaking the bank accounts of struggling indie devs, but without constantly changing the price and observing the results, it'd be tough to pinpoint. Perhaps the odd sale is a good way of testing the water. What do you reckon?

Eve Online's next expansion is on the event horizon, bringing promised NPC AI upgrades, four new Destroyers, a new ORE frigate, rebalanced ship classes and new "tactical combat features," which equates to some UI streamlining. The bounty hunting system will get an interesting makeover as well. Major bounties will scroll across Eve's floating space-billboards and the reward system for successful hunts has been tweaked to make bounty hunting a valid career choice for budding Boba Fetts.

A detailed run-down of Retribution's features can be found on the new Retribution site, which even has an interactive preview utility for the new ships that lets you rotate them in space and tickle their bellies, because spaceships love it when you do that. For deeper detail regarding the December 4 update, check out the CCP dev blog.

The gutted interior of a tower in Tehran's financial district and the shattered remains of a parliament building are two spectacles talked about but not shown in the latest Aftermath footage. We do get descriptions of the four new maps, however, which include "devastated financial district map Markaz Monolith, the heavily destroyed Epicentre map, the Talah market map, which is a mix of the old and the new architecture of the city, and finally Azadi Palace, a huge urban landscape with a massive parliament building at its core." Catch new moving pictures of dusty tussles in Tehran's tattered streets below.

Aftermath will $15 / £11 when it's released on December 18. Premium people will get it on December 4.

When we last checked in on Gaslamp Games' steampunk sandbox Clockwork Empires, Technical Director Nicholas Vining spoke of such wonders as carnivorous birds blending hapless humans into edible giblets and the soul-searching presence of useless machinery. In a new entry charting the rise of Empires' endearing quirkiness, Vining exposed more of the cog- and steam-work guts powering building construction and plumbing, and a small invasion of plant-like humanoids.

Vining explained how interface wizard Chris Whitman implemented a new method for drawing out building blueprints directly onto a construction grid, allowing players to set custom layouts for modules and resource stockpiles. "We’re still trying to suss out the right interface for selecting wall stylings, but that’s on the to-do list," Vining added. "You can even decorate it with windows, lamps, and other useful features."

He also declared that "most of the exploding building bugs have now been thankfully resolved." Well now.

Descending into the spaghetti-bowl world of pipes gave Vining and the rest of Gaslamp's team a challenge over how much control to bestow upon the player when managing tangles of plumbing. "We’re actually in the middle of a knife-fight about exactly how much we want the user to plumb things in themselves, and whether or not giant cities full of terrifying amounts of piping are, in fact, fun," Vining wrote. "They’re certainly visually pretty."

Vining is also toying with a new water renderer because "the old, horrible one was annoying," an instantly relatable decision for most day-to-day purposes. "It looks much better," he continued. "We added ambient light—dynamic lights for lanterns and explosions are coming as soon as I have a spare day—and made the ambient occlusion term a little less moody so that humans were not surrounded at all times by terrible clouds of awful darkness. In general, the game sort of feels like, 'Oh, I might want to play this!' and not, 'Oh, dear, look at all the awful things.' That’s good news."

And yes, plant people. Vining only spoke in hushed whispers surrounding the enigmatic creatures, attributing their appearance to "a bad rewrite of the texture code." The subject was then promptly dropped. Why? Because it watches. Waits.

We've snipped some of the best screenshots of Vining's post for your perusal below, but be sure to have a look at his words for interesting technical tidbits on Empires' formation. We've also got our own word-pile right here in our extensive preview.

"Weird. I suddenly have this refreshing mint flavor."