I spent about two and a half hours with BioShock: Infinite yesterday during a press event in Los Angeles. Infinite already feels like something really special, mostly on the merits of its presentation and creativity. Inside, I’ve expounded on five things I really liked.

Go read Tom’s spoiler-free preview for more thoughts on the same demo, and check out a list of things I didn’t love.

Graphical performance
I’ll get this bit of reassurance out of the way: Infinite ran perfectly. Our demo PCs were admittedly above average: an AMD FX-8120 (an octo-core CPU) and a single card in the AMD Radeon 7900 series (I didn’t have time to verify which one), alongside 16GB RAM on Windows 7. With that considered, I didn’t experience any hiccups, frame rate dips, no texture pop-in, or crashes.

Digging into the settings menu, here’s what was adjustable:

Anti-aliasing
Texture detail
Dynamic shadows
Post-processing quality
Light shafts
Ambient occlusion
Object detail
V-sync
FOV (a slider, with no listed value)
UI margins
Toggleable highlighting of “searchable” or “important” objects
 
An Irrational developer told me that Infinite is running on DirectX 10, but that it does take advantage of some DX11 features.

Themes
With its fiction, Infinite lays bare the worst of American history: racism, sexism, class warfare, secessionism, and the dangers of nationalism. But masterfully, it expresses these concepts without being heavy-handed. Walking Columbia, citizens’ deeply-entrenched racism is immediately evident through the comments they’ll make as you pass, but many of these are innocuous and pleasantly normal, too: I saw kids playing "finger guns" across a stairway, muttering kid-made shooting noises as they did. I also stumbled into the hidden home of abolitionists--in their living room sat a printing press for publishing posters that encouraged racial equality. What I played of Infinite avoided caricature or any kind of elbow-in-the-ribs parody, which I appreciated.

Beyond that, the game’s tableau of intellectually-challenging themes pervade its presentation. Even in the first hour, Infinite felt like it had struck a conversation with me about American history and different ideologies, an experience that still feels preciously unique to the franchise.


The world
BioShock’s willingness to throw handcrafted assets at you is unparalleled. Irrational devotes an inordinate amount of effort to creating elegant 2D posters, detailed 3D models for ordinary objects and authentic music (Mozart’s Rex Tremendae Requiem appears at one point to great effect). The time they invest in creating this content creates guilt when you don’t stop to look at it, so much of it is treated as disposable ephemera, used only for a single key scene or key moment.

I stopped for a half-minute to examine the realistic glean of an oil painting portrait, whose brushstrokes were cast in all different directions--the paint itself seemed to have depth or tessellation on its surface. At least half a dozen Kinetoscope machines scattered across Columbia offered brief, silent propaganda films (with titles like "The Word of the Prophet," "Father Comstock's Gift of Prophecy," and Solving The Irish Problem"). Health-restoring edibles seemed uncountable: hot dogs, bananas, boxed corn flakes, oranges, soda, coffee, and various alcohols.

To avoid spoiling anything, I won’t touch on specific areas of the world too much, but I particularly liked the way an early segment introduces weapons and Vigors (more on them in What I Don’t Love)--it’s effortless and entertaining. You stumble into an idyllic, xenophobic carnival in Columbia, and can step (right) up to fire a shotgun or carbine against laterally-moving cardboard cutouts of the Vox Populi. The "Cast out the Devil" game in this area takes place in a makeshift living room, where you have to aim the Bucking Bronco Vigor (a seismic wave that pops enemies up) at a devil while avoiding a cardboard facsimile of a woman holding a baby. Hilarious. Tiered prizes are awarded for your performance in all these micro-games.

Weapon appearance is also great: Booker’s pistol is a Mauser’s cousin of a magazine-fed handgun cast in scuffed, textured steel.


Freedom

Remember that home of pro-equality abolitionists I mentioned? During this section, Columbia’s police are chasing you as you flee through the city. You enter the house during a small lull in the pursuit, but as you do you hear the 1912 fuzz rapping at the front door, They want in. The house’s owners reassure you--they’re not going to give you up.

In my second playthrough of this moment, I did the dumbest thing I could: I tried shooting one of the moral, innocent civilians whose home I’d intruded on. You’re not at all prompted to do this, and your weapon actually lowers if you look at them, but I wanted to see how Infinite would respond. When I did, the character died and the police stormed in, sparking a firefight right in the living room. This isn’t a sure event: when I initially played it, I didn’t shoot them and snuck out a rear exit to confront those police in the street. I tested a similar scenario during a visit to a mansion belonging to the Order of the Raven--civilians on the bottom floor will fight you if you shoot one of them, but will leave you alone completely if you don’t. These incidental, small discoveries are a great sign to me; it’s encouraging that Infinite reacts when I do something dumb and impulsive.


Executions
After about 40 minutes in, Booker has a magnetic pinwheel-grappling hook attached attached to his left hand, a device used to slide on Columbia’s Sky Lines--airborne transit rails that connect the city. This tool is also your constant melee weapon, and you see it used to deal executions against basic enemies. They’re brutal. The curved, smooth metal fins of the weapon might turn a police officer’s head clean. One animation roughly simulates what it’d be like to kill a man with a motorized egg-whisk through his larynx. I’m not crazy that you’re invulnerable during these executions, though.


Tune in tomorrow for a pile of things I didn’t enjoy about BioShock Infinite, and look forward to a larger preview of the game in both print editions PC Gamer.

I’ll get this bit of reassurance out of the way: Infinite runs perfectly. Our demo PCs were admittedly above average: an AMD FX-8120 (an octo-core CPU) and a single card in the AMD Radeon 7900 series (I didn't have time to verify which one), alongside 16GB RAM on Windows 7. With that considered, I didn't experience any hiccups, frame rate dips, no texture pop-in, or crashes.

Digging into the settings menu, here’s what was adjustable...

Anti-aliasing
Texture detail
Dynamic shadows
Post-processing quality
Light shafts
Ambient occlusion
Object detail
V-sync
FOV (a slider, with no listed value)
UI margins
Toggleable highlighting of “searchable” or “important” objects

An Irrational developer told me that Infinite is running on DirectX 10, but that it does take advantage of some DX11 features.

Reassuring stuff - if only every dev gave the PC as much love.

I've just played the first five hours of BioShock Infinite, and I've come away with the same dazed feeling I got after I first played Half-Life 2. It's a sensory overload: a relentless series of staggering sights, astonishing events, and more story and detail and mysteries than I could possibly absorb.

I'm not quite sure what I was expecting, but not this.

I'll be writing up my full impressions, and my interview with creative director Ken Levine, for the next issue of PC Gamer UK. Evan's also been playing it, and will bring you a longer and slightly more spoilery exploration of the things he liked most about the demo later today. For now, let me give you an overview of the main stuff I wanted to know before I played.



What do you actually do?

It's very, very story driven. Remember washing up at a lighthouse and discovering Rapture for yourself in BioShock 1? BioShock Infinite's equivalent of that lasts an hour. When the fighting finally does break out, it's frantic and chaotic and recognisably BioShock. But then you're straight back to being led through extraordinary new places by the story. There's time to explore, and masses to see, but it never settled into a formula in the time I played: you're always being put in completely new situations.



Does it feel like a BioShock game?

At first, yes: you're quietly exploring a strange new place and finding clues to the story of what happened here in evidence scattered around, from graffitti to audio diaries. But then you find people. Not enemies, just people. At some point you start to encounter more hostiles, but it never switches entirely to you vs the world: each new area of the floating city starts out with civilians neutral to you.

When you find the girl you're here for, Elizabeth, she changes the mood even further from BioShock's. She's with you at all times, as far as I played, and she's both talkative and central to the plot.



What's the combat like?

Very much like BioShock: gun in one hand, spell in the other. The big difference is the spaces you do it in: fighting in a city of floating buildings means a lot of big, open areas with rooftops, balconies and drifting blimps at different heights. Sky rails snake through these spaces, twisting like rollercoaster tracks, and you can leap on and off these any time: they're magnetised, so your skyhook thingy can pull you up to them from quite far away. Racing around these, launching yourself off to new vantage points or directly onto enemies, gives combat a much more acrobatic and fast-changing feel.

The spells - Vigors - are very much like BioShock 2's: turn people to your side, set them on fire, fling them into the air, cover them in crows (previously bees). They're all good. The guns are less exciting: marginally more satisfying than BioShock's, but still not particularly fun to use by themselves.



What's the best thing about it?

Definitely the place. A city floating in the clouds is a cool thing, and we already knew that, but I wasn't at all prepared for how striking and fresh each new bit of it would be. Temples awash with holy water, gold light and gospel music. City streets fogged with cloud, kids playing and townsfolk chatting, all just silhouettes in the water vapour. Dark mansions, banquet halls of rotting food, crows pecking at everything.

All of it's packed with clues and traces of the story, and the story is bizarre, complicated and fascinating. Can't wait to explore more of it.

It's out March 26th. My full preview will be in our issue out in the UK on January 17th.

Super Hexagon may have become our fast, frantic and brilliantly soundtracked game of choice, but Hotline Miami remains an excellent acid trip of revenge, violence and talking owl masks. It makes the 80s look cool, which is an impressive achievement in itself.

If you've yet to experience Dennaton Games' brutal top-down murder-ballet, now's the time to take a look. Steam have gone and chopped its price in half, cutting it down to a criminally cheap £3.49/$5.

The store have also got a 40% deal on the marvellous FTL, dropping its price to £4.19/$6. It's a decidedly more strategic affair than Hotline's hyper-kinetic ode to viscera, but still a panic-inducing experience in its own right.

Both sales will run until Monday.

That's enough exceptionally cheap indie games, now let's have an ultimately pointless argument about which song from Hotline's amazing soundtrack is the best. My vote's for El Huervo's Turf. Or maybe Sun Araw's Deep Cover. Ah, they're all good.

Lara Croft has had her knockers over the years, but it appears the British adventurer still boasts box office appeal, judging by the latest pre-order sales chart from online retailer Green Man Gaming.

The forthcoming Tomb Raider game - due out in March 2013 - has certainly made headlines since a striking showing at this year's E3. And the buzz of controversy and excitement around the game has no doubt contributed to strong advanced sales which see Lara proudly astride the top of the charts this week.

There's a distinctly military thread through much of the rest of the global bestseller's list. In at number two is Company Of Heroes 2, with Aliens: Colonial Marines scuttling behind like a facehugger with the midnight munchies at number three. Further down the pecking order Sniper Ghost Warrior 2 is within range of targeting the top spot at seventh in the hitlist.

A follow-up full of post-apocalyptic promise is in at eight - Metro: Last Light is ahead of triple A sequels Crysis 3 and Dead Space 3. For now...

Here's the full global pre-order top ten:

1. Tomb Raider
2. Company of Heroes 2
3. Aliens: Colonial Marines
4. Dead Island Riptide
5. Bioshock Infinite (excludes UK)
6. South Park: The Stick of Truth
7. Sniper Ghost Warrior 2
8. Metro: Last Light
9. Crysis 3
10. Dead Space 3

Green Man Gaming also have a 25% discount voucher* that you can use on hundreds of PC Digital titles including most of the pre-purchase titles above. Use the code below and visit Green Man Gaming for more info.

GMG25-CZPYL-D5MQ6

Pre-purchase offer
Green Man Gaming are also offering a single-use 35%-off voucher** AFTER they pre-purchase any of the following games:

Bioshock Infinite (Excludes UK)
SimCity Limited Edition
Sniper Ghost Warrior 2
Company of Heroes 2
Crysis 3
Dead Space 3
Aliens: Colonial Marines
Dead Island Riptide
South Park: The Stick of Truth
Metro Last Light
Tomb Raider

Go to Green Man Gaming for more info

*This voucher is valid until 1200 GMT 14/12/2012. Valid on PC Digital titles only. Excludes selected PC Digital titles
**This voucher can only be used on select PC Download games. This voucher cannot be used in conjunction with another promotional offer (e.g. voucher, cashback) and will expire 21 days after receipt.

We already know that Crytek wants Crysis 3 to "melt-down" PCs, that they have the system specs to bring about their computer cataclysm, and even which specific graphics options will facilitate the electronic end-times. What we didn't know is the date that the GPU Armageddon is due to occur. Until now. At an EA preview event, Crytek's Cevat Yerli announced the release date of the nano-suited FPS. I've put it below the jump, because I'm a massive tease.

Players get to prowl through the inaccurately named Nanodome in a literal New York jungle from February 19th in North America, and February 22nd in Europe.

Meanwhile, Yerli's been clarifying his "F2P is our inevitable future" claims. Speaking to RPS, he said, "I don’t think F2P’s a mutually exclusive way of looking at things."

"I mean, the future is definitely free-to-play," he continued, "but likewise, retail can co-exist with it. Premium games can be free-to-play. When I said free-to-play’s gonna be our future, I meant that and I hold to it. But I didn’t mean it for tomorrow. When I say there will inevitably be only free-to-play games, I mean that there might be ones where you can just download them with a free-to-play business model, or you can go to the store and buy it for $60."

He admitted that it was "too early to say" what funding model Crysis 4 would use.

We've hit that mid-way point in a Humble Bundle's life where sweeteners are added to the already surgery proposition of a pay-what-you-want selection of great games. However with this, the most corporate of Humbles, we also get the slightly bitter taste of a DLC mission pack.

The THQ bundle has been updated to add Titan Quest and Red Faction: Armageddon's Path of War DLC for bundlees who contribute over the average - currently standing at $5.61.

Titan Quest is a pretty good action RPG in the style of the earlier Diablo games. While it's not quite as polished as either of the Torchlights, as part of a bundle of already great games, it's a nice extra (albeit one that doesn't include the Immortal Throne expansion). As for Path of War, my detailed research (read: looking at the Steam page) suggests it's a four mission add-on. Personally I never quite forgave Armageddon for not being the brilliantly dumb Guerilla.

As beat-the-average extras, neither are quite as compelling as the ace Saints Row: The Third, but then it's hard to argue with freebies.

The Humble THQ Bundle has now raised $3.86 million, with five and a half days still to go. It's gone up around $3,000 just while I was writing this post! God I love real-time stats.

As one particular Internet meme suggests, flammenwerfers werf flammen. Not only that, they do a particularly effective job keeping soldiers rather toasty against winter's bite in Company of Heroes 2's Eastern Front. In the first of a developer diary video series, members of developer Relic touch upon the weather's adverse effects on mudfoots, FIRE, how both Axis and Allies magically learned to vault low-lying cover, FIRE, the tactical sensibility of rolling 30-ton war machines across a thin skin of ice, and FIRE. The improved line-of-sight behavior suggests crafty multiplayer upsets and ambushes, as well, and considering Company of Heroes' penchant for unpredictability, I'm eager for some unconventional victories.

Crytek has teamed up with Albert Hughes, one half of the Hughes Brothers best known for directing The Book of Eli (penned, we might add, by former PC Gamer Editor-in-Chief Gary Whitta). The 7 Wonders of Crysis 3 is an in-engine cinematic story told in seven parts (who would have guessed?) aimed at showcasing the visual fidelity of the game and "setting the stage" for its story.

The trailer above will give you the basic rundown. The first episode is set to launch next Wednesday, December 12. In the mean time, you can take a look at Crysis 3's graphics settings, and find the answer to the all important question: "Will I be able to run it at all?"

Budding gamesmiths submit their homebrewed sweat-and-code for recognition and reward during each year's Independent Games Festival, but staying on gamers' radar after the competition's close can be challenging for these small teams. No more: In an announcement released today on the festival's official website, the organizers revealed Valve will offer Steam distribution deals to all finalists of each of the seven award categories. Yep, all of them.

Note the deal isn't automatically inked if an entrant makes it to the finals—they have to give the final nod to Valve to go ahead with including their works in Steam's gargantuan library. (Read: no-brainer.) The finalists for each category—the Seumas McNally Grand Prize, Excellence In Design, Excellence In Art, Excellence In Narrative, Technical Excellence, Excellence in Audio, and the Nuovo Award—will get announced in January before undergoing an awards ceremony at the Game Developers Conference in March.

Considering indie luminaries such as Portal predecessor Narbacular Drop, Minecraft, and Fez have won IGF accolades in the past, this is a definite win-win for all involved.