Age of Empires II: HD Edition has been out a little over a week, and has scarcely left the Top 5 best-selling titles on Steam since. It hasn't all been sunshine and mutton dinners with the polished-up classic, however, as the realities of getting such a dated engine to run on modern machines has caused some quirks. A patch is now available for beta opt-in that, notably, fixes framerate issues on higher-end machines.

The patch notes give very simple instructions on how to opt in: "To access the build, simply right click on Age of Empires II: HD Edition in your Steam library, select 'Properties' and then choose the 'Betas' tab. From there use the drop down to select ‘performance’ and steam should download the update automatically." Note that you will only be able to play multiplayer with others who have opted in to this build.

The notes speak of improvements that may boost your framerate "up to 50% on low end machines and up to 500% on the high end systems previously experiencing frame rate issues." My beefy work rig was one such system experiencing these issues, and while I haven't seen a 500% increase, anectodally, it runs noticeably smoother in larger battles than on the previous build. Other fixes focus on the new multiplayer functionality. It seems like Hidden Path is upholding the commitment not to actually mess with the balance or statistics of the game.

You can read the full patch notes on Steam.

Among the Sleep, the atmospheric horror game in which you play as a baby, is now on Kickstarter with the hope that fans will support it as it makes its final steps toward release. Though the game is feature complete, the devs at Norway's Krillbite Studio say the $200,000 in crowdfunding would allow them to turn some of the part-time team into full-time developers as they seek to round out the sharp corners and put those plastic protector things on the light sockets before letting us loose from the crib.

"We're now at the point in development where we have finished the core gameplay and levels, but there is still a lot of production, and a ton of polishing and testing left to do. We want to take our time and make the game as good as possible," the Kickstarter page reads.

"The only obstacle we see going forward, is that everyone at Krillbite still work part time jobs on the side to survive while developing Among The Sleep. This inhibits our focus and productivity on the game, and we don’t want to lower our expectations to the quality of the finished game, or delay the release. We hope this Kickstarter will help us deliver the best possible experience we can, within a reasonable timeframe."

If you're curious, you might find our hands-on preview from GDC informative. Aside from Kickstarter, you can also read more about the game on the official site.

IGN has confirmed that the game being teased is Resident Evil creator Shinji Mikami's survival horror game, codenamed Zwei. We're waiting on confirmation from Bethesda that the game will be on PC.

On Tuesday, it was barbed wire and Bach. Yesterday, it was burning flowers and a hanging man. Today, it's a dimly-lit room, a shadowed figure, and what appears to be beard hair. Or chest hair. Or head hair. We don't know for sure, but this is it for Bethesda Softworks' cryptic Vine video teasers—the reveal is coming tomorrow on IGN.

Rumors about what's being teased have stretched from Fallout to Wolfenstein to Resident Evil creator Shinji Mikami's survival horror game Zwei and beyond. So far, "Scooby Doo MMO" from commenter Thestral has been the most popular call. This last video does give me, like, the heebie jeebies.

So here it is, gang, our last chance to keep sleuthing. I'll be enjoying a comically large sandwich while eagerly awaiting further investigation, and we'll bring you the story on whatever's revealed tomorrow.

A decade and a half ago, I strolled into a Kmart with a plastic pencil case full of saved-up change to buy a game called StarCraft. At the time, no one could have expected it to become the dominant competitive RTS for 15 years. Its sequel, which just received a first expansion earlier this year, is growing in popularity with over $1.6 million in prizes available for competitive play for the 2013 season.

To celebrate, Blizzard has released the video above, featuring developers, pro players, casters, and other community ambassadors wishing the landmark franchise a happy 15th year. To mark the occasion, here's a collection of some of our best, recent StarCraft coverage.

Starcraft II: Heart of the Swarm launch event

We interviewed Jim Raynor voice actor Robert Clotworthy
And Blizzard loremaster Chris Metzen
And Senior Art Director Samwise Didier


Review

StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm review


World Championship Series

The basics
CEO Mike Morhaime breaks it down
Season 1 Overview
Details on the point system and prize pools

DICE has put out a call for a master thesis student capable of implementing support for the Oculus Rift SDK in the Frostbite Engine, meaning the much-hyped VR headset is at least in the developer's periphery. It also answers the question: "Can university life become even further removed from reality?"

The unpaid position requires association with a university's master thesis program, and will also task the student with "modifications to better fit first person games," "reducing latency," and whatever the catch-all problem of "stereoscopic issues" entails.

Aside from Battlefield 4, Dragon Age III: Inquisition and an unnamed Mass Effect game will use the Frostbite Engine, though lack of a first-person perspective probably rules them out of potential support. Most of those who've tried the Rift—myself included—have been impressed, but I worry that the novelty may have a negative effect on performance in a competitive shooter. Nevertheless, plenty of future games will likely use Frostbite, and support from the Big Guys is more good news for Oculus' VR dreams.

Luckily I have super strong fingers, I can wait here all day.

When you have a series with long roots like Splinter Cell, it must be tough to make a trailer. Either you stay true to your existing fans, and show a man smearing himself against a bunch of walls and crates in the rain, or you try to capture the attention of the wider gaming public. That’s why we get man-with-gun Bioshock box art, sexualised nun-punching for Agent 47, and in Sam Fisher’s case, running across a rooftop, effortlessly shivving folks in the neck. Eyebrows were raised. “That’s not Splinter Cell, is it?” was muttered.

"This isn’t a dumbing down of Splinter Cell – it’s taking the slick style of Conviction and bringing it back into official ghost ops."
But Blacklist is very much Splinter Cell. And Killing In Motion isn’t a button you press to wall-run and stab everything. It’s a design approach. It’s the fluidity of Sam’s movement. This isn’t a dumbing down of Splinter Cell – it’s taking the slick style of Conviction and bringing it back into official ghost ops. I played two missions – a botched extraction that turns into a daylight traversal of Benghazi rooftops, and a night mission in an abandoned London mill that positively stinks of classic Splinter Cell. You know, in a good way.

An XP system rewards all styles of play, in a gently guiding way. Ghosts are merciful and unseen. Panthers are stealthy, but leave a corpse-strewn wake. And Assault XP is awarded for being a huge stupid-head. The game, in a stroke of brilliant snideness, calls this “brave, open combat”. Hmmm.

Merciful takedowns are slower, but earn you the Ghost rank.

Talk of ‘playing games properly’ is the language of the gruesome snob, but I’m just following Ubisoft’s lead. And if you want to play this properly, Perfectionist mode lets you give up your less realistic tools. The Last Known Position marker disappears, so you can no longer see where the enemy thinks you are. You can’t mark a number of enemies, then execute them all with a tap of a button. And your goggles become significantly less all-seeing.

If you want to play this properly, Perfectionist mode lets you give up your less realistic tools."
The Paladin aircraft that houses the Fourth Echelon acts like a mini-Normandy. The Strategic Mission Interface (SMI) is the hub for every mission chain, in order to keep people engaged with the entire game, and not just one option on a menu screen. Between missions, you can chat to your mismatched crew, getting missions and generally being a good boss. You can even upgrade the aircraft for in-field rewards.

Game director Patrick Redding is fairly sure about what Conviction got wrong. The choice to indicate a stealthy location by moving into black and white was a source of annoyance to both the art team and players. He also feels that the absence of Spies vs Mercs in Conviction just gave them a chance to get it right for Blacklist. After playing a couple of hours of the excellent singleplayer campaign, Ubisoft Toronto have earned the benefit of the doubt.

“Those trousers, they’re wonderful! I must have them.”

"Tower Offence" is the term 11 Bit Studios invented to describe their 2011 man vs. machine lane attack game, Anomaly: Warzone Earth. Instead of planting towers to laser ordered waves of foes, you tailored convoys of attackers and funneled them down routes strewn with stationary alien pew-pew machines. Anomaly 2 will offer a prettier variation on the same idea, with an additional multiplayer mode lets two players mobilise forces against one another.

Build an amazeballs lazer maze! Kill your friends! For free! We have 2000 beta keys to give away. Read on for your chance to secure a key that's yours and only yours forever. Or at least until the beta ends at the start of May.

To enter, follow the link below and follow the instructions. The first 2000 entrants will go into a big list, and will receive a key via an email when the competition closes on Tuesday.

I would quite like to try Anomaly 2, if you please.

Find out more on the Anomaly 2 site or check out the trailer below. Here's our Anomaly: Warzone Earth review, if you're curious about how all this madness started.

On Tuesday evening, the PC Gamer ShootMania Tournament launched with almost 50 teams signed up to play in the month long double elimination tournament. With both amateur and professional players battling it out in the 3v3 Elite mode of the newly released FPS title from Nadeo, anything can happen and it almost always does. The tournament is played entirely in Elite mode, which you can read more about here. The first team to get to nine points takes the game, although they do have to win by a two-point margin. It’s a best of three with the loser going down to the lower-bracket where every match could be their last. If you were unable to catch all the matches, you can still watch the VOD embedded below before you read on to avoid spoilers!

We had a few problems with the feed, so the broadcast starts at 53.56 and had to be broken up into multiple parts - you can find the remaining matches on our Twitch channel.



The first game of the evening featured the British trio PixelTwitch as they took on the Portuguese team GrowuPGaming. PixelTwitch have racked up an insane number of hours practising in such a short space of time but their opponents anticipated every step, jump and shot they made. By sitting back behind cover rather than leave the flag and hunt the attacker, GrowuPGaming were able to take the series 2 - 0 showcasing strong communication and teamwork.

They are by no means unbeatable, however: their positional play during attacking rounds leaves them frequently open to being flanked. This will have to be rectified if they are to topple the top seed ‘Fnatic’ in the third round. Most of the PixelTwitch losses in the first series were down to nerves causing rookie mistakes. It isn’t time to uninstall the game yet, though - with disciplined practise and better communication, they stand a good chance of making a fantastic run through the lower bracket.

The final series of the session saw Team Infused vs chargers!. Infused.Microstar was the most consistent player all evening, showing audacious triple kills and patience while in defence but massive amounts of aggression during his attacking phase. chargers! played a solid game using the high ground to their advantage but ultimately, Infused was just too strong for them as they took the match 2 - 0.

PyRoGeN's loss to LemonDogs was one of week's bigger surprises.

I spoke to the tournament's expert commentators, Ziggy “nVc” Orzeszek and David “Zaccubus” Treacy from famed eSports crew Team Dignitas. "The big surprise for me and Zaccubus was to see PyRoGeN knocked down to the losers bracket by LemonDogs," says nVc. Although LemonDogs had a stand-in player in the form of Eliance from TCM, who inadvertently had one of the best attacking rounds on the map Spitfire that I have ever seen in ShootMania, we still saw some great and confident play all round. Their Round 3 match against Nine Zero is definitely the best of the bunch, so we'll certainly be covering that one. However, Nine Zero can beat anybody on their day and I'm really hoping that Eliance will stand-in again as their 3rd, I want to see more of those three.

"It's still too early to predict a winner. The obvious place to put your money is on Fnatic after winning the $100,000 tournament at IPL in San Francisco just two weeks ago," nVc explains, "but they then went on to lose to Dignitas.EU at the French Launch Party the following week. All in all it's mostly irrelevant as the beauty with ShootMania is that the competition among the top 3-5 teams is fierce, both teams could win it on any given day. Also, perhaps important to mention is that Dignitas.EU have since replaced Kowa with Quake legend Cypher for this event, they'll need to gel together quickly as we move forward in the tournament to prove they deserve 2nd seed despite the change."

With the top teams filtered through to the third round and the lower bracket full of teams attempting to hang on with their last life, next week is certain to bring even more exciting and diverse play.

If nothing else, the Oculus Rift looks like a great tool for getting a face full of atmospheric alien worlds. And what world could be more alien than the underwater portion of our own? It's got it all: violence, oppressive tension, gross tentacle monsters. And that's not even counting whatever the hell is going on with Anglerfish. Recognising the strange delights that lurk in the depths, a team of UK students are building a Rift supported under-the-sea exploration game, called UnderCurrent.

"Our designers have been studying VR technology reading as many books and papers as we can find in the libraries and online as well as writing our own papers about the future of VR tech," writes team member 'Chard' on the Oculus Rift forum. "We're still experimenting with core game play mechanics which would best suit the Rift but look forward to seeing further development in the future!"

So far the team have assembled three levels of the game, which is said to take around 10 minutes, "so that you can have a full immersive experience without becoming cyber-sick".

You can see more UnderCurrent development progress at the game's website.

Thanks, Joystiq.

Of all the Slender-inspired horror games I've played while hiding from the surprisingly well-dressed giganto-armed monster man, Eyes is probably the best. Rather than picking up randomly distributed notes you're snaffling bags of money - you know, those big bags of money everybody leaves lying around. Replacing Slender's Copse of Evil is a House of Evil, but it's no less frightening for it, thanks to effective sound design and a howling wind that does a lot to establish an unsettling atmosphere. Last but not least, in place of Slender's Slender Man is a big floating ghost head, and everybody knows those guys are just the worst. You can play Eyes - The Horror game in both browser and downloadable form, but you should probably play it either way.

As IndieGames note, Eyes borrows a few tricks from brown-trousers manufacturer Amnesia too, in particular your ability to hide from the bodiless ghost-hair creature, and live to fight another day. Or another few minutes at least. You can also interact with eye-shaped sigils to be afforded a brief glimpse into the spirit world, and see through hair-ghost-lady's eyes for a few vital seconds. This lets you work out where not to go - though the presence of psychokinetically rattling cupboards is also something of a clue.

Can you thieve all the cash before you're murdered by a vengeful ex-Head and Shoulders model? Well, it can't hurt to have a go.