While the arrival of the Radeon HD 7990 wasn’t exactly a watershed moment in PC gaming AMD's statements surrounding the launch were intriguing. AMD’s senior product manager, Devon Nekechuk, was adamant they were looking to “transform AMD into a gaming company.” From recent developments at the Texas-based company that transformation looks to be gaining pace.

Nekechuk claimed that AMD would "win in the gaming space" with a four-stage approach focusing on "Cloud, console, client" and "content." The "cloud" aspect is covered by the Radeon Sky program, which marks AMD's attempt to follow Nvidia’s lead into the game server arena. The technology, along with software layers provided by CiiNOW, will allow their server-based graphics cards to dish out real-time rendered games to mobile devices.

AMD are making ever greater strides into our living rooms, powering the two next-gen consoles. And that could be key for us PC folk as much as for the console crowd.

“Gamers are going to benefit on the PC side and on the cloud side by AMD winning in that console segment,” says Nekechuk. “Since the consoles are really the target for a lot of the game developers if it’s a Radeon heart powering that console, like the PS4 or Xbox 360, that means these games devs are going to be designing their games, designing their features and really optimising for that Radeon heart in the console. That’s going to carry over and give a much better cloud gaming experience and it’s also going to give a much better PC experience.”

Despite the Xbox 360 already having a ‘Radeon heart’ we didn’t see a lot of evidence of that helping PC gamers in the last generation, but with both next-gen devices running AMD hardware more developers will be tailoring their work to AMD's silicon.

Obviously AMD are going to continue iterating new graphics hardware for the PC too. “Winning in the component market is really at the core of AMD’s business,” Nekechuk assured us.

All about the games

The final piece of the jigsaw is the content developers are creating for gamers, and here AMD have been making great strides in signing devs up to their side of the graphics divide. Nvidia’s ‘The way it’s meant to be played’ campaign used to be the flash we saw at the beginning of many a big-budget title, and now that seems to have been replaced by AMD’s ‘Gaming Evolved’ branding and the 'Never Settle' game bundles.

“Not only are we bringing these games to market we’re actually making the games better.” Nekechuk told us. “A big part of the Gaming Evolved program is coming up with features. We have whole development studios internal to AMD that develop technologies, such as TressFX, and we roll these out to games developers and help them implement them into the games so that the content itself is better than what it was prior to the Gaming Evolved partnership.”

Bioshock Infinite was one of the latest Gaming Evolved titles

AMD may have some serious work to do to get PC gamers back onside after years of second-tier hardware and less-than-stellar driver releases, but they are at least putting their limited monies where their collective mouths are.

Meanwhile, Intel are making more inroads into gaming tech with their Iris and Iris Pro processor graphics sets. It seems that gaming is becoming a key battle ground again for the big hardware manufacturers.

SimCity is turning 3.0 this week, a milestone that will hopefully go a lot smoother than the troublesome 2.0, which introduced all manner of bizarre bugs into the game. This time, Maxis have set their sights primarily on traffic, by updating the routing system and making drivers smarter, promising that "vehicles can now make right turns on Red". You'll be happy to learn that "university pedestrian paths can now cross streets" as well - and people say that higher learning is a waste of time. Full list of *fingers crossed* fixes after the break.

New: Added more Hotel models to increase hotel variety.
Traffic: Updated routing system to improve traffic. Routing system now understands more information about u-turns, required vehicle stops, and vehicle behavior on certain road types. This should make traffic smarter.
Traffic: Commercial and industrial buildings stagger their work shifts to start throughout commute hours instead of at the top of the hour. This should reduce traffic.
Traffic: Fixes one issue where a car won't move causing traffic to back up behind it.
Traffic: Vehicles can now make right turns on Red. This should improve some cases of traffic.
Traffic: Trading polish that will improve regional traffic when one city has a lot of jobs and its neighboring city has a lot of workers.
Air Pollution: Fixed more issues where cities that placed air polluting buildings received large amounts of air pollution from unknown sources.
Service Vehicles: Fix for disappearing service vehicles on cities that whose vehicles had disappeared before update 2.
School Buses: Fix for issue where school buses were getting stuck at neighbor's city or arcology.
Audio: Tuned audio on French Police Station.
Trading: Fixed issue where fire servers were not trading consistently between Brakeman's Folly and Twain in Whitewater Valley.
Trading: Sewage trading: Sewage will now take a more direct route to regional sewage plant instead of throughout the city.
Trading: Made gifting more reliable.
Ferry Terminal: Ferry Terminal can now send its sewage to the output pipe and treatment plant.
RCI Tuning: Fixed issue where sims going to a park via transit would sometimes lose their money or happiness on the way home.
RCI Tuning: Bulldozing abandoned or rubble buildings will now prevent new developments for 6-12 hours.
RCI Tuning: Less Happiness is taken from wealth 2 and 3 buildings when rent is due when no money is present.
RCI Tuning: Fix for issue some users experienced where buildings would stay abandoned because moving trucks would not be able to move in.
Trees: Trees now last longer, but also do not eliminate as much ground pollution.
Radiation: Radiation causes less ground pollution than previously.
Transit: Changed thought bubble suggestion to add more trains to deal with crowded passenger trains to suggest that you add more train stations.
Transit: Improvements to lights to make rail look better at night.
Transit: Streetcar stops can now be placed directly on standalone streetcar tracks, and passengers can walk along the tracks to them.
Transit: Tuned the chance buses or streetcars will go to high-traffic stops first as a minor traffic improvement.
Roads: University pedestrian paths can now cross streets.
Manufacturing Trucks: Fixed issue some users experienced where manufacturing trucks left the city and were lost permanently.
Delivery Trucks: Fixed issue where some users would experience a loss of resources is their delivery trucks returned to garages without proper storage.
Sports Parks: Tuned the amount of skateboarders and neighborhood athletes at the sports parks.
Data Layers: Zones are now visible in heavy data layers.
Edit Mode: Added more valid snap points in edit mode. This improvement is most noticeable on Parks.
Buildings: Addressed some cases where buildings would stack on one another.

A post on the Bethesda Blog announces that there's a new Wolfenstein on the way from MachineGames, formed of ex-Starbreeze members behind the excellent Chronicles of Riddick. It's called Wolfenstein: The New Order being built in id Tech 5 and will be released at the end of this year.

According to Gamespot, it's set in the '60s in an alternative universe in which the Nazis won World War 2. You play as B.J. Blazkowicz again, who must defeat the Nazi threat with new "super weapons" on Earth "and beyond." robo-Hitler Moonbase finale, anyone?

There's an announcement trailer over on Gamespot showing giant robots, marching soldiers and burning monuments and, of course, Jimi Hendrix' All Along The Watchtower, cleverly referencing the famous opening verse

"There must be some kind of way out of here,
Said the joker to the thief,
"There's too much confusion,
I can't get no- look out, an army of giant Nazi robots from the future"

Blazkowicz is back, then! Does this fill you with joy, apathy, pain? I'm sure you can't be much happier than the annoucnement robot, who's all |_o_|:

I think I prefer my books dead, on the whole - I'd rather not be chastised for my reading speed, or have to make small talk with a tome while I'm busy scanning its innards - but if Valve are backing them, I expect every book will be 'alive' by the end of the year. Ah - I have, of course, made a rather grievous error. 'Living' in the context of Dota 2's virtual International Interactive Compendium means 'you can click around in it to play games, vote in polls and generally interact with/support the MOBA's upcoming International tournament'. Sounds rather nifty. Sales of The Compendium - which will be added to the Dota Store later today - will also help increase the tourney's $1.6m prize pool, with 25% of all revenue generated by the book being thrown in the already morbidly obese kitty.

If you have a ticket to the international tournament, kindly Uncle Valve are going to give you the Compendium for free. Otherwise you'll have to fork out an unspecified amount - the holy book hasn't materialised in the store yet. Valve had this to say about the endeavour:

"Each year we spend some of the planning time for The International trying to figure out ways to improve the connection between fans and the players in the tournament. We know that the majority of our viewers will be watching the tournament unfold over the internet, so we'd like to make it easier for an online fan to dig deeper into the event, the teams, and the players.

"In addition to wanting more detail, we know fans also love to compete with each other at predicting tournament results. This year we're taking our first shot at addressing all of the these concepts, with an additional step that we hope will result in the tournament itself getting bigger and better as a direct result of fan enthusiasm."

As for The International tournament itself, well that takes place over five days, kicking off in Seattle on the 7th of August. You'll find more info here.

Thanks to Eurogamer.

Have you played Candy Box yet? It's a deceptively simple little ASCII browser game that's hooked more than 450,000 players during its brief lifespan. It starts with a candy counter that increases every second. You can hoard them or you can throw them on the floor. Shortly a trader shows up and offers you a sword in exchange for candies. Before you know it you're questing through dungeons, acquiring potions, meeting swawmp frogs, growing your own candy using Lollipops and going on sugar-crazed adventures.

Candy Box is creator aniwey's first publicly released game. He's a first year computer science student based in Caen, France who enjoys building little experimental games as a way of flexing his coding muscles. He had no idea that his little web game would get so big so fast, but he's already planning a sequel. I caught up with aniwey (who'd rather keep his real name private) on IM earlier to find out more about his sequel plans and try and solve Candy Box's biggest mystery - what happens when you keep throwing your candies on the floor?

Candy Box started life as one of a number of little prototypes aniwey was working on in his spare time, which included "an experimental 2D game with pixels you could place on the screen, a game with racing turtles" and "a game in which you control a white rectangle travelling through a land made of milk bottles, birds and fractal trees." It was Candy Box that made it to completion after two months of work.



What inspired Candy Box? "A lot of people ask me this question. I really don't know" aniwey confesses. "I think it's just like a RPG, but the features come to the player in a different way." Candy Box's levels are a good example of this They're depicted as tiny ASCII landscapes. Your adventurer marches from left to right and annihilates everything he can in his path. You can help him out by deploying potions and making sure he's well equipped before heading in.

Candy Box' opening screen betrays nothing of the dungeon-running to come. Candies appear. You can eat them or hoard them. Once you have ten you gain the option to throw them on the floor. Our Graham left Candy Box running overnight to ammass tens of thousands of candies, and has thrown hundreds to the ground, fruitlessly.

PC Gamer: We keep throwing candies on the floor. If we keep doing it do we eventually drown in candies?

aniwey: Nah, it doesn't do anything. (one of the two useless features of the game !)

PC Gamer: What's the other one?

aniwey: The potion which turns you into superman.

Of course! But why introduce this mysterious option if it does nothing? "It's because it's surprising" says aniwey, "this surprise aspect is what I'm trying to achieve in this game!" Incidentally, if you fancy trying the potion that makes you Superman, "you should be able to craft it after the fifth quest."



A follow-up to Candy Box is planned, which will expand on most aspects of the game. "The player will have more choices, the weapons will have more characteristics! There will be more locations to explore." Aniwey suggests that the secret source of all those candies will be revealed in the follow up, so until then I'll stick to my mental image of them raining down from the sky one by one. Perhaps more importantly, there will also be -

aniwey: lolligators in the farm! (It's like alligators, but, you know, there's a bit of lollipops too)

PC Gamer: FEARSOME LOLLIGATORS. What will the Lolligators do?

Aniwey: The lolligators, will, well, probably provide lollipops, since it's part of their names! (I don't want to spoil too much :>)

PC Gamer: Lolligators confirmed!

There's no time frame for Candy Box 2, as aniwey's just building it in his spare time, between responding to the rush of emails he received after the game was widely reported last week. "I'm glad this game had so much success o/" he says. "Really, anyone can make a game like that. I just learned on the Internet, as anyone can do."

Visit the Candy Box site to play for free in your browser.

Can you picture what an entire world of warships would actually be like? Would they remain at sea, or would the great steel behemoths encroach upon the now-empty land - would they evolve to grow legs? These and other hypothetical questions are now moot, thanks to a series of screenshots that show exactly what a world of warships would be like. It would be like World of Warships, obviously, the next campaign in Wargaming.net's global conquest of the free-to-play space. WoW (not that WoW) swaps tanks for sea-tanks - also known as ships - and you can see some of these in in-action below. See you on the port (or is it starboard?) side of the break.

Admittedly these are not the most exciting images in the world, but they do show off the pleasant scenery and attention-to-detail of the deadly warships, which will soon be blasting other vessels to kingdom come, in the MMO based on twentieth century naval battles. World of Warships is currently still docked in Wargaming.net's expansive harbour, but it will be set loose upon the seven seas sometime this year.

While you wait, why not pass the time with our giant guide to Wargaming.net's current mega-hit, World of Tanks? You know, if you're a fan of land-ships - also known as tanks.

Like the residents of Springfield, I'm easily swayed on pretty much any matter so long as the arguments are expressed in song form. All it took for me to go from 'nonplussed' to 'slightlyplussed' about upcoming Wild West shootyfest Call of Juarez: Gunslinger was the addition of a catchy theme tune - a surprisingly tender folksy number that shouldn't work against a backdrop of bloody shooting, but somehow does. Read on to hear the legend of the "four-holstered reaper" known as Silas Greaves, and to see some new screenshots of him going about his grisly business.



That's going to be stuck in my head all day - not unlike the bullets in the many bad guys Silas is for some reason mowing down. Techland's fourth Call of Juarez game is due out 22nd May. We liked what we played of it last year.

Phosphor Games' Unreal Engine 3-powered action game Project Awakened hasn't had the best of luck. The indescribable game (and therein lies the problem, I think) fell short of its Kickstarter target back in March, and after a couple of months of trying to raise money by other means, their private funding campaign has now been put on hold. Thankfully, everyone who backed will be getting a full refund.

Phosphor Games haven't given up on their mod-friendly third-person thing-a-majig, but the need to start work on new, paying projects, coupled with a lack of contributors, caused the team to temporarily put Project Awakened out to pasture, as CEO Justin Corcoran explained to Polygon yesterday. If you liked the look of the game, however, there is some hope: Corcoran promised that "while we are a bit beat up, we are not defeated. Someday, somehow, we will make this game."

Here's a reminder of what could have been:

Ever wondered what it'd be like to be decapitated by a guillotine? At least three people have, because they've created a decapitation simulator for the Oculus Rift. Don't worry about flying, or riding unicorns in pastel fantasy fields, or playing Team Fortress or Portal or whatever: who needs any of that when you can feel what it's like to get your head chopped off without dealing with the consequences of actually dying? You can just keep doing it again, and again, and again. This is what virtual reality was made for, surely.

Disunion was created during the Exile Game Jam, which took place between the 1st and 5th of May in Denmark. The work of Erkki Trummal, André Berlemont and Morten Brunbjerg, Disunion is available to download right now, so if you've got an Oculus Rift dev kit at hand, the gift of guilt-free decapitation is only a few clicks away.

Things got a little scary after Disney bought out LucasFilm last year, acquiring the rights to all of LucasArts' games before shutting down the studio for good. What would become of classics like Monkey Island, Grim Fandango, and Knights of the Old Republic? Well, we've got our first development—the House of Mouse has signed a deal with EA to develop and publish games based on the Star Wars licence.

EA intends to build Star Wars games for "all interactive platforms and the most popular game genres." According to EA Labels President Frank Gibeau, powerhouse studios DICE and Visceral will be joining BioWare in their work on the franchise. "The new experiences we create may borrow from films," he says, "but the games will be entirely original with all new stories and gameplay."

This comes as good news, kind of, to those who worried about Disney's focus on mobile gaming (one such worrier being Ron Gilbert, Monkey Island creator, himself). With three of the world's top studios named, we can be fairly certain that their talent will be working on some pretty large-scale games, and we might even see something equaling the greatness of 2003's Knights of the Old Republic.

BioWare's latest, however, wasn't exactly an instant success—Star Wars: The Old Republic adopted a free-to-play model not even a year after its release. I do wonder if there's a bit of fatigue around the franchise—is there a limit to the number of Star Wars games we can play before wookies and ewoks become tiresome?

Unfortunately, there's no word on what Disney will be doing with other licences such as Monkey Island, so we'll have to be content with this Star Wars news for now.