Valve have announced their latest Steam experiment - Trading Cards - will venture out from its beta home on Wednesday to journey across the entire community. The official release will see a selection of new games that support the feature, and will pave the way for new functionality in the future. In addition, Valve say it's the first step towards "an event we think everyone can be excited about."

Don't know what Trading Cards are all about? Here are the basics:


While playing a game with Trading Card support, Steam will periodically add cards towards that game's set into your Inventory.
Earn half the cards in a set, and Steam will stop periodically adding cards into your Inventory.
But maybe it's a free-to-play game! And maybe you could spend money on that free-to-play game! And then maybe Steam will let you have an extra card for that set? Maybe?
Or maybe you trade your precious Left 4 Dead 2 cards to complete your set of even more precious Dota 2 cards.
Or, you can just go to the Steam Market and buy the cards from people who have learned they can make actual real money from a digital picture they have been given.
Also, there are "rare" foil cards. They are exactly the same as normal cards, but more expensive. Because Valve have seen what people will pay for Vintage hats in TF2.
Also there are booster packs - randomly awarded packs of three cards. They're dependant on the community generating badges... or something.
Oh yeah, badges! They're what you craft from a completed card set, however you choose to complete it. They do... something. I don't even know any more.


Related: I am a grumpy old man who has no time for this. Still, if nothing else, the real reason to be excited about the scheme leaving beta is that everyone gets access to the new user profile page. It's pretty spiffy looking.

"We'll be continuing to iterate on existing features and add new ones after the release," writes Valve man John Cook. "There are a few things we have talked about previously that we really wanted to get to, that have now been pushed till post release - Trade Offers, and the Card Binder. They will still get done we just don't have an exact timeline on that."

A card binder? DAMMIT! Well obviously I'm now going to have to systematically collect every single card ever released.

As for "The Event", Cook only says, "Making trading cards available to all Steam users is a step towards an event we think everyone can be excited about..." As an entirely unrelated piece of trivia, did you know that Steam's 2012 Summer Sale started on July 12th? Little historical fact for you there, apropos of nothing.

Thanks, PCGamesN.

Last week, Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition was removed from sale after the game was cursed by the legal wizard. If you're wondering: he's summoned in times of messy contractual disputes between an unnamed publishing partner and the developer of a retouched version of a classic RPG. As a result, it was revealed that an upcoming patch for BG:EE, as well as work on Baldur's Gate 2: Enhanced Edition, was on hold. Now, Beamdog's founder Trent Oster has spoken about where that leaves the once planned Baldur's Gate 3.

Speaking to RPS, Oster said the possibility of resuming work on Baldur's Gate was mixed. "Best case, we can sort this out soon. Worst case, this could be in legal hell for a while. I like making games, but this contractual dispute bullshit keeps me up at night."

"Baldur's Gate II: Enhanced Edition is on indefinite hold, as is the current patch. Baldur’s Gate III, we are still interested in the concept, but currently I’d say were very demoralized."

Oster had previously indicated that Baldur's Gate 3 was a long-term goal for Beamdog. Back in November, he seemed much more enthusiastic about the project's possible future, telling us: "If Baldur’s Gate Enhanced Edition is successful, the interest in the partners goes way up. If Enhanced Edition isn’t that successful, the interest goes down. Gotta play it by ear and see how it goes."

Heavy Gear Assault developer Stompy Bot Productions have cancelled their Kickstarter after it failed to catch the enthusiasm of giant fighty mech lovers. Despite some impressive looking early tech demos and a promised episodic singleplayer campaign, the project raised only $44,981 of the $800,000 target since its launch over a month ago. Stompy Bot will now continue to seek crowdfunding through the game's website.

"We appreciate and highly value everyone's opinions here," wrote the devs, explaining the campaign's closure in its comments. "We believe very strongly in resurrecting the Heavy Gear franchise and giving the fans what they want. We are currently evaluating other strategies to raise awareness regarding Heavy Gear and looking at multiple means to get the Heavy Gear name out there."

So far the website's pledge counter is at $121,215 - 13% of the way towards its goal. Although, unlike Kickstarter, its Pledge page takes money at the point of donation, making it an ultimately more risky proposition. And that's on the spectrum of funding things that don't exist yet, which is always something of a risk at every level.

Thanks, Polygon.

You're developing a game called Monster Hunter Online. You need to show that game in the form of a trailer. What do you do? Tencent, who are developing MHO, sensibly chose a monster parade, showing off everything from a giant armoured beaver-bear, to, er, a warthog. But, like, a really big warthog. With massive tusks. So it's still pretty threatening.



Recently, Tencent announced that their CryEngine 3 powered MMO would be opening to closed beta on June 28th. What isn't yet known is if the game will be seen outside of their native China - currently the game's only confirmed release region.

For now then, we'll just have to make do with looking at the pretty CryEngine 3 menagerie. Like some digital zoo made of massively tusked monsters, to be appreciated, but not chopped into pieces with an inconceivably large sword.

Thanks, VG247.

Rift is currently enjoying a resurgence, thanks its free-to-play switch. But having hordes of players bouncing between dynamic quests and rift encounters is one thing, keeping them there is another. In an effort to keep their newly bolstered community engaged, developer Trion held a recent livestream in which they teased upcoming updates and features, and gave the first info on the 3.0 expansion.

Four new souls are planned: Support Cleric, Healing Warrior, Tanking Mage and Healing Rogue. You'd be forgiven for suspecting that Rift's Soul design is based around arbitrarily picking words out of a hat, but in this instance, the added roles fill areas each class has been traditionally weak. The hope is to further expand the flexibility of styles on offer.

Other improvements will see a more customisable weapon and armour upgrade system, with more scope to define your style, and an increased role for companion pets. In addition, Dimensions will get an upgrade, with Trion looking to give player-owned housing more purpose.

Image Source: RiftScene

Finally, they revealed the planned 3.0 expansion - focusing on the plane of Water. Cross-section concept art showed a multi-level environment, including a frozen lake and underground city. Previously, Trion released Storm Legion as the 2.0 expansion - adding two continents that tripled the size of the game's world. If their future plans are anything like as ambitious as that release, it should keep Rift players busy for some time.

Thanks, RiftScene (via Joystiq).

Following on from Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number's expectedly violent teaser trailer is a particularly unsettling first glimpse of the sequel proper, filmed off-screen at this weekend's Rezzed expo by VG247. As you might expect, the actual goon-killing doesn't appear to have changed too much from the original game, but the story seems fascinating, and there are couple of songs from the sure-to-be-excellent new soundtrack featured too.



Powerful, shocking, miserable stuff. In related news, Eurogamer's cracking Hotline Miami 2 preview has dug up some more info about the game. There will be Super Meat Boy-style Hard versions of each stage, accessible by achieving a score of C+ or above. Also, as you may have noticed from the video, the character in the Tiger mask will no longer be able to pick up weapons (however, they can still kill people with a single punch). The new Zebra mask, meanwhile, will allow you to leap through windows - something zebras are particularly famous for.

Torchlight II was a worthy successor to Torchlight, featuring more of everything that made the original such a gas. More classes, more pets, more monsters, more environments, and more loot. One thing was missing, though: a giant hulking brute smashing his way through the game with dual-wielded swords the size of airplane wings. Sure, Torchlight II has the Berserker class, but I found myself missing the original big brawler, the tank who loomed a foot taller and a football field wider than everyone else. The Destroyer Class mod, created by Steam Community member Anoka, sends our favorite juggernaut, along with all of his original skills, stampeding into the sequel.

My original Destroyer from Torchlight and his two favorite toys.

I have some fond memories of the Destroyer. The original Torchlight came along at a period in my life when I was working ridiculous hours at a stressful, soul-sucking job that left me a withered, mindless husk at the end of every day. All I wanted to was come home, turn on my computer, turn off my brain, and click on monsters until they exploded into glorious globs of guts, gold, goodies, and something else that starts with G. The other two classes were plenty of fun, but at the time I just needed the simplicity of walking straight up to a crowd of monsters and violently pummeling them into expensive muck.

The new Destroyer. With an eyepatch! The fewer eyes you have, the more badass you are.

So, for me, it's especially great to see the Destroyer in Torchlight II, once more standing head and shoulders above the rest of the playable classes. And, with this mod, you don't just get a nice new character model: it cleanly delivers all of the Destroyer's skills, both active and passive, from the original game.

The skeleton has a bigger sword than mine now, but check back with me in, oh, say, an hour.

Starting with the Destroyer's Berserker skill tree, you can upgrade your Slash Attack, letting you swing at multiple enemies in front of you, then unlock the glorious Stampede, which lets you ping-pong around the battlefield with a shoulder-first bash, and maybe move onto Chain Vortex, a phantasmal attack with a high chance of leaving enemies stunned. And don't forget Devastate, which is basically the equivalent of stuffing all your favorite weapons in a sack, spinning it over your head, and smacking someone with it as you repeatedly leap at them.

The Berserker's Wolfstrike is great, but I did miss the simplicity of good 'ol Stampede.

Over in the Titan tree, we see the return of Soul Rend (a mighty overhand swing), the shockwave-producing Titan Stomp, and Doomquake, which shatters the ground in all directions. If you're feeling a bit more mystical, you can climb the Spectral tree, inviting the Spectral Bowman and the Shadow Armor phantasm to pitch in and help. All of the skills have appropriate animations and visual effects, and the trees themselves contain the Torchlight icons and descriptions. I've tried out many of them, and they work just as I remember from the original.

All of the Destroyer's passive skills are back as well, from Adventurer (more XP and fame gain) to Treasure Hunter (better chances at quality loot and more gold) to Pet Mastery (shop FASTER, damn you). I checked the entire list of skills from the original game against the mod's contents, and I don't see anything that was overlooked.

Not quite the size of airplane wings. But they'll do. For now.

Before you get too excited to welcome back your favorite man-mountain, there is a drawback to this mod. Since the Destroyer is a bigger model than the rest of the other classes in Torchlight II, he can't wear any of the armor, shoulders, gloves, boots, or helms you spend all your time cutting out of monsterbowels. Cosmetically, I mean. You can equip anything that is level, skill and class appropriate, and enjoy their benefits, but apart for the weapons he's holding, the Destroyer always looks the same. On the plus side, he looks pretty cool as is-- you can't go far wrong with spikes, chains, and an eyepatch-- but the joy of murdering General Grell is lessened a tad when you can't strut around wearing his helmet back in town.

"It's a-me! Mario!" Actually, it's a Titan Stomp from an extremely large man.

While I do miss outfitting my Destroyer with ridiculously huge shoulder pads and great clunky helmets, I've found it's really not too hard to live without the bling. Playing the Destroyer in Torchlight always helped me decompress during difficult, stressful times, and getting to steer, stampede, and smash him through Torchlight II is pretty darn satisfying.

Installation: It's as easy as sending your badger to the pawn shop. Subscribe to the mod here on Steam Workshop, then fire up Torchlight II. Under the play button, click the Manage Mods button. Make sure "The_Destroyer" mod is checked, and Launch Torchlight with Mods. There will be an arrow in the character selection box when you start a new game, and from there just name your Destroyer, pick a pet, and get to smashin'.

We know that Watch Dogs features Dark Souls-ish multiplayer features that will allow you to invade other players' worlds to hack and mess around with their stuff (and be invaded in return), but now we can finally see the game's (anti-)social element in action. The following video shows what to do (or, to be honest, what not to do) when another player invades your world, before illustrating how to hack someone in return.



As well as being a bit similar to Dark's Souls, there's obviously more than a hint of Assassin's Creed's cat-and-mouse multiplayer modes in there. If you'd rather not have your game hacked (and who can blame you?), you'll be pleased to hear that you can switch the multiplayer off - it's also temporarily disabled during story missions.

Watch Dogs hasn't yet been Ubi-delayed, so it's still on track for its November 22nd release.

Thanks, OXM.

Reinstall invites you to join us in revisiting classics of PC gaming days gone by. This week, we set a course through space for a simpler time, when $4 million was considered a lot of money to spend making a game. Strap in for Wing Commander 3: Heart of the Tiger!

During the 90s, PC gaming caught a disease, and its name was FMV. Fueled by the power to fill CDs with video, and filled with the same starry-eyed dreams of Hollywood that typically end with a naive starlet desperately trying to scour the shame away with a wire brush, the industry set out to not merely make games, but interactive movies!

"Wing Commander 3 holds onto a surprising amount of majesty."

Wing Commander 3 is one of the very, very few examples where it worked. The series had always had a cinematic flair, with a huge cast of characters, animated sequences for everything from taking off from your fleet carrier to being awarded a medal of bravery for surviving ejecting into space. It had a then-insane budget of four million dollars, a cast headed up by Mark “Luke Skywalker” Hamill, an epic branching storyline, and — this definitely helped a little — jaw-dropping space combat.

Even now, with the ropey-effects, chunky FMV, and the realization that said combat really hasn’t aged well, Wing Commander 3 holds onto a surprising amount of majesty. The opening chords in the soundtrack are powerful and bombastic. Our first scene is of the triumph of series baddies the Kilrathi, and not merely over a group of nameless mooks, but Angel, both lead character Col. Blair’s lover, and one of the series’ most prominent pilots from the very start. Everything you see is in service of one single statement: Wing Commander 3 means business.



What makes it interesting now though is how it tells its story. Beat-for-beat, it’s a collection of fairly generic sci-fi clichés connected with space battles. Rarely however has such a cinematic game served up such an intentionally depressing tone. Earth is losing the war. Blair, heroic and dedicated to the fight as he is, is visibly on the edge of exhaustion after a lifetime spent fighting the same endless war, and all-too aware that the most his heroism and sacrifices have achieved is to buy humanity a little more time to ponder its inevitable demise. It’s no coincidence that we first see him staring at the crashed wreckage of the Concordia, the carrier from Wing Commander 2, or that his new assignment is aboard a ship barely held together by rust and tradition.

"You can even be called out for favouritism if you constantly fly with the same wingman."

That bleakness works beautifully, not least by giving the uplifting moments something to contrast with. As hammy as the acting often is (the captain’s enthusiastic declaration of “God, I love that boy’s spunk!” so much so that Origin knowingly made it an official soundcard test noise) there’s a genuine warmth to it, and Blair’s growing relationships with the Victory’s crew, helped by the fact that you get to walk around between missions and think of it as home, are in stark contrast to the way games like X-Wing and Freespace 2 saved their focus for the combat.

Here, both sides of the experience matter. You can be chewed out for being antisocial and not engaging with the crew. You can even be called out for favouritism if you constantly fly with the same wingman. In one memorable moment, you can even let Blair go on a depression-induced bender before being forced into action by an enemy attack. Sadistically, it’s one of the hardest fights in the game even if you’re sober. All of this remains excellent stuff, and far more advanced than most interactive movies.



Actual combat on the other hand really struggles to be exciting. Even in the Wing Commander series’ prime, fans of the X-Wing series would loudly proclaim how much better their space combat was. In our post-Freespace 2 world, it’s exceptionally hard to go back. The enemy AI is terrible, the once system-crushingly amazing graphics are no longer impressive, and only a few details, such as the visible cockpit, in-mission videos, and the fact that your wingmen can die for real, still feel like interesting enough quirks to be worth mentioning.

"The further you get, the harder it is to claw back from defeat."

The best bits are firmly when the plot becomes more interactive, with choices like trying to dogfight a Kilrathi ace or return to your rapidly-fleeing carrier, but those happen all too rarely. Worse, the further you get, the harder it is to claw back from defeat. Early on, you’ll often get a chance, but as of the second half, you’re simply given a ring-side seat to watch the Kilrathi curb-stomp Earth.

Still, Wing Commander 3 could definitely have aged worse, and the fact that you can switch on invulnerability in the options menu without any form of penalty means that you shouldn’t let it put you off. At the very least, it’s a great way to understand just what the hell convinced people that interactive movies were the future—from the cinematic style, to its ambition, to the way it used FMV to create a world instead of to cover a gaping hole where its soul should have been. It was an amazing game for its day, and it’s still a movie worth starring in.

You can get hold of Wing Commander 3 for $2.99 on GOG

Every week, Richard Cobbett rolls the dice to bring you an obscure slice of gaming history, from lost gems to weapons grade atrocities. This week, the Egrons are invading Noveria in wireframe spaceships, and that's all the plot you need... though not all the plot there actually is.

I could never work out why flying too low in space kept damaging my ship. Turns out I was flying over a planet the whole time. In retrospect, I guess I should probably have read the manual.

Okay, so when I SAY it, it looks so obvious...

Starglider came out in 1986, and was one of the first games I remember playing. I was old enough that I shouldn't have been confused by the difference between 'planet' and 'not a planet', but there you go. Once, I watched a whole episode of Captain Planet without realising the TV was off. (It improved the plot considerably, and I'm pretty sure the energy savings spared a whole forest or something.)

It was an impressive game for its time, originally intended to be a Star Wars game (and though it didn't get the license, the similarities are pretty obvious) with fast 3D arcade action, wireframe graphics, and a novella that made a valiant effort to pretend that the lack of solids wasn't because computers at the time had as much 3D processing power as the average wristwatch, but was instead an awesome tactical assistant that any pilot would kill to have access to in the field.

With an effort, Jaysan managed to close the canopy. As he did so, the view through the plastiglas changed in an extraordinary way; the walls of the workshop became transparent - as if they had been suddenly and unaccountably turned to glass. "Good grief," he exclaimed.

The further justification is that the ship you're flying - not a Starglider - was intended as a ground attack unit, and thus being able to see tanks behind buildings and so on represented a key strategic advantage. Clearly, the planet's surface is densely populated, filled with the wiliest of enemies.

You know, maybe we should just let the Egrons have the planet.

...or, y'know, not. The sequel later took all these explanations and decided "Haha, no."

Incidentally, the pilot of the dreaded Starglider One - the ultimate alien attack craft of the invading Egrons - goes by the name "Hermann Kruud". With far too many possible jokes about that to pick just one, let's just leave it alone. We can't however skip the fact that, while it wasn't in the PC version, Starglider was a mid-80s game with its own theme song. Sing along if you know the words...



Well, I didn't say it was a very long theme song. But wouldn't it be great if that had become the pattern that future games had followed, including the developer/publisher tacked onto the end?

Brave heroes, it's time to form your party
Head into danger, in the game, Final Fantasy
Oh, all the wonders that you will see
Until it's ruined by linearity
By Squaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaare!

Ahem.

Ah, beautiful CGA. When all games looked yellow, like moss on rock, or a snowy magenta wasteland.

Starglider was one of those games that I played for hours and hours without ever entirely being sure of the goal. Obviously, you shoot stuff. You shoot a lot of stuff, in a variety of colours and increasingly wacky shapes that range from a red Walker - fair enough, and another reason I probably should have worked out this was not in fact set in space, to snapping pyramid things that look like their attack method is to try and pluck planes out of the sky/spaceships out of the space. King of the enemies is the yellow Starglider One - a constantly cloaking pain in the arse that mocks your lasers to the tenth generation.

Despite its simplicity as a game and a 3D world, Starglider was full of really cool touches for the time. To get missiles for instance you had to fly into silos - silos rotating constantly, in a way that I think warrants a refund on at least one stupid point for the "How could you think this was space?!" thing. You had to line up and zoom in, at which point you flew through a quick tunnel and were given a missile to take into battle. This was really cool. Fire it, and a second screen slides in over the HUD so that you can miss absolutely everything precisely guide it into a tougher enemy. Also interesting, if not actually fun, was having to recharge the ship on the move by precisely flying past energy pylons.

Watch out for the next in its line, Starglider Two: Electric Boogaloo.

As far as a specific mission goes, "Kill that thing!" is probably enough. Starglider wasn't exactly great at explaining what it wanted though, with the highlight being that despite being in a warzone, flying into a silo and asking for a specific mission just produces "There are no missions currently available!" Really? Not even a general "Kill everything!" or "Save the world, genius" to get started with? It's fairly obvious that shooting down Starglider One is the priority, but I never came close to landing the three missile hits I'm told that took. I think at one point I grazed it and was then betrayed by the ground.

There's not really a lot more to the game than this - it was a simple shooter, but one I remember fondly even if I never did get very far in it. That's true of a lot of games of the time though, where manuals only occasionally offered any real help on how to play or what you were meant to be doing, and actually finishing something was a rare treat. Somehow, I doubt the ending would have been worth waiting for in this case - I'm assuming it would have been a text screen saying "Mission Complete" or similar. Still, you never know. A developer that could make the Atari ST literally sing its praises might also be the developer that found a way to get a Hollywood quality outro into 100kb or so. No reason to be cynical.

Here's some footage of the game in action. It looks simple, but remember - 1986. The sequel followed soon after, but probably the most famous part of the Starglider legacy doesn't bear its name at all. The intended Starglider 3 instead went through Nintendo and Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto, where it became the on-rails shooter Starfox (Starwing in the UK). The creators weren't exactly thrilled about that idea originally, but it still made a splash on the console that made "Mode 7" sound cool.

No theme song though. Tssk. So much for progress...