Well now, here is something. If you go through every article we’ve ever written about EA’s Origin service (because what else do you have to do on a beautiful, possibility-packed, er, Tuesday), you’ll find that we’ve basically just written a series of pleas. “Come on, EA. Just do something – anything – worthwhile, interesting, or different with your proprietary ball-and-chain,” our posts may as well read. But now, finally, they kinda have>. I guess. If you decide you’re not a fan of your purchase within 24 hours, you can simply toss it back into the sea of weird flame wheel logo things from whence it was birthed.

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In the least surprising news of the year, it looks like The Divi sorry: definitely in some way involved Tom Clancy’s> The Division will be making the jump to PC when it’s released towards the end of next year. Back in June, Ubisoft were asking players to sign a petition to bring the title our way, Jim rather rightly implying that it would have no effect and the decision had already been made. Now in a video from Massive’s Fredrik Rundqvist, Executive Producer on the game, the almost inevitable has been theatrically announced. See below.

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Shadowrun returned! Some doubted. Some declared it too good to be true. Some believed The Prophecy was only a nice story parents told their children to get them from posting 10,000-word rant novels on Reddit. But hark, Harebrained Schemes breathed new life into the series’ patented blend of fairy dust and cyber sparks, and Shadowrun Returns was born. And lo didest Jim end up liking it pretty well. It’s not the ’90s anymore, though. You can’t legally call something a videogame unless you can promise at least 157 pieces of DLC to accompany it. Shadowrun, the retro rebel maverick that it is, is opting for a mere one> at this point, but it’s apparently going to be much, much bigger than initially planned. As in, expansion-sized. The only problem? It won’t emerge from Harebrained’s time machine laboratory until 2014.

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And then some of you can put them away, again. It’s funny, given everything we’ve seen of Carbine’s handsome MMO Wildstar, which includes ten thousand videos and that one time I had a dream about playing it, everyone has been tempering their excitement with because Carbine wouldn’t say how they’ll be charging for it. This is what PC gaming is, now: even “free” comes at a cost, so these questions have to be answered. It turns out the reason Carbine had been keeping silent was because they were knocking together an interactive infographic to explain a system that uses a subscription or in-game money to pay for access. (more…)

HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOORAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY.

Ahem. Sorry. Let me briefly activate my brain’s cyborganic professionalism implant. Bleep bloop. OK then. So the news that Microsoft’s much-reviled game service/malignancy Games For Windows Live is well and truly finished isn’t actually all that surprising. It’s much appreciated – don’t get me wrong – but the writing was already on the wall, given that Games For Windows Marketplace’s days are already very, very numbered. Unfortunately, GFWL’s impending date with the young but exceedingly prolific Server Reaper presents a few game-unfriendly complications.

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If someone is keeping a Big List Of Inevitable Things somewhere, they can cross out ‘modders remaking Morrowind in the Skyrim engine’. For it is no longer inevitable, but is in fact, er, evitable? No, that’s not right. Though I guess you could avoid it, but that would make the modders of Skywind very sad indeed, because all their hard work in rebuilding Morrowind is worth looking at. Even if you just coo over the videos below, because cooing over the scenery is pretty much all that’s possible right now. (more…)

It’d be a relief to spend a few days of gaming in the company of dapper sixties agents rather than gruff space marines. Sadly, the heroes of The Bureau, dress code aside, are space marines. They shoot monsters, then roll between carefully placed cover and magically summon turrets. There are tactics to be found, but are they in sufficient quantity to make the rest of the experience worthwhile? Here’s wot I think.>

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You can’t survive 15 years in the writing-about-games business without understanding the importance of magnanimity. Just because Jim & Co. have, thus far, failed to implement any> of my Sir, You Are Being Hunted improvement suggestions doesn’t mean I’m sulkily cold-shouldering their Hammer-House-of-Hannay creeping-around-on-the-moors game. Just because Sir’s player-protagonist still isn’t a) A downed Luftwaffe pilot endeavouring to retrieve and destroy parts of a top-secret radar jammer, b) King Charles II fleeing to France across a Britain crawling with ruthless Robo-Roundheads, or c) A hedgepig the like of which Wiltshire has never seen the like of which, didn’t stop me spending the weekend with the latest alpha. (more…)

Steam Greenlight’s still a contentious way to do business. The $100 cost of entry, the required cheer-leading, it’s a lot of effort for no guarantee. And while I get the idea of having an established community is important, I’m glad I’m not an indie developer attempting to shout above the noise on there. GOG.com’s new indie submission portal seems to have taken in a lot of the criticisms of Steam’s hand-off approach and applied those lessons to their new venture: they’re looking for indie developers to submit games to their indie portal, with the company promising to “We’re not machines. We talk.” Ouch! (more…)

I have fond memories of Sanitarium, some of which may not be entirely deserved. The game came into my hands at a time when I associated point and click adventures with humour, so my troubled teenage mind was delighted to find such a game starring a man on a journey through his own fractured mind. He had bloody bandages wrapped around his face, screams were cut short as shadows ensnared one another and a man stood in a corner, thwocking his forehead against a wall and leaving a red bruise on the rusted metal. Happy times! It was the journey through different worlds – including twisted fantasy tropes and a sinisterly depleted rural town – that kept my interest. Shades of Sanity, a spiritual successor is seeking $200,000 of Kickstarter money.

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