Blizzard’s upcoming Heroes of the Storm [official site] is, in my humble opinion, a belter of a game. Such praise is small beer to the Californian mega-developer, however, which with HotS and the upcoming Overwatch intends to reclaim a leading role in the eSports industry it helped to create. HotS is still in beta but the long road began this weekend with Heroes of the Dorm, a college-focused competition that culminated in a grand final broadcast live on ESPN the latter being not only something of a coup, but also an eSports first. The event laid bare Blizzard’s intentions for HotS and, despite some community grumbling, what looks awfully like a new take on how best to present competitive gaming.

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Almost the first thing I did when our family bought a PC was to break it. I can’t remember quite what I did, but I was probably attempting to customise something to be more to my liking or to speed something up, and as a result I mangled the Windows 3.1 installation on the very day that this 25MHz 486 SX arrived. The next thing I did was to fix it. Pre-internet, this meant hours of research, and still more hours of trial and error to establish what I’d done and how to undo it. I edited .bat files, I backed things up, I retrieved missing files from compressed directories, I tried and tried and I won. Oh, the perseverance of youth. … [visit site to read more]

Oh hey, remember how I was telling you about Circa Infinity [official site] last week? That demo of the first few levels is out now so in the interests of Following Up and Being Thoughtful and whatnot, I’m letting you know.

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Star Wars versions are a serious concern to fanatics. Really> you should watch the LaserDisc versions of the original trilogy, so I hear. The same goes for versions with certain Star Wars games. It was nice that GOG dug up X-Wing and TIE Fighter, and nicer that they included the original floppy disc versions as well as their 1998 revisions, but what about the CD-ROM versions from 1994 and 1995? According to Those Who Know, those are the best versions of the two space sims.

GOG have rummaged around again, and dug them up yesterday. If you own X-Wing or TIE on GOG, you’ll now find you have their Collector’s Edition versions too. May April 29th be with you.

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Endless Legend’s [official site] Guardian’s DLC is a giant expansion in that it’s an expansion that adds giants, although that’s not to say there isn’t a large bundle of new things to play with. The first major expansion to our Game of 2014 adds new global events, cooperative and competitive quests, legendary deeds and buildings, unique structures, and the titular Guardians. That’s one of the blighters in the image at the top of the post, Skoros the Dust Guardian. He can fully heal allied armies and control enemy minds. Handy chap to have around in a pinch.

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Hi folks!

I’m Scott and I help moderate the RPS community forum. There’s some great discussions going on over there but what I’m really interested in is what the members of the community do together – whether that’s in games or out of them. Every month I’m going to provide a summary of what RPSers have been up to and how you can get involved. This month: Cities: Skylines [official site] succession games; our Guild Wars 2 [official site] guild get more involved in PvP; the PlanetSide 2 [official site] outfits do battle in a server smash; and how to join the capers of our Grand Theft Auto 5 [official site] crew.

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Pip: Adam and Graham, do the football simulators include curve ball physics? I was trying to get to sleep last night and I started wondering if curve ball physics were seen as weird or unfair or OP if they transitioned to games on account of being less predictable than straight shots.

Graham: You can add after touch to shots to curl them in PES or FIFA, but it requires careful aiming on the part of players and is usually limited by the skill of the real life footballer you’re controlling at that moment. The camera angle, because it’s side-on like a television camera, also stops it from being an easy bend-away-from-goalkeeper cheat.

Adam: Going way back, it was the best way to score in Sensible Soccer.

Pip: But people don’t kick off if you use it? What I mean is if curling a ball happens in real life you have to suck it up – okay you might complain but it’s something that physically just happened and you can’t argue that it’s a broken system – but in a game I was wondering if that held or whether it was treated differently.

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I lost interest in Team Fortress 2 [official site] around the time that I became good enough to regularly top public servers but had neither the skill nor the interest to jump to organised competition. A little matchmaking, pitting me against other pubstar-tier fraggers, would’ve been wonderful. So huzzah! After many, many years, Valve are finally planning proper matchmaking.

Details are a little thin for now, based on memories of conversations that TF2 community folk had during a recent visit to Valve, but one thing’s clear: competitive matchmaking is coming.

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Star Wars: Rebel Assault is the series that made a younger me realise fancy technology doesn’t make a game fun or good. It looked like a movie! It had fancy pre-rendered 3D graphics! You sometimes controlled an actual real actor how could that even be! And it was a boring and janky rail shooter and yes I will fight you COME ON THEN.

You don’t need me to stomp all over nostalgia, mind. The two Rebel Assault games are now on GOG in a $9.99 ( 6.50-ish) bundle, so you can see for yourself.

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Let’s play a guessing game: what sort of mods will we see for Total War: Attila [official site] now its official mod tools are out? Game of Thrones>, that seems an obvious world to bosh into a medieval strategy game. Probably Warhammer Fantasy, I’d imagine, even though Total War: Total Warhammer – War Tote is now official. All sorts of rebalancing and tweaking and prettifying and historical doodads too, I’m sure.

Total War devs The Creative Assembly released Attila’s Assembly Kit yesterday, which can make all sorts of mods and comes with Steam Workshop support.

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