[Update: This issue is perhaps less imminent that I’d thought – Frontier dropped us a line to stress that it may be a fair bit longer than six months, though Braben did say “the change will need to come at some point” so it seems this will happen eventually.]

Like in real life, obsolescence in PC gaming is usually a slow process. An achy knee after running becomes an achy knee after hiking then all too soon you’re waking up achy, and your framerates dip lower and lower starting to stutter before you realise you simply can’t play shiny new games. But sometimes there are hard cut-offs, and two are coming soon to Elite Dangerous [official site]. Developers Frontier today announced that they plan to stop supporting 32-bit systems and DirectX 10 graphics hardware. They say it’ll help them make the game look prettier and run better.

… [visit site to read more]

Pro Evolution Soccer 2017 [official site] is a fantastic football game, quite possibly one of the best ever. On the pitch, it plays spectacularly well, with both individual players and teams expressing themselves as recognisable entities, and Master League is a superb singleplayer mode, making player development entertaining and simple to grasp.

Take it online, though, and things start to fall apart. And the PC port is an ugly downgrade in comparison to the current-gen console versions.

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To some extent, “early access game” is increasingly a school of design as well as a state of development. Let’s play bingo:

CraftingLootingPermadeathFree-roamingProc-gen“story to be added later”

And there you’ve got yourself the recipe for a potential Steam hit, as Everspace [official site] has been.

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New satanskulls are now roaming the darkness of Devil Daggers [official site], thanks to a new update launched today. Along with new enemies, the ‘V3′ update has added a top-down viewing mode for replays, which makes the FPS’s arena shoot ’em up stylings even clearer. It’s both cool to look at and helpful, as finally I can learn about the horrors I only ever hear behind me. Also new: a Linux version.

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Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.>

Some days you just want to watch the world burn. Sometimes you want to spin the world of its axis and watch as its mass is consumed by the sun, which has just suddenly expanded to ten times its original size. Some days you just need to play Universe Sandbox.

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RuneScape [official site] players will soon be able to buy the possessions of banned players by bidding on them in Storage Wars>-style blind auctions. Players will bid on a banned character’s possessions as a job lot, a sealed box containing… who knows what? It could be treasure or trash. Maybe Bank Bidders will be be a raffle rather than a police auction; they’re not sure yet. Point is, this is the strangest bit of virtual justice I’ve heard of since, er, well, Cobbo’s article on MMO prisons earlier today.

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Digital Homicide are known for two things: releasing a great many janky, junky games; and being fiercely, litigiously protective of those games. The small studio were best known for suing games critic Jim Sterling over his videos tearing into their games, but they’ve probably one-upped that. After Digital Homicide launched a lawsuit against 100 Steam users, Valve have pulled all the studio’s games from the Steam store.

Digital Homicide allege these users were involved in stalking, harassing, and even impersonating them. Valve say they have “stopped doing business with Digital Homicide for being hostile to Steam customers.”

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Backstage areas have always fascinated me. Behind the scenes in theatres, where all the glitz and glamour dies instantly the moment you step where the public isn’t meant to see – down lethal staircases and in filthy preparation rooms. The tunnels in places like Walt Disney World, where cast members travel to avoid ruining the magic, and tough security guards probably not wearing mouse ears emerge to haul off trouble-makers. And in games, especially online ones, there’s often parts that we’re just not meant to see, from developer tricks to places for the GM team to hang out.

Quite often, these include prisons. For the really naughty players to go.

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Batman – The Telltale Series, Episode Two: Children of Arkham [official site]. For me this game’s biggest problem is that the name hardly trips off the tongue. BTTSETCOA? Betsy Cola? Pepsi Cola? Anyway, Pepsi Cola arrives tomorrow and thus we have a trailer. It’s so Batman. So. Batman. I mean, there is corruption and Gotham and the DeadWaynes and hench dudes with guns and voice modulators monologuing to a literally captive audience.

“Brothers and sisters of Gotham, something something something”.

… [visit site to read more]

There’s this idea that every in-game name chosen in youthful exuberance is an embarrassment you’ll eventually want to be rid of. I actually still like and use the one I picked back then, although I occasionally switch it up nowadays because “Notorious P.I.P.” is too good a pun to pass up. BUT if you picked a horror of a name as your Battletag, Blizzard are now offering paid-for name changes.

… [visit site to read more]