Welcome to the Saturday Roundup, a (bi)weekly roundup of all the important news going on in the gaming world.
If you’re sick of gaming websites' content turning more and more casual, or trying to pass off a single sentence and a link to a cool picture they saw on deviant art as ‘news,’ you've come to the right place. I aim to consolidate and summarize only the stuff that’s most important to gaming enthusiasts. It’s a mix of hard news, interesting features, and other titbits that I feel like you guys would enjoy. Let’s see what’s been going on this week:
 |
| Is patch 1.05 enough to bring players back? |
- Halo 4 has been leaked a full month ahead of it's release. It's currently circulating torrent websites as two 8 gig files. While Microsoft is desperately trying to remove all leaked video content from youtube, it's like trying to stop a flood with a thimble at this stage, and having the entire game leaked so far in advance is sure to put a damper on their sales.
- Diablo III patch 1.05 went live this week. If you've long since put the game down, or haven't yet gotten in to it yet, you might want to check it out. Blizzard have been hard at work to address the numerous complaints fans had with the game. Patch 1.04 was a big step in the right direction, and now patch 1.05 brings us 'monster power' (a way to scale the difficulty of monsters in inferno) and 'the infernal machine' (a way to battle 'uber' versions of bosses for extra loot) as well as a long list of quality-of-life changes. Diablofans have done a nice recap here, and you can view the official patch notes here.
- The first screenshots from the stand-alone version of DayZ have surfaced. If you hadn't already heard, the developers hugely popular zombie-survival ArmA II mod recently announced the development of a stand-alone version.
- Being able to alt-tab whenever I want is a staple of PC gaming. While a lot of games offer a full-screen windowed mode, many others make alt-tabbing a nightmare, often churning to a halt whenever minimized and taking forever to come back when maximised. Steam user hell-strong has made an app that lets you play your games in border less windowed mode. Granted, this may put more of a strain on your system than running a game full-screen, but if your rig can handle it, it's a great little program!
- Sleeping Dogs was a hit, but we haven't heard too much from developers Square Enix since it's release, except for the fact that DLC would come 'eventually'. Well, 'eventually' has been announced as October 30th, when Nightmare in North Point will be released. Nightmare in North Point is a Halloween themed expansion, in which a slain gang member comes back to life with an army of zombies, and it's up to detective Wei Shen to put them back in their graves. Check out my Sleeping Dogs review here!
 |
| Sleeping Dogs |
- Those of you with qualms over EA's business practices might be happy to hear the the gaming giant accidentally gave away thousands of free games due to a bug in their server-side validation of a promotional code. The fact that it was such a novice mistake, and that it took EA 18 hours to hotfix it certainly isn't winning Origin, EA's digital distribution service, any confidence.
- Valve is supposedly hard at work on a number of 'secret' projects, but at least one of them is not so secret anymore. Users on popular gaming forum facepunch have reportedly discovered leaked screenshots and concept art for a game called Stars of Barathrum, an open-world space game. This is still just rumor and speculation at this point, so take this information with a grain of salt.
 |
| Stars of Barathrum concept art reportedly posted by ex-valve employee Peter König |
So that’s the news for this week. Be sure to subscribe to
my twitter for up-to-date news and blog updates, and check back here every Wednesday and Saturday for more content!
Previous gamer news.
No comments:
Post a Comment