PC Features

Lego Star Wars 3: The Clone Wars Preview

The Lego games have traversed time, space, genres and various movie franchises but Lego Star Wars 3 is the first Lego Star Wars game to not be based on the iconic film franchise but rather on the animated series Star Wars: The Clone Wars.  Lego Star Wars 3: The Clone Wars is set in between episodes 3 and 4 of the Star Wars saga but will also feature some sequences set in Episode 2. Lucasart’s is also bringing in the voice actors that portray the characters in the animated series to reprise their roles. The 22 levels in the game will cover the first two seasons of the animated series.

Interview with Michal Marcinkowski – Part 1

I recently had the chance to ask Michal Marcinkowski, the
creator of Soldat and currently the developer of Link-Dead a few questions over
the web. This was quite an honour for me, as Soldat is one of my favourite
games of all time, and I am fervently awaiting the full release of Link-Dead.  Link-Dead is a 2D side-scrolling team multiplayer tactical shooter set in a post-nuclear War setting.

Under the Radar: Games You Might Have Missed

I am a known supporter of smaller indie games and developers. Now, lately, a lot of games have hit it big on the market (comparatively at least), such as Super Meat Boy, Amnesia: The Dark Descent, and the big one: Minecraft.  Despite all of these “blockbuster indie” titles, there are still plenty of great smaller, lesser-known titles that you probably have never even heard of, each of which deserving every bit as much praise as the former games. I’m going to recommend a handful of fun, quirky, and cheap titles that will help you fill that time between the blockbuster titles you get every major season.

Total War Retrospective

The
Creative Assembly was founded in 1987 and was known for many years
among gamers for its sports games. But in 1999 it began work on a new
kind of game that would mix genres in an experimental way and allow
gamers to explore an exciting historical setting. This game became Shogun: Total War. In the decade since then, The Creative Assembly has received numerous accolades for the Total War series and with the release of Total War: Shogun 2 this week, it seems suitable that we take a look back at the franchise’s humble origins.

Shogun: Total War was first announced in 1999 and then released in June the following year. It combined real-time
tactics and turn-based grand strategy to give gamers a unique breed of
strategy gaming that they hadn’t encountered before. The game was set
during the Sengoku period of Japanese history and received a strong
positive response. The game was also successful enough to warrant the
development of an expansion pack by the name of “The Mongol Invasion,”
and both this expansion and the original game were published by
Electronic Arts.

Interview with Michal Marcinkowski – Part 2

I recently had the chance to ask Michal Marcinkowski, the
creator of Soldat and currently the developer of Link-Dead a few questions over
the web. This was quite an honour for me, as Soldat is one of my favourite
games of all time, and I fervently awaiting the full release of Link-Dead.

Battlefield 3 Preview

DICE is going back to basics. After the more console-centric titles Bad Company and its sequel, Bad Company 2, the Battlefield franchise is returning to what once made it so great: PC. Battlefield 3 is set to be released at the end of 2011, and is a direct sequel to the grand strategy of Battlefield 2, with its more wide-ranging maps, equipment and command systems. Whereas Bad Company 2 was designed to counter the massive tide that was Call of Duty, absorbing many of its innovations to appeal to smaller-sized battles, Battlefield 3 brings back humongous environments where fighter jets are possible, as well as 64 players to a map. The environmental effects of Bad Company will be integrated for what could be an amazing experience.

Console Exclusives We Want on PC: Brutal Legend

The powerful gaming rigs that we call our PCs can run games on far superior graphical settings than consoles. They support massive online worlds of every shape and size ranging from Planetside to World of Warcraft. They can run classic games from bygone eras thanks to emulators, but alas, no such emulator exists for modern consoles. This means that PC gamers are still left out when it comes to the odd game here or there.

Can’t Wait for Homefront? Try These Games

Designer Affinity: Markus Persson

It can’t be argued that one of the biggest things going on around the gaming world and the internet in general these days is Minecraft.
It’s a game that began as a side project by a Swedish Java developer,
but now has taken over the lives of almost 1.5 million gamers through
almost entirely word-of-mouth advertising. Minecraft has been
praised for the freedom it gives players and how it inspired hundreds of
YouTube videos showcasing the constructions of players around the
world. It’s definitely worth looking at the man behind this incredible
game.

Markus
‘Notch’ Persson began programming when he was 7 years old. He produced
his first text adventure game when he was 8 years old using his father’s
Commodore 128. Much later he worked professionally as a game developer
for King.com, developing web games using Flash. During this time, he
founded an MMORPG called Wurm Online with another designer by the name of Rolf Janneson.

Dead Island Preview

The internet has been abuzz with talk of the trailer for Dead Island, which showed up a month ago.  While that was a spectacular piece of filmmaking, it didn’t actually show any footage of the game.  Since then a few screenshots and snips of concept art have slowly rolled out.  This week a new batch appeared which will give us a better idea of just what we’ll be doing on this island of death.