League of Legends – PC Gamer UK’s free game of the year
Do you remember the tail end of 2010? We all wore rags and lived in dirt-floored shacks, dinosaurs ruled the Earth, and ‘free to play’ was still a dirty set of words. 2011 saw those words climb into the word shower and wash themselves clean, courtesy of League of Legends.
The Old Republic beginner’s guide
The launch of an MMO is a confusing time. The world is fresh and new, and everyone is still learning how to play it. Which is why, now that The Old Republic has launched, we’ve put together a list of our top 50 tips, learned from hours of beta play to help you get to grips with the new game. For MMO newcomers and veterans alike, we’ve created a definitive guide to classes, companions, conversations, crafting and every other aspect of the game.
Check inside for the full list of our fifty things you need to know about The Old Republic.
MLG Providence in review: the story of Leenock
Somewhere in a wastepaper bin inside Disney’s headquarters, there’s a discarded script. It tells the story of a sixteen year old kid who flew far away from his homeland to compete against the world’s best. This kid – just out of childhood and cast with gratuitously youthful chubby cheeks – is pitted against fully grown adults twice his height and nearly double his age. He makes it through open pool play: a fiercely competitive vipers’ nest full of hopefuls he’s never seen play. He steps out into the searing heat of the tournament spotlight, and wins his first few games. Then the kid falters, dropping down to the losers’ brackets of the competition. He’s jetlagged, he’s inexperienced. It seems his moment in the sun is over. But then the crowd take him to their collective heart, and begin cheering his name. The kid lifts his chin up.
He wins his next game, and his next, and his next, until he’s won thirty eight bouts of his chosen sport across a handful of days. He’s at the final. He’s sixteen years old, at the final of one of his sport’s biggest events, placed against a Scandinavian star whose robotically perfect performance so far would be the story of the tournament. Would be the story of the tournament, were it not for the kid. The kid’s played thirty eight games already. If he wins game thirty nine, he’s won the entire tournament and joined an elite number of the planet’s best.
He wins.
Watch the world’s best pro-gamers at MLG Providence live this weekend
A portion of PC Gamer has just got back from Bristol’s very first Barcraft event, to watch the Providence Major League Gaming finals. Many drinks were drunk and much StarCraft II was watched, making it a turbo-excellent night. It’s getting close to kicking out time here in the UK, but fans of tip-top level pro-gaming, don’t panic: the MLG Providence finals are still ongoing, closing up tomorrow. If you want to watch them – and you really should, as they’ve been brilliant so far – get over to their website and catch the live stream. There’s some incredible games still to go, and the whole event to play for.
We’ve also got two high-quality MLG Providence passes to give away to the first two people who comment with the name of a previous MLG StarCraft II winner below. Be quick about it, mind.
Why Blizzard invited the world’s best StarCraft: Brood War players to Blizzcon 2011
Jaedong, Fantasy, Bisu, and Jangbi are some of the world’s premier StarCraft: Brood War players. This year, these four StarCrafting superstars were invited to Blizzcon.
But why were they there? Sites like Teamliquid swirled with rumours prior to the event: they were there to perform show matches, playing 1998′s Brood War on the big screen to foreign fans. They were there to test out the next StarCraft II expansion, Heart of the Swarm. They were there to mark their transition from professional Brood War – still the majority esports share in Korean viewing schedules – to StarCraft II. But Blizzcon came and went, and the four players were absent from headlines outside of citizen-papparazzi snaps and videos. Why were they there, flown out to Anaheim from their Korean home? The answer is simpler than you might expect. Read on to find out why.
StarCraft 2 tournaments will move over to Heart of the Swarm “when the community decides”.
Just when you think you’ve finally got your head around defending a 1/1/1 push and locked down your warp prism/immortal micro, Blizzard are adding a set of new units to StarCraft II’s multiplayer armies. But what happens to SC2 tournaments like MLG and the GSL who’ve built their empires around Wings of Liberty’s multiplayer? Will they be forced to move over to Heart of the Swarm half way through their season?
World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria’s Pandarens are playable. Also, they’re pandas.
Don’t know about you, but spending my time sat on a hillside in central China, eating bamboo and getting hugged by volunteers sounds like a nice life. Unfortunately, we can’t all be pandas. But wait! Thanks to World of Warcraft’s next expansion Mists of Pandaria, we can all be Pandarans.
Jonah Lomu Rugby Challenge released in UK and US on October 21 to satisfy your desire to chase eggs
Rugby’s first global superstar is more than a bit under the weather, sadly suffering from kidney failure at the moment. The game that bears his name has also taken a knock: the PC version of Jonah Lomu Rugby Challenge will now be released on October 21st.
The game is one of the very few PC gaming options left to people who want to pretend to run very fast into another man while carrying a weird shaped ball, and initial previews have been promising in comparison to lacklustre showings from other developers. It’s already been out in the southern hemisphere for a while, but the slip likely won’t make UK PC rugby-ites too angry anyway, as they’re all too tired from getting up at 4am to watch the ongoing World Cup.
Watch the world’s best StarCraft II players at Major League Gaming Raleigh live now
Hey you, internetter! If you’re reading this on Sunday evening, you’re just in time to catch the planet’s best professional StarCraft II players at Major League Gaming’s Raleigh finals. If that sounds interesting – and it sure does to me – then have a look at the stream above. Some quick background of who’s left and who’s playing who below the cut: people who’ve got family over for the weekend who inexplicably don’t play games and are instead waiting for the VODs and killing people who spoil the winner for them (hello!), might want to avoid looking below.
Diablo 3 beta footage arrives to prime your clicking finger
If you’ve not decided to bite your own mouse hand off and smear the bloody stump down a window in protest over Blizzard’s decision to allow players to buy and sell items for real money, you might be pleased to see this seven minute video, cropped from playthroughs of the beta.
Squint, and you’ll spot all five classes bouncing around. As we mentioned yesterday, it all looks very nice, crisp, and PC-ey. Their attacks look to have the kind of kinetic power that made Tom use words like “zip”, “shred”, and “extendo-punching” all in the same sentence, and the enemies burst with exactly the right amount of discharged goop. Mmm, satisfying.
Editorial: Sorry Kotaku, but you’re wrong about pro-gaming
I love e-sports. I mean, I really, really love e-sports. I love e-sports so much that when IMNestea played the then-named BoxeR in the Global StarCraft II League’s season 2 final, I woke my girlfriend up at some unearthly hour in the morning and crowed at her about marine splitting until she had to physically leave the room. I’ve organised parties based solely around the activity of watching other people play games, many thousands of miles away. I say it here, on this wide internet, and I don’t care who knows – I love e-sports.
But I didn’t always love e-sports. If I went back in time to exactly one year ago, found myself, and said “YOU WILL LOVE E-SPORTS IN A YEAR’S TIME!”, year-younger me would’ve scoffed in my face. I’ve been aware of e-sports for as long as I’ve been a PC gamer: I lived through the false dawns of the early 21st Century, the Sujoy Roys and the Jonathan Wendels coming so close to pushing the activity of pro-gaming into the spotlight, then falling short at some intangible hurdle. Time and again I was promised the rise of Quake, or Counter-Strike, or some other competitive game in the televised market; time and time again they failed to ignite among the wider gaming community.
I could well have reacted like Kotaku’s Jen Schiller did, when she repurposed an interview between Team Dignitas‘ David ‘Zaccubus‘ Treacy, and top-end PC hardware types Alienware. Her post treats e-sports as weird and unnatural: a vestigial limb on the wider gaming animal that we’d all do better to hide under a coat. She makes her feelings about pro-gaming clear:
“Don’t get me wrong, I love watching people who are better than me at video games play them for money, especially when I don’t know those people.
Oh wait. No I don’t.”
Jen penned another response, after seeing the reaction her original post dredged up from the e-sports community. Jen defends herself by claiming ignorance of the scene. A year ago, I could’ve claimed the same.
E3 2011: Mass Effect 3 live-action trailer starts the battle for Earth
In 1938, CBS Radio aired a radio adaptation of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds. Among the gullible, there was panic: the broadcast had sounded so realistic that people genuinely believed an alien invasion was in process. Those idiots.
But wait! Here’s a transmission we just received from E3 that says there IS a real-life alien invasion happening, and we ARE all going to die! And it’s happening worldwide! The French are calling it an ‘attaque globale’! I don’t speak French, but I think that means a global attack! There’s a race of sentient spaceships come back to kill us all! Why did no-one tell us about this before!
Oh no wait, it’s just a mad live-action teaser trailer for Mass Effect 3. Phew, eh?
E3 2011: Hitman: Absolution video interview discusses choice and freedom
Christian Elverdam is Hitman: Absolution’s gameplay director, and that’s his face hovering just above these words. Our combined E3 force caught up with Christian in LA, and pinned him to the wall with the full force of our questioning. In response, he talked about the varied approaches players can take in Absolution. Blood Money fans (of whom our own Tom Francis leads the charge) will be pleased to hear that the videos and demos they’ve shown so far aren’t pointing toward a linear, prescribed route through the game. Instead, Christian points out that 47 will have a range of options at his disposal to complete his grisly duty.
Dead Island co-op screenshots show electric machetes
Personally, I wouldn’t have booked a flight to a place called ‘Dead Island‘ in the first place. At the very least, I wouldn’t be surprised when a swarm of zombies turned up when I tried to check in at the hotel.
I jest, of course. The dead island of Dead Island’s open-world world is the fictional Banoi, and I totally would’ve booked a holiday to a place called Dead Island. Imagine how cool it’d sound at work? “How was your time on DEAD ISLAND, Rich?” “Pretty good: I had to work together with three friends to hold off a horde of shambling corpses, and we jury-rigged weapons out of machinery and tools left around the Palms Resort.” “Oh, cool! Can I see your photos?” “Sure, they’re IN THIS VERY POST.”
E3 2011: Payday: The Heist trailer and in-game video shows co-operative bank robbery
Payday: The Heist came out of nowhere to shock Tim yesterday, forcing him down onto the ground with its co-operative bank robbing action, and raiding his figurative vault of interest. Today, we get to see a set of videos: the trailer, above, and an in-game video below the cut.
Answer: like Left 4 Dead, but with much more swearing and much more cop murder. A heady blend. Click through to see the game in action on the PC.
