However there was another debate on Twitter that stemmed from my, slightly strong worded, response to Rockstar’s announcement of “No current plans to bring Red Dead Redemption to the PC platform.” There was a glimmer of hope with “If that should change, we will let you know.” but for me that wasn’t good enough. I followed that tweet with a comment that perhaps one day developers will regret not supporting my beloved PC as a gaming platform as well as they could. This comment crossed one of my followers feed and they responded by saying that PC games were dying. Throw in a comment about PCs becoming “retro” and my response about how the new army of developers aren’t getting into PC gaming now and we have the basis for a ranty blog post.

Of course I wouldn’t launch into this without proper market research, by which I mean talking to some gamers from that other place some of my stuff gets posted, MOREtotheGAME [Hey, that's us! - Tom]. With such subtle responses as requests to stab persons who suggest PC gaming is dead in the face, and offers to aid in the death of my tweeting opponent almost all support seemed to be in the corner of the PC.

I didn’t choose a channel of gamers for no reason. I know all these people play PC games, but I also know they have consoles, of varying types. They are “respected” (ish) games journalists of the amateur variety and they have their collective fingers on the pulse of today’s gaming culture so they seemed well placed to comment. Their unanimous belief that PC gaming is indeed not dead or dying seemed heartening to me. So why is it that developers consistently treat us PC gamers as second class citizens?

As I write this the on-line Steam users sits at over 1.25 million users. The peak over that last few days sits at almost 2.5 million, with the average sitting somewhere around 1.5 – 2 million. Confronted with those figures, to say there is no market in PC games seems somewhat naive, especially as Steam is just one service in a market of many, and of course the people who don’t use any online service at all.

If the market is there, why don’t people buy the games? That would be because they don’t have the games to buy. Gone are the days when I could walk into a shop and have, laid before me, a multitude of great games. This is no longer the golden age when Bullfrog was pouring out some great titles, no more do Lionhead offer us all we could want. EA, Activision, all seem to be stepping back, as, indeed, is Rockstar.

Is it because I’m looking in brick and mortar stores? Do Amazon or Play or the rest offer a better selection? Well possibly. Digital distribution has also been flying, and the uptake for places like Steam has been brilliant with thousands more users each day. Valve saw a market and seized it, they are leading the way with real support for their loyal fans on PC (and mac), even, some may say, at the expense of neglecting consoles.

Places like GAME and GameStation have been cutting back their PC sections rapidly over the belief the titles don’t sell as well as console games. One of the GAME stores in Nottingham went from a whole floor dedicated mainly to PC games to just four shelves in a matter of weeks. The same is true of the GameStation, but they cut down to two shelves. How, exactly, do they expect to sell the titles if they don’t stock them?

PC gaming is not dead because the gamers aren’t there. I would even argue that it isn’t dead at all, and indeed isn’t even in a state of dying. Retailers don’t think they can sell hard copies so they are moving on-line. Some big companies don’t think they should bother supporting the platform, be it with something like a dedicated server system (hi there MW2), or just not releasing the titles (yes I still want Red Dead Redemption), so the indies are stepping up.

Microsoft didn’t really help the cause at their press conference yesterday. Talking up all the XBox 360 exclusivity deals they’ve signed, pushing only big, blockbuster, titles. The company that made their name on home PCs, the company with the true ability to push gaming on the PC, the company that pushes indie developers with some truly great events, turns their back on the gamers and the devs for E3. Not a great sign. Or are they just scared they’ve lost out to Apple and Mac computers now they have Steam?

So where have I actually gone with this? Hopefully I’ve proven that PC gaming isn’t dead, or dying, or anything other than alive, well, and just evolving. And to any game developers out there who stumble across this page, I ask only one thing.

Keep supporting the PC, the gamers are here, we just want the games.

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This content is reposted from the Random Blog of Random Blogginess. The original post can be found here. It is used, with permission, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

Just under 2 months to go now until MCM, which this time is to last a whole 3 days instead of the usual weekend (attendance at Friday only open to weekend early entry ticket holders only, no general entrance tickets for Friday will be available). As ever MOREtotheGAME plan to be there to find out what holiday season 2010 holds for gaming. It’s early days at the moment but some of the titles that have already confirmed attendance at the expo include:

• Dead Space 2
• Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood
• Super Scribblenauts
• Marvel Vs Capcom 3

and a few others. There are more to be announced shortly (personally I hope Rock Band 3 will be there, but that’s probably wishful thinking). If you want to follow the list games to appear at the expo just check here (http://www.londonexpo.com/show/gamesexpo) every now and again, or for the more lazy of you I’m sure we’ll post here if we find anything new we are particularly interested in.

Now a bit of an update about the last MCM we attended, we did have some content ready for publishing (and I think we did get 1 or 2 articles out), but this was also around the time our previous hosting was failing and giving us incredibly intermittent uptime. But as we have now finally given up on *anonymous host here* and moved to a much more reliable hosting company we are now ready to provide you with our best MCM coverage yet ^.^ But then again why just hear it from us? Go book a ticket now and enjoy the experience for yourself first hand, and if you want to meet up with us you can contact us in the usual way. If you are going and want to brag about it then pop along to our forums and make a discussion thread, or why not vote in our poll on the sidebar (Somewhere over there I think >>)

That’s about it for now, but as I said I’m sure either myself or other writers/admins for the site may be posting the odd update post when we learn more about what is to be expected of this expo.

Farmville

Don’t get me wrong, I dislike a vast majority of the casual, social games. There is a lot them that are just bad. They may spam your wall, rip off other, much better, games, have malicious intent with your data, whatever, but there are some gems out there, and people seem to forget one thing. Facebook as a gaming platform is in its infancy.

Take a look at another example that is the iPhone/iTouch/iPad. Now I’m no big fan of these things, they aren’t, for me, “games consoles”, but they are gaming platforms, that is platforms on which games can be played. The iPhone came out in 2007 and is still very much in the infancy as a gaming platform, although it is growing fast. Yet, for some reason, people find games that they love on it. For every truly great game on the App Store there are 20/30 ones that are absolutely terrible.

Maybe the figure on Facebook is skewed more in the direction of truly horrible titles, it is far younger than the App Store and when that was young the rubbish was piled so high you couldn’t move. But as with the iTouch/Phone/Pad Facebook has something special. A really big user base willing to try anything.

When that happens you get games going viral, and when a game goes viral, hello there FarmVille, it really does go viral. This may not be a great thing for those of us who don’t like our walls filled with news of a brand new cow someone found, but people really do seem to enjoy it.

One thing that confuses me is the people who claim the FamX or XWars are repetitive, dull, and boring. Whilst it’s true that these games do have those elements how many times have you repeatedly shot that one guy in the face? And how many of you WoW players, who feel your game is far superior to the likes of FarmVille, have gone “grinding”? Oh, and don’t get me started on RuneScape.

Sure Facebook isn’t the perfect platform. All these clones that hit get annoying, but hey, all genres, all platforms, have had, and indeed do have, that problem. There are rubbish games, but every platform has that. Maybe those annoying people who constantly spam your feed with stuff get really, really annoying, but what about those squeaky voiced American teens on XBox Live?

It’s not perfect, I know it, and you know it. But it’s a platform, and it has a future whether you like it or not. These games can do well. Those early First Person Shooters you love didn’t start out like Perfect Dark, the first MMORPGs weren’t World of Warcraft. Elite was great and groundbreaking and I love it, but that’s not what travelling through space is like in a game now. Heck, go back and play the first Flight Simulator and tell me it stands up to FSX now.

Sorting the wheat from the chaff happens in the infancy of all platforms and genres. Social gaming has taken off, and it will keep going. I have every faith that not too far away is a great game that will prove wrong all the naysayers. They may not be your Modern Warfare Fortress Episode 3s, they certainly aren’t art yet, but they will get there.

Eventually.

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This content is reposted from the Random Blog of Random Blogginess. The original post can be found here. It is used, with permission, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

Get into dahou.se!

Multiplayer gaming naturally leads to communities and groups forming around certain games, whether they be clans, competitive teams, or just good friends. And I, of course, am not immune to this phenomenon.

A good friend of mine, Lasse Havelund and I have long been partners-in-tech on the interwebs, playing games together, running a dedicated server just for the hell of it, fooling around with Linux, and so on. Lasse, not so long ago, discovered a little game from a little-known game developer called Valve (Some of that sentence may have been a lie). This game was called Left4Dead.

Left 4 Dead is a 4-player co-op game, which relies heavily on communication and teamwork to work effectively, and as such, Lasse made some friends. They played together all the time, and even more when Left 4 Dead 2 made an appearance. A Mumble server was created to help them chat more, in and out of game.

Then I joined the party, and found myself in the middle of what was turning out to be a fairly awesome group of people. There were only a few of us, just enough to play a Versus match every couple of days, if not every day. This went on for a little while..and then things got interesting.

Lasse and I, sick of our current hosting provider, moved to a new provider, and as part of the move, decided we needed a new domain name. After much debating about what would make a humorous name, we chose dahou.se, a tribute to Baman Piderman. We had created a monster.

We branched out, played more games, Team Fortress 2, Battlefield: Bad Company 2, Lead and Gold. More and more people latched on, started running our own private servers for some games, turning dahou.se from a pet name for our little server, into a real community. A band of friends who we could trust to join us in games that weren’t all about winning, but about the fun of the thing.

After a while of slow, but steady growth, we received a call from another, smaller, less established community. They gave us an offer we simply couldn’t refuse. A proper, massive server, with the power to run our own gameservers for whatever we wanted. Some were skeptical at first, but after much debate and planning, things went ahead.

And now we reach the present day. Dahou.se now runs 2 Team Fortress servers, a Trackmania server, a CS:S server and a Killing Floor server. We have forums, a stats system and, most importantly, an awesome community.

This is in no way an extensive account of what has happened over the development of the community so far, and I probably got a fair amount wrong. But the most important thing is that every single member of the community has contributed to getting us where we are, and to forging an environment where everyone is welcome to just have fun, even if they’re as crap as me at gaming. Community is one of the most important aspects of gaming for me, and I’m glad to have been a part of this one.

Dahou.se, being a fairly spread-out entity, cannot be held in one place.
Mumble (Voice Chat): mumble.dahou.se:64738
Forums: forums.dahou.se
Steam Community Page: steamcommunity.com/groups/dahou_se
Facebook fanpage: http://www.facebook.com/pages/dahouse/114715935244701
Twitter: http://twitter.com/getintodahouse

The great thing about doing a university course on developing games is that you get to play games and call it research. The even better part of this is that as a member of the game development society (a founding member, no less) I have access to quite a few Steam games via the university steam accounts. One such game is Drug Wars.

Not the DOS game from the mid eighties where you sell drugs around NYC and try to make money, oh no. Whilst set in Brooklyn, that is where the similarities end. You play a genetically engineered neo-neanderthal who has been separated from his right arm by a chainsaw. As a replacement he has been given a new biomechanical arm that has many powers.

You may remember the outcry that came when an alpha release of the game was pushed on to Steam in March last year. Well here we are in January 2010, and it is a Beta version that we see on Steam, and so there are, understandably, problems. Graphical glitches, a lack of subtitles for the voice acting that is, in many places, unintelligible, and some unclear goals when playing, and that is a great shame, because beneath it all, there is a real gem of a game.

It is the first game from Paleo Entertainment, and if this is what we can expect from them, I have high hopes for the future. What makes this game great? It’s quite simple. It takes an imperfect game and makes it fun. In contrast to some games that give you high polish and nothing more, this game gives you joy without needing to be perfect.

What can be fun about a game you don’t know how to play? I hear my single reader cry, well let me tell you. You have a bionic arm. You can punch people so hard they explode in a cloud of blood. You can take a discarded body part, like a hand, and then use your arm to super charge it. Not just into something that leaves a faint, hand-shaped, red mark on an openants face, now a small, hand-shaped hole. No, you can turn a hand into a nuclear missile. You fill it with so much energy that it will explode on impact, taking your target with it.

Blood and mayhem are easy to come by in the game, but not in that “let’s shoot civilians” way, in that “HOLY WOW THAT’S FUN!” way. I wasn’t able to play the multiplayer with it, but I suspect running around blowing your mates up with their own hands could be quite enjoyable.

The game’s £3.99 on Steam. Is it worth it? Well, it’s hard to say. Having to pay for what is effectively a Beta release of a game is always hard to justify, especially a beta as buggy as Drug Wars. However it is great fun, and Paleo have said they are working hard to fix all the bugs.

If you can live with a few glitches, then this game will keep you entertained, it’s far from perfect, but who said you needed a game to be perfect to have fun with it?

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This content is reposted from the Random Blog of Random Blogginess. The original post can be found here. It is used, with permission, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

Forza motorsport 3 truly is everything it claims to be. The realistic handling, the beginners guidance arrows laid on the track, and the immense graphics are all qualities which really do place this game above the others currently on the market, and it really is ‘as real as it gets’.

Once you’ve loaded the game, it leads you to a practise race, which is a great feature. Controlling the cars of Forza motorsport 3 is extremely different to your average racing game; it takes a lot more breaking and a lot more skill to manoeuvre your customised performance car around the selection of tracks. The guidance arrows which are laid all around the track enable you to position the car in the right place to ensure you get round the bends the best way possible. Of course, your car doesn’t have to stick to these arrows, yet they show the best way around the track, which could potentially put you in position for 1^st place. This feature is optional, so you can easily turn it off to make it more challenging. The game has various options which you can turn off to earn a percentage more credits, making the game more difficult but also more rewarding. However, your driver and car XP tends to increase rapidly, even with these helpful arrows turned on.

The box claims that this game is where dreams are driven, and I agree 100%. Every win is as satisfactory as totalling another car when you know you aren’t meant to, or getting multiple achievements consecutively, which brings me to my next point. For all you gamerwhores out there, this game is definitely for you. Within the first half an hour I had already achieved 100G. Even if you only intend to play for the vast amount of achievements you can get within a short time period, you will end knowing and enjoying more than you had intended to. Before playing, I had just imagined it to be a slightly shinier version of dirt, or gran turismo, yet when I turned off my 360, I was happily surprised.

Turn 10 studios have done an excellent job in designing this game. It really is so much more than just a racing game. It’s a game you can relate to, a game you can play endlessly over and over again and most certainly a game that is completely worthwhile. For a game without machine guns or dropping mines, it really is better that expected, especially for a game where the aim is to win, and not to total other cars or score points whilst drifting or tailing. After playing this game on a 360 Elite, I can highly recommend this game to everyone, no matter what skill, age or gender.

Now who wouldn't want a car like this?

I must admit, my least favourite feature is probably the customisation, I mean it’s not every day you can place a star or explosion shaped vinyl on the hood of your car and spend ages trying to figure out how to move the damn thing. However, once you manage to move it, your surprisingly wizardly car is ready to go. And of course it isn’t just stars you can have pasted on your body work; it’s also other various shapes and lettering. I would suggest being able to move the vinyl into position before you are asked to chose the colour, that way it would have cut down about 10 minutes of my time customising. …Yes, it did take me that long to work out that you choose the colour first and then the positioning. However, the freedom of customisation means that you are able to make your car into various things, such as the night sky, a checker board, or perhaps with practice, maybe even Noel Edmonds, the obvious goal of all car modders.

They're going to have to glue you back together... IN HELL!

The astoundingly successful charity drive led by WiNGSPANTT of Top Tier Tactics, which will culminate on August 31st with the destruction of 13 of the ultra-rare Golden Wrenches given out during the Team Fortress 2 Engineer update, has  closed it’s donations counter at an amazing $30,179.41 for children’s charity Child’s Play.

In the words of WiNG: “Whether you gave 5 cents or 500 dollars, each and every one of you was able to give something from your heart and make a difference to children who need hope and fun the most. You should be exceptionally proud of yourselves and of one another.”

All I can add to that is that everyone who donated is huge credit to team.

*Sniff* Makes me proud to be a gamer.

Be sure to be online around 9pm EST on the 31st of August to see the sparks fly and Australium burn, all in the name of Child’s Play!

A little late to the game, I know. But on the 31st of August, a total of 13 out of the 100 Golden Wrenches that were given out during the Team Fortress 2 Engineer update will be deleted for Child’s Play, including the one currently sitting in my backpack.

Everything that really needs to be said has already been said by WiNG over on the Golden Charity page on Top Tier Tactics, all I can say is you have about a day left to donate to the cause that has raised over $30,000 for an awesome charity, and you totally should.

Hopefully this will mean the return of our podcast TurtleStomp too, which has also moved hosting company. Send us some mail at the usual addresses (available at the TurtleStomp website for those that don’t know) and we’ll see about a new episode!

If you fancy getting involved with writing for MOREtotheGAME, contact admin[at]MOREtotheGAME.co.uk or join us in #moretothegame on AppliedIRC.

Thanks for putting up with our intermittent uptime, and all should be well now!

- TYTMGMT

FUEL was my first purchase, at around £5. I’d read the hype that was happening before it’s release, with it’s ridiculously huge open world and the like, but for me the game was a let down. After banging my head against the wall whilst the necessary Games for Windows Live installed and updated itself (Closing the game around 4 times in the process, I mean, what the hell GFWL, why would you do that?), I leapt into the game. Well, no I didn’t, because I needed to adjust the graphics options, which you can’t do ingame. Sigh. Another restart of the game later and FINALLY I can start playing. And.. well.. I really didn’t like it. The actual racing felt clunky and rigid and the way of accessing races, whilst probably the best way to do it with such a large world, took you out of the game. Ditching races for the moment I decided just to explore, and whilst my surroundings looked nice, everywhere felt kinda samey.. Even climbing to some of the game’s Vista points just got me to see the same stuff in a prettier way. Having said that, the weather and light cycles were really enjoyable. Driving along a clifftop path whilst the sun is setting was the most fun I had in the game. What really killed it for me though is the poor GPS, if you’re going to have a game hyped up because of it’s huge gameworld, you might want to make sure it’s usable.

Whoops, went into a bit more detail that I’d meant to there, so I’ll quickly skip over the next three I picked up. Kane and Lynch wouldn’t even start and I’ve not launched Indigo Prophecy or Painkiller yet. Both games I’ve been meaning to play for a while, and finally picked up nice and cheap. Unfortunately, other games have been calling, but I’ll get round to them eventually. Also grabbed the Hitman pack, which wasn’t even on sale. Curse your purchase convincing ways Steam! Saints Row 2, Killing Floor and GTA IV also got bought cheaply, but I’ve not played them enough to write about those either. I wonder why…

Oh yes. Because Civilisation IV EATS TIME. Taking over 2 hours to complete the tutorial (To be fair, I did carry on with the game ’till I could nuke Ghandi) it’s certainly a game you need to set some time apart for, which we have indeed been doing. We need to finish that 9 player game we started last night people, it was going pretty awesomely ’till everyone had to leave. Anyway yes, classic turn based strategy game, if you didn’t buy it you lost out.

Red Faction Guerilla was a game I nearly didn’t buy when the sale rolled round, but was convinced to do so. Glad I was, because after I’ve jumped through the glitchy hoops of getting it working somewhat on my machine (The driving still lags, anyone got any idea why?) it’s a lot of fun. I’ve been.. ignoring the missions and smashing as much as possible with a hammer. Probably says something about me, but hey, hammers are cool. Not to mention explosives. Explosives are also cool. Combining the two is, well you get the picture. For £3.75, despite it’s bugs, it’s a fun-filled destructionfest. Boom!

FlatOut Ultimate Carnage was on sale for £1.70 one day. It has online multiplayer, so myself and a couple of people in dahouse (<3) decided to snap it up for that price. The opinions you get will be.. different, depending on who you ask. I enjoyed it, the mere pleasure of racing schoolbuses around a figure of eight track was, to me, worth the price alone. The handling, or lack thereof, grew on me, and the destruction derby mode is pretty damn awesome. Toby on the other hand, was trying to find a way to remove the game from his account entirely, he was that unimpressed by it. Deary me.

Finally the sale has gotten me playing Borderlands once again, which the DLC finally being cheap enough (and containing a G enough) for me to pick it up. Damn that game is fun, that is all.

So I have all of these new games to play! What shall I play, what shall I play… spoilt for choice really…

What’s that Valve? …Engineer update?

Eh, screw those games. TO TF2!