With Diablo III actually, genuinely, seriously launching next week, Blizzard has revealed the final piece of its community-unlocked puzzle. Now available for your viewing pleasure is a six-minute animated trailer showing the angels of the High Heavens throwing down against the demons of the Burning Hells.
Unfortunately, as is so often the case, those angels are not quite as pure as they may pretend. Oh no! Could this be the setup for Diablo III, or merely a pretty little cartoon for us to enjoy?
Animation studio Titmouse and director Peter Chung are behind this.
Diablo III launches for PC and Mac on May 15. Tuesday! Oh gosh, it’s so close.
You may remember a curious little indie tech demo from 2010 named Tiny & Big: Up That Mountain, which featured a delightful dynamic cutting laser and some lovely onomatopoeia. Developer Black Pants has been toiling away on the commercial sequel to the physics-based puzzle-platformer, and announced that Tiny & Big: Grandpa’s Leftovers will hit Steam for PC and Mac on June 19.
The charming game sends Tiny off into the desert to recover his dear grandfather’s pants from his nemesis, Big. Armed with a cutting laser, a grappling rope and rocket boosters, you have to slice, tug and blast obstacles in a sanbox-y sort of way.
The demo of the original Up That Mountain is still available for free if you fancy cutting things up, though do bear in mind that was early days for the series.
The Steam page for Grandpa’s Leftovers is already up, though you can’t pre-order.
After announcing its existence last week, The Fullbright Company today revealed its first game. The three-person indie team founded by BioShock series veterans is working on Gone Home for PC, a first-person explore ‘em up set in a curiously deserted house.
Showing off a snippet of early pre-alpha gameplay, Fullbright explains that “core gameplay and UI features” are in place, with half of the world space and story elements sorted too.
“We’re really interested in pushing toward simulation, both in the sense of the physics system but also in allowing the player to open any door or drawer they’d logically be able to and examine what’s inside, down to small details,” Fullbright said in the announcement.
It’s very early art-wise, as all the empty spaces and white textures in the trailer and screenshots show. But the indies say “we can play through a representative, lower fidelity segment of the game and see if we’re on the right track. And so far, we’re excited by what we’ve got.”
The studio was co-founded by Minerva’s Den writer and lead designer Steve Gaynor, programmer Johnnemann Nordhagen and jack of all trades Karla Zimonja.
As Blizzard winds up to launch StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm later this year, it’s also preparing to finally roll out some features fans have been asking for since before SC2: Wings of Liberty launched back in 2010. These include resuming multiplayer matches from replays, playing in other global regions, and watching replays together with other folks.
These features and more should be patched in “at or around the launch of Heart of the Swarm,” production director Chris Sigaty wrote in a blog post.
Resuming from replays will help tournaments go smoother, as SC2’s lack of a LAN mode means that problems with a Internet or Battle.net connections can spoil a match. Rather than starting over from scratch or having judges rule on whether to award the win to one player, they’ll be able to pick up where they left off.
Global play will let you, as you can probably guess, play on other regional servers around the world, rather than being limited to your home region. Multiplayer replay viewing is a feature from the original StarCraft but cut from the sequel, for when you fancy watching a replay with some chums and discuss the game together. Multilanguage support, a clan/group system, and unranked matchmaking are also in the works.
[Update] 2K Games has confirmed to Shacknews that a PC demo will arrive in June before launch.
A demo is out today on consoles for Spec Ops: The Line, Yager’s face-shooting take on Heart of Darkness. However, publisher 2K Games hasn’t released one for the PC, or not yet anyway. As Kurtz said, “The horror! The horror!”
The demo packs “portions of two early chapters” from The Line’s single-player campaign. It’s set in a Dubai ravaged by catastrophic sandstorms, where your soldier man must venture to find the renegade Colonel John Konrad (do you see?) and his rogue battalion.
The Xbox 360 demo is available now for Gold subscribers from the Xbox Live Marketplace and will be opened up to everyone on May 15, while the PlayStation 3 demo will arrive in today’s PlayStation Store update. We’ve dropped 2K a line asking about a PC demo.
Spec Ops: The Line launches on June 26, with pre-order gubbins on offer.
Hello, weekend! How lovely to see you! And, what’s that, you’ve brought some fine PC game deals at digital distributors? Well bless your heart! Why, just at the top of your bulging sack I see Deus Ex: Human Revolution for $7, Driver: San Francisco for $10, Jagged Alliance: Back in Action for $28, Batman: Arkham City for $15, and Syndicate for $30, so who could tell what wonders lie beneath!
Here’s our selection of this weekend’s PC deals:
GameFly
Amazon
GamersGate
There are loads of Sega Genesis/MegaDrive games on sale. Rather than list them all here, I’ll link you and you can rummage yourself.
Get Games
GOG
There’s 50% off Rebellion’s games, including…
Green Man Gaming
There’s a big Paradox sale on, with a few of the highlights included below.
Impulse
Indie Royale
Pay what you want, above a minimum price, for a bundle of Dungeon Defenders, Containment: The Zombie Puzzler, Data Jammers: FastForward, Brainpipe - A Plunge to Unhumanity, and Weird Worlds: Return to Infinite Space, plus some music. All can be downloaded direct or from Desura, and some pack Steam keys too.
Origin
SavyGamer
To celebrate its fifth anniversary, video game deals site SavyGamer has persuaded loads of developers and stores to offer special discounts.
Steam
As well as being on sale this weekend, FPS-TD Sanctum is free to play on Steam until 1pm Pacific on Sunday. Click here to download it, if you have Steam installed.
Hot on the heels of The Elder Scrolls Online’s announcement yesterday comes the first official trailer. It’s all cinematic, with nary a glimpse of gameplay, but perhaps that old epic fantasy vibe is enough to get you jazzed.
The trailer explains that the Imperial throne sits empty, the all-important Dragonfires are unlit, and things that go bump in the night, well, are going bump in the night. As so often happens in these MMO situations, battle lines are drawn, alliances are forged, and loads of players are thrown into the mix.
Developed by Zenimax Online Studios, not Skyrim dev Bethesda Game Studios, The Elder Scrolls Online is coming for PC and Mac.
With each successive annual installment of Call of Duty, naysayers crawl out of the woodwork to declare that, though sales increase year after year, the series has peaked and will surely fail this time. Early indications are that Call of Duty: Black Ops II will also do just fine, as retailer Amazon is reporting Blops 2 is so far its most pre-ordered game of all time.
“Preorders from day 1 of Black Ops II were more than 10 times the amount of preorders for the first Black Ops on its first day of availability,” an Amazon US representative told GameSpot. “Black Ops II even out preordered the first day of availability for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 by more than 30 percent.” Amazon doesn’t even have the fancy pre-order bonanza offered by GameStop.
As MW3 is Amazon’s “most preordered game of all time,” and in the top 20 of all pre-orders, it’s no mean feat. Activision declared MW3 “the biggest entertainment launch ever,” selling around 6.5 million units within the first 24 hours in the US and UK alone.
Amazon UK reported that Black Ops II’s day-one pre-orders were triple the original Cod Blops.
Of course, it bears mentioning that online shopping is increasingly popular, so Amazon would naturally see some form of growth, but still, it certainly seems this won’t be be the year CoD flops.
Call of Duty: Black Ops II is headed to PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 on November 13, set in a near-future cold war with unmanned drones aplenty. Check out our preview for more.
Evolution is a slow progress, as demonstrated by the MOBA genre–that’s Multiplayer Online Battle Arena, or ‘DotA clone,’ as it’s known on the streets. Most early commercial forays into the genre simply recreated the map layout of the initial Warcraft III mod, but Heroes of Newerth is at least putting a twist on that old chestnut. Inspired by an informal mode played by Newerthlings, S2 Games has put together an official ‘all-mid’ map, stripping it down for a team-fight-o-rama.
The Mid Wars map takes the classic ‘Forests of Caldavar’ and strips out the two outside lanes, forcing all players to cosy up in the middle lane for a royal rumble. Respawn times are turned off, too, so there’s no hanging around. The lane is shortened, too, so matches shouldn’t drag on.
“From the high intensity and low stress gameplay, to faster matches and brand new environments, we’ve been addicted to Mid Wars game mode at the S2 Games offices ever since we started development,” S2 said in a dev blog on the Mid Wars mini-site.
Mid Wars is slated to launch next Friday, May 11. Heroes of Newerth switched to free-to-play last year, so all and sundry can give it a go.
Team17 did say it was shaking things up in Worms Revolution, after making largely the same game for 17 years, and it seems that may be the case. Worms Rev will introduce classes to the turn-based strategy series, the English indie has revealed, in four flavours with different attributes and abilties.
The Soldier class is the plain old regular worm as seen in countless games, but it’s joined by the Scout and Heavy classes. They have less or more attack power and are lighter or heavier, respectively, so they trade off damage for mobility and vulnerability to being buffeted around.
The fourth class, the Scientist, is something of a support role. Scientists are weaker and slower than Soldiers, but automatically heal their chums every turn and can equip gear like the Sentry Guns and Electromagnets.
Worms Rev is crawling onto PC and some form of console between July and September. Series creator Andy Davidson recently rejoined Team17 to chip in, after over a decade away.