PC Gamer

Stealth Bastard Deluxe sneaking onto Steam this November

You’ll already have October 12th and 16th marked on this year’s all-black stealth advent calender, but joining Dishonored and Mark of the Ninja is Curve Studios’ excellent Stealth Bastard, which is scheduled to emerge on Steam sometime in November. Originally released as freeware, the sublimely titled Stealth Bastard: Tactical Espionage Arsehole is now getting a Deluxe edition, which will add extra gadgets and suits to the sidescrolling sneak-’em-up. These include a camo suit, two types of decoy, teleporters, and the exciting-sounding ‘antilight’.

GameMaker: Studio – we round-up the best Workshop titles so far

Starting game projects is easy – finishing them is hard. That’s why GameMaker: Studio’s Steam integration is so rife with potential. In addition to providing a guaranteed, albeit squirreled away, gallery for creations in the form of a Steam Workshop section, Game Maker’s latest iteration features, incredibly, achievements, effectively bribing developers into creating, testing and releasing their projects onto a number of different platforms. At the time of writing, 21.5% of people have created an empty room, while only 0.1% have encountered 100 or more compile errors. Developers: make buggier games!

The really exciting part is Studio’s Workshop page, which is already chock-full of titles. Stupidly, however, in order to actually play any of these games, you first have to download the free version of GM: Studio – Steam treats them all as mods, for some reason. Like much of Steamworks, there’s also quite a lot of dreck on the GameMaker channel, so sorting through the Mario clones and reskinned tutorials is going to be a problem. Or rather, it would be without us here – look below for a list of the best GM games to be Workshopped thus far.

Dishonored PC options run-down

It’s getting increasingly rare that games offer a full range of graphics and interface options for PC players – and as Tom notes in his Dishonored review, Arkane’s excellent stealth action game gets it right. We’ve noticed a lot of interest in exactly what the game allows you to customise, so we thought we’d put together a quick video to run you through those hot, feature-packed options menus.

Minecraft meets WoW with the ambitious Crafting Azeroth mod

Minecraft continues its rapid territorial expansion with the ambitious Crafting Azeroth mod, which aims to cram all of World of Warcraft’s Azeroth into Mojang’s blocky expanse – minus the players, the pandas, and the occasional mass extinction, naturally.

XCOM: Enemy Unknown review

“‘Tis a vile thing to die,” Shakespeare wrote, “when men are unprepared and look not for it.” This is precisely XCOM’s favorite way to kill you. Enemy Unknown has just unexpectedly murdered my best soldier. Not with a jetpacking alien-cyborg. Not with a lucky grenade. Not with a plasma gun.

An exploding forklift has just eaten the life of my most decorated alien-killer.

League of Legends playoffs soured by allegations of cheating

We posted earlier about some of the aggressive strategies being employed by League of Legends players during the weekend’s World Championship playoffs, but the competition has taken a darker turn with accusations of cheating levelled at teams World Elite and Azubu Frost.

World of Warcraft: Orgrimmar and Stormwind temporarily wiped out

Yesterday, an event of apocalyptic proportions hit the realms of Azeroth, as entire cities – players, NPCs and all – were summarily slaughtered by hackers. The entire populations of Stormwind and Orgrimmar were killed, as a number of hackers playing as Level 1 characters proceeded to insta-kill everyone in sight. You can see astonishing footage of the mass slaughter beneath this post.

Dishonored: how to get Low Chaos, No Kills and Ghost ratings (no spoilers)

Dishonored judges how ruthless you’ve been with an end-of-mission stat called Chaos. It affects a lot about the way the game works out for you, but the game itself doesn’t fully explain how it works. I misunderstood it, and accidentally committed myself to a darker path than I wanted.

The game also rates you on two entirely optional criteria: whether you were detected, and whether you killed anyone. For the most part it’s obvious how to avoid these, but there are some subtleties to how they’re calculated that could cause you to fail them without realising.

Happily, Bethesda sent us all the juicy details of how Chaos, detection and kills are calculated, so we can tell you.

Dishonored review

I think I can jump onto another light fitting from here. I’m wrong. I slip, fall, and land inches behind a gold-masked Overseer looking out of the fifth-story window. I only have a split second headstart in getting over our mutual surprise at the situation, and I use it to stab him in the neck.

A second after his body hits the ground, I hear carpet-softened footsteps coming down the hall. Panic. After mentally rejecting three even crazier ideas, I hoist the Overseer’s body over my shoulder and jump out of the window.

Dishonored is mostly a stealth game, where you play a kind of assassin, in a somewhat steampunk city. Those floundering qualifiers are part of the fun: you don’t have to hide, you don’t have to kill anyone, and while the city of Dunwall mixes matchlock pistols with crackling Tesla tech, it’s a rusty, crumbling place that feels unique.

Aggressive strategies dominate first weekend of League of Legends’ $2 million tournament

You probably heard about League of Legends’ playoff tournament that happened over the weekend — the event’s shoutcasters even claimed its livestream used more than 5 percent of all the internet bandwidth in the United States on Saturday night. When technical difficulties weren’t disrupting the tense matches, two themes dominated the world championships: NA and EU struggling, and more aggressive playstyles than we’ve ever seen in a global tournament.