PC Gamer

League of Legends cinematic trailer shows a giant serpent eating an on-fire bear

I tend to get quite annoyed by pointless cinematic trailers for games, but this luxuriant CGI video for League of Legends won me over – and this is coming from someone too intimidated by LOL (or MOBAs in general) to play beyond the tutorial. Perhaps it’s because the game has already been out for quite a while – this seems like a fun thing for the fans to pick over, rather than another cog in the marketing machine. The trailer’s a battle royale of sorts between many of LOL’s now-countless heroes, and unlike the game itself it doesn’t involve too much furious clicking on stuff. Barely any, in fact. Instead, the likes of Garen, Katarina and Ryze duff each other up for our amusement. Have a watch below the break.

Holster your six-shooters: Call of Juarez Gunslinger FOV tweak on the way

If Techland’s latest cowboy shooter is making you feel ill – not because of all the cowboy shooting, but due to that narrow, inflexible FOV – then we have some very good news: Techland are working on a fix. Chiming in to a Steam forums thread about the issue, developer ‘kanosek’ revealed that “our patch allowing tidy tweak of the FOV is right on the way!” They didn’t reveal how close it is to its intended destination (your hard drive), or how much we’ll be able to alter the FOV, but at least they’re working on it, and without too much of an angry backlash first.

Reinstall: Fallout 2

Reinstall invites you to join us in revisiting classics of PC gaming days gone by. This week, Richard Cobbett returns to the post-nuclear isometric wonderland of Fallout 2.

Let me tell you the story of a town called New Reno. Isolated and protected from the worst of the Great War by its mountains, it rose from the wasteland like a phoenix addicted to a deadly drug. Folks called it the capital of sin and whores, safe for tourists only while their pockets jangled with precious bottle caps. At least, that’s how it was before you arrived.

Mod of the Week: Crazy Civilian AI, for Just Cause 2

Welcome to Panau’s number one morning news show, “Good Morning Panau!” I’m your host, Skip Tripson! Regular viewers will know that our top story every single day for the past few years is the chaos and destruction caused by Rico Rodriguez as he battles the Panau military. This morning, however, the country seems to be in the grip of a new and unusual phenomenon. To be more precise, every single citizen driving a car, truck, motorcycle, or airplane seems to have gone completely insane!

For more on this, let’s go to our traffic reporter Brock Phosphorus in Traffic Copter One!

Saturday Crapshoot Live – Harvester

Whew! Five solid hours of weird adventure retrogaming! Thanks everyone who joined in on the stream and made this a much more fun experiment than knocking blocks off a giant cube. You can still watch it at Twitch.TV, though it’s a fairly freeform thing. The idea was to try and respond to the chat more carefully… but with over 200 people watching all five hours of it, that just didn’t end up happening. Never tried livestreaming anything before, but hopefully people enjoyed it. We’ll almost certainly do this again at some point (with a bit more notice – this was a very last-minute whim) and hopefully a bit more structure… like savegames, and ideally a second commentator to make it a bit more chatty.

If you missed it, here’s the original Harvester Crap Shoot to get a flavour for the game in text form.

7 Grand Steps is just a short walk away from its June 7 release

IGF finalist 7 Grand Steps is releasing for Windows and Mac on June 7th, developer Mousechief has announced. We haven’t covered the game in great detail before, so here’s a recap: it’s an innovative mix of grand strategy and board game which has a novel familial take on the much-plundered topic of civilisation. Dan Gril called it “hugely inspiring and strange” and “a must play” after having a go on it at GDC, and there’s now a demo version to keep you ticking over till June 7th, when the game will release on both the Mousechief website and on Steam for $15.

Roguelike meets rhythm game in the joyous Crypt of the NecroDancer

While I wait in vain for a developer with the vision to combine the football management sim with the sidescrolling shoot-’em-up, I can take some comfort in the fact that Brace Yourself Games are attempting something equally mad and innovative in Crypt of the NecroDancer, a “hardcore roguelike rhythm game” that…wait, let’s just rewind a bit first. NecroDancer turns the randomly generated dungeon into a hazard-filled dancefloor only slightly less dangerous than the real thing. You’ll still explore, fight monsters and collect bags of treasure, but you’ll do so while shaking your hips and furiously tapping your toes. It’s Michael Jackson’s Thriller mixed with Dungeons & Dragons – brand new teaser trailer after the break.

The Free Webgame Round-Up

We can’t get enough bank holidays here in the UK, and if you feel like spending your weekend hunched over your computer playing browser games, then boy have you come to the right place. This week is all about giant snakes – as all good weeks should be – but we also found the time to fit in a samurai duelling title, a retro platformer, one good joke, and a peaceful game that takes a leaf out of Wind Waker’s book. Enjoy!

The Elder Scrolls Online hands-on: six levels of combat, crafting and exploration

It starts, as it always does, in prison. But The Elder Scrolls Online’s take on the series’ traditional opening is a little different. You’ve been captured and sacrificed to the Daedric prince Molag Bal, harvester of souls. You wake in Coldharbour, Bal’s particular plane of Oblivion. Unlike Mehrunes Dagon’s Deadlands – which you stormed through again and again in TES IV – Coldharbour is a drab, lifeless reflection of the surface world. Your escape from this place and back to reality constitutes The Elder Scrolls Online’s tutorial. My time with the game began immediately after this point.

Where you end up after Coldharbour depends on which of the three factions you belong to. The Aldmeri Dominion, composed of High Elves, Wood Elves, and the catlike Khajiit, are imperious conquerors from the south. The Ebonheart Pact are an alliance of convenience between Skyrim’s Nord, Morrowind’s Dark Elves and the stealthy Argonians – they’re keen to hold on to their independence, but need each other in order to do it. I played the first six levels of the game as a member of the Daggerfall Covenant: the Bretons, Redguard and Orcs who form The Elder Scrolls Online’s final faction.

The wistful, whimsical platformer Element4l is now on Steam

Ignore that number jammed unharmoniously in Element4l’s name, and focus instead on the relaxing music, the smooth curves of the landscape, and the satisfying way your happy cube-character dissolves into embers and sparks.