What if you were to build a full-on third-person shooter from the ground up, with the controls and action that you're used to, and then work the world of Transformers on top of it? That's exactly what they did with Transformers: War for Cybertron. This way, the design focus was on control, and the end result of this is a game with third-person shooter controls and concepts that you're already familiar with. Exploration of the Transformers world is like icing on the cake, especially for fans that would like to fully explore the lore.

So, think third-person, like Gears of War, but you're controlling Autobots and Decepticons. Yeah, it's like that, and it looks pretty sharp so far.

This game takes place totally on Cybertron, set in the last stages of the civil war there. This all goes down well before planet Earth is ever involved, so you need not worry about any of that Michael Bay nonsense. The opening sequence was set in Cybertron's capitol, in a vast, skyscraper-filled, all metal world where doors and gateways sort of...transformed open. Imagine the peak of Transformers civilization, and you'll have a good idea of how this city looked. Being set during the war, gunfire lit up the sky and ships came crashing down into set pieces. The stage looked to be perfectly set for an immersive third-person shooter.

This game makes me happy in my lunchbox.

That's not a euphemism or anything, I just still have my Transformers lunchbox. Believe it or not, it's red. And has Transformers on it.

Sadly, the Thermos was lost to half a can of chicken noodle soup ages past.

Anyway, you gotta watch this fucking trailer.

Ubisoft has blamed problems with its controversial digital rights management solution for PC games on outside attacks.

The publisher told Eurogamer that very few players were unable to access PC versions of Assassin's Creed II and Silent Hunter 5 yesterday due to the outage, but apologised to those who did experience problems.

"Ubisoft would like to apologise to anyone who could not play ACII or SH5 yesterday," the company said in a statement this afternoon.

When five percent of your customers eat shit because people violate your servers on principle you're still wrong, it's just you've been wronged, too.

You're still wrong, Ubisoft. Look, DRM already creates idealist pirates, now you've got idealist hackers griefing you. It's only going to get worse, and I can't believe something like it is actually going into Command and Conquer 4.

Still, y'know, cites or GTFO. Someone could have tripped on a cable before heading out for the weekend and it's not like Ubisoft's going to be up-front about their own mishap. It could be DDoS, but I don't trust guys that pull this crap, either.

We’ve been meaning to post about Ribbon Hero for a while, prompted by — oooh — at least many people. Unfortunately, we wanted to give it a try first and John’s the only one who has a copy of Office (The of us rest being punk rock heroes! and/or cheapskates with Open Office). And John’s spent the last couple of days discharging fountains of bilious fluid from every imaginable organ, so it hasn’t happened, so I’m going to plug it swiftly before I jet off to Seattle. Basically, it turns the process of learning bits of Office (Both 2007 and the 2010 Beta) into a game, complete with achievements and the ability to compete against friends. I’d expect to see a lot more stuff like this over the next few years.

I'm aback. I played a video game plugin for Microsoft Office and I really enjoyed it.

It's like when we first got that computer with graphics. Everything was awesome, Paint was a game, WordPerfect was a game (albeit one without graphics) and games were mana from fucking heaven. This tickles the same part of your brain all the while getting you to learn about Word.

Somehow I also feel like I should do my homework now because otherwise I'm going to have to do it in the car...

Photo: My Game Face

“We have an Aliens game with Sega and 20th Century Fox which we're really excited about,” he told MCV. “It’s the thing I've been stealing from all my career. Now I'm really working on it, but we've been quiet about that so far.”

Furthermore, it’s the success of recent 2K Games hit Borderlands that seems to have slowed progress on the project.

“Borderlands took over Gearbox,” he added. “We had so much fun working on that and when we finished we wanted to carry on. And the DLC — we've launched two so far and there’s a third to come which take us to a new level in every way.”

Sega’s appetite for the title is likely to have been ramped up following the success of Rebellion’s recent release Aliens vs Predator, which shot straight to the top of the ELSPA GfK Chart-Track All Formats Top 40 this week.

Excellent. I gotta say, the last one wasn't as tits as I had expected it to be. (Shock, a bad execution of Aliens and Predator IP?)

I'm always looking forward to the next delicious, acid-blooded disappointment. I'm not even really being sarcastic, either. This stuff makes me giddy. I touched the Captain's USS Nostromo cap. The original one, the movie prop. My friend Rich has it, it smells funny.

Funny like undashed expectations.

And... scalp.

UbiGate continues apace. Yesterday, seemingly cracked versions of Silent Hunter 5 and Assassin’s Creed 2 appeared. Ubisoft have since responded to say these DRMless versions are not complete, backed up to some extent by various forum comments observing that the SH5 scene release can’t make it past the first mission. Other comments claim otherwise. What’s a poor website to believe?

Here’s Ubisoft’s statement:

“You have probably seen rumors on the web that Assassin’s Creed II and Silent Hunter 5 have been cracked. Please know that this rumor is false and while a pirated version may seem to be complete at start up, any gamer who downloads and plays a cracked version will find that their version is not complete.”

Give it more time, this DRM will fail. Either that, or Ubisoft will.

I actually tried the crack, it didn't work. To be fair, that did save me from having to play a submarine simulator. I mean, I can stay inside, wax my shoes, scrub the toilet, and masturbate at home. Do I really need a soundtrack and special effects?

Wait, would that be fun with a soundtrack and special effects?

I better reread Jackspeak...

PC gaming, as the name suggests, is usually something exclusive to the PC. Sometimes there are Mac ports, but any serious computer gamer would either have a dedicated gaming PC or at the very least a Boot Camp partition.

Steam, the online service for PC gamers developed by Valve, looks to soon be expanding onto Mac OS X. While there hasn't yet been an official announcement (perhaps at the Game Developers Conference next week), Valve has sent various teaser images that, when put together, point squarely at a product or service made for the Mac.

Educated guesses would say that all of Valve's internally-developed properties will be available for Mac, which appear to include Steam, Portal, Team Fortress 2, the Half-Life series and the Left 4 Dead games.

Shock. Valve's figured out how to compile a six year old engine to run on other operating systems and therefore squeeze a little extra cash out of IP without having to make new games?

Not that I'm dismissing the Portal stuff, though.

But I gotta say, if they push this out for OS X and not Linux a whole lot of people are gonna be pissed off...

Of course, this means PC gaming is dead as we know it, Windows is in its final throes, and DirectX 11 has nothing to offer anyone.

We’re breaking into an elevated enemy base surrounded by jungle. We have the benefit of cover, lush overgrowth and ancient ruins. But the enemy has the advantage. The approach to their base becomes Hamburger Hill. I die over and over, sniped by a hundred unseen gunmen, trying to push my way toward the goal. The fight starts feeling pointless.

Am I getting too old for this crap?

I’m currently embedded in MAG, the new PlayStation 3 shooter that puts up to 256 players on the same battlefield. And at first, the notion of running and gunning with so many other people is exhilarating. But after all these shots to the head, I feel like this most complex of shooters may only be navigable by younger players with the free time to learn how to handle a hundred human foes.

You can say it, it's OK. You're too old for this shit.

But I gotta wonder myself--why is it that I was way better a decade ago than I am now? I used to league play, for money. We never won anything because I thought practicing was for chumps and faggorts, but my 3:1 kill standard is now 1:1 (plus team points when optional)...

And you know what I figured out? It's my monitor. I have a huge, sexy monitor that I have to crank my head around to see things on, and I have slick graphics hardware to push all the special effects. Back in the day, we had to made serious decisions: Internet and ramen, or peanut butter and ramen. We turned all the special effect off and trying that now, it's like black and white.

Literally, like going back to black-and-white. It sucks. I'd rather lose at a beautiful game than win at virtual whack-a-mole, thank you.

yes, it really was that bad

A few of our readers seem to think we have been intentionally avoiding some of these AMD issues but the honest fact of the matter is that we have felt that 5800 issues at the hands of AMD were getting taken care of. We see our HardForum posters being very vocal about these issues and we know from internal discussions that AMD is aware and working on those issues. The fact is though, when you guys are telling us we need to address a subject, we get in front of the mirror and ask ourselves the questions you put to us.

AMD has pulled up short in some of its commitments to us and we wanted to discuss these issues with our readers and hopefully give you some insight. The two main topics we are going to cover here are dongle problems with Eyefinity when used with three DVI panels and the "Gray Screen of Death" or GSOD problem.

I checked, 10.2, still GSODding all over the place, like, all over the screen, it's everywhere. If it helps, it happens when I run Media Center, exactly 100% of the time. I understand you're the undisputed king of video cards right now, and that's gotta pretty good-feeling, but this isn't a dongle-specific issue.

Hehe, dongle.

Not sure what, exactly, a dongle is? Well, lemme tell you this, Spy's got it, and Pyro wants it. That's kinda disturbing, actually.

Sinclair Solutions Test Pack, the first of several planned downloadable packages, contains a number of customization features that will allow players to further their character’s development in BioShock 2’s multiplayer modes and provide a deeper multiplayer experience. The pack includes:

- Rank Increase to level 50 with Rank Rewards
- New playable characters Louie McGraff and Oscar Calraca
- 20 new trials
- A third weapon upgrade for each weapon
- Five additional masks

In the coming months, 2K Games will also be publishing downloadable extensions of the single player experience that provide new insight into the world of Rapture. These packages will include more narrative, new tools and new challenges that extend the lore and fiction of the failed Utopia under the sea.

The Sinclair Solutions Test Pack will be available to purchase in March for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC.

I'm just going to start calling DLC patches and the games that get it incomplete from now on. And not to be all, "this is why people pirate," but, well. Shit, I'm in a corner, here.

So like, truthishly, in the future, it'll probably be pretty hard to pirate, because the more metrics we include while surfing, the easier and easier we are to track:

We'll admit to having shared a few login credentials amongst friends here and there in our younger days, but it sounds like the party might soon be over: a company called Scout Analytics has developed a way of identifying a user's "typing cadence," and matching it to how a username and password are entered. It only takes 5 login attempts of around 12 characters for Scout to nab your cadence, and although 1 in 20,000 people will share the same cadence, combining the data with browser info and IP addresses makes it accurate enough for general usage.

that's a lamp

It's 1976... a different '76. Stretched out before you are thousands of miles of desert - the American Southwest. The massive engine roars as you slam down the throttle. It's time to get funked up...

You are Groove Champion, auto-vigilante. Your agenda: payback for your dead sister. Your weapon: A 425- horsepower '72 Picard Piranha with two 50-caliber machine guns on the roof and a flamethrower on the side. You're one mean dude in an even meaner ride.

They've messed with the wrong Champion.

You're one bad mother--shut yo mouth!

Just talkin' 'bout Groove Champion, a name not dissimilar to John Shaft or Hiro Protagonist. You don't get a sword but you do get a fucking bored-out Pseudo-Dodge Charger with God damn missile launchers. This isn't a difficult decision, here.

I can only hope Activision is planning to re-release Battlezone in some way that brings its multiplayer back with it.

'Cause browser Tribes seems to be forgot.

I have decided to play the Star Trek MMO. This is not because I am a fan or have a thing for MMOs. In fact, it's quite the opposite. But I will try. It has to not be pointless; MMOs by their very design are anti-narrative. Sure, you might think you're getting a story but what you're really playing is a series of mini-games designed to obstruct the plot and distract you from its completion so that you spend as much time and money as possible before throwing in the towel.

I will play Star Trek Online because I believe it has a greater potential for narrative than other MMOs, one of two kinds of story that no other game of this kind has ever bothered with.

The first possible narrative is of legacy; Star Trek has always had an over-arching ideal with every series and, to greater or lesser success, expounded on it. The original had civil equality, the Next Generation was all about individual equity. Deep Space Nine was a different kind of Star Trek that focused on peace between ideologues, AND NOT THE ISRAELIS AND PALESTINIANS, NO. Enterprise was tribute to the world's ever-love for Scott Bakula. Voyager was about abortion.

It is this capacity for plying a narrative that the Star Trek medium has, and an MMO has the opportunity to do so in a very participatory way.

There is another possibility for narrative, and that's personal. I'm not saying the two are exclusive, but if it fails on one, it doesn't have to the other. But for the first time ever, someone's made an MMO that doesn't require you play with anyone else. Now that's a selling point for me right there. Because I don't want to compromise my experience over forced participation. I want to tell my own story.

It will succeed if the game lets me steal a cloaking device. I don't care if I have to duct tape a gray cardboard disk to a Romulan Bird of Kill or whatever it's called, I want to do something unique and epic. If the Star Trek MMO can do this, then it's a good game.

If it fails at both narratives, it's a pointless money-sponge.

Sega has just released an Aliens vs. Predator demo for the PC. You can get it on Steam here. Sweet!

But then I tried to actually play it on a LAN with some friends. Oops, no such luck. It's public servers only. And it's only deathmatch, which results in some utterly silly alien-on-alien, predator-on-predator, and marine-on-marine violence. So unrealistic. And for a fairly complex shooter, it's completely undocumented. If I hadn't spent many an hour playing the last game, I would have been lost. Well, even more lost. For instance, I eventually figured out how to toggle the predator's vision mode, which led to being jumped by aliens or gutted by predators several times because I was scanning for marines. This is a game heavy on making sure you get killed in elaborately animated ways. I look forward to being able to inflict them on other players in appropriate gameplay modes.

Or at least the multiplayer does, anyway.

What really sticks with me, more than just the really bad demo's actual gameplay, is that it was clearly Modern Warfare-style peer hosted. Oh, and the graphics are shit.

Peer hosting has to go, there's no better way to make me hate multiplayer more right now. It would suck less if you could just exchange real-world money for health; I'm constantly wondering if the reason I just died was because I suck, the other guy's got some kind of lag loophole going for him, or he's straight-up hacking. I mean, haxxorz, gaf.

Look, it's hard to type "fag" when you can't even tell the difference between a delicately-tessellated alien and the 32x32 Doom load screen behind it.

Bayonetta's hardly a realistic woman. Her legs are probably twice the length of her body, she's disproportionately slender and yet possesses a butt that her character modeler confesses to having spent a lot of time getting "perfect."

Nor is she demure; Bayonetta fights enemies with the same magical hair she wears as clothing, which means vigorous combat leaves her naked. She blows kisses to break through magical barriers. She's constantly nursing a small lollipop, suggestively, for little apparent reason. Oh, here we go, video games are exploiting female sexuality again, right? Not so fast.

Game director Hideki Kamiya is known for distinctly stylizing his action games. The Devil May Cry franchise has always been about flair that often goes comically over-the-top, and characters that make players feel powerful just by virtue of how cool the heroes look.

Alright, can I be all, this chick (the writer chick, not the gunboots chick) is wrong without putting forth the idea that Bayonetta is exploitative?

Because it's not empowering, it's just sexy. It's not demeaning, it's just sexy. And sexy and sex are separate, otherwise, ever since I went to that drag show, I'd be gay. 'Cause those dudes were sexy. And sexy is relative. Those Sarah Palin spectacles aren't doing it for me.

But if you want a real, empowering female character in a game? Give her fucking dialog. Make her a person. She can have gunboots and legs up to here and not represent if she's got the personality of an empty pizza box. This rule: apply it to all characters, for that matter.

i'm so glad someone else chopped that for me. i'm terrible at choppery

Just when you thought Microsoft wasn't freakishly interested in nabbing timed exclusivity for high-profile game add-ons -- wait, why would you ever think such a thought? -- we find out at CES that the company has made sure Xbox LIVE will receive the initial Modern Warfare 2 DLC packs first.

We'll have to wait until we get closer to the DLC's spring release to find out more details, but for now, we can look back at what's been said by Infinity Ward on the add-on front. Have you guys been clamoring for some additional Spec Ops missions? I hope so, because that'd be something I can get behind.

It seems like a lot of fans also want multiplayer maps (duh), although interestingly enough it sounds like many would opt to pay for their favorite Call of Duty 4 maps in order to relive the fun in Modern Warfare 2. There are two add-ons announced so far, so these guesses might not be too far off base.

Not that I was phased by the cliffhanger ending of Modern Warfare 2, I am somewhat surprised that there is going to be DLC. Or is DLC just the new word for map pack? The reason being, they didn't announce anything.

The whole point of DLC is that it prevents people from chucking a game into the used bin at GameStop and picking up something else out of it. Without the heads up, there's a lot less incentive to hang on to a game for more than four hours. Eight, if you play through it twice. Multiplayer notwithstanding.

Which, and I'm sure I'm late to the game here, but manual port forwarding with PC multiplayer? I feel like there's a 360 controller-sized hole where my ass used to be.

i'm not going to photoshop goatse hands around an xbox controller, you can do that in your own head

It's hard not to start playing BioShock 2 without thinking about it as one of the most unnecessary sequels in gaming. It is easy, however, once playing has begun to recognize it as a very promising game.

Lop the boss battle off of the original BioShock and the 2007 game would seem to be just about perfect. It was a novel dive into a failed Objectivist utopia called Rapture. It was a philosophical exploration of free will played as a first-person shooter designed to accommodate a player's tactical ingenuity. It introduced one of the great and weird new relationships in video games, the life-force/Adam-draining Little Sisters and their monstrously powerful protectors, the Big Daddys.

And aside from that final boss battle, BioShock ended well enough that nothing could improve it, not the addition of a 2 at the end of the title, not the tacking on of multiplayer and certainly not the opening title screen that credits twice as many studios for the sequel (four, none of which are the series' founding studio, 2K Boston).

People who say Bioshock was the greatest game of all time have the gaming equivalent of iStockholm Syndrome.

Look, I'm not saying the game wasn't good, I'm just saying it wasn't this Utopian orgy of software bliss. It doesn't make sense! Gene-splicing won't make your face fall off, if you suck at it, you just fucking die, let alone go around stabbing people to get more genesplice money to make even more of your face fucking fall off.

If it was me, I'd be like, "Cool, I can shoot lightning out of my d--OH GOD MY EYE!" and pretty much do away with additional genework. I mean, you can still get chicks as an eyepatch-wearing ubermensch, but you gotta draw the line somewhere.

Hurray! Rifles! Machine guns!

Howitzers and mortars!

Projectile weapons!

PC gamers everywhere rejoice! The DirectX 11-powered Games for Windows LIVE edition of DiRT 2 is now available in stores for $39.99, just in time for the holidays. Put this one on your wish list! Codemasters takes advantage of DirectX 11 features to add to the realism of the racing environment. Hardware tessellation further improves the appearance of water and other surfaces as well as crowd animations. The performance of Shader Model 5.0 aids in creating an even richer 3D experience, enhancing key image quality parameters such as depth of field, ambient occlusion and shadows. These DirectX 11 features have produced the most exciting and visceral racing experience yet.

I played around with the demo for about ten minutes and then said fuck it, they're not even trying to enlist the PC platform. There's no mouse support. No freaking mouse! What is this, Grand Prix Circuit, 1987? It's not even like they tried to take advantage of the PC control scheme, they deliberately punish you for not running out and buying a 360 controller. You cannot customize the keybindings. Nowhere in the game does it tell you how to shift. You could more precisely play this game by blowing into a tube.

All that for some DX11 prettiness. You know what? That's like a reach-around from a guy who's got you pinned down. But it's not even a nice reach around, like the guy's a tool-and-die worker and his hands are all calloused and cracked. He's definitely got a job along the lines of punching sheet metal into knives. Probably brushes his teeth with iron filings, and--hey, screw it.

And screw you, Dirt 2.

The Engineer combat class makes its return in Mass Effect 2, and BioWare has injected a few new abilities to make things more interesting.

As before, Engineers possess a roguish finesse and approach battle in a more roundabout manner than most. In Mass Effect, these guys were Tech Specialists who focused on supporting the party by disabling weapons, debuffing enemy shields, hacking mechanical enemies, and even healing the party. There's still the tactical focus in the sequel, but they can now take a more direct approach by summoning combat drones, set foes on fire, or freeze and shatter them.

We'll likely be seeing more class highlights will be released before the game comes out January 26, 2010.

We'll likely be seeing whether or not they complete the game and balance it, too. I've run my mouth about the things that sucked in Mass Effect, but I have to admit that I still enjoyed it. Plus it's about the only genre of game where chicks represent--Commander John Shepard is one foxy lady.

Well, in any case, if you need some hot ship-on-ship action in the meantime, I suggest you look into Gratuitous Space Battles. It's sort of a real-time boardgame version of desktop tower defense and I have gotten more zany play time from it than the aforementioned franchise. Of course, if you're not keen on spending your holiday budget on a little something for yourself, over at Shrapnel Games, they're giving away Strange Adventures in Infinite Space, among others.

Go, go and blow shit up.

Most netbooks aren’t blessed with the same excess horsepower as current desktops and conventional laptops. In order to keep your system running to its full potential, it’s important to select applications that are easy on resources. You don’t want to needlessly overwork that Atom processor, do you?

One place you can save CPU and RAM usage is your antivirus program. I’ve found three options that are perfectly suited to netbooks, providing an excellent level of protection while keeping the impact on your system to a minimum.

While it’s not quite as light on Windows XP, if you’ve got a newer Windows 7 netbook (or one of the few running Windows Vista) MSE is an excellent choice. Like other traditional antivirus programs, MSE needs to download definition files to your PC to identify viruses. Scans are fairly fast, can be scheduled, and it’s been tested to detect about 98.5% of malicious files. The most common knock against MSE is its lack of any kind of heuristics-based protection, but the jury is still out on just how effective that type of defense is anyway.

Right, I know this is netbook news, but whatever sits idly by in the system tray without sweating an Atom is an application that won't tank a few rounds of Payload, so this is actually two kinds of news.

I wouldn't know, actually. I've been virus-free for years, and anti-anti-virus. It's like, condoms seem like a good idea until you actually use them, but then you decide against it and start following whatever crazy link strikes your fancy. How 'bout you just make good link-following decisions in the first place? Wait, what the hell am I saying?

margaret sanger was a foxy bitch. look at 'er, with that come-hither comstock smile

Cor, big gaming news: EA have announced Medal Of Hono(u)r is to return next year, all up-to-date and modern. What they’ve done here, you see, is they’ve taken a popular WW2 series and updated it to present what I’m going to call “modern warfare”. And frankly, good. Because I liked the Medal of Honour games even if they weren’t quite the most cutting edge, and the splendid Medal of Honour: Airborne was lost in the noise of Call of Duty’s reinvention. You should buy it. Although not at that price — cripes — that’s what it cost new! But to the new game. So, what do we know so far?

The game, named only Medal Of Honor, is planned to arrive some time in the next year, and to be set in the most contemporary of settings, Afghanistan. Set to be jam-packed with war for the foreseeable future, Afghanistan is 2010’s Iraq. It’ll be interesting to see how the game handles this, whether with sensitivity or balls-out realism.

It’s been in development for a while, the secret somewhat blown last month, and EA now explain that “Tier 1 Operators from the US Special Operations Community” have been consulting on the game since it was first conceived. They are, I’m reliably repeating, super-soldiers who work under the National Command Authority. They’re elite types, and so presumably get involved in the more interesting campaigns.

I don't care if this is copying a good idea. Look, after getting betrayed by promise of an alluring new multiplayer system, and being sold half of a game (but damn, would you check out that half? That's the half that's got it goin' on) I could definitely have another helping.

Whatever happened to making games in 'Nam?

Hey, I like pho as much as the next guy, but bring on the Agent Orange.

man, pho sounds perfect right now. who am i kidding, it's always a good time for pho