Daily News - 14th July 2012 - Steam Summer Sale In Full Swing, Borderlands 2's Epic Budget and GTA V Screenshots

Steam's Summer Sale Is On In A Massive Way

What a special time. The sun is shining (ish), the plants are in bloom and everybody's indoors getting some sweet bargains off Steam! Yes, Valve are at it again and this time they mean motherfucking business! Not content with making 9 games super cheap for 24 hours at a time, they now also do a seperate 6 hourly vote, in which the Steam community decides what game will be the next to get discounted. Also, there are now "Flash Sales" which are smaller slaes that change every few hours, cycling between 4 different games at any one time. The sale also includes the usual 'packs' with a developers entire catalogue contained within for savings of around £100 a time, and there are discounts absolutely everywhere! So many sales to be had it hurts my feeble brain! (Though writing that Yu-Gi-Oh article didn't help with that) Unfortunately, if this is the first you're hearing about the sale then chances are you've already missed out on super cheap Portal 2 and Deus Ex: Human Revolution but if it's any comfort, there's still fucking LOADS to come. Lock up your wallets, it's gonna be a rough week!

List of Amazing Savings from Reddit - All Games 70%-80% Off

Portal 2 was like £3 yesterday. THREE FUCKING QUID!!!

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Borderlands 2's Budget Revealed To Be Between 3 To 4 Times Bigger Than Original

Borderlands 2 closing in on us and as I said on Twitter yesterday, doesn't seem to be majorly challenged by any other releases that I can think of. It's, for me, the most exciting game to come out this year and so news like this fills my underpants with happy. It turns out that the success of a game, means that studio has more money! Who know, right? And so Borderlands 2 had, well let's just say, more access to funds than the original. Head of Gearbox Randy Pitchford said the following on the subject:

"Effectively [the budget is] like triple or quadruple, because in Borderlands 1 we had a lot of invention. We had to figure these things out. ...we knew what's fun about the RPG is the fun of collecting loot, and levelling up and growing and making choices. That's not mutually exclusive with the moment-to-moment fun of a shooter, we knew that, but we hadn't figured out all the details of what that means to put those two things together. You fish around in the dark, you try things and they don't work, and you try other things and you learn from what you tried, and build on that. With Borderlands 2 we don't have any of that. We got to be experts at making Borderlands in the act of finishing it, so with Borderlands 2 all of the effort is spent towards value that the customer sees, not towards fishing around in the dark and making things that don't work that we have to throw away in order to make new things. ...Effectively it's way more than double. It's actually double budget, effectively it's way more."

Borderlands was a blast to play through side-by-side with my buddy, and we intend to do the same again with Borderlands 2. It's going to be an experience, that's for damn sure!

I sense much holding of the right trigger, and even greater amounts MOTHERFUCKING GUNS.

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GTA V Screenshots Released... But Just 2 Of Them

Rockstar, it seems, are the masters of the cocktease. Only releasing 2 screenshots of GTA V?! What is that?! That's like being told you're going to have sex, she strokes it once and rolls over "I didn't say when" then expects you to get on with your night. We need more! Looks pretty though, I'll give 'em that!

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Daily News - 8th July 2012 - Nintendo's eShop Unification, Walking Dead FPS, Final Fantasy VII PC and More!

Nintendo Unifying eShop Accounts For Wii U

In a shockingly sensible move, Nintendo are going to be linking your 3DS and Wii U eShop profiles together, so that you can buy games for either system from either store, in a way similar Sony do with the PS3 and PSP/Vita. A Nintendo rep said the following:

"A unified account system will be implemented later this year with the launch of the Wii U. Eventually this same account system will be made compatible with Nintendo 3DS systems. At this time we have no additional details to offer and nothing to indicate how or if this will work outside the United States and Canada."

Buying stuff for the Wii was a pain in the arse, and I hear the DSi Store wasn't much better, so it's encouraging to see a move like this from Nintendo, though we need to see more coming to the Wii U to make people happy, I'd wager.

The current eShop is far from Nintendo's greatest achievement.

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The Walking Dead First Person Shooter In Development By Activision

In a move that will cause rolling eyes and tuts across the world, Activision are making themselves a juicy cash-cow in the form of a Walking Dead FPS. We don't know much right now except that it'll be out in 2013 for all the platforms, and that it will be based on the show's universe and follow some characters from the show. The game will centre around show fan-favourite Daryl and his mega-racist brother Merle as they male their way to Atlanta from Georgia. You'll have the option of either shooting zombies or stealthing your way past them and you'll meet ther character along the way who with either help you or screw you over. It doesn't sound too bad on paper, but the game is being developed by Terminal Reality, who have previously worked on such turd-fests as Ghostbusters: The Video Game  and, oh dear, Star Wars Kinect. Keep your hopes low folks. Super low.

Definitely the best character from the show. Could be interesting.... But will almost definitely also be terrible.

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Final Fantasy 7 For The PC Is A Thing That's Happening

Apparently 'Coming Soon' to a PC near you will be a port of the classic Playstation 1 game Final Fantasy VII! Remaining largely unchanged since 1997. The game will require you to have XP or higher and will have basically no hardware requirments, so it's going to be easy for everyone everywhere to play. The game will feature achievements, cloud (haha) saves and, more importantly, something called character boosters, which will let you increase your HP, MP or Gil to their maximum at the push of a button. The additions actually make this an enticing prospect! Much moreso than a straight-up port. good qork square! Now get it here soon...

Revisiting Midgar will be bittersweet I'm sure, but infinite Gil? That'll be fun!

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And Finally...

Minecraft Version 1.3 Will Come Out 1st August

The update will add things like writable books, traps and more multiplayer/single player crossover.

Pokemon Black and White 2 Sell 2 Million Units In 2 Weeks

True, those new Pokeon suck, but Japan loves them anyway!

Minecraft Game Of Thrones is pretty sick.

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Daily News - 2nd July 2012 - Fez Creator Making Games, KotOR Collection and Battlefield Premium Is Doing Okay

First thing's first: Sorry for being so terrible with updates. There was very little news for a few days; and then I wrote my Diablo 3 review; and then that was quickly followed by a weekend trip to London for the Starcraft 2 UK Championships. But here we are, almost a week since the last news post, and I think there's just about enough news to justify telling you fine people about it. Happy faces all round, I say!

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Fez Creator Phil Fish Working On 2 New Games

Fez is the kind of game where afterwards, you almost question the sanity of the person whos idea it was. Were they a conspiracy theorist, or a serial killer, or maybe just a regular crazy-person-who-is-also-a-genius? Who knows! Well actually, we do. His name's Phil Fish, and he just kinda likes making games. Fez was his first and was so face-meltingly impressive that people are itching to see what emerges from his brain next. According to a speech he gave last week, he has 2 upcoming games under his belt:

"I'm working on two games with friends. I started working on one of them during the development of Fez, but I had to leave it to focus on finishing Fez. It is difficult to decide which game you are going to dedicate to, it may be something that will occupy many years of your life."

I can only imagine what Fish can do with another few years time working on a game, and by then, hopefully I'll have broken through the emotional barriers Faz put me behind.

I see those pixels in my nightmares!

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KotOR Collection For PC Outed By Amazon

It seems as though an entry on the USA Amazon website indicates some kind of Knights of the Old Republic bundle featuring both games at a discounted price. I tried playing both KotOR 1 and 2 quite recently and hated both, so I think it's fair to say this is the only post you'll see on it here, barring some problem with it. The bundle will be available for $19.99 (£12.75) whenever they decide to confirm it.

You wanna play something set 1,000 years before this? DO YOU FUCK AS LIKE!!!

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Battlefield Premium Nets 800,000 Subscribers

Not a huge amount to add here, other than that 800,000.... is a lot of poeple. Congrats Dice!

Such a beauty, if I get a decent PC 1 day it may look this for me too!

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Daily News - 25th June 2012 - Mass Effect 3 Extended DLC Tomorrow, Black Ops 2's Massive Zombie Mode and Resident Evil 6 Collector's Edition

That Mass Effect 3 DLC Will Be Here Tomorrow (But Not On PS3)!

Well this fucking crept up out of nowhere! Bioware are apparently done and happy with the changes they've made... well, I say happy, here's what Casey Hudson had to say:

"Ultimately our passion is entertaining people, so delighting them with our stories and giving them amazing worlds to escape to, that's what we love to do, so in this medium it just wouldn't make sense for us to make some kind of artistic statement, and then turn our backs on it forever.

There was some feedback that we can't address. There are people who just outright rejected the whole concept of the endings, and wanted us to start from scratch and redo everything. And we can't do that because that's not our story, we wouldn't know how to write that story.

What excites us is the challenge of learning how people consume our stories, so it's a learning process for everybody. And then incorporating that feedback, that's how we make our work better.

You can never completely satisfy everyone. We've seen a whole range of feedback, ranging from people who wanted a total redo, to people who had concerns and questions about the original endings, to people who loved the original endings and have told us they don't want to change anything."

Not a boatload of confidence but one things for sure, however this thing turns out it's a pretty massive landmark moment for gaming. What is encouraging is the fact that this ending clocks in at an impressive 1.9GB. You can do a lot with almost 2 gigs, which means a lot of content. It's fascinating stuff. The content is free (ofcourse) and launches on Xbox, PC and PS3 in America tomorrow, but European PS3 owners will have to wait a week. For what reason we do not know. Poor Playstationers.

Fuck those Reapers up again... For the first time

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Black Ops 2's Zombie Mode Quickly Sounding Like The Best Thing About Black Ops 2

Details are emerging about Call Of Duty: Black Ops 2's new and improved zombie mode and it's starting to get me pretty flipping excited! They're building the mode this time entirely within the game's multiplayer engine, which means expanded player numbers and possibilites:

"The zombies mode is being developed in with the multiplayer engine, so you can imagine taking everything we can do in multiplayer and seeing how that's applied to the co-op mode.

The team has talked about things like four-vs-four and a range of new modes that we will get into down the road, but I can tell you without a doubt that it is easily the most ambitious and biggest zombies universe that we've ever attempted."

That quote come from Joe Rafacz, Director Of Communications for Treyarch. The absolute most exciting thing for me is his use of the word "universe". I foresee some kind of persistence in the game mode and levelling seperate from the regular multiplayer. That's my wish anyway. Come on you zombies! Kick some ass!

You think those horses in that trailer animated them-fucking-selves?!?

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Resident Evil 6 Collector's Edition Revealed. Not As Good As Japan's

The collector's edition of Resident Evil 6 we're getting is The bundle contains the game, an Ivy University Hoodie, Avatar or 'Dynamic Theme codes' depending on whether you get Xbox or PS3 versions, a Zombie Steelbook, a concept artbook and it all comes in a box designed to look like a Needle Bomb. Now that all sounds well and good (or more acurately, bad) until you remember what Japan's getting. Japan gets. An authentic. Leon S Kennedy. Leather jacket. And it looks. Fucking. SICK. That bad boy will set you back a cheeky £800 though... so maybe don't get it.

Here's what we get...

...AND HERE'S JAPAN'S!!! FUCKING SEXY AS FUCK!!! ARGH!

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Daily News - 22nd June 2012 - Downloadable Game Collections, Wii U Price Potentially Revealed, Okami HD, Final Fantasy 7 News and LOADS More!

'That Game Company' And Ubisoft Both Readying Collections Of Their Best Downloadable Games

I tentatively use the word best in that headline because while That Game Company only have 3 games to their name anyway (pretty easy to make a compilation out of 3 games) Ubisoft may very well have dozens... though I'm hardly going to go looking that up right now, I have work tomorrow and more news stories to write! Now while I can't outright claim that these Ubisoft titles are the company's best downloadable games on offer, I can say with some confidence that they're 3 little belters. For the no doubt cheap-ass price, they're gonna be good 'uns to add to your collection. The games are listed below:

That Game Company Compilation:

Flow
Flower
Journey

Ubisoft:

From Dust
Outland
Beyond Good And Evil HD

TGC's will be out at the end of August, and Ubi's will be with us at the end of September.

I'll add this to my PS3 collection... I don't own a PS3 yet, but I'm getting this!

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Amazon Germany May Have Leaked Wii U's Price And Release Date

One of those stories you maybe wanna take with a few handfuls of salt this, but we have our first semi-exciting rumour regarding the Wii U. According to the source, which you can view here, the console will be out on December 21st and will cost just under 400 Euros, a whopping £322!!! That seems to go directly against Nintendo's whole "we're the cheap ones" philosophy, which strikes me as odd, though price and such can change rapidly. The site also has Zombi U and the Wii U Rayman Legends for just over £55 each, another steep price. It has me worried, but keeping my fingers crossed this is just a wildly overblown price and that it will drop significantly.... like, by a third or something. Soon.

"The key is to wait until there's a zombie right behind you. 2 birds, one stone!" - Is what his gravestone shall read.

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Newly Announced Downloadable Okami HD Will Have Move Support

Okami is a great game. Gorgeous, fun to play and with a cool twist on not only gameplay in general, but that Legend Of Zelda formula which is just so hard to get right. I played the game on the Wii and had fun, which leads me to believe that the Move version will work just fine with the game. Expect it to come out sometime in the next month or 2, and to be less than £15. If you have a PS3 and there's any joy in your heart, then I completely recommend it. (And here's a small tip, free-of-charge: The last flower's on the cunt's motherfucking HEAD. HIS HEAD. Commit this fact to memory!)

This is an IN-GAME SCREENSHOT! Imagine how good this is gonna look in HD!!!

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Final Fantasy VII Coming To Steam?

It seems so, as this leaked domain registration suggests. There's been no confirmation as yet but all signs point to a Steam version of the game with achievements, cloud saves (lol) and the ability to do a little light cheating with those character boosters. Depending on the price I could totally see myself playing FF7 again, unless those graphics are uglier than I remember, which is almost certainly the case... Well, I don't wanna make myself depressed so I'll look for screenshots from Advent children instead.

Spoilers?... I guess?...

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And Finally...

Next Saints Row Game Named?

Temporarily (though hopefully permanently, if you ask me) titled 'The Next Great Sequel In The Saints Row Franchise' it will incorporate the planned DLC Enter The Dominatrix into itself. I estimate fun.

Maybe Don't Buy Diablo 3 Digitally

Digital Buyers will be put behind a 3-day wall where they can only play the trial version. What what the the fuck fuck?!?

A Free-To-Play Timesplitters On The Way?

Crytek CEO Cevat Yerli absolutely loves the games, but would also love to make money off the game, if he can. The last Timesplitters wasn't too popular, so it's not guaranteed profit, which usually spells disaster before the game's even been started. We can hope though.

Dota 2 Will Sell Online tickets To It's Tournaments In It's Online Store

Pretty self explanatory story for a pretty shit-looking game.

Timesplitters 2 was sublime. I could do with a little more Timeplsitters in my life!

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Daily News - 18th June 2012 - Humble Bundle Breaks Record, A Draw Something Gameshow and Old Republic Free-To-Play

Humble Indie Bundle V Makes Over $5 Million

I posted about the fifth Humble Bundle pretty much as soon as it was brought to my attention, as it was, to be honest, probably the best collection of games I could ever imagine. The bundle contained Limbo, Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Psychonauts, Bastion, Braid, Superbrothers: Sword And Sworcery EP, Super Meat Boy and Lone Survivor, attracting more people to the bundle than have ever been attracted before. More than half a million people purchased the bundle, averaging just over $8.50 per person. It's a pretty big victory for the guys behind the bundle, who support the developers themselves and also the Child's Play charity, and with Humble Bundle V more than double their previous bests. If you missed it then I hope you're kicking yourself. It was awesome.

The further I stay away from Amnesia: The Dark Descent, the better!

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Draw Something TV Gameshow In The Pipeline

Hey, remember that game everybody played for like a month? Well it's soon gonna be a gameshow! Isn't that just the dumbest thing you've heard all day?! I can see it now "Wendy, you're behind the screen, your teammate Judy can't see you, so you know what that means! It's time to.... DRAW SOMETHING!" And the audience go wild as a 43 year-old woman struggles to accurately represent a unicycle via the medium of artistic scribbling. It's gonna be shit, and we all know it. Great stuff.

I just don't even know... Not even slightly.

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Star Wars: The Old Republic Devs Considering Free-To-Play

This quote by the game's lead designer, Emmanuel Lusinchi says it best:

"there are definitely good games out there and good games coming out, so of course all of this competition impacts your plan with what you want to do."

"The MMO market is very dynamic and we need to be dynamic as well" he explained. "Unless people are happy with what they have, they are constantly demanding updates, new modes and situations. So we are looking at free-to-play but I can't tell you in much detail. We have to be flexible and adapt to what is going on."

It's encouraging to see a developer get with the times, and respond to the trends, I just hope they don't regret doing it from the start!

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And Finally...

Splinter Cell Series To Become Movies?

Apparently we're close to a movie coming to fruition. Will it be poo? Yes. Yes it will.

Just Cause 2 Multiplayer Mod Back From The Dead

The mod disappeared for a while but it's back now and much more stable. (Sick as fuck) Video below.

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GameBanter Update - Sorry About My Lazy Ass

It's 7:47am, and I need to start getting ready for work soon, but I felt the need to come and do a bit of an apology. I haven't updated the site in what feels like ages now, I did the E3 podcasts and then took a bit of a rest, but messed my sleep pattern up completely for work with all my incredibly late nights (I had the week off from my job, why not). I was literally staying up all night, then going to sleep the next morning. I started work again on Monday and it's been... a struggle, for lack of a better word, getting back into some sort of coherent routine... But here I am, at 7:51, awake and just about to get ready for work, feeling like maybe I've clocked it. What this basically means is that I don't have to go to sleep at 5 o'clock every night after work because I'm exhausted, which in turn means I can get back to some pissing writing!

It's been a while since I wrote anything substantial for the website, so it's my mission to pull my finger out and get the fuck down to it. I've had a Diablo review in my head for about a week now that I need to get out, the same way you need to listen to that annoying song you've been humming all day; and I HAVE to write a feature about what did and didn't impress me at E3, because there was alot to like/hate about this year's show. Basically I know I've been a prick about it and I'm sorry. If it's any consolation, I now have to go get a shirt on and walk to my boring, data-entry job with no money to even buy dinner for myself. That'll show me! Ha! Suck it, loser!

...Now I feel sad.

Knowing I have to write something or risk hating myself, I can't help but feel a little bit like Asura...

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GameBanter Does E3 - Day 2: All The Podcasts Up

Totalling up at over 7 hours, my podcasting of this year's 5 E3 press conferences is complete. Coverage of Microsoft, EA, Ubisoft, Sony and Nintendo is now up and totally ready for y'all to listen to and (hopefully) enjoy. So download them all and listen to them instead of doing your data entry, of serving food, or taking phone calls tomorrow, come on, it's only 7 hours....

GameBanter E3 2012 Special - The Press Conferences: Day 1

GameBanter E3 2012 Special - The Press Conferences: Day 2

Best looking game was probably The Last Of Us. It looked unbelievable.

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GameBanter Does E3 - Day 1 Podcasts Now Up

So that's it, day 1 is over and done with, and now the internet trolling can begin. Microsoft, EA, Ubisoft and Sony came out with all their big guns for the year ahead and I was there the podcast ever second of the press conferences. I had my friends Jamie and Liam drop in while we watched the goodness, badness and straight-up weirdness unfold and a good, if tiring, time was had by all.

All 4 podcasts are up right now, for your listening pleasure, totalling in at around 6 hours of podcasts covering everything that happened, from Usher to Aisha Tyler; from Halo 4 to Assassin's Creed 3; from Kinect to Move, we saw it all. I'll be doing a full write up after Nintendo's press conference tomorrow, which will round out this year's lot of press conferences and leave me free to enjoy show floor coverage from all those other video game websites who are actually there (the lucky arseholes), but until then, it is 5:13am and my bed is calling. Hope you guys enjoy the podcasts, or at the very least give them a sympathy download, it's been a loooooooooooooooooong day!

GameBanter E3 2012 Special - The Press Conferences: Day 1

Ubisoft's Watch_Dogs is my surprise favourite game of the show so far, here's hoping Nintendo bring it tomorrow!

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GameBanter Blackout - Trying To Ride The Pre-E3 Spoiler Free Express

You may have noticed that the past few days I've not posted anything. This has been fairly deliberate. E3 officially kicks off on Monday with the Microsoft, EA, Ubisoft and Sony press conferences (Microsoft and Sony obviously being the bigger of the 4), and with it being so darn close to all that craziness, I don't want to subject myself to video games websites or Twitter, for fear of the inevitable spoilers they yield, instead I've kinda gone 'radio silence' on all that stuff. Instead I've been filling me non-writey time with Diablo 3 and, when not playing Diablo, thinking about the next time I'll get to play Diablo. It's been fun!

Anyway, current activities aside, E3 is basically tomorrow (dude, WHAT?!?) and I'll ofcourse attempt to write about what I can, but I also intend to podcast the press conferences as they happen and upload them, with any luck, right after the press conference finishes. Fingers crossed I'll have a podcast up after every press conference for those of you who can't watch them yourselves, probably with a front-page news post I'll update as the need arises.

I'm looking forward to it! Finally an excuse to do some hardcore podcasting, and get some use out of this damn microphone I bought! Exciting days ahead guys, exciting days!

When in doubt: Fillion

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