The PC Centric Extravaganza 07.01.08

Posted by Chris Evans on 07.01.2008

With Diablo III leading the news what else can Chris Evans throw into the PC Centric Extravaganza this week?

The PC Centric Extravaganza 1st July 2008

What happens when you go away for a few days? Well when you get back you realize you have probably missed a whole load of PC news, but that the most important news has yet to break. That most important news was the announcement of Diablo III.

However due to my being away for a few days at the beginning of the week this column may seem a bit lighter on the number of news pieces than normal, however I have thrown in my experience of earning the OMGWTFBBQ Achievement in Team Fortress 2 which was quite fun to write, even if as Tom Francis pointed out to me, it wasn't quite up to scratch when compared to his monstrosity.

Read on!

Diablo III

It may have taken months of agonizing waiting for some people, but Diablo III has finally been unveiled as we guessed it would be at the Blizzard Invitational today.

The first cinematic trailer and gameplay videos can be found on the new Diablo III site or you can view them both below.





Some first impressions - they have taken the classic Diablo visual stylings and heavily updated them, but yet it is still unmistakably Diablo. There is a wonderful mix of 3D/2D graphics present and there is some very classy destructible environments.





Taking information gathered by Rock, Paper, Shotgun it emerges that Diablo III is going to have a focus on co-operative play, this will go hand in hand with a totally revised version of Battlenet which will go live with Starcraft II later this year.

The campaign will be of similar length to Diablo II with NPCs and story events taking place within the game world itself. There will also feature a variety of randomly generated and hand-made static dungeons.

The best guess on release is for Christmas 2009 on PC and MAC with Blizzard still having no plans to become a console developer.

More screens and game background on the Diablo III website.

OMGWTFBBQ

Upon witnessing that appear in the bottom right of my screen in Team Fortress 2 I was a happy man, the hunt for the achievement which had lasted all of five minutes was finally at an end. I had become a holder of the OMGWTFBBQ achievement, and I am proud to say that I did it legitimately.



After reading Tom Francis' bloggings on his quest to earn the OMGWTFBBQ achievement and Chris Livingston's take on it I decided to go out and focus on getting it myself.

I informed my comrades on the Rock, Paper, Shotgun Steam Group chat of my goal and received numerous 'good luck' messages. Well maybe not quite, but I was given various hints about strategy and whatnot.

I jumped onto the PC Gamer Team Fortress 2 server, went through two rounds on some map that I have already forgotten the name of, then we got onto cp_Well and map which I have enjoyed immensely in the past few weeks. I went to the other side of the tracks and saw two possible victims, a Heavy who was my initial target and a Soldier who was running in my direction. I whipped out my Shotgun, hit G and hoped for the best.



I held my breath as my Pyro went through the motions of the Haduoken and suddenly there it was my achievement, I had done it. OMGWTFBBQ, perhaps one of the most ingenious acheivements Valve have put in their games, just behind the Gnome in Episode 2 was mine. A great day in the land of Team Fortress 2.

Cosmic Sunder Elements

Some of you may remember me talking about Welsh developers Dark Rock Games a few months ago and talking a bit about some projects they had in the works.

Well today I can finally unveil Cosmic Sunder Elements to the public. Cosmic Sunder is a 2D Space Invaders/Peggle mash-up with a whole bunch of personality thrown in to boot. I have been playing the demo for the past few days and have had a great time with it.



Simple straight to the point games are a rareity these days, but Cosmic Sunder seems to be one of those rare games. It provides good clean fun and is well worth checking out.



Take your spaceship, fire some spaceballs into space and score some points while earning power ups and more. Great fun.

Blood Bowl Trailer

Blood Bowl will be the latest game based on a Games Workshop entity, of which there have been loads! So moving on, Blood Bowl is being touted as a mix between American Football and Warhammer, and I guess with a whole heap of blood and violence thrown in for good measure. Blood Bowl is being developed by Cyanide, the team behind Pro Cycling Manager 2008 so it is interesting to see how a sedate cycling game developer can transition into making Blood Bowl. Hit the jump for a trailer.



Also of note is that Blood Bowl will be playable in both turn-based and real-time modes with a single-player experience which will allow players to manage their team by dealing with sponsorship management and the death of your players.

Expect Blood Bowl by the end of the year.

Klepacki working on Red Alert 3

So after my interview back in February with Frank Klepacki this new video comes out and shows that he is in fact returning to work on the Red Alert 3 soundtrack! Expect Hell March III goodness then come October.

Tally Ho!

Dunno what next weeks column will be like, got another week of just me and the missus, but regardless I will make sure you have something to read next week.

Tally ho!