CD Projekt RED is pretty much my most favorite developer. They have made The Witcher and The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings. That makes them pretty awesome in my book. They are dope. They are fantastic. They are- okay okay it seems my point has been put across.

So you can imagine my reaction when they put up a blog post with a title saying “Join Our Studio Today”. My excitement levels increased to over 9000 and I could not read the rest of the post without a crazy maniacal grin on my face. Here’s a little more about the new IP:-

Our mature dark-fantasy world is well known around the world, though if you can’t stomach dwarves, elves or sorceresses who put their ample charms on display in Playboy magazine, we’ve got also something special that might be right up your alley! We’re looking for people who would rather work on an entirely new and different IP – a vast RPG for which we want to assemble the best possible staff. It represents an opportunity for you to create a grand new project from the ground up!

So it seems it’s a dark SF world. One that aims to fill up the void left by Mass Effect perhaps?

Joyous day, indeed.

Blizzard has been revealing small bits of about the Lore of the Diablo III universe, the playable classes, skills and developer diaries on their Darkness Falls, Heroes Rise portal since the past few weeks. And now, with just under a week to go for the game’s release – all content on the Diablo III has been completely unlocked on their portal. The last big reveal: a six-minute animated short film directed by Peter Chung and animated by the animation studio Titmouse.

Titled “Wrath”, the video shows Deckard Cain chronicling the battle between Angels of High Heavens and Demons of Burning Hells, well before creation of the sanctuary. Without further ado, check out the video and let me know your thoughts on it!

And oh, if you’re new to the Diablo series, Gamespot has a video unraveling the story of the Diablo universe – go check it out!

Ever been in this situation where you’ve purchased a kickass game during your work hours and can’t wait to reach home and start playing it? You’re eager to start the download. But you run into a small glitch. You can’t start the download till you have access to your home system and you can’t access your home system from work.

Luckily, Valve’s come up with a solution for this.The latest beta version of Steam client comes with a new feature: the ability to initiate remote downloads. You’ll need to opt-in into the beta program to utilize this.

Once you’ve updated to the new client, login to Steam Website, head over to Community -> Games. Now all games tied to your Steam account will be listed, as will be shown, the icon to start the remote install.

You can even pause and check the status of the download, all right from the website.

Pretty nifty feature this, to be honest. Hope it gets featured into the stable builds soon. Till then, you can always opt-into the beta and start using this.

EA has some really bright ideas about marketing this wonderful commodity called a “video game” to potential buyers called “video gamers”, who have a fairly good idea about what this commodity should be. However EA does not, which has been repeatedly shown throughout its recent debacles. Not a month goes by without EA doing something wrong that is so basic that one wonders just how they did manage to become one of the biggest game publishing houses in the world.

Players (“Rockers”) of Rock Band for the iOS – a $4.99 game on the iTunes – were recently accosted by a friendly popup that said:-

On May 31, ROCK BAND will no longer be playable on your device. Thanks for rocking out with us!

No apologies, no explanations. Just that rather verbose message. What gives?

Many are of the opinion that relicensing the music was too expensive for EA, now that they already had the players’ money, so they just let the game “expire”. See, when you ‘buy’ an app on the iTunes Store, you are just buying the license to use it, which can be revoked at any time by the licensing authority – in this case EA.

So what can you do about it? Nothing much, although you can try to get a refund from EA. You can also email Tim Cook of Apple and tell him how this sort of behavior from a licensing company is atrocious.

[Picture via Reddit]

Words with Friends is one of the best game available on Facebook app store which is very similar to the traditional Scrabble game. Words with Friends allows users to play the game with multiple friends online. I have been playing this game for a while and love it. The game also has apps for both iOS and Android allowing you to play the game on the go as well.

Considering that the game is played online there is a lot of chances for people to look up the dictionary to find words and score high points. So how do you score high points in Words with Friends? Well there are several ways to do it and I’ll list a few of them here.

The first option to find words out of the alphabets on your board in Words With Friends is Word Solver. This website provides you options to solve Scrabble words using various dictionaries including; Scrabble Tournament Word List, English Scrabble Dictionary, Words with Friends Dictionary and French Scrabble Dictionary among others.

All you have to do is enter the words on your board in the textbox provided and click on the "Find words!" button and it will automatically display the words you can create using your board. Another similar alternative for finding words is Lexical Word Finder.

The above websites can be used to create words from alphabets on your board. However, what if you want to add to already existing words created on the table? Well, there is a cheat for that too.

More Words is a excellent website which would help  you in many ways with solving words in "Words for Friends" and Scrabble in general. It is basically a word search engine which provides you with definitions, anagrams and more. More Words also provides users with an option to create words by adding letters to it and also search for larger words containing a particular word and words starting with or ending with your search.

So if you are looking to cheat in Scrabble or Words with Friends online, look no farther than More Words since it can provide you with the best help you can do with.

While there are many more websites that can help you with finding words for your Scrabble or Words with Friends game. I think the above mentioned websites should be more than sufficient.

P.S. I didn’t want to be a spoilsport and take the fun out of the game. However, considering that players can play at their own pace and have the internet to look up words this isn’t technically cheating or is it?

According to a huge scoop from Phoronix, Steam might just come to Linux. That’s right, Valve’s insanely popular video game digital distribution platform will finally see the light of day on /etc/Steam (Linux users please note that I am a newbie and as such am just throwing around filesystem names to appear “cool”)

For those that have doubted the exclusive Phoronix claims for quite a while now that the Steam client and Source Engine are in fact being ported to Linux, the doubts can be nearly laid to rest. Even I began to wonder how long it would take before the clients for their popular games would be publicly released under Linux. However, after confirming the information perhaps a bit too soon, their level of Linux interest is much more clear after spending a day at their offices.

After years of denying Steam on Linux it seems that Gabe Newell has finally let slip the codes of Linux into the fiery pit of an Internet guy. Michael Larabel, the founder of Linux focused website Phoronix had been personally contacted by Newell and subsequently he flew down to Valve’s headquarters and has apparently seen the build in person. How awesome is that? He also says that he will be posting the Linux screenies soon on his twitter feed. Soon, he says. Soon. Which translates to “not soon enough!”

#valve does have Linux games coming plus other very positive Linux plans… I’ll briefly post some screenshots and such tonight.

— Michael Larabel (@michaellarabel) April 25, 2012

Since the announcement, a barrage of followers and users have pretty much taken down the site where he promised a video will soon be uploaded.

welcome to all the new followers…. in a few hours when the load is back under control, I’ll post the brief #Linux video on @phoronix

— Michael Larabel (@michaellarabel) April 25, 2012

Excellent news? You bet. It is thoroughly welcome after Desura’s Linux-specific game search as well as Steam’s own SteamPlay Mac support. Cannot wait for the video!

With less than a month to go for Diablo III to be released worldwide, Blizzard threw in a real surprise earlier today by announcing that Diablo III beta will be open for all Battle.net account holders.

The open beta will run from Friday, April 20 12:01 p.m. PDT till Monday, April 23 10:00 a.m. and will allow you to play co-op with your friends, with each of the five available classes, limited to a level cap of 13.

So to get into the open beta, this is what you’ll have to do:

• Create/Login to your Battle.net account.
• Create a BattleTag
• Download the game client.

That’s it!

Blizzard calls this as a stress test to ensure that their servers are in order just before the big launch event. Korean players, however, won’t be able to participate in this stress. Blizzard has mentioned that players from Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau will be involved in a separate invite-only test. The closed beta will run in parallel to this stress test. While the stress test ends on Monday, the closed beta players will be able to play till the First of May, after which the beta ends.

Mac owners will be pleased to know that they aren’t left out this time, and Blizzard has separate Windows and Mac clients. So, what are you waiting for! Headover to Battle.net & download the client!

BioWare will be releasing a free DLC tomorrow, titled Mass Effect 3:Resurgence. Resurgence will be focusing on the multiplayer section of Mass Effect 3, with the DLC bringing in 6 new characters and 2 new multiplayer maps.

The new characters include

• Asari Justicar(available as Adept)
• Krogan Battlemaster(available as Vanguard)
• Batarian (available as Soldier and Sentinel)
• Geth(available as Engineer and Infiltrator)

Image courtesy BioWare.
The new maps featured are Firebase Condor, a warzone outpost located on one of Palaven’s moons and Firebase Hydra, an old abandoned Quarian colony converted into a dam facility.

Apart from these, the DLC also features goodies including:

• More weapons – the Striker Assault Rifle, Harpoon Gun and Geth Plasma SMG
• More reinforcement packs including Targeting VI, Shield Power Cells and Strength Enhancers.

Resurgence will be available for free on PSN, Origin and Xbox Live on the 10th of April in North America and the 11th of April in Europe.

Epic Games has cancelled Gears of War: Exile, Epic’s rumoured upcoming game for the Xbox 360. Speaking to Gamespot, Epic Games Design Director Cliff Bleszinski mentioned that the studio has ceased working on the game.

Quoting Cliff

Let’s just bury the hatchet now. Gears of War: Exile was an unannounced game that I can’t give any details about that has since been cancelled.

Gears of War:Exile was rumoured to be unveiled at E3 2011, with Epic Games having even gone to the extent of trademarking “Gears of War: Exile”. However, since then, very little has been known about the game, apart from rumours of it being a Kinect-supported rails shooter.

Cliff’s statement indicates a certain amount of frustration about it being canned, and we can only wonder what was the real reason for it being shelved.

Minecraft creator Notch’s new space faring Massively Multiplayer Online game called 0x10c has an ominous backstory of a doomed people waking up after billions of years of cryogenic sleep in a universe that is slowly dimming:-

In a parallel universe where the space race never ended, space travel was gaining popularity amongst corporations and rich individuals.

In 1988, a brand new deep sleep cell was released, compatible with all popular 16 bit computers. Unfortunately, it used big endian, whereas the DCPU-16 specifications called for little endian. This led to a severe bug in the included drivers, causing a requested sleep of 0x0000 0000 0000 0001 years to last for 0x0001 0000 0000 0000 years.

It’s now the year 281 474 976 712 644 AD, and the first lost people are starting to wake up to a universe on the brink of extinction, with all remote galaxies forever lost to red shift, star formation long since ended, and massive black holes dominating the galaxy.

That is definitely a lot of information to digest, but I am guessing Markus Persson (Notch) wanted it that way, since it is a hard science fiction (read: as grounded in plausible engineering and science as it is possible) video game with a player controlled ship that is guided by a player controlled and software emulated 16-bit CPU. That is correct, you are a space farer on a ship that is controller by a computer from the ‘80s, that you have to program on the fly to work in deep space. Sounds like fun? We bet!

The website for 0x10c mentions a lot features such as a fully working computer system, lots of engineering and knowledge-based game play and, of course, lots of space loot! The documentation for the working computer system has been released. There is also an unofficial FAQs available that answers a ton of questions!

Notch also mentions that this will be a game that features a monthly fee; probably not as much as the mainstream MMOs like EVE: Online or World of Warcraft, but is a sufficiently significant step in the annals of indie gaming history.