Gamernode: Latest PC News

Medic achievements revealed, Soldier tweaks coming...

If you've read this, you'd remember that additional achievements for the Medic class are on the way. But as you know, we Medic fans have been waiting for awhile.

Thankfully, German TF2 fansite TeamFortress2.de can alleviate our pains; they got their hands on the mind-boggling 36 new achievements for the healing class.

A few achievements are missing their descriptions and some are direct translations so it's only a matter of time till we know the full details. The list and the accompanied icons are listed below.

In related news, it looks like the next character class to be examined is the Soldier, according to this Steam thread. If you folks remember, the Pyro and Demoman got a few changes in the past, so for you rocket-jumpers, stay tuned for the Soldier tweaks.

1. Assist Capturer- Helping w...

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January 3rd GameTap releases

It's the New Year, so happy New Year! In the meantime, celebrate with this nifty GameTap update.

With a festive mood on their minds, GameTap is offering five new subscription games this week. The first game is a classic title from 2003, Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Covert Ops Essentials. Offering new levels not featured in the original game, players will also get an inside look to the world of covert operations.

The second game is a 1985 shoot 'em up title called B-Wings, which I'm sure arcade fans will recognize. The third game is a 1986 arcade/action title named Express Raider, which puts you in the shoes of a Wild West train bandit; who doesn't want to be one?

The fourth game is one of the first scrolling shooters ever made and the first shoot 'em up game where you can shoot in four directio...

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TF2 update, medic's future and free play weekend

This Team Fortress 2 update news bulletin mentions a few more changes to the team-based, multiplayer FPS.

Specific changes include a fix to the sniper quick-switch exploit, which allowed them to avoid zoom/unzoom times, a fix to the medic's syringe gun, which sometimes pushed players high into the air and additional player position data logging.

For medic fans (me!), you'll be happy to know that Valve is working on new features for the helpful healing class. This thread on the Steam forums mentions a player who received comments from Robin Walker about the medic's future. Apparently this is separate for the planned additional medic achievements.

"...We're working on a large new feature that'll add a set of interesting choices for Medics to make about their tactics, so in the future we expec...

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Black Mesa's Christmas media release

Black Mesa media releases are few and far between, so when the main site went down yesterday, the rumors started flying left, right and center. Thankfully, those rumors were proven to be true yesterday, when the main site came back online with a new news post, a bunch of new screeshots and hints of more to come.

What a nice Christmas present!

In the first site news since May 2007, Nathan "NateDGreat3" Ayres spoke of the progress of the mod.

"Development has been going great and proceeding steadily towards completion. The team has really settled into an efficient development pattern, with very few bottlenecks arising in development now. Internal milestones have been organized to ensure a timely release, and we've been doing a great job of hitting those milestones. It's been very exciting to ...

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Steam sale from now until January 1st

You can tell that Valve really loves the holiday season. Outside of the Portal-themed Christmas flashes and cards, you can be sure they're throwing one hell of a Christmas party. Unfortunately, we can't be there. Instead, we get some pretty nice discounts all across the board in the Steam store.

From now until January 1, 2008, save 10-50% on every game from every publisher in Steam's store. (Except Darwinia and Shadowgrounds Survivor, for some reason.) There's a lot of nice discounts, but here are some of the better ones to possibly spend more money on this Christmas season. Don't forget, you can also gift Steam games, so if you were desperate for any last minute presents...

Several games normally priced at $19.95 are on sale for $9.95, such as FlatOut 2, Peggle Deluxe, Psychonauts, Vampire...

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Crytek's present for you: free Crysis maps

Are you one of the four people here who can play Crysis? If so, Crytek brings you an early Christmas gift this year: the Crysis Tournament Mappack.

"Of course we have prepared a little Christmas present for you as well," community manager Cry-Alex wrote on the Crymod post. "Within the past few months and weeks we haven't been working on patches, SDK and Linux Server only, but also our Level Designers have been very active. Thus we are happy to announce you the release of the official ‘Crysis Tournament Mappack'.

Some of you might know this map pack series from FarCry already. We wanted to continue it for Crysis and have turned it into an official map pack that is being developed and approved by Crytek."

The mappack features 5 brand new multiplayer maps for Crysis: PowerStruggle - Desol...

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Mod DB's 2007 Mod of the Year awards enter phase 2...

It's that time of the year again! Time to vote for your favorite released and upcoming mods! Over on Mod DB, their sixth annual Mod of the Year contest has entered phase 2. After 20 days and over 40,000 votes, the first portion of the contest has ended, narrowing the field from 4,000 potential winners to 100. This next round will cut even more out, resulting in the five finalists for released mods, and upcoming mods.

You can head on over to Mod DB's Mod of the Year section to vote. If you aren't registered don't worry, because you don't need to be to vote this time. If you're really indecisive, you can also vote for several of your favorite mods.

In case you're wondering, I voted for Urban Terror and (obviously) Black Mesa. You obviously should vote for Black Mesa, too. It's meant to be. I ...

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First Crysis patch delayed till next month

So it's been two weeks, where's the first Crysis patch? According to inCrysis, the first patch ran into technical delays and it's expected to be released sometime next month.

Sorry folks, but it looks like more waiting is in-store for Crysis fans. In the meantime, Crytek released a more fleshed out patch change log, which offers a lot more fixes and tweaks than before.

Lastly, Crytek offered some information regarding the second patch for Crysis. They're planning the second patch to be a full content patch; it'll address stability, gameplay tweaks, balancing issues and new features for single player and multiplayer. Also it'll add Punkbuster support and the game's SDK.

The "major" patch change log is as followed:

Fixes

1. Damage dealt to vehicles when shot by LAW has been made consistent2. F12 ...

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December 20th GameTap releases

A little late, but better late than never! I just got home from college for the holidays, so what better way to celebrate that than with a GameTap update.

There are three new subscription games this week on GameTap. The first is Street Fighter III 3rd Strike: Fight for the Future, which was ported to Dreamcast back in 1999. Street Fighter III was released in three editions so 3rd Strike features additional characters, such as Chun-Li, Makoto and Remy.

Next is a 2006 action/RPG titled Mr. Robot from independent developer Moonpod. The game received pretty decent reviews and Moonpod's debut game, Starscape, was pretty acclaimed too. The last game is an action/beat 'em up title called Metal Combat from Solar Studios. You play a mutated heap of metal and you fight other heaps of metal in a junkya...

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The new Crysis rocket launcher. Lethal and tasty

We've seen all sorts of cool weapons in Gears of War, Resistance: Fall of Man, Halo 3 and others, but this Crysis weapon that was modded by a gamer takes the prize as deadliest weapon.

The rocket launcher was redone by "phresh" to not shoot rockets, but something far more evil and destructive. Nuclear tipped missiles? Bah, far too pedestrian and ineffective. What we're talking about is...chickens.

Now before you laugh, take a look at the video for yourself and see the carnage unveil as the rocket flames shoot out of the chicken's, er, booster.

Shooters will never be the same again. Oh, the Crysis gamer is also working on the frog edition of the X72-9 too.

I don't think I'm ready for that one yet. The chicken launcher was too intense for me. Check out the video--if you dare.

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PhysX physics cards only $50 in Japan

The PhysX physics card certainly hasn't been the success that Ageia were hoping for, but that could soon change.

Ageia has just announced a new deal with Japanese graphics card manufacturer ELSA, who are going to be start selling the PhysX cards in Japan. The cards will be known as ELSA Phynite X100s and will retail for around 6000 Yen, which is just over $50 USD.

The idea behind the Ageia PhysX card is similar to the idea behind graphics cards. Graphics cards were first introduced to help alleviate calculations from a computer's CPU, specifically calculations relating to 2D and 3D graphics. The PhysX card works in a similar fashion, handling calculations involving physics, allowing the CPU to work on other calculations.

With current Ageia PhysX cards still sitting in the $130-$180 USD price ...

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Duke Nukem Forever teaser trailer

In all of its glory, the teaser trailer for Duke Nukem Forever is now live. I'll gladly admit, seeing Duke again sent chills down my spine.

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More Half-Life after Episode 3

Just in case you couldn't figure this one out on your own, it appears that there's plenty of Half-Life left in the gaming industry's future.

In a recent interview, Valve's Doug Lombardi confirmed that the series will survive beyond the upcoming Half-Life 2: Episode 3, and that should definitely make gamers happy.

"We haven’t announced anything specific, but Half-Life won’t end at Episode Three – hang on to your crowbars!" said Lombardi.

That statement is pretty unclear, however. We don't know if it means that more episodic content is on the way, or if it means that there's a full-blown Half-Life 3 on the horizon. Either way, I've got my crowbar on standby.

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S.T.A.L.K.E.R. MMOG a possibility

GSC Game World, developers of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl (SoC), recently allowed S.T.A.L.K.E.R. fansites to submit questions in relation to the current game, as well as the upcoming Clear Sky prequel.

One of the questions, "Will there be S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Online?", garnered an interesting response from the devs.

"If it is the cooperative mode, then no, there will be none. Even at the time of development of the first part of the game we said that a cooperative mode is impossible, since Life Simulation would be different at each computer. Synchronizing it would be practically not doable."

Now this might not seem like much, a little dissapointing at the most, but thankfully the devs gave a little hint of things to come with the next sentence: "If you mean an MMOG, then we are seriously c...

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AMD delaying ATI R700 until 2009

AMD has delayed the release of the new R700 series of graphics cards until 2009, with the company looking to cut capital expenditures in order to return to more profitable waters.

2008 will only feature ATI R6xx (ATI Radeon HD 2000-series and ATI Radeon HD 3000-series) graphics cards, leaving AMD in a tough position, given NVIDIAs current dominance of the graphics card market, thanks to their new 8800GT and 8800GTS cards.

During it's Analyst Day, AMD revealed that "the Leo platform will feature ATI R6xx cards and is due in 2008, whereas its successor -- the Leo Refresh platform -- that is scheduled to arrive in 2009 and will sport code-named ATI R7xx graphics cards. In addition, ATI R700-series graphics will be featured with Kodiak and Cartwheel platforms, which are also scheduled to debut i...

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Duke Nukem Forever trailer tomorrow at noon CST

Much like opening an eagerly anticipated gift during Christmas, George Broussard from 3D Realms announced that a teaser trailer for Duke Nukem Forever will be released tomorrow (Wednesday) at noon CST.

For Duke Nukem fans, this will be music to your ears since this will mark the first new Duke Nukem footage since the E3 2001 video.

The game Duke Nukem Forever has been promised to gamers for about a decade now. In the gaming community, this has been a running gag as the title of the game certainly follows its name...it's been virtually forever since it was first set in motion in April of 1997.

Who knows, since we're finally seeing the trailer appear, maybe we'll see the game show up ten years from now too?

Follow-up comments from Broussard on Shacknews advocate that the teaser trailer will jus...

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NetDevil reveals Lego Racers and new game division...

Auto Assault developer NetDevil announced the formation of a new web games division today. In addition, the company announced Lego Racers, its first new game. It'll be a flash-based racing game set for release in early 2008.

Lego Racers will feature several upgradable cars, a few online racing competitions and an online scoreboard. Players can also race offline through different training modes.

Speaking about Lego Racers, Scott Brown, NetDevil's president, said that while the division's first game will be aimed at kids, they're planning several other games not aimed at kids.

"We have several games planned that are not aimed at kids that we hope to announce soon. A good example of the direction that we hope to follow would be comparable to how Pixar makes movies for kids, but they are obvious...

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Crysis--3,000 stacked barrels all fall down

You may have been tweaking your PC in order to squeeze the best performance out of Crysis, but one gamer has put his time and effort into something much more important than mere game play and graphics of the title.

He decided that stacking explosive drums on top of each other, to the tune of 3,000, was a worthy project. (We'll, it is Christmas break after all...)

We've all done this on a smaller scale before with our games in attempting to create a nice chain reaction effect, but 3,000 barrels? This guy should get some sort of award or commendation for his efforts.

To see them all go crashing down and then everything going boom, check out the video.

[via gamevideos.com]

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Sales of UT3 for the PC stall drastically

Being a mad UT fanboy, this news has got me a little worried. Seems that in the month of November, only 39,995 units of Unreal Tournament 3 for the PC were sold in the US. The expected number of units to be shifted was 70,000 so to only move half that number is not a good sign. 

Crysis on the other hand, which was expected to move just over 68,000 units, ended up with over 86,000 units being shifted. Of course all of these numbers pale in comparison to the console sales, so hopefully with the release of UT3 on the PS3 a few days ago, and a 360 release sometime next year, the sales for UT3 will be a lot larger. Christmas could also help to push UT3 PC sales up.

Being a PC enthusiast and gamer for many years, it is both annoying and saddening to see PC sales drying up, while the console sales ...

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December 13th GameTap releases

It's Thursday; I'm enjoying a nice snow day, so why don't you enjoy a nice GameTap update.

There are three new subscription games this week on GameTap. First up is a decent action/RPG called Seal of Evil, which was released in 2005 from Strategy First and Object Software. If anyone remembers Object Software's 2002 action/RPG Prince of Qin, Seal of Evil is its prequel.

Next up is a 2004 card game from Strategy First called Texas Hold 'Em Poker. If you wanted to get good at Texas Hold 'Em, here's your chance.. The last new subscription game is Brigade E5 New Jagged Union from Strategy First. This game was pretty terrible, unfortunately, so I would honestly skip this one.

In addition, the list of free-play titles has been expanded to 70, which equals to two new free-play titles this week. The tw...

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