The Tears of the Hextadon map pack consists of two new maps for Brutal Legend’s completely non-real-time strategy online multiplayer mode. The Circle of Tears map is completely surrounded by water, while the Death’s Fjord map takes place in an icy mountain path, where players must brave wide open spaces in order to reach the fan geysers needed to generate units.

Double fine’s Tim Schafer explains the map names.

“I play Brütal Legend online every night,” said Tim Schafer, President of Double Fine Productions. “And I need more maps! Circle of Tears is named after the crying of my vanquished foes on the battlefield, and Death’s Fjord is obviously a tribute to my Nordic ancestors, and their love of fan geysers and… Well, actually I just thought the name was cool. See you online!”

He doesn’t explain, however, why the PlayStation 3 version of the downloadable content is free from the November 5 release until November 19, while the Xbox 360 pack costs 400 Microsoft points as soon as it hits Xbox Live on November 3. Perhaps EA is trying to drum up more PS3 business? We’ve contacted EA about the reasoning and will update as soon as we hear back.

The site is running a post-mortem about the game all week, which would be interesting enough based on Shadow Complex’s roots as a dream project of the brothers running Epic-owned Chair Entertainment.

The look back at the game is all the more interesting due to the fact that people who make Super Metroid-style adventures seldom talk publicly about the process of designing the games and the maps that serve as their core feature.

Here’s a bit from Chair’s chief designer, Donald Mustard:

“We created these little grid blocks and lines. We did a lot of it by hand at first, but then we went and transcribed it all into [Adobe] Illustrator…you could literally see a side view of the map, it was all just grey, with lines and stuff. And we had a stick figure that represented the player, and we’d say, ‘Ok, the player can jump this many units high.’ And we had a little graph that showed how high you could jump and how long it would take to build up to a speed run and stuff like that. So we’d ‘play through’ the entire game with this little stick figure guy.”

Check out the MTV post for a bigger look at this prototype map and for more on how the game came together.

Exclusive: ‘Shadow Complex’ Prototype Map Revealed [MTV Multiplayer]

Playing an unreleased title on Xbox Live is typically an indicator the game has been moved out of development on Microsoft’s PartnerNet, and has moved into the certification process.

But more importantly, the people who spied IW level designer Alex Roycewicz (gamercard above) and community guru Robert Bowling playing the game say they spotted these map names in free-for-all and team deathmatches: Afghan, Underpass, Highrise, Derail, Invasion, Estate, Wasteland, Favela, Terminal, Rust, Scrapyard and Quarry. This forum thread added three other map names: Uprise, Sub Base and Skidrow. The names don’t give up much regarding the game, but those are a solid 15, just like the first Modern Warfare. McWhertor played two of these, Favela and Highrise, if you want to read more about that.

Here also, thanks to reader Richard K., is a video showing FourZeroTwo getting his multiplayer on in a party last night.

Modern Warfare 2 Now Playing on Xbox 360 [WePlayCoD]

The Red Faction Guerrilla Multiplayer Pack, due out on September 17 for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, introduces players to the new Bagman and Team Bagman game types, with the eight new maps included playable in any of the game’s multiplayer modes. I’m not sure what Bagman and Team Bagman entails, but I’m sure there will at least be a bag, a man, and in at least one case, a team.

Look for the Red Faction Guerrilla Multiplayer Pack next month, when it goes on sale for $US6.99 or 560 Microsoft points. In the meantime, here is a whole slew of screens to get the old Martian juices flowing.

Valve have released a couple of videos showing the evolution of a Team Fortress 2 map (Viaduct), from planning to completion, as the team tinkers with not just the look of the map, but the layout and design as well.

The clips are accompanied by an interesting run-down courtesy of Valve’s Corey Peters, which basically boils down to: We do a lot more work getting these maps right than any of you have probably ever realised.

This point ain’t gonna cap itself! [Team Fortress 2]

You can head over to Cartagen, the mapping utility, and see for yourself. It runs in HTML5 and does not require Java or Flash. Punch in a landmark and off you go. (I did Big Ben, above).

London Mapped in Warcraft II Style [Boing Boing]

The Elven Legacy free expansion for Runes of Magic adds several new areas to the Taborean map, from the North East’s Weeping Coast to the Savage Lands, a rainforest area that serves as the naga-infested home of the elves. Frogster is adding the obligatory lava area, in the form of the Aotulia Volcano region, its ash-filled skies a stark contrast to the peaceful tranquility of the Elven Island, which I assume was named after Bob Elven or something.

I’ve included the game’s previous world map so you can see just how much is being added to the game come September. I kind of like what they’re doing with the place.

While the first round of Halo Wars downloadable content focused on new game modes, the Historic Battle pack is all about delivering new places to strategically kill the enemy. You’ll get two new 1v1 maps in Barrens and Blood River; Memorial Basin, which is a 2v2 map full of wide open spaces; and Glacial Ravine, a large map bisected by snow-capped mountains, perfect for 3v3 play, as seen above.

The pack also comes with four brand new achievements. Add up to 100 points to your gamerscore with:
• Tour Coming Through: Hot drop 50 squads to your Covenant Leader in a single game on Memorial Basin (30 points)
• Never Leave a Man Behind: Finish a game with 5000 net resources contributed to your teammates on Barrens (15 points)
• Drain Cleaner: Kill 20 enemy squads with a continuous Covenant Leader Power on Memorial Basin (30 points)
• Killjoy: Disrupt 5 active Leader Powers in a single game on Blood River (25 points)

The Historic Battle add-on is due out on July 21st for 800 Microsoft points.

Memorial Basin

Blood River

Barrens

If the above image seems familiar, that’s because the new Heretic map revisits Halo 2’s Midship map, allowing players to plasma grenade each other all over the interior of the Pious Inquisitor. From purple reign we move on to the Forerunner Citadel, which features tight spaces where communication is key. Finally we make a stop off at Old Mombasa in the Longshore map, built for large scale battles over control of this strategically important port.

They seem like a lovely trio of places to get killed in, and that’s what I’ll be doing when Halo 3: ODST drops this September.

The latest patch for Call of Duty World at War hits the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 today, bringing with it a free daytime version of the Makin multiplayer map.

Just a re-lit multiplayer map? Isn’t that a bit cheap? No, it’s not cheap – it’s free, and they’ve done a little more than simply changing the day, modifying some of the paths and cover found on the map in order to change things up a bit. You can’t really scoff at free, especially when it’s riding on a patch that fixes many of the game’s more serious issues, like stat resets, multiplayer map exploits, and rocket jumping, which while incredibly handy was also incredibly unrealistic.

The new Makin Day map downloads automatically with the PlayStation 3 patch, while Xbox 360 users can download it once they’re online in the game. For a full list of changes in the patch, check out the official World at War forums for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions respectively.