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Three Words I Said To The Man I Defeated In Gears Of War That I'll Never Say Again 
New Doom 3 For Xbox 360 And PlayStation 3 Supports Head-Mounted Displays 
Far Cry 3 And The Stranger In A Strange Land While it’s fairly common these days for console games (Wii excepted) to launch with widescreen/16:9 support, PC games aren’t so fortunate. Even in 2008, with widescreen monitors becoming so popular that even the Xbox 360 natively supports many of their resolutions, a ton of PC games don’t ship with proper widescreen support. Widescreen Gaming Forum to the rescue!. If there’s a workaround, you’ll find it there. If there’s complaining to be had, it’ll start there. So it’s great seeing that the site have just held their first “Widescreen Gaming Awards”, to both honour and shame the best and worst in supporting widescreen gaming on the PC.
Last week seemed to go pretty well, so we’ll keep on running with the NPD/Steam tag-team. The NPD charts, they’re as…predictable as ever, with plenty to please Maxis and Blizzard fanboys the world over. The Steam charts, they’re a little more fluid, with Far Cry 2 shooting straight to #1, closely followed by pre-sales of Fallout 3.
The Unterhaltungssoftware Selbstkontrolle, or USK, are Germany’s classification board. And as you may already be aware, they’re a conservative bunch, banning games that even Australia let slide. But this, this is new. Witness Germany’s box art for Valve’s upcoming zombie co-op shooter, Left 4 Dead. Notice anything, uh, different?
Seems Ubisoft’s free-roaming gun safari has “done a BioShock” and fudged its widescreen, with gamers on the trusted widescreengamingforum quickly noticing that rather than render the game in true 16:9, all Far Cry 2 does is crop the top and bottom of the screen. See pic above for reference. Disappointing, Ubisoft; we buy widescreen monitors to see more of the game, not less. Hopefully they can copy 2K a second time, and get a patch out to fix this.
Far Cry 2 [WSGF]
Gonna try something new this week. Something a little…fairer. While we appreciate the lengths the NPD Group go to in providing us with weekly sales data for the PC gaming market, the fact they cover only bricks-n-mortar sales skews the data somewhat, what with so many people buying their shit from Steam these days. So this week, we’re going to run two charts. The NPD charts, and the Steam charts. Give you a clearer overall picture of how the PC market’s shaping up.
Hey. PC gamers. In case you’ve forgotten, you need to know that one of the most exciting PC games in development at the moment isn’t coming from Valve. Or from id, or from Relic, or from Creative Assembly. It’s coming from Eskil Steenberg. He’s at work, single-handedly, on the MMO Love, which although difficult to describe, basically amounts to a co-operative MMO, built atop procedurally-generated worlds, that plays out like a summer cocktail made from Populous, Spore, shooters and everything in between. At the link below you’ll find the game’s debut trailer, and while you’re watching it, remember: everything you see is the work of one man.
Love: Debut Trailer [Rock, Paper, Shotgun]
It’s not all Tokyo Game Show here at Kotaku. BlizzCon’s going down as well, and as Blizzard are prone to do, they’re following up their major announcements with new media. in this instance, two new Starcraft 2 clips, one Protoss v Terran, one Zerg v Terran.
Blizzard have released the specs sheet for their upcoming World of Warcraft expansion, Wrath of the Lich King. And, yes, being World of Warcraft, they’re nice and low (though they have been upgraded from previous WoW specs, just a pinch). So low that it feels good typing them here, like we jumped in a way-back machine and set the “TIME” dial to “The Good Old Days”. PC users will need a 1.3ghz processor and 512MB/1GB RAM (XP/Vista), while Mac users will need a PowerPC G5 1.6 ghz or Intel Core Duo. Full specs after the jump.
The latest bricks-and-mortar PC sales charts are in. They cover the week of September 21-27. As you expect, the words EA, Maxis and Blizzard feature prominently. But then so do the words Crytek, Firaxis and Traveller’s Tales, so please, enjoy the variety.
You may not have heard of Uwe Boll’s 2007 film Seed. Mostly because it wasn’t based on a game, and as such, would have received absolutely zero press (as opposed to the slight amounts of press he gets from a strangely-obsessed gaming media). That means that the DVD version of the game’s going to be a tough sell! So to sweeten the deal with Boll’s primary (only?) fanbase, the DVD box set is going to come bundled with a copy of Advent Rising on the PC. Hopefully because the distributors found a few thousand copies lying around, and not because Uwe Boll is planning on doing an Advent Rising movie.
