Windows 8 to restrict desktop customisation?

One of the very few choices we have left in this world is the ability to put a picture of family, friends or favourite frags on our desktop backgrounds, but even that facsimile of free will is being withdrawn. According to an interview over at our sister site TechRadar, customisation of Windows 8′s new Metro interface will be limited to decisions about the solid colour background.

The reason given is that a photograph wouldn’t scale and slide as the icons shift beneath your fingertips – although as the owner of an Android tablet I’m pretty happy with the way Google’s got around this issue. Android simply makes the desktop smaller than the image, so that it moves in the background as you scroll.

Thanks to iOS, though, desktop customisation is going out of fashion fast and it’s not surprising that Metro introduces more limits. Even Linux is becoming more proscriptive by the day. Still, there’s hope yet. I don’t think I’m not alone as being able to say that early Windows’ backgrounds enhanced my vocabulary, as simple as they were. I’m not sure I knew what ‘teal’ was until offered it as a choice of shade, and if I remember rightly I could spot a houndstooth background pattern long before I understood its sartorial significance. I certainly owe ‘cyan’ to the keyboard of a ZX Spectrum.

Perhaps Microsoft could liven up the options with language? Maybe a simple niveous, or a subtle leuchroic backdrop would help Metro icons stand out. If the default smaragdine doesn’t appeal, perhaps you’d prefer a sorrel or porraceous alternative?

For those curious to find out more about Metro, the full Windows 8 beta is planned to arrive at the end of next month. It’s worth holding off until then to make up your mind.

Get Mass Effect 2 and Dragon Age DLC cheap

Bioware points are going super cheap on one particular screen in the Bioware store. If you access the “add points” page through the Mass Effect 2 DLC section of the site, there’s an option to buy up 1200 points for £4.33. Buy three lots of this and you’ll have enough points to buy every single DLC episode, weapon pack and alternative skin pack available for Mass Effect 2. You’ll be able to use these points to buy DLC for the Dragon Age games, too.

Here’s a screenshot of the page you want. To get there, sign into the Bioware social site with your EA account and get to the Mass Effect DLC page like this:

Then pick a DLC pack and make your way to the checkout page. Click “add Bioware points” at the top and buy away. It could be an error. The 1200 points for £4.33 option isn’t available on the Dragon Age page. As such, you might want to snap this one up quick before it gets changed.

Warface screenshots have sliding, shooting and massive mech

Today I accidentally knocked over Owen’s coffee, and SAW THE FACE OF WAR. It looked like this: >:(

All the soldiers in Crytek’s free to play multiplayer shooter, Warface, make this face at all times, even in victory. Sadly they’re all facing away from the camera in the three new screenshots over on RPS, doing soldiery things like shooting mechs from the cover of a shattered tree stump. One chap is firing and sliding simultaneously, one of Crysis 2′s most common manoeuvres.

Warface will have class-based competitive multiplayer, co-op missions and a “constantly updated extensive PVE universe.” It’s built with CryEngine 3 as well, so it’ll be Maximum Pretty. See for yourself in these carefully posed shots.

Move over, Rosie the Riveter. Dinos coming through!

What if Hitler cloned a giant army of dinosaurs to fight for him during WW2? If you mounted two turrets onto a T-Rex’s face, could it still chuck bombs only using his huge mouth? These kinds of questions used to only be answered in our dreams, but thanks to the open-minded dev team behind Dino D-Day, we now do daily epic battle with Nazi dinosaurs during waking hours as well. This far-out FPS lets you enlist in either the dino-heavy Axis team or the gun-wielding Allies for an explosive, all-out deathmatch for supremacy.

The dev team’s made some glorious propaganda posters for this alternate reality war, and we have high-res versions of the five best right here. Let them them stomp around as your background. And make sure you don’t let your grandpa, who actually served in the war, see them—he just won’t understand.

Trine 2 review

Trine 2 is less of a sequel, and more radical cosmetic surgery. Frozenbyte have exploded the formula into a beautiful, rainbow-sodden spectacle. You don’t realise how few purple and green crystal-lit caverns there are out there, until you’re forced to stop and bask in one.

Trine is a fairytale platforming adventure, based around a magical floating sconce that’s bound together the souls of a wizard, a knight and a thief. The story itself is sweet enough – perfectly charming and a shade too earnest – but what really drives you, beyond the irresistible instinct in platformers to travel to the right, is the satisfaction that’s gained from solving the inventive physics-based puzzles.

Playing solo, you can swap between characters instantly as you require their different skills. The Wizard can levitate objects, conjure boxes, and eventually planks, allowing him to bridge gaps and create steps. But he’s all wizardy and crap in a fight, so tap him out when goblins and bosses appear.

Best use of purple in a forest setting 2011.

The Thief can fire a grappling hook and swing from wooden surfaces, and her bow makes her the best ranged fighter. Then there’s the Warrior, who dishes out the melee damage with his sword, deflects lava with his shield, and smashes delicate stuff from afar with his hammer.

If you’ve played the first game, you’ll be thinking “well, this sounds pretty familiar. Shouldn’t you be focusing on the new stuff?” The weakest thing about Trine 2 is how broadly identical it is to the first game. The energy bar has gone, and there’s online co-op play, but Trine 2 amounts to a skill reset and a bunch of gorgeous new levels.

The flexibility of the puzzles and the overlapping powers mean that often there’s no pure, one-way solution. In particular, the Thief’s agility becomes less essential as the Wizard learns to conjure more simultaneous objects. Solo, this doesn’t matter. Multiplayer changes the nature of the game.

First off, and this is such a superficial observation that I feel obliged to say it in a stupid way, it’s nice to do a solve on a puzzle with a friend. The first Trine had local multiplayer, bizarrely hidden in a sub-sub-menu, but Trine 2 brings it to the main menu, and adds online matchmaking and text chat. It’s now easy to drop into a game with strangers or pals.

He’ll feel that up his wizard kilt.

More fundamentally, dividing the powers between three players, instead of one player swapping between the powers as he sees fit, means that progress that could only previously be made by one character now has to be achievable by all three. Frozenbyte have addressed this in two ways. Firstly, the Wizard can levitate items that he’s standing on in multiplayer. But life’s too easy with a magic carpet.

A more elegant solution is Unlimited mode. Tucked away in the ‘host a game’ options, this allows multiples of each class on screen. It’s more chaotic, more flexible, and more fun. It solves some huffier moments, like when the Thief realises she’s a complete spare wheel. And that moment where the Wizard decides to avoid a boss fight, hanging out by the partner-regenerating checkpoints while an endless stream of Thieves and Knights do the work.

Trine 2 may retread a lot of old ground, but it’s beautiful. It’s like Frozenbyte are saying “Oh, did we make Trine? We meant this.” The same moderate puzzling challenge, the same characters, the same charm and some problems fixed.

And in other PC gaming news…

The word of the day was ‘transmogrification’. It’s the technique that allowed World of Warcraft high earner The Mogfather to transform the auction house into a fashion boutique, and it’s also the process by which Blizzard are hoping to turn Blizzcon 2012 into two games and an expansion pack. Meanwhile, The Darkness 2 demo offers you a taste of what it might be like to transmogrify into a gangster who transmogrifies into a tentacled primaeval monstrosity that transmogrifies people into terrified bits of meat.

Elsewhere in the world of PC gaming, Zynga continued to transform other people’s ideas into suspiciously similar-looking games, and the Raspberry Pi mini-computer set out to turn the kids of today into the programmers and computer scientists of tomorrow. All this and more after the jump.

• Edge explores the allegations of idea theft that Facebook game dev Zynga has incurred over the years.
• The chaps behind the brilliant Monaco take us through a level from the game.
• Beefjack track down some corridor-heavy footage of STALKER Online.
• Mode 7′s Paul Taylor writes in-depth about the making of Frozen Synapse over on Gamasutra.
• GamesIndustry.biz have a long talk with Eben Upton, the man behind Raspberry Pi.
• GAME tell Eurogamer that “a gremlin” removed PC games from their online store.
• IGN’s Keza MacDonald writes about the history of LGBT characters in gaming.
• With SOPA gone for the time being, RPS investigates other pieces of anti-piracy legislation with similar aims.

 
If you could transmogrify anything into anything else, what would you transmogrify? I would probably turn myself into a thesaurus.

Muster the Rohirrim! Lord of the Rings Online rides to Rohan

Fresh off the heals of the Lord of the Rings Online expansion that pit us against Saruman, Rise of Isengard, players will finally get to take their first step in the realm of Theoden himself, Rohan! I sat down with the game’s executive producer, Kate Paiz, to hear all about the new content, gameplay mechanics and adventure coming to ring-chasers this Fall.

Before we get into the specific details of the expansion, let’s focus on how players will get there.

The first update related to the Fall expansion is tentatively scheduled for this spring, and will return players to the footsteps of the fellowship by sending them to the Great River region. This area—south of Lothlorien and north of Fangorn—is the region that the fellowship traveled through before they were separated. The biggest new feature in this update will be the ability to summon Skirmish Soldiers (currently trapped inside the skirmish instances you run) in the general landscape. That’s right, your trusty companion in those countless skirmishes will no longer be relegated to helping you wipe the floor with Sauron’s minnions where only a few can bear witness, but will be free to help defend you as you travel all of Middle-Earth. While the exact mechanics aren’t finalized yet, Paiz said that players shouldn’t expect any major overhauls to combat mechanics of the soldier system.

I asked Paiz if my soldier would ever be able to join me in an instance if we’re running one man short, and she stated that it’s being looked at, but that she can’t say anything definite at this point.

It's okay, horsey. There are updates for you in this expansion too. Let the skirmish soldiers have their couple paragraphs.

As Turbine moves players through this Lone-lands-sized region, getting ever closer to Rohan, they’ll still release the usual near-monthly patches with quality-of-life fixes, bug fixes, and possibly a new festival as well. Paiz was light on details about the festival, but I’m excited to see what the next one will bring.

At some point in the Fall, the wait will be over, and Riders of Rohan will arrive like a thundering herd. The expansion will include the largest region LOTRO’s ever seen. Rohan is a vast kingdom, allowing players to level to the new cap of 85 while exploring its expansive terrain. And this massive zone will only cover the East plains of Rohan, so you’ll have to wait for the next expansion to visit the legendary Helm’s Deep–which is located near the Western border of the region.

Be careful where you talk. Horses are notoriously bad at keeping secrets.

While a new, huge region is cool and all, what really made me excited about the expansion was that it will introduce of mounted combat to the game. The generically named War Steed will become player’s newest ally in the fight again Sauron. These trusty companions will level with the players, and have upgradable armor to tweak their appearances and performance. This sounds like a great idea in theory, but I’m slightly worried that this might follow the path of Legendary Weapons, and become more headache and hassle for players to deal with than its worth.

Fighting on horseback will open up a whole new type of combat and leveling experience, Paiz explained to me. There will still be some traditional questing areas in the new zone, such as Amon Hen (where Boromir died and the fellowship split), but Paiz told me that the plains of Rohan will feature roving band of enemies that players will engage more fluidly. When you first spot the clouds of dust in the distance, you’ll have to decide if you want to flee the incoming riders and run away, or charge into the battle on your War Steed, clashing with the enemy. This sounds like it could be an interesting twist on the traditional MMO quest grind setup, and I’m anxious to see how it’s implemented.

Shall we dismount for combat? Neigh!

I pressed Paiz hard to answer my two most-burning questions, but when I heard her saddening answers, I kind of wish I hadn’t asked.

Do we have any chance of seeing the Battle of Helms Deep in this expansion? Negative.

Will Ent Session Play ever be a reality? Laughter that wasn’t very reassuring.

Swallowing my crushing disapointment, I tried to bolster my excitement for mounted combat with the stirring quote from J.R.R. Tolkien’s classic:
“Arise! Arise, Riders of Theoden! Spears shall be shaken, shields shall be splintered! A sword day… a red day… ere the sun rises!”