Dead Space’s gratuitously gory space battles were its key selling point, and the ability to dismember various pustular space monsters never, ever got boring. One thing sorely missed in its vacuous setting was multiplayer, though. This time Developer Visceral Games has added a team-based multiplayer element to Dead Space 2 and despite some reservations it’s actually okay.

The multiplayer definitely, and somewhat inevitably, takes its cues from Singularity’s overlooked multiplayer campaign. In true Left 4 Dead style, you get to play as humans or hideous necromorphs.

The humans have weapons, the monsters have unique attacks. Play as The Pack, for example, and you’re a hideous baby thing able to pounce on humans and chomp away. The necromorphs also have a unique x-ray sight system, whereby they can see the human’s nerves and eyeballs as they panic.

The biggest problem is that Dead Space’s slightly clunky, slow controls remain; particularly when you’re playing as a human. The controls were fine in the claustrophobic confines of the USG Ishimura, where a slow turning speed meant you couldn’t quickly respond to an enemy attack. But in multiplayer, which is pervaded by twitch controls, it feels awkward and clumsy. Admittedly, we played the PS3 build; hopefully mouse and keyboard will make Dead Space 2′s multiplayer a must-play rather than a tacked-on addition.

Dead Space 2 is out on 28 January 2011.

I’m steaming of a Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings Digital Premium Edition Pre-order Christmas? Just saying…

Wow, the dodgy puns are endless with this new Steam promo. Load up your Steam wish list with ten or more items and during Steam’s ‘Give & Get’ sale they will randomly pick 30 accounts a day and give them the top 5 games in their wishlists for free!

It being a sale and all, games will be cheap. Amazing how that works. Today, for instance, Borderlands is a tenner, and the Indie Energy Pack is worth the £4 just for Galcon Fusion alone.

You can also buy a pack of multiple copies of one game to give out to your mates: 8 copies of Deus Ex for 8 quid or a 10-pack of Half-Life 2 for £14.

Steam’s ‘Give & Get’ sale starts today and ends Tuesday, November 30.

The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings is beginning to look like one of next year’s biggest PC games, thanks in no small part to its miraculous, home-brewed engine. Its draw distances are stunning, the lighting effects impressive, and the huge battles awe-inspiring and now GOG.com has announced it’s taking pre-orders of The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings Digital Premium Edition.

GOG.com has subsequently gone on to hint at a bright new, expanding future for the retro game download service.

GOG.com is owned by CD Projekt RED, the same company that’s developing The Witcher 2, which means it’s able to offer such gamer-friendly treats and what a good deal: as well as the usual 10% off, a free game “of five games” (why five?) the game will be DRM-free (as all games are from GOG.com) and include “free exclusive bonus content”.

All very good, but does this mean that GOG.com is throwing its hat (or monk’s hood) into the arena against the other digital download platforms, such as Steam and Direct2Drive?

Yes, and no. GOG.com had this to say when we asked them: “If there are publishers who would be willing to offer their new games on a similar basis as The Witcher 2 (DRM-free, fair price worldwide, loads of bonus content) then I’m sure our bizdev is open for negotiations”.

Theoretically then GOG.com could add new games to the ranks of retro titles, but as Lukasz Kukawski of PR man for GOG.com admitted: “This would probably require creating a new platform for Good New Games.” However, if GOG.com has a distribution service capable of selling Witcher 2 to the masses then it shouldn’t be too much of stretch to add other titles, surely?

GOG.com is open to digitally distributing other current game releases, as long as the games are DRM-free and fairly priced.

For now though GOG.com are “still focused on getting classic PC games as there are still hundreds of titles to re-release. So we’re not saying a definite “no” and we might start releasing new games someday in the future.”

Are there are any publishers willing to go DRM-free and charge a reasonable price then GOG.com wants to chat to you! It seems to me though that they would be better off tempting in small indy developers with favourable rates…

The “bonus content” for Witcher 2 turns out to be: “unreleased music from the soundtrack [naked lady elves singing?] HD wallpapers [of naked female elves?], avatars [of naked nubile elves?] and behind-the-scenes photos of the development team at work [Naked? Dressed as lady elves? Ouch, that's a mental image I did not want to create in my head...]“.

UPDATE – Steam has Witcher 2 Digital Premium Edition in the store for 10% off and includes pretty much all the bonus goodies GOG.com is offering – and possibly more as two papercraft game character dolls are listed too. This doesn’t quite sound like a “one-time special” for GOG.com alone.

Since the PM’s communications man can’t seem to stay out of the news, maybe David Cameron should try smoozing Valve’s Master of Media Intercourse, Doug Lombardi as a replacement? This is a man that knows how to spin bad news and make it feel good somehow. This arrived in the email post this morn:

Valve today announced that Portal 2 – the sequel to the ground-breaking title that won over 30 game of the year awards, despite missing its original ship date – will now be available the week of April 18th, 2011.

This two month slip not only marks the shortest delay in Valve’s proud tradition of delays, it represents the approaching convergence of Valve Time and Real Time. Though this convergence spells doom for humanity, it will not affect the new Portal 2 release date.

George Romero’s zombie classic, Night of the Living Dead has been given a Youtube ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ remake, Editing the Dead. I’d forgotten how dabba zombies looked in the 1960s, in an all-night office party bender kind of way.

When you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you…

Revisiting old games has long been a tricky affair. The process has been made easier by the devotion of fans running Abandonware sites for games without owners (or absent owners) and the genius of the DosBox game emulator.

But times are changing thanks be to GoG! It still surprises us how many people don’t know about GoG.com. This is a site devoted to getting the best retro games running smoothly on contemporary PCs and selling them legally, DRM-free and at a reasonable price.

Recently we weren’t that impressed when GoG.com faked it’s own death when going from beta to full release, but then it teased us with the promise of Planescape Torment and the Baldur’s Gate franchise and they’ve since delivered.

Today, it’s the turn of Baldur’s Gate 2: Complete for a mere 10 American bucks.

You meet dragons – and kill them. That’s okay though they are pretty arrogant.

The complete edition has the original game (obviously) Baldur’s Gate II: Shadows of Amn plus the tightly sculpted expansion Baldur’s Gate II: Throne of Bhaal.

We tried to dig out the original review of the game, but the archive librarian wouldn’t spit it out for us to read, but we liked Baldur’s Gate II: Throne of Bhaal a lot. In fact we gave it 92%!

Here’s what we said, words by David Bradley (who is now the editor of SFX):

We could be cynical and say that Baldur’s Gate II is the last game to need expanding: at 200-plus hours it’s already massive. But the truth is that we love Baldur’s Gate II, and so do you.

Character building
If you haven’t rumbled with the kobolds and golems yet, this is the perfect excuse to get yourself a copy. Throne of Bhaal extends the story of the BG series – bringing it to an end, in fact and adds masses more possibilities. But beware because this expansion extends the story, you either need saved games at the end of Baldur’s Gate II or the desire to skip ahead and start from where Throne of Bhaal picks up.

The Watcher’s Keep is a massive and tricky dungeon, and here we are, preparing to descend.

You can, however, play through the Watcher’s Keep adventure at any time, although, like the rest of the expansion’s content, it’s furiously tough. Good job, then, that you can now take your characters up to seriously high levels: we had level 30 characters well before the end, although priest magic ends at level seven and mage spells at level nine.

Now, though, characters can also gain special abilities when they level-up, such as whirlwind attacks for fighters and super-powerful spells for clerics and wizards. There’s also the new wild mage character, plus a new NPC to join your party – and a familiar face at that. The trouble is that experience points come thick and fast: while it might have taken nearly 200 hours to gather three million in Baldur’s Gate II, you’ll double that in the 40 or so hours it takes to play Throne of Bhaal.

Combat plays a heavy part, and there are plenty of new monsters to take on (or old, as this was the original caption. This looks more like a high fantasy foam party to us).

Destiny’s imp
The story is convincingly driven forward through your own discoveries and in-engine cut-scenes. Again, you’re being manipulated, but your destiny looms ever closer, and the tension and urgency is excellently portrayed. Surprisingly, there’s more humour to Throne of Bhaal than before: interactions within your party are better acted than ever, and you’ll laugh out loud when you encounter Cespenar the imp, your butler and weaponsmith.

The simple formula which won us over with previous Baldur’s Gate games is stronger than ever, honed to a razor edge in this satisfying conclusion to the series … Anyone with the slightest interest in adventures and role-playing would do well to get this and a BGII, and buy into the finest PC storytelling experience around.

GOG.com are also chucking in some nice RPG loot, including the original soundtrack, artwork, wallpapers and a map.

Also on PC Format: re-release and replay review of classic RPG Planescape Torment

Call of Duty: Black Ops looks set to be another massive hit for Activision, even allowing for the company’s slightly reduced expectations for sales. Even so, on release the multiplayer performance has been less than stunning.

Many report poor frame rates and keyboard-pummelling lag. We’ve experienced similar frustrations ourselves, so here’s the PC Format quick guide for getting smoother frame rates out of your machine.

First, take your graphics settings out of the equation by setting everything to fugly. You’ll be able to dial all those settings up again later, but when it comes to trying to sort out your connection and general performance settings, it’s worth easing back on the ol’ GPU first.

• Turn ANTI_ALIASING OFF.
• Set SYNC EVERY FRAME is set to NO.
• Set TEXTURE FILTERING to BILINEAR.
• TEXTURE QUALITY to LOW.
• Turn SHADOWS OFF.
• Turn BULLET IMPACTS OFF.

Well done, you’ve just made Call of Duty: Black Ops looks ten years old. It should, however, now spin along at silly frame rates. Give it a go, and see if it runs any smoother.

The next stage is to get your hands dirty and throw yourself, hands flailing, at the configuration file, where you’ll find far more juicy sounding settings. The jury is still out on which settings actually have any real effect on your performance, but try the following and cross your fingers.

You’ll find the config file in your Steam folder (by default “C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam”) inside the “steamapps\common\call of duty black ops\players” folder.

Open the config_mp.cfg up in Wordpad and scroll down until you find the line:

• seta r_multiGpu “1”

Change the “1” to “0”.

IF, and only if you only have one video card. If you have multiple video cards (SLI mode), setting it to 0 will reduce performance.

Directly underneath it you’ll find:

• seta r_multithreaded_device “0”

Change the “0” to “1”.

Again, this is if, and only if you have a multi-core CPU.

There are plenty of other settings in here worth messing around with, including the all-important net code parameters – although with a rumoured overhaul in the netcode in the works, it’s not worth losing too much sleep over this.

The main value you need to mess around with is cl_maxpackets, which you should try setting to “100” to see if it makes any difference.

Also on PC Format:
Poll – Are you happy with Black Op’s multiplayer performance at launch?
QuickFix: Split screen Left 4 Dead 2
The Good, the Bad and the Plain Ugly of Black Ops Multiplayer by the PCF Clan

Call of Duty: Black Ops game tweak guides elsewhere: FragWorld

I guess we didn’t need to wait long to figure out whether GOG.com’s closure was a marketing stunt or a sad reality. The answer, as we thought, is marketing. This YouTube video (above) is an official ‘Thanks for the memories’, but bang in the middle of it is Baldur’s Gate, which GOG.com didn’t have the rights to sell when the service ‘existed’. So either someone fluffed the research or GOG.com is hinting at a Lazarus-like resurrection, presumably with DRM and new game titles.

People are already talking about this discovery, which I guess is a win for GOG.com’s marketing department. It’s quite an achievement if it’s true.