Rockstar Games have released the third trailer for Grand Theft Auto V showing off the three main protagonists Michael, Franklin and Trevor.

The trailer focuses on telling us a little more about each protagonist’s background and story as opposed to showcasing any of the game’s new features and mechanics.  Here at GTN we feel that this is a bit of shame considering how important the new features and mechanics announced so far seem to be within the game (The bank heist missions and swapping between protagonists).  It’s not long until its release date of September 17th this year (America) which means we will hopefully see more revealed about the game over the coming months, perhaps with a major showing at E3 in June.

You can view the trailer below and for more information on the game you can visit the official website here.

In the trailer, titled “Out of Control”,  protagonist Aiden Pearce is also seen running through Chicago, jumping over cars and beating people with tire irons.

“Pearce will use the city of Chicago against the people who crossed him and how far he will go to make them pay.”

Ubisoft’s open-world, hacking action-adventure title is expected to release November 19, on PC, PS3,  Wii U, Xbox 360 and next-gen consoles.

Declassification: The determination that, in the interests of national security, classified information no longer requires any degree of protection against unauthorized disclosure, coupled with removal or cancellation of the classification designation – DOD Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms 08 November 2010.

You’re William Carter, it’s 1962 and you’re a special agent working for a top-secret US government organisation called The Bureau.  It’s your job to investigate attacks from extraterrestrials and conceal the evidence afterwards.  The Bureau has been operating secretly for decades but as with most classified operations, the truth eventually comes out.

2K Games have today announced The Bureau: XCOM Declassified which is a third-person tactical shooter set in the XCOM universe in 1962.  Players will play as William Carter and lead a squad of special agents as you defend Earth against attacks from extraterrestrials.  It’s a far cry from the first person shooter we were shown last year but maybe 2K have listened to fans of the series and made it a little more in-line with their XCOM strategy games by introducing the third-person mechanic.

Little information has been released by 2K other than the above but it is due for release on August 23rd this year on PS3, Xbox 360 and PC (Steam).  One of my first thoughts on this game are genuinely how much XCOM Classified is starting to sound like that time when Agent J time travelled back to 1969 in Men in Black 3.  Ok, so it’s a little earlier but it has a top-secret organisation which very few people know anything about working to protect planet Earth from extraterrestrial beings and making sure no one finds out about it.  I know it probably won’t play out in that way, but it’s certainly exciting to think about how cool it would be if we could all wipe player’s minds with neuralyzers.

In any case, alongside a snazzy new Bureau website 2K have also released 3 screenshots and a live action trailer, check them out below.  Can you spot the Sectoid which they have hidden in the trailer somewhere?

Interested in finding out where the Sectoid appears in the trailer if you can’t find it yourself?  Check out the embedded tweet below on 2K’s Twitter account after I was the first one to discover it.

@ajb123644 Well spotted Agent Bridgwood. I wonder how many more secrets you can discover?

— 2KUKPR (@2KUKPR) April 26, 2013

With the release of the dark survival game Don’t Starve today, let’s take a little look at the game. The developers, Klei Entertainment, are better known for such titles as the stealth-assassination game Mark of the Ninja and action-adventure Shank. This one’s a bit different from those…

“An uncompromising wilderness survival game full of science and magic.”

You play as one of eight playable characters, starting with Wilson: the Gentleman Scientist (“I will conquer it all with the power of my MIND!”). Each character has their own special abilities and conditions with varying graphical details. Wilson, for instance, grows a Magnificent Beard which can be used as a crafting material later in the game, once you shave it off with the Razor. Yeah, the game is that weird.

Oh, and the voice acting is all done by musical instruments.

Another example with Willow, the first unlockable character, nicknamed: the Firestarter (“Things are so much prettier when they burn”). The additional characters are unlocked as you gain experience, which is earned by surviving as long as you can. The more days you survive, the more experience you get, and you get lots of it if you manage to complete Adventure Mode.

Willow “the Firestarter”, the first unlockable character

This is a game of exploration. Discovery. Sure, you will one day get accustomed to the mechanics and the items like we all did with Minecraft and Terraria, but it is an experience on the first play-through. From first meeting Maxwell, to finding your first Pig Village, to building your first Science Machine. It’s fun to just find these odd things and wonder what you could do with them.

The game aims to create a weird balance between magic and science. You build your own tents and farms for survival, while finding weird items in the world like the things, which build a portal to the next world. Science and logic are vitally important to tackle this world, full of magic and strange creatures. It’s awfully similar to the real world, except with everything being different. For example, you can take the hair and meat from the wildlife to survive, but in Don’t Starve the main source for this is Beefalo. You can shave them while they sleep for wool, or hunt them down for meat, they also go into heat and can get angry. Really angry.

Angry beefalo are angry

Beefalo are found in the savannah, one of the many biomes in the game. Other biomes include the forest, grasslands, marsh, rockyland, mosaic, and the ultimate ‘Maxwell biome’. Each one typically has its own wildlife and plant life, each worth exploring as they vary significantly.

There are also pigs, but in this game, they are humanoids that run around all happy and content with their little lives. Feed them meat and they will form an army to follow you. Pigs will turn into Werepigs when there’s a full moon, too. There is also a Pig King, who you can give stuff to and he will repay you with gold nuggets (used to build the Scientific items and better equipment). The pigs seem to have created a civilized nation.

It’s easy to get distracted by the –ooh, wormhole!

In Adventure mode, a new world is generated and the player is dropped randomly into this world, within a relatively safe area, where you can find your bearings. Dangers around will most likely be spider dens and beehives. A spider den, at the beginning, will be a big ball of webbing attached to the floor and will spit out just a few spiders – not a challenge at all, though that isn’t to say that they are worth attacking without some preparation. As the game progresses, however, these dens grow, so far in that a Spider Queen will be spawned as a den reaches the end of its life span.

These bees were especially aggressive

The aim of the game, clearly, is to not die of starvation. Pretty simple goal, right?  Well yeah, it is really. But it is certainly not an easy one. Be mindful that you now also have to watch your sanity (a fairly new feature to the beta), which drops a certain amount during particular times and when certain events happen, like eating spoiled food or ‘evil’ food. Sanity goes up when eating healthy food and sleeping in reasonable conditions (such as in a tent). Basically, pretty much everything wants to kill you eventually.

In Adventure Mode, it is up to you to find the mysterious Maxwell, the guy who put you here, and to learn the secret of what is going on in this world. There are five worlds in total to progress through, each randomly generated. You need to find certain items that, when combined together, build the Wooden Thing and open a portal to the next world. This requires exploration (and survivability) to find these items and create the portals.

Pick up Box thing – one item needed to build the Wooden Thing

Your first day, like in many survival games, will be spent gathering supplies: finding twigs, wood, and foraging nibbles from berry bushes. Basically anything you can find that isn’t nailed down. Spider dens and beehives are pretty avoidable near the beginning, so the main danger to watch out for is night time. Having the materials necessary to build a campfire is essential, so the night-nasties don’t get you, but this is by no means any difficult task. All you need is some wood and cut grass and you’re good to go, with some extra weeds or more wood to fuel the fire during the night. It is easy, however, to get distracted with the many curiosities within this world.

There are three stages to each day: day, night and the in-between bit, dusk. It doesn’t go completely dark at dusk, but it goes dark enough that you need to start thinking about stopping and finding a place to rest. Dusk goes on for far too long though, leaving you to continue hunting supplies until night time unexpectedly drops on you. This shouldn’t happen though, if you pay attention to the dial in the corner of the screen that tells you what time of day it is.

Once night time comes, you need to start the campfire. If you don’t, the invisible night-nasties will get you. When you walk around in the pitch-black dead of night, you get damaged and killed pretty quickly if you are not near a light source. Creepy noises follow you, eyes stare at you, and you get slashed in the dark.

I was too busy doing my science stuff to notice it had become night time, I did not last long…

The user-interface (UI) is used to demonstrate some of the happenings in the game. In fact, it’s a shame that this isn’t used more often. When your sanity drops too low, the game shows you with the interface, as red tendrils appear on the screen, audible whispers play and rabbits, of course, turn into little beardlings (evil beard creatures, good for farming beard hair!).

The time of day also varies depending on the season. Don’t Starve does a convincing job of subtly changing between summer and winter. The weather varies as well, making the eerie theme even darker when it starts raining. During winter, the floor freezes over and surviving becomes much more difficult, as everyday tasks become challenges. There are so many ways to die in this game, starvation is just the tip of the beefalo farm. Freezing becomes a very real problem and you need to dress up in winter clothes just to keep warm. Again, the items in the game are so varied and creative, you can build odd contraptions – with SCIENCE – that can be used to keep warm.

Wolfgang isn’t used to having to use his head

It is an amazing adventure, working your way through Don’t Starve. Like Alice in Wonderland, it’s a very apt comparison with the  odd variations of regular creatures and strange characters you meet. Sometimes a game manages to create a world full of interest and curiosity, which the player feels like they must explore and find every little detail. This leads to a provocative journey, mostly of strange ways of dying, at least on the first few attempts of finding Maxwell.

Don’t Starve is released today on Steam. You can get it there or from the official website directly – which comes with keys for Steam and Google Chrome, as well as a stand-alone download.

Remember how everyone made a fuss over paying $20 over Final Fantasy Tactics? Well This may be taking it a little far..

A couple weeks ago Siliconera discovered that Namco Bandai had trademarked the terms Idolm@ster and Shiny Festa in Europe and North America. Now it has been officially announced that the series of rhythm games is going to be translated to English but they are going to be ported to iOS for $54.99.

There are three games in this series, which means that if you wanted to have the full set then it would cost $164.97.

This comes back to the point of your moral purchases as a consumer. On the PSP this might make sense as you would probably pay the same amount for an import. But just being on the iOS market sets  you up for people complaining about the price. The iOS market is great for pick up and play arcade games and maybe even some bite sized story games. But can you justify that much money for games on the app market? It’s even worse considering that they are going to also have DLC releases, and they won’t be free.

As you may have heard from the Nintendo Direct earlier this week, the Wii U is going to be adding many of the Wii’s virtual console games to the Wii U online store.

In the Nintendo video there was no specific date given for the retro games but there was a hint.

The virtual console games will be updating shortly after the Wii U spring update.

Well it turns out that those virtual console games are going to start launching April 23 starting with Excite Bike which will also be launching on the Nintendo 3DS Eshop.

The Wii U’s online shop isn’t exactly new to the world of virtual console games, recently Nintendo has been releasing games once a month for 30 cents in memory of the Famicom’s 30th anniversary. Most recently they have released Kirby’s Adventure, a favorite of yours truly. They have also released Balloon Fight, F-Zero and Punch Out.

So look out for a possible Wii U update tomorrow, it will include not only faster loading times but also instant boot up to the Wii menu and downloading updates while the console is turned off.

Planetary Annihilation has come a long way since it first appeared on Kickstarter and have done
numerous live streams to keep everyone up to date with the development. In these days of beta tests being used not as betas but as a demo or pre-order incentive it is refreshing to see.

Last night (Your Time Zone may vary) Uber Entertainment did another live stream. It was short but was the first to feature gameplay. Have a watch after the jump.

So what can we take away from this?

First, an announcement of when the alpha is going to start, around the end of May (dates to be finalised and subject to change).

Second, Planet size. The planet shown was stated to be about 1/4 of the way up the diameter slider, this means that the largest possible planet will have 16 times the surface area. Even with the huge units we would expect from a successor to Supreme Commander that is one hell of a big battlefield, not to mention the fact that maps will be able to contain more than one planet and moons.

Finally, they talk about it being a client-sever based game. They did confirm that this is from a technical point of view not a business model. They will not be insisting that *they* host the servers like EA and Blizzard have done with Sim City and Diablo III respectively. From your point of view if you start a single player game it will all run on your computer, it is just that the rendering and interface are run on a different applications. I imagine this process will be entirely behind the scenes and the user won’t even notice. It does mean that single player and multi player are exactly the same game though.

The game is certainly looking good so far and has come a long way in a few short months.

Don’t Starve is this wonderfully quirky and curious little indie game, developed by Klei Entertainment – the same people behind The Mark of the Ninja and Shank. The game isn’t released until Tuesday (UK) but Klei have already put out the launch trailer, check it out above.

A final beta update has been released (a few days early, notably). Details posted in a forum post celebrating the launch, where Klei founder Jamie Cheng (Bigfoot) talks about the progress and added features to the fully launched game.

The changelist for the beta patch includes the fully completed ‘Adventure Mode.’ This one involves some story line as you explore and survive with the hope of discovering Maxwell’s secret, and why the character has been taken to this mysterious world.

Every playthrough presents new challenges. Exploration and adaption is key, and only the best survival experts will make it all the way to the end.

Don’t Starve manages to create a survival experience, while still keeping a relatively friendly early game to make the player able to adapt to the weird surroundings. There is always a real chance for survival, provided you have the vaguest idea what you’re doing.

Here are some other new stuff included in the beta patch:

• Divining Rod (adventure only) – helps you track down missing portal pieces
• Sewing Kit – repairs degraded clothing items
• Newly-planted trees take a while to grow into small trees
• We’ve gone through the game screen by screen and made everything look nicer and be more functional. The world customization screen in particular got a complete re-write. There’s also a new credits screen.
• HUD size is more readable on larger screens
• Wes is now unlocked by finding him in Adventure Mode
• Beating Adventure Mode unlocks a new character
• As well as lots of bug fixes

This is everything that was listed in the forum post. Bigfoot claims that listing everything would “ruin the surprise” so I’m sure we will all be looking forward, finally, to the launch of Don’t Starve.

Keep in mind that the game is available via the official website on special offer until the title’s release date on Tuesday. There is also an expansion planned some time post launch, but Klei are still working out the details on that.

The unexpected simulator game that recklessly gives the player a scalpel in one hand and surgical saw in the other, has successfully gone through the Steam Greenlight service.

Surgeon Simulator 2013, developed by Bossa Studios, is now available on Steam with a hefty 30% discount (discount until April 22). It is now a full game with new features, including a “fiendishly” difficult ‘ambulance’ mode.

Nigel Burk, a true professional [Source: Steam]

The finished game also has 48 Steam achievements, some of which seem quite curious. One of these achievements is Vworrrp Vworrrp, and requires the player to create a Time Lord (probably by adding a heart to the patient before taking one away).

Surgeon Simulator 2013 became an internet hit back in January, with controls comparable to QWOP and the bloody fun of being a real-life surgeon. It started as just a heart transplant op, but now the game has more procedures and modes to save the patient.

If you still aren’t sold on the weird phenomenon that is Surgeon Simulator 2013, the original prototype is still available here.

It’s been a while that we have seen anything from the Resident Evil creator but his new game being published by Bethesda looks absolutely terrifying.

Over the past couple of days Bethesda has been teasing videos about the next game that they are going to be publishing. Many people wondered if it could be the new Fallout or maybe even a new Wolfenstein, but Bethesda doesn’t do the best job really putting a line between Bethesda Softworks and Bethesda Game Studios. For a while now we new that Shinji Mikami was working for Bethesda to make a “true survival horror game” but details have been scarce. As the days counted down to Bethesda’s reveal, connections to Mikami’s Project Zwei began to become more apparent until the trailer was revealed today.

IGN posted the new trailer for The Evil Within today showing blood, guts, four armed bloody women, people covered in glass and exploding safe heads. The trailer really doesn’t give us many more details on the game, as everything in this trailer could be actual enemies or characters in the game or it can just be a trailer to give a good feel for what the game’s setting is like. Either way this trailer is incredibly creepy and uncomfortable and I can’t wait for more details.

Source: IGN