A little over a month ago, Gamasutra editor Chris Remo revealed on his own personal blog site that Electronic Arts was planning to market a pre-built gaming PC designed specifically to run the upcoming shooter Crysis Warhead at a resonable price. Remo has since updated his blog site with more info on this project, stating that the PC will sell for $699.

The actual rig will be built by a company called UltraPC but EA, Crysis Warhead's developer Crytek and video chip company Nvidia were all involved in the development of the PC. The specs for the PC include an Intel Core 2 Duo e7300 processor running at 2.66GHz along with an Nvidia 9800GT based video card (no word on what company provided the card) and 2 GB of RAM. The dev team got Crysis Warhead to be optimised to run on the machine at high detail running 30 frames per second. Supposedly pre-orders will be accepted this week with shipment to begin on Sept. 16, the same day that Crysis Warhead will ship to stores.

This patch updates Bionic Commando Rearmed to version 1.01, which optimizes the game to perform better with single core processors.

Download the Bionic Commando Rearmed v1.01 Patch (4 MB)

Former Electronic Gaming Monthly editor-in-chief Dan "Shoe" Hsu has been writing about his opinions and experiences in game journalism since his departure from Ziff Davis earlier this year in a new blog called Sore Thumbs. Hsu has talked about his own experiences dealing with game publisher PR reps but the latest entry isn't written by Hsu but by an anonymous PR rep at a "Big Publisher" who basically confirms what some may have guessed; publishers can sometimes pay hardball with media outlets to get the best coverage for their games.

This person admits, "I have pulled ad buys in protest of what I felt were unfair review scores. I have spoken to the "boss" of publications before, and complained about certain journalists. I have "banned" certain media outlets from getting pre-release access to games, because of previous unfavorable coverage." This person defends such actions because they just want journalists to give their titles solid coverage, saying. "Any good PR people working for a game publisher understand what a developer goes through, and should fight hard to get the game looked at by journalists fairly."

If you went to Penny Arcade Expo a little over a week ago you got some badge lanyards promoting the upcoming Ghostbusters video game, even though that now former Vivendi Games title is in limbo thanks to the Activision Blizzard merger. So what happened. According to Variety's gaming blog it was just a matter of bad timing.

Vivendi Games bought the rights to the PAX badge lanyards way back in January and actually delivered them to PAX in June, two months before PAX 2008 began. Just a few weeks before the show the Activision Blizzard merger became official and the new company decided it didn't want to publish the Ghostbusters game after all, leaving PAX with advertising a game that is currently "between publishers". As PAX head man Robert Khoo stated, ""We didn't have much of a choice as finding an alternate lanyard provider, so we just ran with it." The game is still expected to be released sometime in 2009 but a new publisher has yet to be announced.

After a long dry spell for major PC games this summer, we are looking forward to playing a lot of cool titles in the next three months. In the meantime let's look back on the first week of September and see what we can come up with for news, downloads and our exclusive features:

Exclusive features

• Spore: It ships to stores today in the US so make sure you check out our coverage of Will Wright's magnum opus, including our five reasons we thing we will love this game, our first out of the box experience and some interesting Spore related advertisements.
• Champions Online: We get a hands-on look at the Snake Gulch zone for Cryptic Studios's upcoming super hero MMO title.
• Reviews: Our latest review takes a look at the next chapter for American McGee's Grimm, Godfather Death.
• Team Fortress 2 Comprehensive Achievement Guide: If you want to see detailed descriptions of every achievement in Valve's multiplayer shooter there's no better place to look.
• Big Ideas: Our latest column on game themes takes a look at being a hero in an MMO title.
• MacMonday: Our latest column on Mac gaming takes a look at the action horror game Larva Mortus.
• Alt-Tab: Our latest feature gallery column takes a hands-on look at Gas Powered's upcoming title Demigod.
• Freeware Friday: Our latest look at free games checks out the recent adventure game remake Quest for Glory 2.

If you are not busy checking out Spore as it ships to stores today, there's another major PC gaming event happening on a normally quiet Sunday. That's the launch of the open beta for Warhammer Online, the long awaited fantasy MMO from developer Mythic Entertainment and publisher Electronic Arts. It's the last chance you will be able to play the game for free before the official launch begin on September 18.

Our sister site Massively reports that some players are unable to log into the beta test but that's to be expected as Mythic was planning on hundreds of thousands of beta testers to be checking out the game. So if you were planning to join the event be prepared to experience some delays.

Today Electronic Arts finally ships Will Wright's latest game, Spore, to stores in the US. It's a title that has garnered almost mythical status since it was first revealed (partially because of its many development delays) but now that's its out in the wild Wright seems eager to see what others think of his alien evolution sim.

In a new interview with Venture Beat, Wright comments on the early reviews of the game, some of which have not been kind to Spore. Wright states, "We're taking some hits in the press for the depth of levels. Shallow or not. That was pretty much intentional." He added that he would rather have a game that is lower on the Metacritic score but still sold well, saying, "Intentionally, if you go after a lot of people who don't play games at all, you will take hits among the hardcore gamers." After working on the game for seven years, Wright will certainly move on to his next game, saying, "I'm working on a couple of projects like I always do. I'm going to take a breather. I'll decide which one to run with pretty soon."

Earlier this week we reported that the MMO company Multiverse had announced plans to develop a game based on the Buffy The Vampire Slayer TV series. They also revealed that a previously announced MMO based on another Joss Whedon created TV series, Firefly, has been put on the back burner. We wondered at the time about Multiverse's motives since they announced the Firefly MMO nearly two years ago and had revealed nothing since.

Well our sister site Massively managed to chat with Multiverse's marketing director Corey Bridges and while he dodged a lot of their questions he did say that development of the Buffy MMO was indeed underway with a 2D Flash client planned for release around the end of the year (he declined to give any gameplay details). He also said that there had been some actual development work done on the Firefly MMO but declined to say what happened with that game, saying only, "There are just some issues that need to be worked through. Hopefully things will get back on track before too long." We still will believe it when we see it.

Eidos is famous for hiring sexy English models to portray Lara Croft and then send them over to various game conventions and promotional events.They have been doing this for over 10 years now and have just hired their newest model, 23 year old Alison Carroll. However these models are strictly for eye candy; they have never actually participated in any of the Tomb Raider game development. They have never been the voice of Lara Croft nor handled any of the motion capture for the character.

That is not the case for actress-model Melinda Cohen, who showed up at Penny Arcade Expo last weekend to promote the upcoming Replay Studios-Gamecock stealth action game Velvet Assassin. Cohen was there as a booth model but she is also handling the voice for the character of Violet Summer (in both English and German versions) in the game itself. She's also doing motion capture work for the character in the game. all of which puts her several steps ahead of any Lara Croft model. Velvet Assassin is currently scheduled for release late in 2008.

[Via Destructoid]

There's a lot of third party middleware game engines out on the market: Epic Games has the Unreal Engine, Valve has the Source engine, Crytek has the Cryengine, Emergent has Gamebyro, id has the upcoming id Tech 5 and so on. But Electronic Arts is looking into the posiblity of doing the same thing with the engine that's the basis for their alien evolution sim game Spore.

In an article at the Rocky Mountain News, EA Games president Frank Gibeau states that the Spore engine is "extremely malleable. You could add RPG or action, you could take it to different platforms, like (Web-page) flash games, the PlayStation 3, the Xbox 360, Nintendo's Wii." He even stated that they are looking into licensing the Spore technology to third party game developers. One big problem with this is that third party developers might not want to use technology that's owned by one of the world's largest publishers. A few years ago, EA bought Criterion Software who created the Renderware engine that was used before EA's purchase in tons of games (including the GTA III series). However, licensing of Renderware dissapeared overnight after the EA/Criterion acquisition.

[Via Kotaku]

In the past few months, we have heard from Crytek CEO Cevat Yerli rant a number of times against piracy of PC games, specifically for his 2007 shooter Crysis. He has even claimed that just one legitimate copy of the game has been sold compared to 20 pirates copies of the game. But are such numbers misleading? Edge Online has an opinion that says, "Yes",

That opinion comes from Tom Jubert, an editor for the UK based Gameshadow which supplies automatic downloads of PC games. Jubert does state, "There's no doubt that PC gaming suffers due to piracy - and to a considerably greater extent than console titles." However, he believes that Yerli's claims of the amount of piracy is overblown. Jubert uses data from their own Gameshadow program to prove his point, saying, "What that means is I can tell you the ratio of legal vs illegal Crysis installs in GameShadow's UK customer base is more like 7:3, while in the US it's closer to 5:1 - a far less bleak scenario."

And while Yerli's ratio claims may in fact be true in a worldwide sense, Jubert adds, "they are not representative of the true impact of piracy on the PC games industry." He states most pirated copies are going to territories where there's not a large PC gaming market anyway. Also he feels not everyone who pirated a copy of the game would haved purchased it anyway if they couldn't get a free copy anyway. Jubert's conclusion? "In short, rampant piracy is no longer the catch-all excuse it's often employed as."

You may have noticed that the trailers for the upcoming movie version of Remedy's Max Payne game series don't have a rating yet, even though the movie is a little more than a month away from release. That's because the Twentieth Century Fox production is trying to get a PG-13 rating for the ultra-violent film. However the MPAA ratings board has slapped an early cut of the film with an R rating which will almost certainly lower its potential take at the box office.

Das Gamer has a chat with the film's director John Moore who expressed frustration over the ratings fight with the MPAA with Max Payne. Moore states, "They said to me, the movie feels R. And I said, "What the f*** is that, a group therapy session?" You can't do that. They're meant to judge content, not intent. They said the movie felt dark." Max Payne is due in theaters on Oct 17.

Electronic Arts' long awaited alien evolution sim game Spore is already shipped for folks in Europe (the US release is due on Sunday) but it appears that the folks across the water have had some issues signing onto the game's online servers.

While Spore is technically a single player game EA has set up its DRM that makes people register their copy on the Internet before they can begin playing. A post on EA's UK message board states, "We are aware that many of you are having login problems with Spore. This is being investigated so please bear with us." While another message from the same message board moderator seemed to indicate things are improving, several other posters are still stating they cannot log in and register their copy of the game. Just for the record we downloaded and registered our review copy of the game without any issues so it's possible that the US release will not have as many problems.

You may remember that a week ago Electronic Arts took over a gas station in Los Angeles to give out free gas to anyone that showed up. It was a neat little promotion for their now released open world action game Mercenaries 2. Well, EA tried to do the same promo stunt in a UK suburb of London but had their efforts shut down by local officials.

According to the UK based Telegraph web site, the promotion caused a massive traffic jam as hundreds of cars got in line to get the free petrol. Local politican Lynne Featherstone stated, "Whilst a lucky few might have got some free petrol, hundreds of local residents have faced misery on their daily journeys this morning. They deserve an apology for being the victims of such an ill-thought out media stunt." Not everyone feels this way. Local resident Donna Lashley waited 40 minutes to get her car fueled for free and stated, "I think it's a brilliant promotion. I don't see it becoming a full-time thing, but I think it's a great idea - I'll be telling my sons about the game."

[Via GamePolitics]

THQ has had the Warhammer 40,000 PC/Video game license from Games Workshop for several years now. They company has released a poorly received first person shooter (Fire Warrior)and a highly regarded RTS game series, (Dawn of War) based on the Warhammer 40K property with Dawn of War II and an upcoming MMO already announced.

However it looks like the publisher is planning to bring the franchise into yet another genre; the third person action shooter game. Leaked footage found its way to YouTube which displays about nine minutes of footage (taken from an Xbox 360 version) from what is titled Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine. The footage show some early but what looks like highly playable scenes from the game as the Space Marine of the title deals a lot of damage to its foes with some impressive looking graphics. No developer was revealed for the game and there's no indication when it might be released.

[Via Shacknews]