Long before there was Battlefield 3, there was Call of Duty, and before that, there was Quake and Doom. All those games can trace their lineage back even further, to Wolfenstein 3D, iD's awesomely innovative Nazi-hunting FPS adventure. Today marks a milestone for the classic franchise: B.J. Blazkowicz has been blasting SS guards and chaingun-wielding robo-Hitlers for a whopping 20 years. Even better, rather than just tooting its own horn, iD's showering gamers with freebie gifts to celebrate the anniversary.
In 1697 William Congreve coined the phrase, “Hell has no fury like a woman scorned”, though in 2012 its starting to look like “indie” might also be an acceptable substitution. The controversy surrounds EA’s use of the words
When people say that we're living in a post PC era, they're typically only looking at sales of mainstream, prebuilt systems -- the HP, Dell and Lenovo "PCs in a box" that grace the shelves of your local retailers. Those numbers, however, fail to take component sales and custom builds into consideration. (Sacrilege!) Now, a new report highlights just what we're missing by omitting component sales: Jon Peddie Research, a prominent research firm, says that PC gaming hardware sales will hit $23.6 billion -- that's "billion," with a "B" -- in sales by the end of the year.
The Nvidia GTX 690 is real, and it's amazing -- both in specs and in price. But while the tech world swooned at the announcement of the dual-GPU behemoth, another new product outlined at the GTX 690's unveiling holds even more intriguing potential for the gaming world at large: the cloud-based "GeForce Experience," which promises to automatically optimize the graphics settings in games based on the components in your individual PC.
Last year, Valve teased gamers around the world with the promise of eventually releasing a level editor for Portal 2. The company's been frustratingly close-lipped about details since then -- until yesterday, that is. Valve announced that the level editor is shipping as a DLC offering called the Perpetual Testing Initiative, coming to PC and Macs on May 8th for the low, low price of absolutely free.
Most notebooks that are capable of pulling off a true frag fest on the run are portable in name only, being heavy-duty 15- to 17-inch monsters with battery lives briefer than butterfly's lives. To make mobile matters worse, Alienware recently announced that its M11x is being put out to pasture. Fear not, traveling gamers: all is not lost. Maingear is, well, gearing up a new 11-inch gaming notebook of its own, the Pulse.
As you all know, Intel announced the launch of its much anticipated 22nm Ivy Bridge processors earlier today. Intel is counting on these third-generation Core processors for the success of ultrabooks, which it hopes will be able to check the rampant growth of tablets and, in the process, conquer a large chunk of the mobile PC market. But ultrabooks will not be the only products to make use of Ivy Bridge chips; there will also be plenty of all-in-ones, desktops and notebooks. In all, over 570 Ivy Bridge-toting systems are expected to ship in 2012. The MSI GT70 and GT60 are two such products. Hit the jump for more.
Have you ever wondered what everyday life is like for the average worker at Valve? As a privately held company they tend to be a bit overly secretive, and as such we know surprisingly little about what they do all day. Aside from tormenting us with silence over Half-Life 3, it turns out new employees actually get issued a handbook on what to do 
Valve has been attempting to be very outwardly complimentary of EA over the last several months, perhaps in the misguided hope that the publisher will quit it with the Origin exclusives, and start bringing some of its titles back into compliance with Steams terms of service. You’d be hard pressed to find any bad blood between the two companies, at least on the Valve side, but yet the stalemate remains. On the most recent 
Attention would-be witch doctors and wizards: it's time to reschedule whatever you had planned for the weekend. Homework, quality time with your significant other and bleaching your grandma's teeth all take a backseat to your new to-list entry -- blasting demons and devils in Diablo III. Last night, Blizzard announced that the game would be free for all this weekend as part of a stress-testing open beta. Actually, you can start swinging your swords any minute now.
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