This isn’t really gaming news because it’s for TV and film, however, the service is now available (confirmed by various users) via Wii (go to the Wii shop channel), Playstation3 and Xbox 360 as well as standard via your PC or Mac.

The service will cost €6.99 per month, but as a bonus for signing up you get a month free!

Anyone visiting the site over the weekend will more than appreciate the fact that the site has been a bit buggy. Unfortunately that’s all down to me moving the site to a new server package.

In detail that means a move from Windows IIS to Linux Apache. All sounds good so far, I’m sure… and you’ll notice small changes, tweaks and improvements over time. Right now it’s all a bit messy. The content is fine (as in, the text) but there are a lot of things the old server was doing that are highlighted in the new one. For example, the entire database refers to the old Windows paths for images, so old thumbnails and what not don’t show anymore until I update this… which sounds fine outside of the fact that the database is actually very large. In technical terms, it’s more than phpmyadmin can actually handle!

Anyway. Thanks for sticking around and I’ll roll out more changes and updates as we go!

That’s a huge number, and a huge chunk of their 35 million strong userbase (based on active users). A lot of this is helped along by the sales which boosted sales numbers and helped generate a lot of game-time for people who otherwise may have gotten bored playing TF2 (which is, of course, free). However a large chunk of this concurrent usage is down to Skyrim players.

The strange thing is that I imagine this number would have been bigger had EA stuck with Valve and put Battlefield3 on the platform as well.

One huge boost for this kind of news is that it proves that PC gaming (regardless of your platform-of-choice) is defiantly hitting back at consoles with an iron fist!

[source]

With this kind of groundbreaking research, it was only a matter of time before the Japanese got involved and did something mad. Like, say, a Wipeout track! Check out the video below of scientists recreating Wipeout. They even commented that they would love to develop this idea further…

Our team has shrunk but the passion for games hasn’t.

I hope everyone has a great 2012 and I hope you continue to support us the same way you did in 2011.

5 of my favourite games from this year. I’ll add some notable ones thereafter but these are the 5 that captured my attention, imagination and – most importantly – my time. Oh, and my money… most definitely my money.

Although I’ve ranked the games from 5 to 1 (1 being the best), the 5th, 4th, 3rd and 2nd games may as well be lined up together as an equal share of awesome while the first is most certainly my “game of the year”.

5. Deus Ex: Human Revolution

The original Deus Ex was a stunning showpiece for PC gaming. How do you create a fully realised world? By having meaningless bits of it work, like ATM machines and the ability to wander up to seemingly random folks on the street and have a chat to them.

This new title was fraught with worry from gamers. Could Square Enix re-capture that feeling from being in the Deus Ex world? Or will this be so bad it ruins the original… As it turns out they did a great job. They captured a great middle ground between a full world that suits Deus Ex and a story that belongs with Ghost in the Shell in terms of sci-fi that might actually come true.

The story is a huge strong point for this game, even more than the excellently orchestrated combat, visuals and acting. The script is strong, solid and easy to follow and the voice acting is one of the best I’ve heard – not just this year, but any year.

This would have been the best FPS RPG type of game this year if Skyrim wasn’t released.

4. Portal 2

I remember when Valve acquired the students who made Narbacular Drop everyone expected something special. Add the flare and creative spark from Valve, coupled with their excellent Source engine and give it an odd puzzle-solving twist and you have to be onto a winner. And they were. Portal was a commercial & critical success that bound FPS style gameplay elements with puzzle solving. Something you often don’t get. The fact that Valve had released a game with no major multi-player element was testament to the fun of Portal. The script was incredible and it launched Jonathan Coulton’s career into new realms with the track “Still Alive”.

With that, most fans would have been happy if Portal 2 was just Portal with new puzzles but Valve really kicked it up a notch. They added Wheatley, the now-synonymous scientific robot entity that was cast brilliantly with Stephen Merchant as the voice behind the ball of cables.

In Portal we had GLaDOS, cake and personal companion cubes as memes, but Portal 2 stepped it up with potatos and Cave Johnson.

Portal 2 deserves to be in every “top games of the year” list because it’s so good, so fun and so funny. The direction Valve are taking with the Source engine is exemplified with new effects seen in Portal 2… which hopefully leads on to Half Life 3 (or episode 3).

3. Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

This is a surprising entry. Not because it’s not number one on the list but because it’s on the list in the first place. I hated Morrowind. I hated Oblivion. I actually dislike Lord of the Rings, LARPing and games/books/movies set in fantasy lands that involve “magic”. I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed such a thing from start-to-finish without being unimaginably bored for lengthy periods of time.

Skyrim is Bethesda’s answer. It’s the everyman RPG with magic, potions and men who look like cats. The opening sequence involves you as an interned criminal. How you manage to stop being interned is exactly what stopped me being bored… dragons. The game is all about dragons and violence. I’m into that. In fact, despite not being that far into the game, but far enough in to have a grasp of the story and direction of the game, I’m glad I don’t have to use magic, potions and other such horrendous “get out of jail free” cards RPG writers use to make their boring stories interesting (my opinion, of course).

There’s a lot to talk about in Skyrim. It’s difficult to explain the scope of this game, and in fact one of my only complaints is that some quests take a long time to do because you have to go an incredible distance to get to the quest location (once you visit a place you can get there in one click via the in-game map).

2. MineCraft

Indie darlings Mojang only released MineCraft a month ago, but many people have had it for well over a year now thanks to their business model. The model was to release the game in alpha mode for a low price and let it generate revenue before it’s even released. This was a genuinely brilliant idea that generated millions in revenue without having a finished product shipped. Slowly but surely the team added features as the game went through alpha phases and finally released a product that made sense.

While I’m gushing over it, it is worth noting that the game is horribly difficult to get to grips with if you’re a new user because there is literally no in-game help or assistance. There’s also no clear story mode to help you understand it. It’s kind of like dumping someone into an online StarCraft match with a pro player without explaining a thing or providing the single player experience first…

All that considered, it’s hard not to feel a sense of joy about this game. It’s great to see an indie developer do so well so quickly, and still have the ambition to go forward as an indie – ignoring the courting advances of EA amongst others.

And while I’m on about Sweden…

1. Battlefield 3

…which is also the home of DICE. Anyone who’s ever visited a shop, gone online or talked to someone who plays games knows what BF3 is. No, it’s not the next iteration of Bad Company, which was a lot of peoples’ introduction to Battlefield via consoles. No, BF3 is a stunning follow up to 2005′s Battlefield 2. Yes. 2005. I know a lot of people who will wince at that fact.

Years of mine life were lost to BF2, and indeed 1942. BF2 was an amazing open-world experience. For me it defined multi-player as an experience far beyond my first online MP days with Unreal Tournament. There is quite literally nothing like running to a capture point by gunning down 3 Chinese enemies on Wake Island while a helicopter crashes into a jet above you and a boat is launched into the air via C4 on the beach below. All controlled by real people somewhere in the world.

BF3 does nothing new. The netcode is improved. The graphics are far superior to anything this year and it runs on the earth-shattering (quite literally) Frostbyte2 engine, which gives DICE games the ability to destroy everything in front of them. This means that the mayhem and madness of Battlefield also includes destroying buildings. Twice yesterday I died because of RPG fire. I didn’t get hit by the RPG or the fallout from it… but no, the RPG took out a wall which took down the roof on top of me. The game told me “Bad Luck”…

The level unlocks are great and frequent enough to make the next round worthwile. I’m only level 13 but feel I’ve achieved a lot in that time, but obviously have a lot to do also.

The new maps are a mix between close-quartered areas and huge open worlds that would rival full games, let alone single maps in a 64-man battle.

The two maps that stand out for me are the two Parisian ones. One is set in the Metro tunnels under the city. Russians invade from the streets above while US troops try to defend the tunnels and get back out to the streets above. Stunning and life-like city streets add an extra sense of wonder to the game.

Seine Crossing is another real-world map with photo-realistic design and graphic notches. It’s here that using an RPG to blow the side of a building up really shines. There is no greater joy in this world than blowing the side of a building off to expose an enemy position.

There is a single player addition to this game, which helps new users get to grips with it as well as appease the console entrants to the Battlefield. The SP campaign is very good but falls short of Modern Warfare 3 simply because MW3 is ridiculous, over-the-top and maddening, which gives it the extra edge. BF3′s realistic campaign just doesn’t compare to rolling into Berlin as buildings fall down around you. But the multiplayer experience is far, far superior in DICE’s effort.

While my Macbook Pro (2011) with its i7 and 6750M GPU is a great companion for Bootcamp & gaming, it’s time I stepped up and bought an actual PC for the first time in at least 3 years.

Battlefield 3 runs fine on my Mac but I have to turn down some settings to make it look a little extra sweet. My housemate also has a killer system, so it makes sense that I one-up him.

Looking at the various resellers, component shops and online merchants I think I’ve settled on going with a somewhat-upgraded build from overclockers, which is a component seller from the UK who do tailored bundles and builds for their customers.

I’ve been looking at the “Titan 8300i Supersaurus“. The stock machine is nice but the GPU is undercooked. The core product here is the Intel i5 2500K processor which is overclocked to 4.60GHz, which is obviously a beastly number for a processor (especially given the price). The 6870 GPU (Sapphire brand) seems to be the best GPU when considering raw power versus cost, and it’ll easily churn out Battlefield 3 or any future iterations of that engine, or the CryEngine 2.

The other major upgrade is an SSD. These can be a bit costly but using an SSD in my Mac has changed the way I use it. No more am I reluctant to restart the system after an update. The less-than-10-second boot time is so good it’s worth restarting now and then just to clear out the cobwebs, and with OS X Lion’s ability to remember what I was doing in an app before shutdown it’s all remarkably convenient. So on the PC the idea would be to run Windows and any important applications on the SSD and all of the content and “meaty stuff” would go on the bigger hard drive. For example, Steam would run on my SSD but I would use the Windows equivalent of symlinks to have it read the game files from a folder on the other drive.

I haven’t purchased it yet, but knowing Overclockers don’t do Christmas sales is quite useful as a device for temptation…

The game is more of a short, direct tale with very little gameplay in there – but it is worth taking a few minutes to play.

It’s quite an Irish game, with Irish names like “Mammy”, “Daddy” (who tells you to fuck off while watching porn) and the protagonist called “Eimear”. It plays on the typical old-school religious type of family that’s been portraid for many decades, but it takes it to the extreme level with language and content.

It’s not for the light hearted, and does render a certain sense that perhaps the author of the game (hosted on newgrounds) has had some bad experiences in his/her youth. This is the kind of game that will probably never get remade, released properly or even have the chance to get mainstream attention.

But it is a prime example of “games as art”.

Check out this Skyrim-themed one!

Beta sign-ups are going on via f1onlinethegame.com.

Track information, car data and other such ‘stuff’ is coming from the console & PC versions of F1 2012, so this will be a fully featured F1 title.

Grand Prix events, home-crafted teams (with your own livery etc.) and leaderboards will be a big part of the community features.

Check out the trailer below!