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Discuss the issue on the forums here!If there's one word to describe September here at PCPP, it's cataclysmic. World of Warcraft's explosive new expansion is coming this year, so we spent some hands-on time with the all-new Azeroth at Blizzard HQ.The resulting six pages are brimming with everything you needed to know – new locations, new battlegrounds, new raids, new intricate class dynamics! WOW – and your life – will never be the same again.Tim Denee experiences a cataclysm of his own, with his all-new illustrated Dwarf Fortress battle report. Admire his beautiful artistry. Feel for the poor little people as they battle zombie elephants. And remember: losing is fun!Elsewhere, EVE Online correspondent Bill Mulholland gives us the most comprehensive expert's guide to this overwhelmingly complex MMO. Whether you want to be a dashing pirate, an intrepid explorer or a captain of industry, only here can you learn how to make your mark on the universe!Singularity is the big review this month – can we get past the Back to the Future references to find out whether turning people into time zombies is at all fun? Elsewhere, Sniper: Ghost Warrior cops a beating, we check out Telltale's new episodic Pilot program, and our banana republic grows with a Tropico 3 expansion.PCPP's Tech Editor spent a few freezing days in Jakarta (so much liquid nitrogen!) to witness the Regional Finals to Gigabyte's Open Overclocking Championships. We also roundup the best case fans, and a couple of cool cases to go with them. And did we mention we got our mitts on the ASUS ARES, the world's fastest videocard? Exclusive review inside!Since we weren't busy enough, we've gone ahead and built you a custom, top-of-the-line PC that you can win – just subscribe before 25th August and all $2621 worth could be yours! Check out this thread for a detailed rundown of its components.The Veldt begins its transition this issue toward a broader, multiplayer focus. We go in-depth with the Medal of Honor beta – does it have a chance of replacing Modern Warfare 2? Our definitive verdict inside!To go hand-in-hand with our expert's guide, we've given you the full EVE Online client on this month's disc! No downloading required – play it right away! We've also got massive demos for Mass Effect 2, Sniper: Ghost Warrior, and the entire future of PC gaming presented in glorious HD trailers.PCPP#181. The future really is now!

Discuss this issue on the forums here!OUT JUNE 30!August comes but once a year, and this year we're spending August in Vegas! Sure, a grim, post-apocalyptic Vegas overrun with gouls and other unpleanantries, but hey, we take the vacation time when we can get it.And what we get is a massive six-page feature on what could be the biggest Fallout yet. Discover: how mods have inspired game changes! Thrill: at Dan's awesome puns! And etc. Deeper in, PCPP#180 delves into the psychology of piracy. Why do we do it? You wouldn't steal a baby, why steal so many games? Maybe it's because games and TV have never got along... That's not a non-sequitur, by the way, that's the topic of our next feature. Doug Hendrie examines the shows that were, are and are yet to be. Elbow bump for awesome!In reviews, we pour our focus onto Alpha Protocol while we wait for E3 to cough out some sweet new titles. Still, TCP Safari, indies, Sam Max and Vooju Island keep us from going TOO insane...In tech, we ask whether PC gamers are precisely the wrong audience for the iPad, round up sweet gaming cans, and bring back ReShuffle... albeit in a "lite" form before its proper serious rebirth in PCPP#181. We also road-test the Predator G7750 - that's the same $7000 PC you can win if you subscribe before the end of July!The Veldt turns its evil eye on the QuakeLive scene, and gives its final verdict on the StarCraft Beta: game = good, Battle.net = not so good. Don't take it from us: we speak to Australia's top SC2 players for the skinny.The DVD is all about Mechwarrior 4: Mercenaries. Free at last! Free at last! That plus a batch of sweet demos and E3 trailers in high-res without all that tedious waiting around for streaming...PCPP#180. What happens between the pages STAYS between the pages.BONUS MAGAZINE-ONLY EDITION COVER! Yep, just because we could!Discuss this issue on the forums here!

The Korean E-Sports Association has permanently banned all eleven players implicated in the match-fixing scandal that overtook Korea early this year.All eleven players will also reportedly be stripped of their titles and rewards gathered over their entire pro-gaming careers, although not their money, as well as banned from the pro-gaming scene permanently.Two new players were named in this judgement who had not previously been mentioned in reports; Jung Jin Hyun (By.1st) and Choi Ka Ram (ShinHwA). Other players charged include Kim Sung Ki (DarkElf), Ma Jae Yoon (sAviOr), Park Chan Soo (Luxury), and Jin Yung Soo (Hwasin).These could be seen as a tough move by the Korean E-Sports Association to attempt to prevent match-fixing from ever occurring again. The E-Sports association is in a rough patch at the moment, between the imminent release of Starcraft II and Blizzard's attempt to set up its own competing pro-gaming scene.Interestingly, no Protoss players were implicated in the scandal whatsoever. Weird.(Thanks to Team Liquid and Fomos)

Cliff Harris doesn't mean to complain: "I am NOT moaning about sales," he says on his blog. Developer of Gratuitous Space Battles, an unusual indie game that vaguely fits into tower defense and real-time strategy, Harris is known for his quizzical nature. As one of the first people to actually go out and talk to pirates about why they steal games, Harris now wants to know why people didn't buy his."I am not whining or anything like it," Harris continues. "I just like making games that people enjoy, and I don't know why the people who didn't buy it, didn't buy it. I'd like to know."As the subject of the PCPP Interview for Issue #176, Harris may have answered his own question in speaking to us: "Most PC games are made for a big triple-A audience of 100,000 people at least, so the idea of doing a tower-defense/RTS hybrid was too niche for a big developer to do."Too niche to sell as well, perhaps? Harris is predicting such responses, asking people to consider some of the following points before answering:"I Thought it would be an arcade game, but it wasn't and I don't like strategy games.""I Don't like 2D games, or at least won't pay money for them.""I don't trust buying it from your website""I wanted direct control of the ships, and that was frustrating"Harris is also aware that price may be an issue. Whatever the case, he wants to know why you didn't buy his game - or, why you did buy his game, and didn't like it.""My intention here is to hoover up all those comments that invariably get made, that could, in a perfect world, be fed back to the creator of something to make the product better," he says.Send Harris an email at cliff@positech.co.uk with your reasoning, or visit his blog for a deeper insight into his brain. And yes, "It's just not my kind of game" is a perfectly valid response.

In an effort to draw a greater population, Turbine is preparing to release a free-to-play option for The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar. Though the MMO enjoyed a healthy launch and saw two expansion packs, its long-term viability within an already hyper-competitive market is becoming exponentially questionable. Player populations are spread over too many shards and high-level areas.Rather than consolidate its player-base and close multiple shards, Turbine's free-to-play offerings will hopefully draw in healthy new fellowships.Those who purchased a lifetime subscription at launch need not worry about being undercut. According to the free-to-play beta signup page, a monthly subscription option that adds multiple benefits is still available.Free players will be limited to one character per server, be unable to earn more than 2 gold, not earn Rest XP and be unable to spend Destiny Points. Many of these features can be purchased through microtransactions if a monthly subscription is still too much of a commitment to make.The microtransactions come in the form of Turbine Points, which can be purchased with a credit card or through PayPal. They can also be earned through gameplay, though we expect at a much slower rate.The free-to-play beta is expected to begin this spring. Visit the official website to sign up for a chance to be a part of it!

You might not have known it, but Ubisoft has an online shop in other, more important countries where you can purchase and download the best of the publisher's PC library. Well, the store has had a bit of a makeover, and launches today in Australia as UBIShop.According to the official press release, UBIShop will eventually begin selling boxed copies of PC and console games too, along with merchandise. Authentic Altaïr hoods or leather Prince vests? Probably not - expect a few t-shirts and mousepads.In celebration of the Australian launch, Ubisoft is offering customers a free budget game with any full-price purchase. So shell out for the likes of Splinter Cell: Conviction, Assassin's Creed II or the new Prince of Persia, and you can get Beyond Good & Evil, Rainbow Six: Vegas or the original Assassin's Creed for free!No word on exactly which other classic titles are up for grabs, as the relevant page doesn't seem to click through properly for us.There seems to be some good and bad aspects to Ubishop. Prices are thankfully displayed in $AUD, though - as a storefront without a client, customers cannot re-download bought games without the purchase of a $12 Extended Download Service for each title.Ubisoft will "automatically store on [its] server a back-up copy of the software that you purchased and downloaded for two (2) years from the date of purchase. System crash? Hard disk error? No Worries! You can re-download your files anytime during your extended protection period."EA attempted to apply the same surcharge with the EA Download Manager, despite it being an actual client in and of itself. Really though, in an age where Steam and Good Old Games let you re-download your games as many times as you like for free, we wonder how quickly PC gamers will take to using UBIShop.And when you think about it, it is a bit of a silly name.

The Napoleonic Wars were about as far as The Creative Assembly was willing to push the Total War series through time; any further, and the core elements of the seminal grand strategy franchise would begin to fall apart. Or worse - become entirely redundant!So it is that the super-scale RTS developer is rewinding rewinding its ludography ten years - and history three hundred years - to create Shogun 2: Total War.As a sequel to the Total War series' debut, Shogun 2 has the luxury of ten years worth of tech and gameplay improvements to draw upon. The naval battles featured in Empire and Napoleon will be back, with the addition of coastal battles that combine both land and sea combat strategies.Hero units, multi-stage castle sieges and an AI that apparently adapts to player strategies by following the teachings of Sun Tzu (hey, when in Rome...) round out just some of the other improvements Shogun 2 will feature. We've already seen a remake of Medieval, so the announcement of Shogun 2 begs the question: has The Creative Assembly worked themselves into an infinite loop? Will we see remake after remake of the same periods of history stretching long into the future? Has the past been completely exhausted of appropriate eras for new Total War games? Hell, are we all okay with that, so long as each title is markedly better than the last?It seems like only time with Shogun 2 will tell. The PC-exclusive title is slated for release in 2011. Expect more information, and perhaps some gameplay footage, once E3 rolls around in a couple of weeks. Until then, check out the following pages for the official fact sheet and some sweet concept art.

While the world is going crazy over Apple's ridiculously expensive iPad, computer manufacturers ASUS and MSI want you to know that a cheaper alternative is available - ASUS's new Eee Pad and MSI's Wind Pad.Announced at the Computex trade show in Taipei, Taiwan, ASUS is offering two different models of Eee Pad. The first is the 12inch model, the Eee Pad EP121, which is essentially a small notebook PC with the functionality of a tablet system. Running Windows 7 Profession and featuring an Intel Core 2 Duo processor under the hood, the EP121 has your standard touchpad or stylus options or the ability to dock it to a QWERTY keyboard, pretty much transforming it into a notebook. It offers 10 hours of battery life, and – unlike an iPad – offers a USB port, SD card slot, webcam and Flash support.ASUS's second model is aimed squarely at the casual user market, if such a thing exists; an nVidia Tegra SoC and Microsoft's Windows Compact 7 system are stuffed into a 12.mm thick and 675g tablet. Oddly enough, it doesn't offer support for Google's Android operating system.ASUS are also offering a fancy e-reader under the name of the Eee Tablet (originality is a lost virtue in the Computer Hardware market), which has built-in note taking functionality and is set to compete with hardware such as Amazon's Kindle. An integrated two megapixel camera and a built-in microphone round out its features, although it's suggested that the Eee Tablet's battery life will only last a measly 10 hours or so.MSI's Wind Pad, on the other hand, is looking to be available with either Windows 7 or Google Android, with a 10 inch touchscreen, a 1.66Ghz Intel Atom processor and a 32GB solid-state drive. It's also expected to cost less than US$500.Whether or not there is a large enough market for all of these crazy devices to happily compete in remains to be seen. Perhaps the lower costs offered by these rival entries into the field might be enough to get more customers into tablet PCs. Who knows?

The dust hasn't settled just yet from the whole Infinity Ward/Activision debacle, as related developers Treyarch wander into the fray with some choice quotes from their latest Call of Duty: Black Ops media blitz.Treyarch Head Mark Lamia told CVG that Treyarch was now a "100 percent Call of Duty studio" and that it had been "long before any of the [Infinity Ward] events occurred". The developer has previously worked on Bond shooter Quantum of Solace and various Spider-man games, but its most recent works have all been various Call of Duty games.Black Ops is not only Treyarch's first Call of Duty game that ventures outside the sorely overused setting of World War II, but also their first game which will take up the entirety of the studio's resources. Reportedly, this includes a dedicated multiplayer team – another first for Treyarch.Lamia also told CVG that Black Ops reportedly did not take any inspiration from Modern Warfare 2, because development began a year before Infinity Ward's game came out. "We're two totally different developments, two totally different creatives" he said. "It was all about what we wanted to create and what that was is something new and fresh – give players some variety, give players a reason to come back to Call of Duty and get some new experiences".Treyarch's Call of Duty: World at War was noted as having a large degree of influence from the original, especially in the look and feel of cinematic, almost action-movie-esque gaming. But Lamia insists things are different for Black Ops."We obviously had a lot of confidence that Infinity Ward would make a great game," he said, "but that game hadn't come out yet, so we couldn't draw anything from it – and weren't going to."Speaking to Develop, Lamia refused to speculate on other forms of competition in the first-person shooter market. "I can tell you that the competition has nothing to do with what we are creating."Treyarch community manager Josh Olin also weighed in, identifying EA's rebooted Medal of Honour franchise and Bungie's Halo: Reach as competitors in the shooter market. "But it doesn't matter," he continued. "...What we're making is our game, and I don't think Black Ops is going to be anything like their games."