While the third iteration might not have the same impact of the original sale, The Humble Frozenbyte Bundle is still offering a number of great games for the price you want to pay, and it's still making hundreds of thousands of pounds for both the developers and a number of different charities. As well as letting you pick your own price, the bundle also lets you choose how much to give to each charity using sliders.

The games in the bundle include the very popular Trine and Shadowgrounds, Splot and a 'prototype' version of Jack Claw. This collection makes it probably the weakest actual line-up of titles so far for the bundle, with Trine having been out for many months, Splot not being released yet and Jack Claw being nowhere close, it's a shame we couldn't have seen a more interesting mix of finished games, especially considering the troubles that some Mac users have had actually getting the titles to run.

Still, it's for charity, so we won't complain. The average price paid is currently sitting around $5, and if you haven't already played Trine then that game alone is worth that much, so it's still a great deal if you enjoy indie platform/puzzle titles. If you're not sure how to work out a 'fair' price to pay, The main page declares that the actual price of buying all the games individually would be around $50, which is roughly £30 for the exchange rate challenged.

With all the games in the bundle totally DRM free - and therefore very easy to pirate and share with friends - the continued success of the project not only encourages indie game development, it also proves that treating gamers like real people and not criminals probably does more for your reputation and bottom line then trying to stick useless DRM all over your games.

It's been reported this week that German developer JoWood will be shutting down after being unable to fix its debt issues during bankruptcy. The company has been trying to find new investors since January thanks to an incredibly bad year for the company in 2010 which piled on the debt. While two investors were looking at the company during the first few months of the year, both pulled out leaving JoWood with nowhere to go. We could now see the IP of the company being sold off to pay for their debts.

If you're wondering who JoWood are, you'll probably best know them for the Gothic series of open world RPG titles. The last Gothic Release which title swapped the series to become 'ArcaniA: Gothic 4' was released in Q3 last year. The series has always been an ambitious roleplay adventure but since the original game the series has been plagued by bugs, performance problems and a general lack of polish that kept the game from being lifted out of relative obscurity. While patches and user fixes have made the Gothic series an interesting RPG in its own right, many long term followers of the series have already moved on to the new RPG franchise from the original developer: Risen.

Other titles include the popular - if basic - Painkiller series and more niche RPG and simulation titles such as SpellForce and The Guild. As a publisher that has been working so heavily with the PC market over many years, it's a shame to see JoWood bite the dust.

One of the most amazing things about the PC is modding, and one of the most amazing things about modding is that sometimes a mod for a game can go so far from the titles original template and ideas that it creates a whole new genre. That's what happened to the Warcraft 3 mod Defence of the Ancients, which popularised a form of RTSRPG called that's a mix of tower defence games, standard RTS titles and MMOs. It wasn't long before DOTA was cloned by several other developers in a bid to make a little bit of cash and the two most well known DOTA clones on the market today are the free to play but micropayment supported League of Legends and the full price Heroes of Newerth.

This week we've got another entry to the market with SMITE, developed by Hi-Rez studios. Hi-Rez CEO Todd Harris said:

"These are features we understand well from Global Agenda and our studio is excited to progress team-oriented PvP in new and original directions with SMITE. At this point we already have a really fun playable version of SMITE and we look forward to sharing additional details about the project in the coming months."

It's been announced as an MMO though it has some clear DOTA influences. Hi-Rez also made the FPS game Global Agenda, which they also described as an MMO even though it wasn't really what most gamers might consider an MMO to be. SMITE is all about mythical gods and creative use of the always beautiful Unreal 3 engine.

The biggest problem we've found with DOTA style games is the fairly high learning curve, and both Heroes of Newerth and League of Legends are known for their somewhat unfriendly communities that don't take kindly to new players not knowing what the hell is going on. Hopefully SMITE will have enough tutorials and help in place as well as a sensible ranking system in order to avoid a community full of nerd rage.

When Peter Molyneux was part of Bullfrog, they managed to make some of the world’s most iconic PC games of the mid-nineties. While Theme Park has had its fair share of remakes, spiritual sequels and knock offs in the last fifteen years, people have been content to let their dystopian strategy game, Syndicate, sit generally unmolested since its creation.

Now it’s almost certainly being remade by EA, original designer Peter Molyneux, now famous for the Fable series and generally making up features on a whim has voiced his desire to go hang out EA for a day and tell them all about what was “really special” about the game.

“I wish I could just spend a day with them saying what I thought was really special about Syndicate, or another title for that matter. They're smart people and I'm sure they'll work it out. But it's like a parent watching their kid grow up and do something with their life - you still want to be a little bit involved. There's been a Populous DS. That was okay, it didn't do brilliantly. Again, I wish I had ten minutes with them at the start.”

And why not? Molyneux may have his flaws, but Syndicate had his name and talent all over it, and if EA would lend them their ear for a day it might avoid the new title falling into the astounding amount of remakes that just don’t really “get the point” of the title they are trying to remake. Then again, if his design suggestions are as bad as some of those made in Fable 3, perhaps he should just keep them to himself.

Source: CVG

In a shocking revelation involving gaming peripheral market, gaming mouse producer Warmouse has released a press release today that happens to find that their new gaming mouse outperforms the next best gaming mouse in the test, the Razer Naga, by 30 percent. It also claims that many of the gaming mice tested couldn’t out-perform a standard office mouse.

Hold up for a minute though - though the medium of Excel charts and flowery words that make it sound all scientific and impressive, the main flaw of this test seems to be that WarMouse only seemed to test how fast the mice managed to click, which funnily enough is the main draw of the Warmouse, a mouse designed to give users easy access to hotkeys and cut down time spent ‘interfacing’ with things.

Unless you’re playing Farmville or Diablo 2 though, there’s more to a gaming mouse than how fast you can click a button. Most gamers would consider those little things like accuracy and weight more important than the fact their mouse can only register an inefficient ten million clicks per second.

Still, you can’t blame WarMouse for trying; it’s a packed market and at £69.95 the WarMouse isn’t anywhere near the cheaper end of it. Meanwhile our £20.00 Logitech MX518 continues to serve us well, providing quality performing and avoiding the intense embarrassment of being caught gaming using an Intellimouse.

Source: Slashdot

Since having a full time job I’ve had to do one thing that I regret the most – stop playing SimCity. It’s a game that can quickly eclipse all other games, jobs and social interactions. Gone are the weekends where I spent 30 hours straight building my perfect city to then attempt to destroy it – gone are the weekends feeling like a god of my mighty city – well at least I thought they were gone.

The genre defining city builder that stole many gamers free time has hit Steam in the form of SimCity: 4 Deluxe Edition. The deluxe edition contains both the original game as well as the expansion [What did ever happen to expansions?] Rush Hour. So get your construction gear on and be ready to take control of thousands of Sims. The game is on Steam right now for $19.99 or £9.99.

Simcity 4 was one of the best games in the series - plagued with performance issues on release this could be your chance to play it on a more modern system - and let’s face it with the underwhelming Simcity: Societies and Cities XL we might not be seeing another any time soon.

So thank you EA & Maxis – thank you for trying your best to get me addicted again after all the hard work I put in going Cold Turkey. You and Steam are working together better than a drug pusher with an excess of stock. The deluxe editions seem to be the standard one rather than a localized version such as SimCity 4 Deluxe Edition UK which you can grab on Gamersgate for £9.95.