Finnish developer Frozenbyte Studios have released a demo of their forth-coming physics based platform/puzzler Trine.  It’s currently available on GamersHell and FileFront as a 461MB download. Trine, with it’s battling  Warrior, high swinging Thief and object conjuring Wizard  is one of the most charming and promising games we’ve played in a while, and you’ll be able to catch the full review in our next issue. In the meantime, you can briefly ...

I recently went to Paris, to get a look at a third person adventure game called Risen, by German developer Piranha Bytes. Most easily described as a cross between Fable and Oblivion, Risen has you shipwrecked on a medieval fantasy island, needing to arm yourself to survive in the wilds of the island before finding civilisation. The full preview and interview with Kai Rosenkrantz, Audio Director and an overseeing producer at Piranha Bytes will be in Total PC Gaming Issue 21 out ...

Total PC Gaming's sixth podcast can now be listened to directly on our Podcast homepage or downloaded via the wonders of iTunes so you can listen to us on the bus. This episode is spent welcoming our new - already indispensable - staff writer Sam Bandah, chatting about some of the latest PC games winging their way to market and mulling over the latest industry ...

The indication from early Fallout 3 reviews bodes well for Bethesda's much-hyped big-budget title. The sprawling, open-world action RPG has been rated maximum scores on 1Up, Eurogamer, Gamespy and Official Xbox UK and scores in the nineties on Metacritic. Incidentally, PC Gamer rated Fallout 3 at 90%, 4% less than Far Cry 2 in its September issue, which would indicate a lesser game to the undiscerning eye… Look out for our Fallout 3 review in issue 14 of Total PC Gaming magazine, ...

Thought I'd follow up Tuesday's shameless TPCG/Imagine Publishing blog plug with another one. Shameless, because there's absolutely no shame in it when you're promoting something that's genuinely good: SciFiNow.co.uk, IP's website for its hugely popular SciFi Now mag is adding video content for the latest films, including trailers, behind-the-scenes footage, interviews and previews. It's being hosted in partnership with Moviebeat and will shortly show featurettes and interviews for The Mummy: Tomb Of The Dragon Emperor, Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Hellboy ...

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A beast of rare quality… the Greater-headed TPCG, as seen with the aid of EA's Spore Creature Editor demo, available for download as of 17 June. Oddly fascinating this… relatively speaking, I'm not enjoying it that much, but I can't stop making freaky creatures with it.

Age Of Conan launches on the 23rd, so Eidos and Funcom thought it would be a great idea to hire a medieval re-enactment group, dress them up as battle-scarred barbarians, give them wenches, then make them fight eachother in a field filled with debauched and drunken journalists. TPCG thought so too, which is why I got sent to Oslo with explicit instructions to take photos and if possible, challenge Conan to manly hand-to-hand combat. I did. He wussed out....

  There was a time, before the competition for retailers' shelf space became as fierce as it is today, when a new PC release wasn't just crammed into a standardised plastic case and filed in their hundreds onto a single shelf. It came in a big, chunky box, proudly displayed five or six across and maybe three deep in your local games store. Publishers back then seemed to be more aware of the event that a PC games purchase was and filled this box out with enough paraphernalia to keep the gamer occupied during the lengthy install times. You got something that was both more tangible and looked much prettier on your shelf.

Hi folks! My name’s Ben! This is my first blog ever, I hope you’ll enjoy it – and do come back again to read my next blog entry, it’s a doozie! (Whatever a doozie is. I hope it’s a good thing) Seriously, this is genuinely my debut blog. But I’m not gonna dwell on that, instead I’m going to vent bile and spleen over a subject that’s really hacking me off at the moment: casual gaming. Or, rather, some of the developers who are perpetuating it. Two gaming gurus in particular, Chris Taylor and Peter Molyneux, both spoke about opening their games out to a broader audience at GDC this month: