This year's E3 manifests the industry's dearth of creativity via the rampant case of sequel-itis running wild throughout the development world, but that doesn't mean you can't continue creating your own unique creations with flexible tools such as the popular Garry's Mod.

A new update to Garry's Mod is now available over Steam and will be applied upon restarting Valve's digital distribution service. The update includes fixes such as the shotgun having unintentionally decreased damage, TF2'2 blood overriding Half-Life 2's, and a crash that occurred "when prop's physics object couldn't be created," according to the official Steam website.

Several months ago, PC processor maker Intel purchased the game physics development software company Havok, which is used in a ton of PC and console games. In February the company announced that it would release the PC version of the Havok tool set for free for anyone to use for non-commercial uses. Well, today is the day to download those files.

The files contain both the Havok Physics and Havok Animation tools and can only be used for independent game developers along with academic uses and "enthusiasts". The files do not include Havok's other products such as Havok Cloth and Havok Destruction. The company feels this new release "will boost creative game development throughout the industry."

Indie-built sidescroller Halo Zero was a big hit with PC gamers when it released in 2005, years later new independent Halo titles are jumping into the spotlight.

Halo-Battle, a French php-based strategy game set in the Halo universe, has recently launched online. Players, who may choose to fight for humanity or the alien Covenant, are tasked with resource gathering via mining facilities, building labs to research further technology, developing an army to do battle with the opposition and nearly everything else standard in RTS titles.

Beating Ensemble Studios to the punch with the RTS Halo-Battle, the game is available for free after registering a user name. We have yet to see it in action because of frequent site crashes, probably due to the popularity of the release. Keep in mine the entire site is French so it may be hard to navigate; a translation is apparently in the works.

Also released recently is the public beta for Halo Zero 2, which adds more weapons and better enemy A.I. than the original 2005 title.

Download Halo Zero from Big Download now!

[via 7th Columnist]

Within A Deep Forest was a deeply affecting, strangely lonely platformer where you bounced around a ball that could change its physical properties. In much the same vein, Crazy Bound 2 has been released to fuel the need to bounce spherical objects around a lifeless environment. Featuring the same platforming-action-puzzle gameplay that made Within A Deep Forest so entertaining, it is similar without being exactly the same. And more of a good thing is excellent, right?

[Via IndieGames]

Geometry Wars was a huge hit. Initially released on Xbox Live, it then shifted over to the PC through the use of the excellent Steam service. It has inspired countless clones, many of which are amazing games in their own rights. Well, a new clone can now be counted among them, now that OUEO has released their arena shooter Debrysis.

More of a game that is inspired by Geometry Wars rather than copying it exactly, Debrysis is a fun little arena shooter that is great for killing time in small chunks. It has radar, power-ups, and most important of all, explosions in great quantities. The download is minimal, so give it a whirl and tell us what you think!

[Via IndieGames]

Jack Thompson would be so ashamed at the sort of violence that is being perpetrated recently. First Fantastic Blood Boy, and now this?! Beltality is a small, quirky game where you control presses with one of two goal: squish people (in showers of square blood, no less!) or assemble robots. It's an amazingly simple game, and a good time waster. There are also leaderboards, for those obsessives who have to show their awesome high scores to their friends.

[Via IndieGames]

Welcome to Freeware Friday, a weekly column showcasing excellent games that you can play free of charge!

No self-respecting freeware gamer can talk about freeware games without mentioning one of the masterpieces. It's a simple and yet absurdly good platformer/shooter, developed by one Japanese man over the course of 5 years. It's quite possibly the best freeware game of all time. I am, of course, talking about Cave Story (Or Doukutsu Monogatari for those who want the Japanese name) by Pixel.

Paradroid was an excellent, if mostly overlooked, action-puzzler for the Commodore 64. There have been countless remakes, including a very good freeware one (Freedroid). Now Puppygames have decided to toss their hat into the ring with the indie title Droid Assault, and they have done a fine job.

Sharing the same sort of gameplay as Paradroid, you must capture other droids to do your dirty work for you in Droid Assault. However, where Paradroid has a little mini-game to spice things up, it's merely a button press in Droid Assault. The graphics are a huge improvement, the gameplay excellent, and it's overall a well-designed and executed indie game. You can download the demo or buy it for $10 at Puppygames' site.

While another independent programmer plugs away at a full remake of the classic GameBoy title Metroid II, Nintendo fan Von Richter is hard at work at another programmed lover-letter to the Metroid series.

Metroid SR-388, which according to the trailer has been in development for four years, features new moves, weapons and abilities in what is described as "The Ultimate Fangame."

It would be a shame if the thousands of frames of animation in the game were put to a halt by Nintendo's legal department before we got our hands on the PC release, so our hopes go out to Richter. No word on the status of the fan-made title but we can't wait to curl up into a ball again and not have it be related to meeting our deadlines!

[via Kotaku]

Here in the Big Iron room, we're going to be throwing around a lot of computer acronyms and terminology. So, for those folks who may be new to the notion of taking a screwdriver in hand to see what's inside their system, or when it's time for you to upgrade for the very first time, here's a quick list of the components we'll be making reference to and what their roles are.

CPU: Central Processing Unit. This is the processor itself, the expensive bit of silicon that performs a bunch of math very, very quickly. Intel's Pentiums, Celerons, and Xeons, along with AMD's Athlons, Durons, Semprons, and Opterons. Most of us are going to have some flavor of Pentium or Athlon (yes, even Mac users have Intel chips under the hood nowadays, though you PPC folks are a bunch of die-hards). When referring to processor speeds, we'll typically be speaking in terms of gigahertz (GHz), or billions of cycles per second.

Both Intel and AMD have, independently and somewhat confusingly, moved away from coming right out and saying how fast their CPUs are in terms of raw clock speed. Instead, each of them has come up with an arcane and obscure "performance rating system" that sort of, kind of, using a perverse combination of marketing, advanced differential calculus and a lot of handwavium, gives you a vague idea of how your new CPU would stack up to a first-generation Pentium IV. This may not, in fact, adequately express how arbitrary and confusing this practice is, and I'm going to stay well clear of that particular morass. You'll be getting clock speeds in this space for the sake of everyone's sanity.

Cores: Recently, both Intel and AMD have begun offering CPUs with more than one processor tucked into a single package. Such dual-core or quad-core (and, in some cases, triple-core) chips allow the system to do two (or three, or four) things at the same time, and more games -- and applications in general -- are beginning to take this into account with their programming -- a practice known as multi-threading or symmetric multi-processing (SMP).

RAM: Random Access Memory. This is where your system stores the information its actively working with, and is typically measured in Megabytes (MB) or Gigabytes (GB). There are two main types of RAM in most current PCs today -- DDR2 and DDR3 (DDR stands for Double Data Rate -- the practice of transferring information on both the "up" and "down" cycle of the memory clock. More detail for those who really want to investigate it is in the links).

HDD: Hard Disk Drive. Main storage, measured in Gigabytes (GB), and occasionally in Terabytes (TB). This is where everything is saved - from operating system files to games to music - everything that takes up space when it's saved.

Video Cards: Arguably, the single most important component when it comes to determining how well a PC will perform a video game in terms of frame rate (often called FPS -- frames per second -- not to be confused with the same acronym used to refer to first-person shooters). There are two major players in this arena - nVidia and ATI (which was recently purchased by CPU maker AMD). The players in this field have also been engaged in a bit of marketing and naming chicanery, but at least they're numbering their offerings sequentially, so you can be pretty confident that a 9-series card is faster than an 8-series card from the same manufacturer most of the time, for instance.

SLI / Crossfire: The respective "multiple video cards in one PC" implementations supported by nVidia and ATI.

There are a lot of variables that go into building and optimizing a gaming rig. It's our hope here at Big Iron to demystify some of what goes on under for you, and allow you to share in the hardware enthusiasm. There's a lot of pride in craftsmanship when you do build your own PC. Hop in, it's a hell of a ride.


Rafe spends his days wielding a phone in one hand and a screwdriver in the other. When not causing friends and enemies alike to /facepalm electronically, he can be found extolling the virtues of the weird peripherals in his life, from kettlebells to the Trackman Marble. If you have any hardware, performance, or upgrade-related questions you'd like to see in future editions of Big Iron, the target coordinates are rafe.brox AT weblogsinc DOT com.

Riding on the coattails of their announcement about the new Majesty sequel, Paradox Interactive has unleashed another atomic bomb on the indie scene. This time, it's about the Europa engine. Partnering with GamersGate, Paradox is releasing the Europa engine license and tools to anyone who applies for free.

Not only that, but for those who actually utilize the engine, you've got some good news. GamersGate will allow products made using this free license available on their service at no cost to the developers, giving indie devs the same deal most companies give established companies.

Sprites are quite hard to make. No, not the delicious lemon-lime beverage that mixes well with just about anything. 2D pixel art, especially of the hand-drawn variety, takes quite a while to draw. With this in mind, DoctorM64 has found an official spriter to help him out on his Metroid 2 remake using Game Maker. This marks the first person other than DoctorM64 to work on AM2R. There's some sweet new in-action shots showing off his fine sprite work on the official AM2R blog, and an announcement of his addition to the team. Check it out.

Want an excellent way to get your girlfriend involved in gaming? Get her hooked on clicky web-based games like PopCap's insanely successful casual title, Bejeweled. Want to make sure that not only will she continue to love gaming, but stick around and geek out with you for years to come? 'Hack' her favorite game and use it to propose to her!

Sound far-fetched? We thought so too, until we heard the story of Bernie Peng, who got creative when it came to popping the question to his other half, Tammy Li. After working for a month or so on a homebrew Nintendo DS port of Li's favorite PC game, he passed it along to her claiming he 'found' it. After she hit the required score, a ring dropped down on-screen -- something totally different from her usual gaming! That's when Peng asked her to marry him, she said yes, and the rest became gaming geek history.

In an interesting aside to this story, PopCap Games, makers of Bejeweled and many other highly addictive time-sucking clicky games, have decided to fly the happy couple to Seattle for a visit to their offices as part of their Honeymoon. (Getting angry about a cool port would be a bad call, after all.) They are also giving the happy couple lots of free copies of Bejeweled to give away as wedding favors. We sense many more clicky-game addicts will be in the making as the happy couple kick off their new life together.

cactus has finally released a new game! This one, Ad Nauseum 2, is a shoot-'em-up with graphics and visual style that is quite possibly meant to cause seizures in all those who play it. It also has a ton of explosions, has a noisy soundtrack, and is extremely hard. There's not much else to say, because there's not much else to the game. But it's fun, challenging, and free!

[Via TIGSource]