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In 1979, Moonraker was first shown in movie theaters. It's perhaps the dumbest premise ever for a James Bond movie: A super rich psycho with a Hitler complex decides to kill everyone on Earth via a bio-weapon in favor of his own specially picked humans. In order to kill everyone on the planet all at once he decides to build a space station to fire pods that would disperse the weapon from orbit.

The final battle takes place in and around this space station as a fleet of US Space Marines (yep, that's what they are called) head up in a space shuttle. The Marines and the villainous minions, all wearing bulky space suits, fire at each other with lasers in Earth's orbit. Again, it's really dumb for a James Bond movie but in another context, this kind of space battle had not really been seen before. In fact since Moonraker we have yet to see this kind of space combat duplicated for any other movie or TV show.

If you're itching for an action hack-and-slash role-playing game to hold you over until Diablo III releases, then you can't do much better than Torchlight. Developed by Runic Games, with a team comprised largely of people that worked on the original Diablo and Diablo II, this is probably as close as one can get to a Diablo-esque experience without actually summoning the Lord of Terror. Even the music is reminiscent of Diablo. That's not to say that Torchlight is any kind of rehash. The game generally carries a light tone, thanks largely to its cartoonish art style and bright colors. Even in the deepest depths of the mines that run underneath the town of Torchlight, with the blood setting turned on, you won't find a creature that can be characterized as horrific or scary, so the game does a good job of standing out on its own.

Download the Torchlight Demo (418 MB)
Check out all Torchlight Downloads

Each week we find more and more free games that do not quite fit into the freeware mold. Games that do not require a subscription fee to play, but encourage player usage of money through microtransactions or special subscription services. This is Playing For Free, a column that showcases these games.

Once again, we return to the realm of free-to-play MMO shooters. We've covered Quake Live, Battlefield Heroes, and even Combat Arms, so maybe it's time to tackle something a little more new. CrimeCraft was released in August, and quickly went to the "free unlimited trial" system that boils down to being free-to-play. It's not great, and certainly not better than other free-to-play MMO shooters like Combat Arms (even with insane community), but it's passable and, at least on the surface, unique.

It's been a few days since our last giveaway so it's time we gave our Big Download readers a chance to win something cool. In this case we got three Steam download codes to give out that will let the winners download the full version of Shattered Horizon, the just released multiplayer first person shooter from developer Futuremark Games Studios.

As with most of our contests, entering the giveaway is simple:

• To enter, post a comment on this contest page.
• The comment must be left before 11:59 pm Eastern Time on November 9
  
• You may enter only once.
• Three winners will be selected in a random drawing.
• Those three winners will be sent a Steam code that can be use to download a full copy of Shattered Horizon (valued at $19.99 each)
  
• Click Here for complete Official Rules. You must be a resident of the US or Canada (excluding Quebec) who is 18 years or older to enter this contest.
• Also keep in mind that this game can only be run on Windows Vista or Windows 7 with at least a DirectX10 based graphics card.

Our thanks to Futuremark Games Studio for the donation of the prizes. Good luck.

Epic Games has supported mod makers by releasing tools for their PC games ever since the release of the original Unreal game. Tons of new levels, weapons and total conversions have started out as mods based on Epic's games like Unreal Tournament, UT 2004 and UT 3. A few have even made the jump to becoming full stand alone commercial games like Tactical Ops, Red Orchestra and most recently Killing Floor. All of those games required the developer to buy a full Unreal Engine license from Epic.

With today's release of the Unreal Development Kit by Epic, mod makers who previously needed to have one of Epic's commercial games installed no longer have that limitation and can now make stand alone games that they can release for free or as a commercial game. Toltec Studios, the UT 3 mod team behind the unusual first person action-puzzle total conversion The Ball, have already released a stand alone free demo version of the game using UDK. You can download the demo right now at Big Download.

Big Download got to ask some questions to the mod team's leader Sjoerd "Hourences" De Jong to find out more about their UDK version of The Ball, whether mod makers will gravitate to Epic's new free release and their plans for a commercial version of The Ball.

San Diego-based Psyonix is a full fledged professional game developer with lots of experience in using Epic Games' Unreal Engine 3 technology. Indeed the developer has collaborated directly with Epic on several of their games. However, the team also likes to experiment with new game prototypes and one of those efforts, the casual underwater-themed platformer Whizzle, has been turned into a full (and free) stand along game using Epic's now officially released Unreal Development Kit.

Big Download got a chance to ask some questions to the Psyonix team and its founder Dave.Hagewood to find out more about how Whizzle was made, what they think the release of UDK will mean for game development and more.

Games that are coming out soon have a lot of unknowns that the average person might not know. Who is this character inspired by? Is all the talk of volumetric fog or cel-shaded graphics really worthwhile? Do the game mechanics really seem solid, or are they lackluster? In All You Need To Know we provide information to help you fully appreciate what these upcoming games have to offer.

Feed your head after the jump.

Check out our collection of Diablo III related downloads here on Big Download!

It's said that beauty is in the eye of the beholder; it is a completely subjective experience, dependent upon the taste of each particular viewer. This is palpably evident in the video game industry, where one man's trash is another man's treasure. One need only review the relatively recent controversy over Diablo 3's color palette to realize the truth of this.

Have we evolved a different set of standards for the concept of beauty in a video game? Is there ever one prevailing standard, apparent and provable to all? Why is beauty so hard to define?

Futuremark has made its mark (pun intended) in the past with its benchmarking software, especially 3DMark which has become a defacto product to put high end PC hardware through its paces. However the company has also wanted to make games and in 2008 it announced its plans to start up Futuremark Games Studios.

Later today its first title, the multiplayer first person shooter Shattered Horizon, is scheduled to be released via Steam. As one might expect their first game is not the typical FPS as it takes place in Earth orbit with players as armed astronaunts shooting in zero gravity. Big Download got the game's lead designer Antti Summala to give us some more info on Shattered Horizon and get some hints about the future plans for the game.