Everyone has been tinkering with virtual reality as more Oculus Rift developer kits arrive on people's doorsteps everyday. Their testing ground: Team Fortress 2. Valve are hot on the case with fixes and patches, the latest primarily aimed at the VR mode. Also, the Linux version of Team Fortress 2 has has “Improved performance and stability", which can only be a good thing.
The anticipated SimCity 2.0 update has finally been announced, heading to mayors around the world on April 22nd. Containing mainly “top-requested" bug fixes and improvements, it also includes a smattering of new features as well. Mayors will now drive their fancy cars, helicopters or batmobiles to work if they have the modules available. Also in are huge improvements to the color blind mode and a colour filter to data maps.
The patch notes for the 0.6 update to massively multiplayer FPS Firefall clock in at an astonishing 7,337 words, enough words to drown a small rodent, enough words to reach from here to the moon, depending on font size, enough words to feed a family of sentences for a month. The girth of these notes should give you some sense of the scale of the changes Red 5 have made to their game's progression systems, which have been ceremoniously overhauled. That's progress, after all.
A new Steam client update has been released, that adds official support for Linux and some much needed improvements.Now you can send your friends messages while they’re offline, receiving them when they next log back in. It’s like instant message magic. A bit. Our Spotlight units plug content our journalists have made, that our advertisers want to promote. Sometimes the promotion is paid for, but the content they go to is always independent with no client oversight or approval.
Say what you like about Wargaming, say what you like about tanks, write a 500 word opinion piece on cannons for The Guardian if you want, hire a skywriter to express your true feelings about armoured warfare in the clouds if that's what you're into, just say what you like about Wargaming, but they do put together a damn fine trailer. The latest World of Tanks trailer is all about the freshly revealed Chinese tanks, from China.
Since launching last year, Trion Worlds have been regularly updating RIFT with content patches filled with dynamic changes every couple of months. Now RIFT's first proper expansion, Storm Legion, is ready. And it's huge. The latest update 1.11: Tempest Rising has already set the ball rolling in the lead up to Storm Legion's launch, unleashing a four-staged World Event and some pretty extreme class changes. But what's included in RIFT: Storm Legion? And why should you play it? Here's everything we know.
The Guild Wars 2 Trading Post is now open for business, throwing open the doors of the MMO's auction house to players across all servers. It had been off-limits to many players during the game's opening week — in which it performed so well that ArenaNet had to stop selling copies of the game — but the most recent Guild Wars 2 update has ironed out some unseen auction house kinks, allowing the Trading Post to effortlessly handle the volume of traffic running through it. Lovely.
Robots are bastards. Terminator taught us this. I, Robot taught us this. Wall-E didn’t teach us this, but there was always something suspicious about that little bugger. The point is, when you’re being swarmed by a hundred of them, and one has a bomb, and there’s also a big tractor with a bigger bomb in it, the previously ludicrous firepower at the disposal of Team Fortress 2’s nine classes doesn’t seem quite so ludicrous. It seems a little inadequate. 
Even though they’ve put hero releasing on hold until after the International (in three weeks!), there’s still plenty going on behind the scenes in Dota 2. Today’s patch brings the ability to swap heroes with another player, so long as you do it before the first bell that signifies creeps spawning. 
It’s easy to get caught up in the magical madness of the Summer Sale, but Valve are still busy behind the scenes giving us more DOTA 2 content every week. Naga Siren is this week's hero, along with a bunch of UI updates and the first community made announcer: “Pirate Cap’n". You can check out the change log yourself here along with the regular breakdown by Cyborgmatt, the communities patch analysing hero. 
What's the tiniest patch you can think of? No, smaller than that. Wait, too small - look, nevermind, it's Diablo 3's 1.0.3b patch, which fixes precisely four things. It would've fixed one more thing had Blizzard not reversed loot drop changes in a hotfix two weeks ago. The patch goes live early tomorrow, with European servers down between the hours of 4am and 8am BST on Wednesday, July 11. The official forum has the extensive patch notes. Don't bother making a cup of tea for this one.
Dogs are excellent! That's my dog Sam, up there. He's dead now, which makes him the perfect canine candidate for an appearance in an upcoming version of DayZ. According to the Arma 2 mod's creator Dean 'Rocket' Hall, the zombie survival simulator is soon to receive a pooch patch, which will populate the wilderness with wild dogs. Maybe even zombie dogs.
Blizzard are due to give an update on Magic Find gear swapping today. What's Magic Find gear swapping? It's when you carry around a spare set of armour that's tuned towards increasing your Magic Find stat and change into it the second before you kill an Elite enemy. So you get the benefit of your regular combat effective gear as well as the increased Magic Find that comes with your poorer gear - at the obvious expense of convenience: switching all your armour over is a pain in the patoot, not to mention the valuable inventory space it soaks up. Blizzard, it seems, are about to change this for the better.
Along with Wisp and Luna dropping today in the latest Dota 2 update, Valve have added a couple of extra additions, aimed at making things a little more transparent for everyone. The first is the Heropedia, available online as well as within the dashboard of the game, and the second is an Item Browser, that lets you, well, browse items. And have a look at what they do. But these could be the start of something even more impressive.
Trion have announced that the 1.9 update for Rift is now live. This introduces the new Conquest mode, as well as mentoring, character re-customisation, a new sliver, new instant adventures and new world events.
The official Diablo III blog has opened up its Trenchcoat of +4 Revelations and is currently waving its Patch 1.0.3 Preview of... Metaphors in our shocked faces. That is to say, they've revealed the changes being made in the next Diablo III update, which lands later this month. We've summarised the best bits for you below.
Anyone who's built an amazing representation of their genitals in Minecraft knows the frustration that getting that cubic masterpiece into the real-world. There's no easy way of sharing your home builds with the world, but its something the Mojangstas are working on. The direction they're taking Minecraft in will eventually make no distinction between single and multiplayer.
