If you were interested in getting Interceptor’s 2013 remake of Rise of Triad but still haven’t, get yourself over to GOG quickly. They’re giving away a limited number of free copies.

There’s 30,000 copies going for free, and it’s a game that’s a recreation of a 1995 FPS with five dstincy characters. They’re trying to take down a cult known as the ‘Triad’ and has multiplayer mode if you want to play some old-school shooter game action.

If you miss the free copies the game is 80% off this week anyway so win-win.

There are many topics of debate in the gaming industry, and one of the biggest is the issue of piracy and how best to combat it. Some studios will use methods such as CD keys to combat it, while other games get programmed with hidden bonuses that trigger if a game is pirated and makes the game difficult or impossible to play. Paradox though plan to cut down on piracy for their new city-builder game Cities: Skylines simply by regularly updating it over Steam for free so often that it will always be more up to date than any cracked version.

This stance on tackling piracy was outlined by Paradox’s VP of Acquisition, Shams Jorjani, who spent a few hours last week clarifying it. He pointed out that services such as Netflix were so popular even in an age where if you look hard enough online you can find most programs available for free, simply because it offered a fair service that wasn’t really available elsewhere. Paradox previously used this update strategy with Arrowhead Games’ Magicka.

Since this, Jorjani has had tweets from people who may or may not have pirated the game who appreciated not being branded as hated criminals and enjoyed the game so much that they soon all went to actually buy it so they could get access to the regular free updates that were being offered by Paradox. Also of interest is the amount of people who said that they originally pirated the game purely because they had been burned before by the launches of games like SimCity, not wanting to waste money on what could potentially be another letdown.

Originally scheduled for a release date of mid-March, Neverwinter’s latest expansion has now been announced to be delayed by a few weeks.

Executive producer of the game, Rob Overmeyer, explained the delay by saying: “When we first announced Neverwinter: Elemental Evil in January, our team was excited to introduce the community to our biggest expansion launch for Neverwinter to-date. With our efforts to revamp nearly all of our in-game systems, including the introduction of the level cap increase and the new Oathbound Paladin class, our plan was more ambitious than we had anticipated.

Our Neverwinter team wants to ensure that we deliver our promise of a high quality expansion, and in order to do so, we need a few more weeks to fine tune the Neverwinter: Elemental Evil experience. Consequently, we have made the decision to delay the launch of Neverwinter: Elemental Evil to April 7.”

Named Elemental Evil, the expansion will introduce the ‘Oathbound Paladin’ class, up the level cap and will include a cameo from Baldur’s Gate character Minsc and his hamster Boo.

Last year developer Crytek were going through a difficult period. There’d been news of staff going unpaid and some even walking out, but eventually they got back up to speed. To do it though they had to sell off an IP for a game that was  still in development – Homefront: The Revolution. Since then, there’s not been a lot of news about the game.

Now though buying studio Deep Silver have announced that the game’s original release of some time in this year will instead be pushed back a little bit to 2016 instead. They’re developing it with their new UK studio Deep Silver Dambuster Studios in Nottingham, and the delay was decided upon to give Deep Silver Dambuster “every opportunity to turn Homefront: The Revolution into a best-selling title.”

The game itself is an interesting little open-world shooter that’s been compared to Crysis and seems to show promise. Let’s hope that the transition between studios won’t cause any hiccups in the development cycle.

Today at EGX Rezzed Chris Sutherland and Gavin Price of studio Playtonic Games took to the stage for their dev session entitled “A rare reunion: Rebirth of the 3D platformer”.

Sutherland, Price and everyone else in their small group formed Playtonic 4-5 weeks before the presentation and all of them had worked at Rare during their heyday of the 1990s when they produced some of the mostly fondly remembered classic 3D platformers of the day – games that are still looked upon favorably even today. Sutherland said that they had formed with the goal to bring something like those beloved games into the modern age.

As for details about the game named “Project Ukelele” there were few really big ones. We got to see the silhouettes of the characters who will play parts in the game but the audience were told that if we saw anymore than that too much would be given away. They also showed off screenshots of the hub world (linked below) and another world (at the end of the article).

Sutherland promised that there would be no microtransaction or free-to-play stuff in the game, nor would there be any in-game advertising (although amusingly the presentation DID have some mock advertising thrown in). Other than that we were told to expect a lot of what the Playtonic guys were good at – collectables (one called ‘pagies’), special moves to learn, humour on par with that of Banjo-Kazooie, inanimate objects with big googly eyes and more.

Mostly though they emphasised that Project Ukelele was going to progress depending on feedback given to them by the fans waiting for the game. They plan to have a Kickstarter for the game in May and are currently taking feedback on their forums and social mediums for what tiers people would like to see.

It’s excited me, I’m going to be keeping an eye on this. I hope it turns out to be just what that part of me that’s still a 7-year-old child would love to play.