With the game coming out soon, EA has opened up a small slice of Star Wars: Battlefront for beta testing. I’ve taken it for a spin and collected my thoughts for you in a handy video. Check it out below:

Cheltenham, in the leafy Cotswolds of England, has a long history of Music, Art and Gaming. It was the home of developers Acclaim, way back in the day and artists like Jimmy Hendrix, The Beatles and more, over the years have regularly played at the various venues and events held at the yearly festivals the beautiful spa town holds.

It’s also the home, of course, to Sanitarium.FM and lots of great business’, and has been the venue for Guinness World Record attempts over the years too. This weekend will add to that list as Joe Kelly, of Flaming Paper, a local video production company, is attempting to beat the CURRENT WORLD RECORD for playing Minecraft. The current record for this stands at 24 hours and 10 minutes. Joe hopes to beat this, and will be streaming his attempt live online from the Holiday Inn Express in Cheltenham. It all starts this Saturday at 8:30am and I will be standing as an expert witness to the record attempt aswell, which I am immensely proud to do.

Joe is attempting this record in order to raise money for Cancer Research UK. You can visit his Just Giving page for more information, plus Sanitarium.FM will be donating any of the station’s monthly donations (for October)  to this cause aswell as it’s a great cause.

Joe will be livestreaming the record attempt to his Youtube channel over the weekend while he plays, but he has also made a series of films on his Youtube channel about the difficulty of record attempts and how to not only prepare for them, but survive the attempts

Once again, myself and the Sanitarium.FM are very proud to be supporting this attempt and we wish Joe every luck possible with it!

~Lone

Today the full version of Prison Architect releases, and to celebrate the developers of War For the Overworld have released a small patch that contains an exclusive worker skin if the player also owns Prison Architect in their Steam Library.

Writing a post on Steam Subterranean Games wrote: “We’re rolling out a small patch today in support of our friends over at Introversion Software, they’ll be launching v1.0 of Prison Architect tomorrow on October 6th. If you love management games and want to see more of them be sure to grab yourselves a copy, and to show our appreciation we’ll reward you with an exclusive worker skin that we know you’ll want on your side in a prison break.”

The skin will be available to players in both the Multiplayer and Skirmish modes of the game, with anyone who already owns both games before the patch automatically having the reward available to them without need for an extra code input.

The patch does also come with some minor changes, with team colours added to prop efficiency and progress shields as well as a slight performance improvement to reduce overhead caused by unused animation bones on the standard theme worker. However the post does also say that another patch with more content will be coming out as soon as Subterranean are sure it’s been tested enough to say it works correctly.

Steam “Patch 1.2.2 Release Notes”: [x]

The Old Republic is going to be slightly revised in time for the launch of its upcoming expansion Knights of the Fallen Empire.

Previously if you were a higher level than your friends you might have been separated from them in-game because of the level mismatch. Now BioWare are introducing a system that will let you re-visit lower level planets by scaling down your level temporarily while you are there.

Called Level Sync it kicks in automatically if you land on a planet with a target level lower than your currently held one, matching you to the missions you tackle. It also scales down your stats, weapon damage and armour as well to the appropriate levels, but abilities and passive effects stay in place. You also receive “scaled experience” which BioWare feel will see players “rewarded appropriately for [the] time investment”.

There have also been changes to XP assignment in grouping as well. Experience is no longer split between members of a group – but rather is based on the level difference between your most experienced comrade, post-level sync, and the mob you’re fighting.

It all sounds pretty sensible. And is probably a relief to those players who managed to level out of the range of their friend group (there’s always one person who seems to level faster than anyone else).

The Elder Scrolls Online is due to get a new DLC that revolves around its Orc race. In the upcoming Orsinium DLC we get to see the Orcs’ ancestral home during a period of time when it was going through a time of rebuilding and adventurers are being invited along to help and of course fight.

Orsinium hasn’t been in an Elder Scrolls game since Dragonfall, and it will probably look a bit different to how it did then, graphical updates not withstanding. It’ll be cold and full of Orcs as well as people and monsters attempting to stop the rebuilding. The city will be situated in the mountains of Wrothgar, a new zone being added for the DLC and provides ample space for more exploration.

A whole bunch of new missions will be made available to fill up in your Quest Log and there will also be a solo arena challenge – the Maelstrom Arena.

The Orsinium DLC will be launching on November 2nd, and it’ll be free for ESO Plus members while being 3,000 crowns for everyone else.