Blizzard's Diablo II, the year 2000's best dungeon crawler, has once again been resurrected from the brink of incompatibility. The game just received patch 1.14a, making Diablo II one of the longest-supported video game titles in history, with on-and-off patching for sixteen years; in 2011, Blizzard pushed patch 1.13 for expanded OS & hardware support.

A developer post on the official Blizzard forums (posted by “Classic”) indicates official support for OSX Mac operating systems. Somewhat surprisingly, Blizzard also pointed toward updated cheat-detection and hack-prevention systems. In the official post, Blizzard wrote:

Steam has long been rife with first-person survival -- from DayZ to Rust to The Forest to, to, to -- there’s enough to fill the biggest house voxels can build. To cut through the melange, Teotl Studios gave upcoming title “The Solus Project” a twist: it’s linear, not open-world. The plot to The Solus Project will be familiar to anyone who's been watching sci-fi movies over the last couple years. The protagonist is on a ship carrying the last remnants of humankind, eventually downed when the ship crash-lands on an alien planet. The protagonist is the only surviving crewmember of the crash and, of course, it’s up to them save what’s left of the human race.

Korean developer Pearl Abyss (or, more likely, Dutch publisher Daum Games) has proven itself PR-savvy with the release of a free, standalone character creator for its “open-world action MMORPG,” Black Desert Online.

GDC’s opening day saw a session with publisher Paradox Interactive and developer Pieces Interactive, the duo responsible for bringing Magicka 2 to the world. Magicka’s unique “competitive co-op” charm netted the first game a staggering 3 million units shipped, giving way to the forthcoming PvP “Wizard Wars” title and co-operative sequel, Magicka 2.

Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor is not a Lord of the Rings game. There are no epic battles between a wizard and a balrog, there are no disguised female noblewomen slaying wraiths, and there are no hobbits singing jigs and jumping on top of cave trolls. However, having demoed Shadow of Mordor at Monolith Productions, I had not wanted any of that in the finished product.

Sure, Peter Jackson’s films have translated well to a couple of titles, and some of our readers may have been satisfied by the more recent War in the North or Lord of the Rings Online, but there’s more to be had. What the Tolkien universe has needed to keep us inspired and excited is a logical, original interpretation of Middle-earth. Shadow of Mordor offers this originality by stripping the Tolkien world down to brains and blood, and the game is better off because of it.

Nine months after releasing its first episode, Telltale Games’ The Wolf Among Us has concluded its edgy 5-episode canon with Episode 5, Cry Wolf. Bigby Wolf finishes his pursuit of Fabletown’s seediest gangster and pieces together the remaining mysteries surrounding a series of murders and shady characters. Telltale Games’ final episode does a great job of tying up the loose ends while keeping players engaged with well-devised action scenes. The end result seems predictable, but there’s enough freedom for the player to decide how his ending plays out.

This The Wolf Among Us: Episode 5 - Cry Wolf review picks up from where we last left off. You can find our reviews of the previous four episodes here:

The roguelike genre has experienced a revival in recent years, indicated by the success of games like The Binding of Isaac, Spelunky, and Rogue Legacy -- perhaps to the point of saturation. That's why it's refreshing to see a game like Ascendant add something new into the mix.

We've been covering the Orcs Must Die! series since its inception -- actually, it was one of our very first camera interviews ever -- and have followed it through the second iteration. The first OMD shipped as a single-player, traps-oriented game that encouraged Rube Goldberg-lite combos to pulverize orcs. The idea centered on tower defense mechanics (prevent the bad guys from getting to the end) mixed with on-the-ground action-RPG mechanics. The second game -- cleverly named "Orcs Must Die! 2" -- introduced co-operative play between two players. It was a much-needed refresh that we largely enjoyed within our team.

I suppose I'll take the opportunity to mention that OMD! is made by Robot Entertainment, a studio that's largely formed of refugees from Microsoft's now-dissolved Ensemble Studios - the makers of Age of Empires and other RTS games.

The newest game was unveiled at PAX East 2014 this weekend and brings F2P 5v5 combat to the series. In playing Unchained on-site, the game felt like one part MOBA, one part action-RPG, and many parts Orcs Must Die! (that is to say: blood, giblets, and gratuitous amounts of cartoon death). Let's do the interview thing before we jump to further details:

When I was first given the game Echo Prime by Robot Entertainment, I have to admit it looked slightly amusing but limited in overall entertainment value. I am pleased to say that I could not have been more wrong. Echo Prime has become one of my all-time favorite small studio games after playing it for the past few weeks. Every single battle feels fluid, every movement consistent, and every choice meaningful. That is not to say the game is perfect or without flaws—some of them glaring—but overall the experience was highly enjoyable and required very little concerted effort to find interesting new ways to slaughter aliens and robots alike.

In Echo Prime, you play as our space-venturing hero, traveling the galaxy to fight off the Slivers - a little-known alien race hell-bent on destroying the rest of the galaxy. Sort of like AT&T. The Hero is equipped with energy swords and heavy-duty firearms, because disemboweling them isn't enough -- but disemboweling and head-shotting seems, oh, ample.

It's a word.

It's been a while since we've talked about Magicka -- one of the most chaotic, purely entertaining games I've ever reviewed -- and now's the time to talk about its successor. Magicka: Wizard Wars is due out for release shortly, as published by Paradox, and still focuses heavily on combinatory spell-slinging combat with heavy collateral, friend-killing damage. That's the fun part.