Castle Crashers PC!

Finally, the co-op brawler Castle Crashers is heading to PC! This is something fans of the game have been waiting for for a long time, and it's finally coming true; Castle Crashers available on Steam! Behemoth, the team behind Castle Crashers and PS2 platformer Alien Hominid , announced the news via their blog recently. 

Castle Crashers! Now in Black!

The game will be available Wednesday the 26th of September and will be available for PC and Mac; it should also work fantastically well with Steam Big Picture mode, if you haven't tried that out yet, now could be a good time!

Check out Castle Crashers on Steam.

League of Legends: Kha'Zix Revealed

Kha'Zix, The Voidreaver

League of Legends have just revealed their latest champion, Kha'Zix. He is the latest offering from the 'Void' which is the origin of classic champions such as Kassadin and Cho'gath, and also Kog'Maw and Malzahar (originally Al'zahar, they really like their apostrophes). Kha'Zix will be an assassin type character and as such will excel at "surprising enemy champions and dealing massive burst damage". Here is his skill set:

Unseen Threat (Passive): When Kha'Zix is not visible to the enemy team, he gains Unseen Threat, causing his next basic attack against an enemy champion to deal bonus magic damage and slow.

Taste Their Fear: Deal physical damage to a single target. Damage against isolated targets is significantly increased. Kha'Zix passively marks enemies that are isolated from nearby allies.
Evolving claws increases damage to isolated targets even further. Kha'Zix also gains increased range on both Taste Their Fear and his basic attack.

Void Spike: Kha'Zix fires spikes that explode on contact, dealing physical damage to all nearby enemies. Kha'Zix is healed if he is within the explosion radius.
Evolving spike racks causes Void Spike to fire three projectiles in a cone. Spikes will also apply Unseen Threat to all enemies caught within the area of effect.

Leap: Kha'Zix leaps to an area, dealing physical damage to enemies in the area he lands.
Evolving wings increases Leap's range dramatically and causes a kill or assists to refresh the cooldown of Leap.

Void Assault: Each rank of Void Assault allows Kha'Zix to evolve one of his active abilities, granting it an additional effect. Upon activation, Kha'Zix enters stealth and gains Unseen Threat, increasing Movement Speed. Kha’zix can cast Void Assault again for a short time after activation.
Evolving active camouflage allows Kha’Zix to cast Void Assault three times over the course of its duration and reduces any damage he sustains while in stealth.

A tad confusing but essentially when he gets his ult he can upgrade one of his skills to improve it, increasing his range, damage, etc. Basically this will allow you to tailor Kha'Zix to your enemies team composition and change how you build him even down to his abilities based on how you are faring mid-game. I think it's a neat idea but will probably boil down to him upgrading the same skills each game, probably his R, E and Q, but I look forward to seeing how it plays out in game. 

I assume he will jungle with his W giving you a heal and his passive giving a nice slow just for popping out of a bush, but I wouldn't be surprised to find him top lane either, with all that bush to hide in and his leap giving him a great escape. Either way, Riot continues to prove they can give us interesting champions even with a roster of over a hundred.

Click here to read more on the League of Legends website.

Dead Island: Riptide announced

Deep Silver have announced a full standalone sequel to Dead Island, disappointingly named Dead Island: Riptide. It will be released some time in 2013, roughly 2 years after it's relatively successful predecessor. The 1st game was made popular by a rather entertaining and certainly impressive CGI trailer, which became a victim of it's own hype, leaving a bit of a bitter taste in their mouths when the game came out and was not the blockbuster they were hoping for. Despite that, the game has been praised for it's cooperative play and still managed to sell over 4 million copies. I for one enjoyed the game, though I did manage to snag it through a Steam sale and pretty much any game seems fantastic when bought at 75% off.

It provides a simple hack and slash gameplay, combat that is more rewarding than Left 4 Dead and simple RPG mechanics that keep you interested, at least for a little while. Comparisons between Borderlands and Left 4 Dead are pretty fair, it's basically a combination of the two, and is definitely worth playing if you can convince a friend to do follow suite!

The sequel seems to be more of the game, which may not be a bad thing especially considering their decision to lower the price due to the 'end of the console era', probably also a way to help convince people to buy the game; I'm certainly not complaining and look forward to seeing what ideas they can add to the mix. For more information, watch the cool trailer above (though not as cool as the spectacular original trailer), and also check out the game website.

Smaller, Lighter PS3 unveiled

Sony have just announced a new model of PS3 at the Tokyo Game Show; this new model will of course be lighter and smaller than the previous incarnation, itself a smaller and lighter model of the original Playstation 3. This new model was rumoured several months ago and as such is no surprise to anyone following Playstation news but it's confirmation that Sony are trying to give the PS3 a (possibly final) push as rumours of next-gen consoles surround us, and the Wii-U arriving sometime at the end of this year. 

The new, sexier(?) PS3 model

The new model is available with either a 250GB or 500GB HDD, quite the increase from the 320GB that is currently available (although of course all models of PS3 are upgradeable and this will likely continue with the new models). Sony clearly want to push digital content as they are offering a bundle which includes $30 worth of content for DUST514, available digitally, as well as a hard copy of their star franchises latest offering, Uncharted 3. The lighter PS3 will be "approximately 25% smaller and 20% lighter than the current PS3", nothing to scoff at when the price point has been unveiled at $269.99 (for the bundle offer), approximately $30 cheaper than currently available bundles.

Click here to read more from Sony's blog

First Blood! Welcome :)

Hi there, I'm Liam and I will be posting to this blog as much as I can about pretty much anything I find interesting. Anything video game related, that is. I'm passionate about video games and look forward to using this as a nice medium to get some news out there and hopefully spark some discussion about topics like e-sports or upcoming titles, whether negative or positive, I look forward to it!

The name of the blog is Pentakill, as a homage to competitive online gaming (PvP), a topic I'm very fond of, so there will probably be a lot of talk about FPS games and MOBAs, but I am a fan of all genres and all areas of video games (particularly game development) so hopefully I will produce some interesting content for all.

Thanks,
 -Liam