Battle.net World Championship

Quick heads up - the Battle.net World Championship kicks off tomorrow in Shanghai, China, featuring both World of Warcraft Arena and Starcraft II competitions. The event will feature a "free, six-channel HD broadcast" via the BWC website.

I'm kinda looking forward to watching this thing; other than the last GSL finals, I feel like I haven't watched a major SC2 tournament in a year. The festivities kick off tomorrow night and run from 9pm-ish Friday until 8am-ish Sunday morning. Check out the full schedule for more details.

SC2: Heart of the Swarm Release, Preorder Info

Blizzard finally announced a definitive release date for Heart of the Swarm earlier today. The expansion pack hits on March 12, 2013 for $39.99.

Additionally, there are Digital Deluxe and Collector's Edition versions available for $60 and $80, respectively. The Digital Deluxe version adds a handful of skins and portraits for use in SC2 along with a pet for your World of Warcraft characters and zerg-like wings and a banner for Diablo III. The Collector's Edition includes all of that stuff plus a behind-the-scenes DVD, the game's soundtrack, an art book, and a mousepad. I could maybe see buying these if I still played WoW or D3, but then again I'm a cheap bastard.

The best preorder deal seems to belong to Amazon right now. While you don't get a price break, you do score access to the HotS beta. The game's Amazon page states that they'll email you a code "within 4 business days" so that you can get your frag on early. Pretty tempting.

New Releases: Week of November 12th

Here's a look at what's new this week.

Call of Duty: Black Ops II. That's basically all you need to know about this week. The only games brave enough to go toe-to-toe with the yearly sales juggernaut are a couple of MMOs and titles like The Sims and LEGO Lord of the Rings, which likely don't have the same playerbase as the military shooter. Your wallet shouldn't face any tough decisions this week as your stance on these franchises is probably well-established at this point.

Skip to:

• Call of Duty: Black Ops II
• RIFT: Storm Legion
• Other Noteworthy Releases

Backlog Review: Homefront

Like Call of Duty, but less entertaining and with more Koreans.

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Homefront
THQ, Kaos Studios, Digital Extremes
March 15th, 2011

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Since its release in early 2011, Homefront has been known as "that mediocre shooter with the really short campaign." Hearing this over and over again made me a sad panda.

The game originally piqued my interest after I saw the trailer depicting a "future history" (albeit an unlikely one) that served as a backdrop for the title. Given that this was early 2011, with Call of Duty becoming stale (and alienating PC gamers) and Battlefield 3 not yet having seen the light of day, I was ready for something new and exciting to come along. Homefront was supposed to be that breath of fresh air.

Indie Bundles + Free Bioshock

Quick note on some deals happening right now:

• Humble Android Bundle 4: Here's yet another pay-what-you-want bundle from the Humble Bundle guys. This one includes Spice, Eufloria, Waking Mars, Swords and Sworcery EP, Crayon Physics Deluxe, and Machinarium. Despite this being an Android bundle, all games are available on Windows too (with individual Steam keys, minus Waking Mars). They usually add games to the bundle halfway through, so if you buy now you'll get those for free regardless of what you paid.

• Indie Royale Harvest Bundle: More indie stuff here. This one is also pay-what-you-want, but there's a minimum price involved (~$5.50 as of this post). The bundle includes Mutant Mudds, Pineapple Smash Crew, Spirits, Avernum: The Great Trials Trilogy, and Basketbelle.

• Free Bioshock @ Gamefly: To celebrate the GameFly Client leaving the beta tag behind, GameFly is giving everyone Bioshock 1 for free. A client download is required and I think you need to enter a credit card despite it costing $0.00, but hey, free is free. As far as I can tell this doesn't redeem on Steam.

Pro Tip: Trick Out Your Desktop with Rainmeter

I was introduced to Rainmeter via this excellent Lifehacker article last year. Raimeter is a powerful desktop customization tool that lets you style your desktop to your heart's content. There are hundreds of modules and themes out there for you to choose from, and best of all, everything is completely free.

Rainmeter's usefulness immediately became apparent when I made the jump to a dual-monitor setup. Each skin suite includes a selection of widgets that can range from email and RSS readers to system monitoring tools and app launchers. Personally, I find Rainmeter useful for displaying system temps and monitoring CPU and GPU usage while gaming, a task which was previously relegated to the tiny LCD screen on my old Logitech G15 keyboard.