Rumours that Valve would announce a new DOTA game were sparked this morning when developers working at Valve, and who had previously worked on other DOTA games, hinted at an upcoming announcement.

According to a sparse press release from Valve, Defence of the Ancients 2 will be a RTS / RPG hybrid released for PC and Mac. The release date is set at 2011.

Icefrog, the anonymous developer behind Defence of the Ancients: Allstars will be leading development of the new game, which Valve bills as “a massive sequel to one of the most played games in the world.” Serious Sam voice actor Jon St. John has also been linked to the game.

The Defence of the Ancients genre started as a small mod for Blizzards Warcraft games, but the unique blend of avatar-led strategy soon caught on and spawned a litter of copy-cat games.

Solipskier is pulled together and made brilliant not just by the fluidity of the gameplay though; it’s the music and graphics which really sell it. The stark black and white visuals are complemented by rainbows that trail behind your skier. The snowballing speed of the game is emphasised by the frantic guitar riffs that constitute the background music.

Insterestingly, that music also serves another purpose in the house – letting us know when each other are playing, as well as telling us how well we’re doing. When my son’s headphones start to leak the sound of another violent guitar solo then you know he’s playing well. And when the music stops suddenly, you know he’s finally fluffed up.

Finally, I’ve found a game I’m better than my son at.

Irrational Games has announced “BioShock Infinite”, the 3rd installment of the first person shooter series BioShock. Set in 1912, BioShock Infinite takes place in the sky city of Columbia (previously BioShock was in an underwater setting).

Former Pinkerton agent Booker DeWitt has been sent to rescue Elizabeth, a young woman imprisoned in Columbia since childhood. Booker develops a relationship with Elizabeth, augmenting his abilities with hers so the pair may escape from a city that is literally falling from the sky. DeWitt must learn to fight foes in high-speed Sky-Line battles, engage in combat both indoors and amongst the clouds, and harness the power of dozens of new weapons and abilities.

StarCraft 2

According to Daily Tech the problem occurs at the main menu, where the lack of a framerate limit allows hardware to max out, potentially failing permanently.

“Certain screens make your hardware work pretty hard,” Blizzard said via its tech support site.

“Screens that are light on detail may make your system overheat if cooling is overall insufficient. This is because the game has nothing to do so it is primarily just working on drawing the screen very quickly.”

Blizzard’s current solution is to tell customers to go to Documents\StarCraft II Beta\variables.txt and add the following lines, replacing the final integers with the desired value.

frameratecap=60
frameratecapglue=30

Some fans have voiced outrage that such a big and obvious bug, one potentially capable of destroying entire systems, slipped through to the release version. As Dailytech points out though, Blizzard isn’t entirely to blame and even a maxed out GPU will only overheat that quickly if it already has cooling problems.

Torchlight 2 is currently set to be released in Spring 2011 and will apparently be distributed by digitally, just like the original Torchlight was.

New features for Torchlight 2 include outdoor areas, new weather effects and four character classes. It’ll feature online co-op gameplay too, with matchmaking systems that’ll pair players up with a similar characters at a similar level.

The game is set to move beyond the eponymous town (and caverns beneath) of Torchlight, with characters venturing into the wider world once a prophetic dream summons them to the Estherian Steppes.

“There, you meet with the Destroyer and soon venture across the continent of Vilderan, an exotic frontier besieged by forces of evil,” goes the official spiel. “A discovery unfolds, that the Alchemist, following his conquest of dark ember, disappeared on his quest to defeat the unknown corrupted force responsible for destroying the mystical race of Estherians.”

“Aided by the remaining Estherian Guardians, and clues left behind by the missing Alchemist, you will find yourself battling a powerful enemy that threatens to unravel the elements of the entire world.”

More information is available on the official Torchlight 2 site.

The Steam hardware survey allows Steam users to contribute their system details to Valve, allowing the company to monitor changes in the market and develop games for the right hardware. Valve also makes the info available online, for free.

Microsoft’s latest operating system has enjoyed a 3.67 per cent increase in popularity since last month, while the nearest competitor has dropped by 2.82 per cent, making 64-bit Windows 7 the most popular OS overall with a 30.32 per cent market share.

Windows XP 32-bit remains in a close second place, with 30.17 per cent, while Vista 32-bit lags behind with 13.92 per cent.

Other notable figures point to Nvidia as dominating the graphics market, holding 59.11 per cent compared to ATI’s 32.98 percent and Intel’s 6.22 per cent. That said, the most popular single card is the ATI Radeon HD 4800.

The most popular primary resolution is 1680×1050, while most users have 512MB of VRAM and 3GB of system RAM.

The most popular language for Steam users is still English (60.22 per cent), followed by German (8.43 per cent).

Let us know your thoughts in the forums.

Blame Society Comedy Experiment presents Brad Knight, aka “The D&D Monster Man”, doing impressions of monsters from the Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual.

Valve’s rather clever take on Ridley Scott’s famous Apple Ad to announce Half-Life 2 for Mac, 05/26/2010.