Stardock announced today the Gamer’s Bill of Rights: a statement of principles that it hopes will encourage the PC game industry to adopt standards that are more supportive of PC gamers. The document contains 10 specific “rights” that video game enthusiasts can expect from Stardock as an independent developer and publisher that it hopes that other publishers will embrace. The Bill of Rights is featured on Stardock’s website (www.stardock.com) and is on prominent display i...

Today's the day Impulse launches to the public with much fanfare and celebration.  In anticipation of the release, Brad Wardell walked through what will be available in Impulse on release, and a few sneak peeks at what will be added in the comming weeks and months. It's required reading before you get the final version later today.  It will answer a lot of questions and hopefully clear up a lot of confusion of what Impulse is, what it isn't, and what it can and can not do.  ...

Twilight of the Arnor continues to draw critical praise from the gaming media. The latest review to come in is from GameSpot who gave Twilight a 9 out of 10 and an Editors Choice award. Brett Todd took the final Galactic Civilizations II expansion for a spin and found a lot to like; New graphics, unique tech trees, new campaign, Ascension victory and of course, Terror Stars!  In general, GameSpot labels Twilight a must-buy for any Galactic Civilizations II fan. Be sure to check out t...

Rory Manion of 1Up.com gives Twilight of the Arnor a glowing grade, rating it an A on its review scale.  Torn between the desire to have a peaceful, altruistic empire and the need to wage a four-front war, this review covers the wide range of new possibilities present in Twilight of the Arnor quite well.  Rory's regime was at times kind and giving, and at others brutal and unrelenting, often destroying entire stars, and enacting terrible genocide programs.   Overall, he s...

James Allen of Out of Eight PC Game Reviews took a crack at Galactic Civilizations II: Twilight of the Arnor and posted his review of it last Friday, giving it a perfect 8/8 score, placing it on a short list of 18 games that he feels are must-buy titles.  Two of the other titles on the list you might recognize: Sins of a Solar Empire and Galactic Civilizations II: Dread Lords. While spending time on improvements such as the custom tech trees and ascension victory condition, James talks...

G4TV's X-Play recently reviewed Twilight of the Arnor, giving it an incredible 5 out of 5!  Like just about everyone else who's reviewed the game, they loved the tech trees, the increased galaxy size, improved visuals & performance and even the new content creation tools. Since it's X-Play, there's also a video review... Click the story link to read their full review.

Yesterday, Steve Butts of PC.IGN posted his review of Galactic Civilizations II: Twilight of the Arnor.  The result?  A respectable 9.1/10 review.  The two-page review covers everything from the unique racial tech trees and planetary improvements, to the new Ascension victory condition and the return of the Terror Star. Steve closes out his review of the final Galactic Civilizations II review with this: There are no two ways about it: if you like space strategy games, you...

I-Mod Productions , one of the top community sites for Galactic Civilizations II mods and modding recently launched a brand new modding wiki .  The goal of the I-Mod Wiki is to create a central knowledgebase for modders of virtually any game to come and share their knowledge, or benefit from the knowledge and experience of others. To start things off with a bang, they've launched the wiki with a huge modding guide for Galactic Civilizations II, with contributions from the I-Mod develo...

Recently Joystiq sat down with Brad Wardell (Stardock CEO) and Chris Taylor (Gas Powered Games Founder) recently to talk a bit about Demigod, a little bit about Sins & Gal Civ 2, and of course about copy protection and where the PC games market is headed.  The result?  It looks like PC Gaming isn't dead afterall, and that Stardock/Gas Powered Games have some interesting ideas on where the future lies. Click to read the full interview , it's definitely worth a little bit of your...

Ok, we're in the final weeks of development and testing on Twilight of the Arnor now, so it's really coming down to the wire for sites to put together and post their preview articles.  Video Game Generation is the latest site to put Twilight through its paces.  Nick Arvites took on the daunting task of summarizing Twilight in a few pages. Major items that Nick focused on include the unique tech trees, unique planetary improvements, improved graphics, and of course, the Terror Star!...

As the release of Twilight rapidly approaches, more previews are cropping up around the Internet.  Last Friday, GameShark joined the party with their own impressions on the latest build of the expansion pack.  Troy Goodfellow puts the game through its paces and shares what he found. Like just about everyone else, Troy paid special attention to the degree of customization and differentiation between the races.  Unique tech trees for each race, unique structures, weapons and def...

GameSpy's Allen Rausch recently took the latest build of Galactic Civilizations II: Twilight of the Arnor for a spin to see what had been added to the game since he last played it back in November.  After many hours with Beta 6, Allen found himself still consumed by the new, unique racial technology trees, and the implications they have on gameplay. "We played through several games as the Krynn and we discovered that we had actually underestimated the impact that unique technology tre...

Huzzah! We've completed our work for the night and the forums are back up and running.  You'll notice a number of visual changes, and you'll hopefully notice improved speed and general performance. Please post any issues you run into here.  We've done a lot of testing this past week and tonight, but if something slipped through we want to know so it can be fixed quickly. Thank you all for your patience.

When: Sunday February 17th, 8pm EST - Monday February 18th 9am EST This weekend we will be conducting extensive maintenance on the database systems that power Stardock's forums, articles systems and blogs across all websites.  During this period we will be locking the database preventing anyone from posting to the forums (new threads, replies, private messages etc). For full details on the upgrade, click the link below.

There's no doubt that 2007 has been a good year for Galactic Civilizations fans.  In February we released the Dark Avatar expansion pack, and have completed several major game improving patches.  We top the year off with the upcoming release of our second expansion pack: Twilight of the Arnor.  Eager to learn more about the soon-to-be-released expansion, GameSpy strategy games guru Allen 'Delsyn' Rausch sat down with Brad Wardell to try and glean a few more tidbits of information...