Wizards of the Coast, the company responsible for Dungeons & Dragons, have not had a great week. As io9 reported, plans for a revision to D&D’s Open Gaming License—through which other games from other people can borrow some of D&D’s systems—went down terribly, facing opposition from both fans and other tabletop…
AMD recently announced that certain Ryzen 5000 processors come with free copies of Company of Heroes 3, so if you're looking forward to the rather promising WW2 RTS, due to debut on February 23rd, this is a sneaky way of getting the game (normally £50) and a ~£100 processor for less than £100.
DDR5 RAM is steadily getting more affordable these days, and even surprisingly high-end 6000MT/s kits are going on sale. That's the case today with this deal on a 32GB dual-channel kit of DDR5-6000 from TeamGroup, specifically their T-Force Delta RGB RAM. It's been reduced from its ridiculous launch MSRP of $339.99 down to $149.99, a great price for this spec and especially for a kit that comes equipped with RGB lighting.
(If you'd prefer the same kit without RGB, then it can be yours for $133.)
Guilty Gear Xrd Rev 2, Arc System Works’ 2017 entry in the long-running anime fighting game franchise, is will get an update on January 20. This isn’t just any old update, though, as it makes one crucial change that will benefit everyone who plays online. The game is finally receiving the much-coveted “rollback”…
Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer juxtaposed the joys of gaming with the current sense of despair in the world after accepting the Andrew Yoon Legend Award at the 12th Annual New York Game Awards on Tuesday night. He also applauded creators who still release “their visions” into the world in the “current culture of…
You may be able to hack your way across the Lands Between, but do you really know them? Can you tell your Nokrons from your Nokstellas? How about your Sanctums from your Catacombs? Can you distinguish between the Ainsel River and the Ainsel River Main? Look me in the eye and tell me you can pinpoint the Cathedral of Manus Celes, I dare you.
Alternatively, you can try out this fan-made Elden Ring Geoguessr-inspired game that plonks you into a random bit of the map and scores you based on how close you can drop a pin to your true location. If Rings aren't your thing LostGamer.io has maps from other games, too, including Skyrim and Fortnite. It's a lovely idea.
I still say the Hylics games are some of the prettiest around, with their striking mix of claymation and video capture. So I'm delighted to realise that, unbeknowst to me, creator Mason Lindroth occasionally give behind-the-scenes peeks at props and animations on Twitter. It is very interesting to see those original handcrafted figures. And it is very funny to discover that the process of animating one character's hands involved wearing a little cardboard green screen like a shroud while waggling a sexy gloved arm through the hole.
Pokémon Scarlet and Violet are about two months old at this point, but the quest to find out which Pokémon are the very best like no one ever was is an ongoing conversation among the competitive community. Smogon, one of the biggest hubs for competitive Pokémon on the internet, has been trying to sort through the…
At last! Returnal, the hit bullet-hell roguelike that set PS5 owners hearts' a flutter back in 2021, is launching on PC on February 15th. It'll be prettier and ray-tracier too, if this new PC features trailer is to be believed.
I played Returnal last year and can confirm that it is splendid, and also that you will grow to hate the kamikaze squid in the final area with every fibre of your being. Presuming you get that far.
There are two sides to gacha in Genshin Impact. One is the normally infuriating and wallet-draining character gacha. Its more sinister brother is the weapons gacha, which is widely considered by the community to be a massive scam, especially for players who aren’t made of gold bricks (Thankfully, they’re also entirely…
Crap, it's an attack ship on fire off the shoulder of... no wait, it's the upcoming full release of Blade Runner-inspired city builder Industries of Titan, from Crypt Of The Necromancer developers Brace Yourself Games. They've announced Titan will be out for realsies on January 31st, when it will unshackle itself from its early access chains while forcing thousands more workers into indentured labour.
It's more than just a slick sci-fi city builder, boasting battleship combat and the ability to tinker with what goes on inside your buildings.
Cardboard boxes are very useful. You can use them to move stuff, create large elaborate forts out of them, and uh, probably other things too. But did you know that you can use a cardboard box to hide from a highly advanced military robot? It’s true, even if it sounds like something straight out of a video game.
Far Cry 2 is a lot of things, based on the memories I have from playing it a decade ago. First and foremost, I recall Far Cry 2: Parasitic Pain, which tasks you with running around begging for pills to stave off a growing infection. Next comes Far Cry 2: Buddy Bonanza, which lets you make lots of lovely AI friends, charge into battles together, and then hide while they die. Then, there’s Far Cry 2: Firewatch, which is all about watching fire. It's the best.
I’m barely a minute into the premiere episode of HBO’s TV treatment for The Last of Us and I’m already uncomfortable. No one’s died yet, and no one’s speaking in a cringe-worthy Texas accent, but as two experts chat about the threats to human society from airborne illnesses, I realize that I’m not quite sure if I’m in…
You may have seen I was dead excited about The Pale Beyond in our most anticipated games list the other week, and now we finally know when it's coming out. Publisher Fellow Traveller have announced this Arctic naval expedition gone wrong will be setting sail on February 24th, so ready your blankets and hot cuppas, folks. This icy, story-driven survival 'em up will chill you the bone.
Following rumors earlier this week from Sky News, tech giant Microsoft has announced a slew of layoffs affecting 10,000 workers, some within its game studios, blaming slowing e-commerce sales and a potential economic recession. Kotaku has confirmed that a number of developers at 343 Industries, The Coalition, and…
The EU have voted to push for reform in the videogame industry, backing a report that takes aim at everything from loot boxes to human rights violations tied up with gold-farming. The report includes calls for better parental control options, "harmonised rules" compelling sellers to show more information about game content, and a clamp down on third-party skin gambling.
Those are all laudable goals, but time will tell how much change this actually amounts to.
Last month, Fortnite’s newest season, Chapter 4 Season 1, started. With it came some big changes, fresh content, and a new island to explore. Most of the new stuff this season has been great! But one change to how quests work has frustrated some players, myself included, and while Epic’s recent attempts to fix this…
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Something you could never accuse A Plague Tale: Requiem of is a lack of eye candy. As grim, gory, and engulfed in rats as this medieval stealth adventure is, mon dieu is it a looker on PC. For those among us with one of the brawnier graphics cards on the market, it’s just become even prettier too, via the slightly delayed implementation of ray tracing.
Action games are often like rock music: it’s hard to pinpoint one definable essence, and most borrow liberally from other genres. That said, the genre is often at its best when you don’t have too many mechanics to memorize, and can mostly rely on your wits and your reaction time to get through each challenge.
I've been holding something in for 5 years. It first started as a deep joy, like a ray of sunshine in the palm of my hand. Then it became a deep sense of longing for something I'd lost, like a cascade of sand that fell from my palm as I wept gently on an empty beach. The "it" is a mobile and Nintendo Switch game called Pokémon Quest (don't laugh), which was the first - and only - mobile game I've actively obsessed over.
The game's an auto-battler where you gather a small trio from the original 150 Pokéfolks, level them up, and then tackle trickier and trickier stages. After a frankly disgusting number of hours, I'd finished all the stages. So, I thought, "Yes, of course they will add the 2nd generation of Pokéfolks with a bunch of new stages. This is its natural evolution, if you will". It still hasn't happened and probably never will. And I hate that I can't find anything else that'll replace it.
Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot faced tough questions from some exhausted and fed-up staff about recent missteps and future plans in a company-wide Q&A session on Wednesday. The meeting comes just a week after the Assassin’s Creed publisher announced new cancellations, delays, and cost-cutting measures, and told employees…
Thunderful Games have announced they're going to be holding a special SteamWorld stream next Monday January 23rd, where they'll be unveiling what's next for the series. Taking place at 9.30am PST / 5.30pm GMT, it's not clear what the SteamWorld Telegraph: Special Broadcast will entail just yet, but given we already know several SteamWorld games are in development at the moment, here's a rough guess-timate of what to expect.
Yesterday, Blizzard announced the latest event for Overwatch 2. In celebration of the Lunar New Year, the Year of the Rabbit seasonal event brings some holiday-themed stylings across maps, and some returning game modes. But a lack of compelling and earnable skins and cosmetics has fans disappointed, pining for the…
Indonesian studio Mojiken have been making games for years. Most of them are less than an hour long. They're short, punchy adventures and cover everything from digital fortune tellers, violin-playing owl-men, and poetic folktales about potato-shaped forest creatures.
A Space For The Unbound is Mojiken’s first 'big' release in that sense, clocking in at around nine-ish hours. What begins as a YA coming-of-age tale about a small-town romance quickly gains remarkable momentum, and suddenly you’re dealing with supernatural teens trying to desperately stop a world-ending calamity. Part sci-fi drama, part high school romance, A Space For The Unbound manages to have incredible weight and grandeur while also being poignant, sweet, and honest at the same time. It's a triumph.
The original Mass Effect is coming up on its 16th anniversary this year, but even now, new secrets are being revealed about BioWare’s science fiction RPG. That’s because Series Director Casey Hudson has confirmed the first game’s iconic text intro is actually an homage to the 1986 movie Top Gun.
Last time, you decided that programmable party members are better than optional grinding. I can respect that. Yeah, it's sometimes fun to turn your brain off and grind out a bit, but there's a lot to say for doing the work up front to get your party and builds running correctly then just watch them go. This week, I ask you to choose between one thing which speaks to my inner teenager, and one thing which speaks to my inner child. What's better: big engines rising from the bonnet, or knocking folks over edges?
As Google prepares to kill off its Stadia streaming service for good, there have been a few parting gifts to emerge from its demise. Users got a final game, along with the ability to unlock the Bluetooth capabilities of their controllers (even if that was something they should have been able to do from day one), but…
Coffee Talk is one of my favourite visual novels from the last couple of years, and when developers Toge Productions announced they were making a second episode back in 2021, I raised a steaming hot mug of tea in celebration. Now, it's time to brew up another one, as they've just announced its official release date of April 20th.
Over the past few years, the minimum amount of RAM you’d need to play the latest games on PC has been somewhere around the 8-16GB ballpark. Unless, that is, you’re talking about some very weird outliers, both of which are also games from, or appearing on, the PlayStation 5.
In games it's often a delight to be proven wrong. Such as, for example, my longstanding belief that Dwarf Fortress would never make the biggest and most important change it possibly could, and fit itself with an interface fit for purpose.
Bay 12 Games have, of course, gone further than that, and released it for general sale on the biggest shop in the business after sixteen years as freeware. There's even a charming new graphics overhaul to replace the famous ASCII symbols which, depending on who you ask, might not have technically counted as "graphics" at all.
I'm not here to discuss the relative merits of this shiny new version and the "classic" version. Both will be updated in future, the latter still free, and neither expected to reach a full 1.0 release inside 20 years. All this chips around the edges of what I've been pondering, which is this: What exactly is Dwarf Fortress's place within our culture now, after a decade replete with games that looked to it for ideas?
The decade-old PlayStation 4, released all the way back in 2013, has continued to receive big, new exclusives from Sony, even if those old-gen ports feel outdated or inferior. But now, it finally seems like Sony is ready to move on and leave the aging PS4 behind. Well, almost ready…
In 2021 I reviewed Backbone, a masterpiece of 2D pixelart that was partly a point 'n' click detective noir game, and mostly a grim story-focused fever dream about collectivism. At the time I described it as "like The Good Place with more depression, or Disco Elysium with raccoons." Backbone has an ending so bizarre on a literal level that it defies description even if I wanted to spoil it. A while back developers Eggnut teased that they were working on a new game, and it turns out that game is Tails: The Backbone Preludes, a prequel that probably won't answer any questions you might've had about the ending of Backbone. It's also out very soon, on February 2nd.
Ubisoft hasn’t had the best couple of years. A string of flops and disappointments means the company isn’t in the best shape as it heads into 2023, so in an attempt to get everyone firing last week CEO Yves Guillemot sent an email to staff telling them “The ball is in your court”. It did not go down well.
Part of RPS’s goal is to shine a spotlight on every corner of the gaming peninsula, and a BIG part of that includes the incredible realm of indie games. In additional to our written work about the wonderful world of indie games, starting from now we'll also be doing that across the audio waves in the form of our brand new podcast, Indiescovery!
Indiescovery is the new sibling in the RPS podcast family and will sit snuggly next to Ultimate Audio Bang, and The Electronic Wireless Show, but our focus is strictly on the wonderful world of indie games. It’s best to think of the podcast as an extension of our Indiescovery tag on the site - although we've got the Indiescovery Podcast tag just for the pod, if you ever want to check all the episodes. Every episode video bud Liam, guides lass Rebecca and myself (reviews ranger Rachel) will highlight a bunch of cool indies and talk about why we love them. We'll be gabbing about the latest indie darlings, exciting upcoming releases, hidden gems lost to space and time, and more.
In the down moments of playing a distressingly long Mario Party 2 game this weekend—my friends get a garbage truck full of NES and Super NES games with their Nintendo Switch Online membership—I started wondering what other retro games were only a download away on publishers’ official storefronts.
The WD SN850x is one of the very fastest NVMe SSDs in the world, with its PCIe 4.0 connection, super-fast TLC NAND flash memory and high-speed controller offering some frankly astonishing speeds - up to 7300MB/s reads and 6300MB/s writes, not to mention random read and write speeds of 800K IOPS and 1.1M IOPS respectively. This puts it within the top echelon of SSDs - perhaps why we named it the best PCIe 4.0 SSD for gaming!
Like Charizard and Cinderace before it, Greninja is the latest seven-star raid in Pokémon Scarlet and Violet. The limited time event gives you and your friends a chance to catch the Kalos water starter, but it’s a tough battle. The raid is coming back for a second time this weekend, and there’s still time to do some…
The JAN10 10% off Ebay code that featured in two of our previous deals posts this week has popped up again, this time offering excellent prices on not one but two top-spec 2TB SSDs. You have the choice of the Crucial P3 at £104 (vs £120 on Amazon) or the faster Kingston KC3000 at £155 (vs £202 at Amazon). Both are great drives for the money, so if you're in the market for a storage upgrade you've just got to decide whether you can benefit from the faster speeds and better components of the KC3000, or whether you prefer the lower price of the P3.
