January 2023

The C&C Remastered Collection is just a few bucks (or quid) on Steam this week

1 year 4 months ago

Our review of the Command & Conquer Remastered Collection, which bundles and shines the first C&C and Red Alert, called it "as close to a perfect restoration of two genre-defining real-time strategy games as you’ll get." It included all three expansions, it made everything look great at 4K resolution, it revived the multiplayer, it remastered the beloved music...

And now it's 85% off this week on Steam, meaning you can pick it up for £2.69/$3.

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Author
Graham Smith

Switch Dominated 2022 Sales, And Modern Warfare 2 Beat Elden Ring

1 year 4 months ago

Now that 2022 is over (thank God), the NPD group has done its thing, collecting and processing all the resulting sales data. Now we can look back at the last 12 months and see what games and consoles sold best, and how much money people spent on this stuff. Shocking nobody, Nintendo had another successful year while

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Author
Zack Zwiezen

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Forspoken's PC system requirements are demanding, kind of baffling

1 year 4 months ago

Steam's most recent hardware survey says that 65% of PC players use 1080p, but you wouldn't know it to look at Forspoken's system requirements which benchmark the game against 720p 30fps (minimum), 1440p 30fps (recommended) and 2160p 60fps (ultra).

Regardless of what kind of performance you're aiming for, you'll need a pretty beefy machine, with 24GB of RAM and an RTX 3070 required to hit those recommended specs.

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Author
Graham Smith

French union calls on Ubisoft Paris employees to strike, demands 10% pay increase for all

1 year 4 months ago

Last week, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot sent a letter to all staff in which he asked employees to "give it [their] all" and to be "as efficient and lean as possible." French union Solidaires Informatique have written their own letter today, arguing that Guillemot's "words mean something: overtime, managerial pressure, burnout, etc."

In response, they're calling for Ubisoft Paris employees to strike from 2 to 6pm on Friday, January 27th, with demands that include an "immediate 10% increase for all salaries" and the "implementation of a 4-day week."

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Author
Graham Smith

Persona 3 Portable isn't only a great JRPG, but a history lesson too

1 year 4 months ago

As someone whose only experience with the Persona series lay with Persona 5, I dove into Persona 3 Portable's PC re-release with one expectation: it will be old and therefore quite bad. Looking back, was I naïve? Yes. And was I wrong? I'm delighted to report that I was catastrophically wrong.

From what I've played so far of Persona 3, I reckon it's well worth a whirl if you're a newcomer, or a Persona 5 fan who's concerned that a game from 2009 won't be all that good. Not only does it stand on its own as a fun high school mystery with an alarmingly dark undertone, it almost acts as a fun history lesson too.

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Author
Ed Thorn

Have You Played... The Longest Road On Earth?

1 year 4 months ago

According to the definitely legit authority of Dangerousroads(dot)Org (and maybe also the Guinness Book Of Records), the actual longest road on Earth is the Pan-American Highway, measuring 30,000km long, and spanning several different countries as it wends its way from the bottom of South America to top of Alaska. I can't even imagine how long it would take you to do a full journey across it all, but it will definitely take you longer than the two hours you'll spend in the company of Brainwash Gang's loosely connected anthology story game The Longest Road On Earth. But cor, what a lovely, wistful two hours those are all the same.

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Author
Katharine Castle

Stellaris is getting a First Contact story pack, Paradox confirm after leaks

1 year 4 months ago

Sci-fi grand strategy Stellaris will take a step back from the stars and concentrate on pre-FTL civilisations with its upcoming First Contact story pack DLC. Paradox announced the DLC today after details, screenshots and a trailer leaked ahead of the reveal through SteamDB. YouTuber Aspec also uploaded a video detailing the leak and revealing the DLC’s trailer, which has since been made private. You can watch the official trailer below.

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Author
CJ Wheeler

Halo Infinite players built Mario Kart's DK Mountain track in the Forge beta

1 year 4 months ago

What’s the purpose of creative tools such as Halo Infinite’s Forge beta if you can’t use them to stuff things from other, completely unrelated games into your timesink of choice? Well, Hinfinite map makers LudoHT and Its L0L0 have done exactly that, crafting a surprisingly authentic version of Mario Kart’s DK Mountain track. It sounds like there’ll be more tracks to slide your Mongoose around too, as they’ve also gone and made a Mario Kart race gametype for Halo Infinite.

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Author
CJ Wheeler

Why are there so many good video game adaptations, but not good adaptations of video games

1 year 4 months ago

We had a discussion in our Monday meeting that got louder than things normally do, because The Last Of Us TV show came up, and we found ourselves divided into two camps. Well, three. Camp one was excited for the TV show and camp two posited that there's no point making an adaptation of something if your adaptation is just the same thing. (The third camp was "eh, I might check it out" and watched the other two camps duking it out). I was in camp two. If you're adapting something, adapt! Make changes! Otherwise I might as well just consume the original thing again! The Last Of Us has already been released, what, three times?

This was made funnier by the fact that nobody on staff had seen the TV show, so we were just arguing about tweets we'd seen that describe the show, the worst way to conduct a discussion outside of e.g. scrawling insults on the side of Teslas and self-driving them into each other's front doors. But it got me to thinking about adaptations, because there have been loads of adaptations of things that aren't games into video games. What goes wrong in the other direction?

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Author
Alice Bell

I adore these Far Cry 5 recreations of mundane Edinburgh places

1 year 4 months ago

While Dan Douglas captures English culture in a Duke Nukem 3D level, another mapper has been diligently recreating corners of Scotland in Far Cry 5. Since 2019, YouTuber "Mojo Swoptops" has rebuilt a wide and weird range of Edinburgh sights inside Far Cry 5's level editor, from the big tourist landmarks like the castle and Forth Bridge to perfectly mundane places such as blocks of flats and nightclubs at chucking-out time. As an Edinburgh resident, it's great fun to see, and a very pleasing contrast to the gleaming miniature reimagination seen in Forza Horizon 4.

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Author
Alice O'Connor

The Last Of Us show teases the rest of the first season with its Weeks Ahead trailer

1 year 4 months ago

HBO’s TV adaptation of fungal post-apocalyptic funfest The Last Of Us debuted on streaming services on both sides of the Atlantic over the past few days, and now a follow-up trailer shows what’s coming for the rest of the show’s first season. It has plenty of cordyceps-infected baddies, gritty human drama, and Pedro Pascal being Pedro Pascal. You can watch the Weeks Ahead trailer below, and wonder where The Mandalorian’s left his helmet again.

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Author
CJ Wheeler

Leaked screenshot shows Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League has a battle pass

1 year 4 months ago

A leaked screenshot showing menus from the upcoming co-op supervillain ‘em up Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League has revealed the game will feature a battle pass and a store. The image was originally posted to 4Chan, but made its way onto Reddit and Twitter. An unnamed development source has since confirmed to VGC that the Suicide Squad image is legit, and shows the menus in a recent test build of the third-person shooter.

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Author
CJ Wheeler

We’re finally getting a “clear glimpse” of Steam wishlist hit The Day Before just weeks ahead of release

1 year 4 months ago

Survival MMO The Day Before may have slipped out of its top spot on Steam’s most wanted games list, but it’s still the second most anticipated game on Valve’s storefront. Up to now, devs Fntastic haven’t shared unedited footage of the game in the lead up to its planned release on March 1st, but they say that’s about to change with a showcase of features at some point in January. You can watch the most recent, very short clip of edited ray-traced footage from The Day Before from this month’s CES show below.

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Author
CJ Wheeler

Greninja Is Coming To Pokémon Scarlet And Violet In 7-Star Raids

1 year 4 months ago

Greninja, originally introduced to the world of Pokémon as part of Gen VI, in Pokémon X and Y, has proven to be one of the most popular pocket monsters ever. What an ambitious froggy-gecko-thing it is. And now, thanks to a forthcoming weekend tera raid event, it’ll be showing up in Scarlet and Violet as one of the…

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Author
John Walker

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Atomic Heart may be a beautiful FPS, but I wish it had a silent protagonist

1 year 4 months ago

I've played around four hours of soviet-punk FPS Atomic Heart, which took me from the story's opening moments to plenty of the game's earliest bits. The final hour or so was split into two parts, thanks to a lovely dev who time-skipped me forwards and into the game's open world, before warping me through a gate and into an early boss's lair. There was a lot to take in, from robo-gloves, to sex-dom vending machines, to grannies with bazookas.

I went in with expectations that it might be a little like BioShock, all steely and serious in its delivery of some vaguely philosophical truth. But I emerged with a totally different impression. Far from polished seriousness, Atomic Heart seems a little disjointed in its ambition, with a main character who almost immediately kills any atmosphere when he opens his mouth.

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Author
Ed Thorn

This Kingston NV2 1TB PCIe 4.0 SSD is the first to cross the £50 barrier

1 year 4 months ago

Mum, get the camera! It's finally happened - a 1TB PCIe 4.0 SSD is selling for less than £50. The winner of this impromptu contest is Kingston's NV2, an expectedly budget drive that still manages to deliver some fairly impressive performance according to independent reviews. To squeak in under the £50 mark, you'll need to use code JAN10 at the checkout at Ebay.

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Author
Will Judd

AMD's Ryzen 7 5800X3D drops to £306, a new low price

1 year 4 months ago

OK, this isn't fair. A week ago, I was genuinely excited that the Ryzen 7 5800X3D was down to £348 at Amazon. Now though, thanks to a rogue 10% off deal at Ebay, you can pick up the same processor from Ebuyer's Ebay store for £306.

£306! That's a tiny price for a CPU that launched last year at an official RRP of £429 and a real-life asking price of £530. To get this reduced price, use code JAN10 at the checkout.

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Author
Will Judd

Hero dog saves streamer's life (in Elden Ring)

1 year 4 months ago

My dog is undeniably a good boy, but he's never saved my life in a videogame. He could learn a trick or two from MissMikaa's dog, who apparently knows when to step in and move her Elden Ring character away from a fiery death.

MissMikaa is the streamer who last week simultaneously beat Elden Ring with a controller and a dance mat, which should give you some clue as to how he rendered canine assistance.

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Author
Matt Cox

Fresh Lies Of P footage shows off a fight with a lightning gorilla robocop

1 year 4 months ago

Bloodborne was great, but it didn't have any lightning gorilla robocops. This is a problem the upcoming Lies of P hopes to fix, as revealed in a new gameplay trailer designed to show off how nice it looks on a Radeon RX 7900 XTX. I will likely never own a Radeon RX 7900 XTX, but it's looking increasingly likely that I will buy Lies of P.

It's a Soulslike that plonks you into an alternate Victorian London where people got real good at inventing creepy automata. You play as the big P himself, Pinocchio.

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Author
Matt Cox

Shang-Chi is apparently the most overrated card in Marvel Snap

1 year 4 months ago

Shang-Chi is a card in Marvel Snap that destroys any and all opposing cards in his lane with a power of 9 or above. He feels great to play, and miserable to play against. He is also, apparently, quite bad - at least according to project lead Ben Brode, who's consulted his big statistics bank to discover that he appears in more losing decks than anyone else.

Huh. I suppose I can stop agonising over whether he has a place in my latest Patriot deck.

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Author
Matt Cox

Valheim's next biome update will be the Ashlands, a volcanic land of the dead

1 year 4 months ago

The mists of the Mistlands have settled, so viking survive 'em up Valheim developers Iron Gate have decided it's time to start cracking on their next biome update. They're now chiselling away at the Ashlands, a volcanic "land of the dead" packed with skeletal horrors.

It'll be a while before all the horrors are ready, but a smaller update with clothes and haircuts is on the way soon.

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Author
Matt Cox