Rock, Paper, Shotgun

While writing a post about the Deus Ex randomiser mod last month, I tried to find a high-resolution clean version of the venerated immersive sim's box art to use as a header image. I trawled through archives of official sites hoping to discover that the marketing department had released it as a wallpaper or something, to no avail. But I did find a load of other official Deus Ex wallpapers which are so delightfully turn-of-the-millenium. Scanlines! Lensflare! Photoshop Difference Clouds filters! Come, admire, enjoy.

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A new bundle of discounted indie games on Itch.io is aiming to raise $150,000 towards reproductive rights and women’s charities following the US Supreme Court’s overturn of federal abortion rights last month. The Worthy Of Better, Stronger Together bundle is organised by streamer and musician Abbey ‘Scruncho’ Smith of horror game publisher Dread XP, and features 169 games. Picking up the bundle aids the National Organization For Women and the Center For Reproductive Rights in equal measure.

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Katharine has been raving about Tangle Tower ever since she reviewed it a couple of years ago, and I finally sat down and played it this weekend. I can confirm it's really good! A lovely point and click mystery with some tricksy puzzles, but unlimited goes so you still get to feel clever - plus the story plays with some mystery tropes in really fun ways. But the real joy is its characters. It's a cast of suspects that are both wacky and relatable, and I love them.

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Every weekend, indie devs show off current work on Twitter's #screenshotsaturday tag. And every Monday, I bring you a selection of these snaps and clips. This week, my eye was caught by a train ride through endless winter, a submarine controlled by connecting cables, some striking art styles, and yes, another cat.

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What may be leaked images of multiplayer maps from 2024’s Call Of Duty and this year's Modern Warfare 2 have emerged online over the weekend. The concept art was posted to Twitter by RealiityUK, an account that’s since been suspended, but not before they explained that the images were discovered in Warzone Mobile test files (thanks Eurogamer). The images shared by RealiityUK are still up on ResetEra if you want to have a nosy.

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Publisher Sega have joined the growing number of companies across the games industry to issue statements supporting reproductive rights, and have gone a step further than most by offering to match employee donations to non-profits supporting that cause. Sega’s decision comes in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturn of the Roe v. Wade ruling last month, which had enshrined abortion rights at a federal level for almost half a century.

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Annual speedrunning event Summer Games Done Quick has raised more than $3 million (£2.5 million) for the charity Doctors Without Borders. SGDQ drew to a close yesterday with an All Remembrances run of Elden Ring on PC, followed by a shorter bonus Any% run of the game to cap things off. You can watch HYP3RSOMNIAC take on FromSoft’s latest in just half an hour in the video below.

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Ubisoft are switching off online services for several older singleplayer games, including Anno 2070, Far Cry 3, Prince Of Persia: The Forgotten Sands, and Splinter Cell: Blacklist. For several of those games, that means that as of September 1st, "the installation and access to DLC will be unavailable," according to an Ubisoft support page.

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I can't tell you how much I'd prefer to ignore brandter, in which corporate Twitter accounts pretend to be people with terrible senses of humour. Alas, in this instance I cannot. Yesterday EA tweeted a terrible meme and related it to single-player games, and in the process drew the ire of several current and former game developers at studios owned by EA.

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Final Fantasy 14's next patch, 6.2, is scheduled to launch in late August. Among its many additions will be a new "Island Sanctuary", a personal island where players can gather materials, build facilities and look after creatures. It sounds like a slice of Stardew.

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You can once again buy the fan-created ScummVM release of 1997's Blade Runner adventure game via GOG. The fan version was removed from the store a little over a week ago when Nightdive Studios released their own Blade Runner: Enhanced Edition, then swiftly bundled together with that remaster when people complained.

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After all my griping about summer, torrential rain has arrived and yes, I'm still glad. I cycled home from seeing pals last night in a downpour and that's one of my favourite feelings in this world. Still, better stay indoors and dry off, maybe play some video games. What are you playing this weekend? Here's what we're clicking on!

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The Tour De France, the grandest race in professional cycling, started today. Across three weeks, 176 cyclists will ride 3328 kilometres (2068 miles) winding through France, Denmark, Belgium, and Switzerland, including the Alps and Pyrenees. As a keen cyclist and avid Tour watcher myself, I'm excited. So in celebration, over the coming weeks I'll be gabbing about the Tour De France, cycling, and bikes in a wide variety of video games with my own Tour De Jeux, from big-budget open-world extravaganzas to cute wee indie adventures. Let's start in the obvious place: the official Tour De France video game.

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There's no rule, but I try to cover things here that haven't already been poached by, for example, Graham last year. Sanabi is far too good to overlook, though.

I've nothing against 2D platformers, but to stand out in such a saturated genre you really need to capture something special. Wonder Potion have more or less nailed both the tricky but rewarding platforming, grappling, and baddie smacking parts of their formula, and perhaps more impressively, the story parts as well. This is a game with character, and the storytelling chops to make the most of its relatively simple ideas.

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While I’ve been down in the hardware mines, searching for the best early Amazon Prime Day deals and choking on consumer advice fumes, Graham has been working on how to make this list a little more colourful and readable. Behold, then, our new-look guide to saving some cash on your next component or peripheral upgrade – even before Prime Day 2022 itself, which will run July 12th-13th.

What’s more, you won’t need an Amazon Prime account for any of these, unlike most of the big deals that launch on the 12th. Amazon’s Prime Day landing page might already point to various bits of discounted PC hardware but you won’t be limited to the big A alone, as plenty of rival retailers will be running their own, competing sales. I've included some of the best early non-Amazon deals right here, and I’ll eventually post a full anti-Prime Day deals guide for those who’d rather avoid Amazon entirely.

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The arrival of Monster Hunter Rise's Sunbreak expansion has brought a swathe of quality of life improvements to Capcom's beast-bashing action game, including support for Nvidia's performance-boosting DLSS tech. Announced earlier this week as part of the game's 10.0.2 patch notes, enabling DLSS does bring some welcome frame rate improvements to proceedings, but it also, err... has the rather unexpected side effect of shaving off everyone's hair / fur. And in a game about felling all manner of feathery, scaly lizard animals, that's not exactly ideal.

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The house cat. Felis destructus. Humankind's absolute best mate and undisputed master. Some upcoming video games are planning to examine the motives behind these enigmatic creatures, whose origins remain unknown. Stray will put you in the paws of a street cat finding their way home in a cyberpunk city. Little Kitty Big City will see you wearing the whiskers of a cat less concerned with going home than it is with wreaking urban havoc. But what if you don't want to wait for these games? Well, you have options. Here are 10 of the best cats in PC games.

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Back in April, Ed advocated that more games should adopt anime-style openers. I come to you today with another proposal. In addition to, or perhaps instead of, anime openers, I put it to you that more games should celebrate their launch days with live action music videos - and after watching Capcom's freshly unveiled "Matsuken Sunbreak" vid for Monster Hunter Rise: Sunbreak, I think you'll heartily agree.

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PAX East 2022 may have taken place all the way back in April, but we still have a few bits and pieces left to talk about from our time in Boston. Namely: the 12 indie games included as part of the event's PAX Rising Showcase, a booth that's been a fixture of PAX for over a decade that allows developers to show off their upcoming projects to those attending the show.

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Yesterday tech journalist Alex Hern, who has been making comparatively gentle fun of the crypto crash, pointed out that he didn't Tweet about bitcoin in the boom times "because it wasn't funny then." So, after we posted yesterday about a crypto fan who very shoddily stole Itch and for some reason tagged Itch's founder in a tweet about it, allow me to bring you the news that some No Man's Sky players have come up with what I think is the most useful application of a crypto currency I've seen. And it works because it is deliberately valueless.

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Detective RPG Disco Elysium is not short on words, and now that text is a little more inviting. A free update yesterday added the option to display text in fonts which are intended to be easier to read for some people with dyslexia. The popular OpenDyslexic typeface is used for many languages, while Russian and Korean have their own fonts. I have a touch of the ol' dyslexia myself and do find this font helps me a bit.

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GameStop are offering an RX 6700 XT graphics card for $470, a price drop that's since been matched by Amazon. We've linked to both retailers below, as the price is $50 below the US MSRP and hundreds of dollars cheaper than these cards cost earlier this year. This is a PowerColor Red Devil model too, a critically acclaimed design that offers excellent thermals with a triple-fan cooler.

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Get your knee and elbow pads ready, EA have finally rolled out some more information about its upcoming open-world skateboarding game, Skate. This is the first bit of news we've had since last year's incredibly brief announcement and it’s in the form of a shin-shredding “pre-pre-pre-alpha” gameplay trailer.

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Adapting an established property in any medium has got to be a pretty tricky proposition. Satisfying the long term fans while keeping things approachable for newcomers on top of, well, making a good game. Add in the complexities of making a turn-based game based on an existing turn-based game and it’s surprising that developers don’t just collapse into gibbering, tentacle-waving Chaos Spawn.

Complex Games, the developers of recent XCOM-like Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate – Daemonhunters not only managed to resist the mutating power of the Warp, but produced an absolute cracker of a game. Suspecting pacts with Dark Powers were behind it, I put on my big Inquisitorial hat and set off to question Noah Decter-Jackson, the game’s Creative Director.

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Want an efficient yet powerful processor for gaming? Right now you can pick up a Ryzen 5600X for $176 w/ code JULYSAVINGS over at Antonline's Ebay. That's an awesome price for AMD's six-core 12-thread Ryzen 5000 CPU, especially given how affordable compatible AM4 motherboards and DDR4 RAM is right now!

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It turns out that school won't be out for summer this year, because The Sims 4's next expansion pack High School Years is set to release on July 28th. The first full expansion since Cottage Living launched a year ago, High School Years is set to do exactly what it says on the tin, massively expanding gameplay options for Sims in their teens.

The pack promises to introduce staples of high school life like attending classes, getting detention, going to prom, and graduating, all as on-screen activities that the player can guide their Sims through. While there's a fair bit of overlap with the series' established college-themed expansion packs like The Sims 4 Discover University, giving this treatment to high school-aged characters is a franchise first, and something that's been on the fandom's collective wish list for a very long time.

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Last month, 343 Industries announced that Halo Infinite's long-awaited co-op campaign would begin its public testing phase in July. Now, we finally have a date. The Campaign Network Co-op test for Halo Infinite is due to start on the week of July 11th, 343 Industries announced last night, and will support up to four players with any combination of PCs, Xboxes and Xbox Cloud Gaming players. Thanks, crossplay.

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Let’s face facts: the old Sonic games have been re-released more times than I’ve had hot dinners. And every single Sonic fan has bought every single one of them, such is our sheer madness. We’re a little spoiled on PC for Sonic content these days, with every recent game of note having its own PC port that’s immediately been modded from bottom to breakfast. But it wasn’t always this simple, oh no. It used to be pretty slim pickings for us Sonicsters, and I’m here to tell you what we fought through to get to the promised land of ports we bask in today.

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The creator of indie game storefront Itch.io has called out a website that appears to have taken the site’s code for itself and begun selling creators’ games without permission. Dubbed 'W3itch.io', the copycat site's creator replied to a tweet from Itch.io founder Leaf Corcoran, who promptly asked them not to "rip off" Itch.io anymore. W3itch.io even described itself as a “free-as-freedom open marketplace for independent game creators inspired by Itch and Gitcoin”. Not the most sensible of ideas to engage with the person whose work you’re replicating, W3itch.io.

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Charming roguelike deckbuilder Dicey Dungeons will see six new episodes added to its gameshow on July 7th in the free Reunion update for all players. Hailing from designer Terry Cavanagh, the DLC gives each of the base game’s six contestants an episode with “wildly new designs and rules”, the devs say. Play through all the episodes and you should get another 4 to 5 hours out of the game.

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A few years back, Pip enjoyed Hook, a minimalist puzzle game about untangling mish-mashes of hooks and pins by removing pieces in the correct order. If you try to remove that one, the hook will snag on that pin, so first this pin needs to go but ah! that goes through the middle of this ring, so... it's interesting to understand a shape and system so you can pull it to pieces. Now a sequel is out, and it's also nice, and it's under £2, and it has a demo too.

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Back in 2020, a group of digital art smugglers lifted the National Gallery’s entire art collection, nabbing each of the 2,400 hi-res digital artworks straight from the institution’s website. Since the collection is made up of paintings long past their copyright expiration, countless works by Van Gogh, Da Vinci, Titian, Vermeer, Rembrandt, and the rest were all legally (technically) snatched up in what could have well been the biggest digital heist in art history.

The cheeky looters in question were StikiPixels, the very same team behind the art gallery sim Occupy White Walls, and now anyone who owns a PC and a copy of the game can hang these priceless paintings in their own private virtual collections. In OWW (officially pronounced Owouawwouaw if you have the time), you can build your own architecturally ambitious gallery and stuff it full of artwork.

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Monkey Island co-creator Ron Gilbert appears to have taken down his long-running blog today, after posting that he doesn’t feel he can share news about the upcoming Return To Monkey Island online anymore. While no longer there to view, VGC managed to capture Gilbert’s post on grumpygamer.com before the site became unavailable. You can see the new art style for yourself in the trailer below.

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Against all possible odds, we're officially halfway through 2022. What a year it's been so far! After one of the busiest starts to the gaming calendar in recent memory (looking at you, Elden Ring), my backlog is barely keeping it together right now. I've started so many things on as many different services that just keeping track of what I've played when is fast becoming a second job. If you, too, have been feeling overwhelmed by the sheer number of new and exciting releases coming out, then why not have a gander at this freshly compiled list of all our favourite games from the year so far? Maybe you'll find something that will similarly catch your eye, just as it's done ours. I'll warn you now, though. It's a big list.

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Video game parodies are often ropey, being neither funny nor fun to play. I am delighted that The Looker is both, and free too. It's a loving send-up of The Witness, inviting us to a strange island to solve more line-drawing puzzles and listen to more audio tapes. Some of the puzzles are quite clever, and many of the jokes made me laugh—plus it's only an hour or two to complete.

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Classically animated platformer Cuphead will finally get its Delicious Last Course with the release of the expansion on Steam today. The DLC adds a new character, Ms. Chalice, the third beverage-container bonce you can play as. Once you’ve unlocked her in the DLC you’ll be able to play as her in the base game too. There's also a new island with mountains, icy tundra and desert to navigate. Watch the trailer below, although it’s getting on a bit now.

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It wasn't until I played a hands-on preview of Cult Of The Lamb this weekend that I realised how much ovine imagery is knocking around Christianity. All them lambs being sacrificed in the Old Testament, shepherds, flocks, the lion and the lamb. In Cult Of The Lamb, which is sort of a dungeon-crawling roguelite with a colony sim bolted on, you are a literal rather than metaphorical lamb. Although possibly also a metaphorical lamb. Point is, the game makes great hay from the juxtaposition of cute fluffy animals and a violent cult.

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Steam Deck production might be ramping up again but it turns out more recent orders could be something of a lucky dip, SSD-wise. Valve have quietly updated their Steam Deck tech specs page with a note that the NVMe SSDs in “some” 256GB and 512GB models might now use the PCIe Gen 3.0 x2 interface, meaning the drive has half the usual bandwidth of the Gen 3.0 x 4 SSDs that previously featured as standard.

As first spotted by German site HardwareLuxx, there's no indication as to why Valve made this change, and it doesn’t look like anyone with an outstanding Steam Deck order will know which SSD bandwidth they’ll get in advance. However, Valve's added note explains that “In our testing, we did not see any impact to gaming performance between x2 and x4.”

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Looking to load up on storage? Seagate's enterprise-grade 16TB 7200RPM Exos X16 HDDs are down to $200 when you buy a manufacturer refurbished unit at Amazon USA.

That's $73 cheaper than a new equivalent, and the drives come with a 90-day 'Amazon renewed guarantee'. This means that you can check the drive's actual usage and performance using tools like CrystalDiskInfo, and keep it only if you're happy with it.

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The excellent Kingston Fury Renegade PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD has dropped in price on Amazon UK, from its regular price of £143 all the way down to £109.98. That's a significant reduction and equals the lowest price we've ever seen for this drive which is the fastest we've ever tested as of February 2022.

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