Until recently, Mad Maggie's main claim to fame in Apex Legends was that she had a surprisingly spry 80-year-old mum, and loved to tell people about it. Now we know she'll be emerging from the backstory and joining the playable Legend roster with Season 12 (Defiance), and a new trailer gives us our first look at her rather destructive set of abilities.
This week the Electronic Wireless Show podcast discusses some of our favourite (and least favourite) inventory configurations. A humble beast, the inventory, yet a feature of many games - sometimes even a necessity. Often we only notice one if it's terrible. But boy, a good inventory is worth a dozen mules. So lets talk about them today!
In other news this week, Nate thinks he has come up with an original premise for a Pixar film, only to discover he has invented Seth Rogan's nightmare film Sausage Party, and we are officially starting our campaign to get Henry 'Vitamin H' Cavill on the show. We will be mentioning him every week from now on. Plus: what we like doing on our birthdays, school plays, and pro-wrestling adaptations of Dickens.
After basically remaking Bullfrog sim Theme Hospital with their first game, Two Point Studios are preparing to return with a new comedy management game. Today they announced Two Point Campus will launch on the 17th of May, inviting us to build and run universities. All I need to know is that it seems one of the courses you can run involves cooking giant pizzas the size of a minibus. Is this real? Did I miss megapizza when I dropped out of university?
Boomerangs are cool as hell. The sleek wooden objects careen through the air in a perfect circle - in theory, at least - before returning right back to where they began in the palm of your hand. They’re something that fascinated me as a child, and 20-something years later I still don’t really know how or why they work.
Deflector is like someone taped two swords to a boomerang, Mad Max-style. How does the boomerang still operate with twin blades slashing back and forth on either end? Don’t know. How does it always circle its way back to where you’re standing after dashing around an arena filled with enemies? Not a clue.
When warp-tunneling multiplayer shooter Splitgate came zooming out of its beta portal, gun barrels aflame, it was joyful madness. The maps were some of the best things about it. Old-school mega-arenas adorned with portal-zappable walls that functioned as DIY shortcuts. As virtual coliseums of chaos go, they were pretty cool. Well, now you can make your own. Splitgate is launching into season 1 this week (the developers insist the last four months have been "season 0") and alongside a couple of new game modes, there's now a map creation tool.
Tell you what's the opposite of cosy: watching the world crumble from your bedroom window. Tell you what is cosy: playing as a fox who repairs quirky machines and eats nice meals cooked by furry friends. That's FixFox for you, an upcoming sci-fi adventure game developed by Rendlike which looks like the video game equivalent of a soothing balm.
Official support for same-sex marriages will arrive in Crusader Kings 3 as part of Update 1.5, launching alongside the first expansion in February. It'll come as both a game rule for everyone and new options for modders to work with. It's taken longer than expected, but Paradox adding an option for same-sex marriage without using mods is more than they had initially planned, so that's nice.
My personal top Twitter tip: add pleasant breaks to the nightmares of your feed by following a few good image accounts or bots which regularly post nice things. I like accounts which post rock formations or bots which generate landscapes. Perhaps you find comfort in violence? If so, you might enjoy interrupting your doomscrolling with the Doomscroll Doom Bot, a Twitter bot which is very slowly posting a complete playthrough of Ultimate Doom, one frame every hour.
After a short delay at the end of last year, Valve have announced their portable Steam Deck PC is officially launching on February 25th. Sort of. The very first units won't actually ship until February 28th at the earliest, but the 25th is the day Valve will be sending out their first batch of order emails to existing reservation holders.
"Just tell us about the crystals", demands Jack, Stranger Of Paradise Final Fantasy Origin's prickly protagonist. He has no time for the posh dark elf who applauds him for something. Whatever it is, Jack doesn't care. In fact, I don't think he knows where he is. If he does, he wants nothing to with it.
This interaction is contained in a new trailer that I deem to be perfect. It sells me on this Final Fantasy action RPG, because it seems like I'll get to control someone as impatient as I am. Jack lives for crashing and bashing. The story is an inconvenience for him, the fighting is not.
With powerful graphics cards worldwide still being snapped up by cryptocurrency miners, it feels almost cruel for Crytek to announce another Crysis game. Today they confirmed they're returning to their supersuit FPS with a new instalment they claim will be "a truly next-gen shooter." They're not clear about what next-gen means to them. Will Crysis 4: a) require a £1500 graphics card; b) be a battle royale; or c) sell NFT hats on the metaverse blockchain cryptonet? Answers on a postcard, reader dear.
Activision Blizzard have declined to voluntarily recognise the union forming at Raven Software's QA department, forcing workers to take the long approach. The group calling themselves the Game Workers Alliance will now have to hit up the National Labor Relations Board and run elections, but say they're still confident about unionising because, y'know, they have the support of a supermajority. "Once again, when management is given a choice, they always seem to take the low road," the group said.
Although announcing three games at once feels a bit much, I'm really happy about the Respawn feat. Star Wars news. Respawn Entertainment always felt like one of those development studios that should have been shut down by a bigger studio circa 2015 because the people loved Titanfall but it wasn't, you know, Call Of Duty or anything. I turned my back for what seemed like but a moment, and suddenly Apex Legends exists and Respawn are one of the key players under EA, growing stronger from within. One day we'll be watching Andrew Wilson at an E3 showcase and realise it's actually Vince Zampella's eyes looking out at us. Everyone coming on stage to present is just Vince Zampella doing a voice and wearing a different baseball cap.
Point is, I'm mostly just pleased that Respawn are still around to make games featuring robots that surprise and delight us. And if they're not allowed to do Titanfall 3, Star Wars is at least a rich field to till said robots. Lousy with robots, is Star Wars. But honestly, if anyone is going to make Star Wars games (apart from BioWare, who have spent recent years making Dragon Age 4 and / or collapsing like a magnificent neutron star) then I'd root for Respawn. They may not make the Star Wars games you think you want, but they'll make the ones you need right now.
Three new Star Wars games are in development at EA. Respawn are leading the projects, working on "the next chapter" in the Star Wars Jedi story, an "all-new first-person shooter", and partnering with new studio Bit Reactor on a "new Star Wars strategy game."
Vampire Survivors is an action RPG boiled down to its core. You walk around, you kill monsters, you level up, you get stronger, you kill more monsters. In place of story, an inventory, or even the need to fire and aim your own weapons, there is pixel art spectacle.
On my last life, I killed around 24,000 monsters in 30 minutes. I am hooked.
Watch Dogs: Legion isn't getting anymore post-launch content. In an update from the development team, they say that the previous update was the last, and that 'seasons' in the online mode will soon begin to repeat.
Cities: Skylines' Airports DLC is out now. It lets you build your own airports within your cities, placing down terminals, taxi lanes, customising the plane liveries and so on. It also comes alongside a free update for the base game which expands some substantial city customisation options.
Blizzard have announced they're making a survival game set in an "all-new universe." There's not much information on it bar two pieces of concept art, but they're looking for artists, designers and engineers to join its development team.
After six long weeks, Final Fantasy XIV is back on sale. That's after Square Enix stopped selling the MMORPG after the critically acclaimed life-hog overwhelmed its servers, causing massive server queues and network errors. Thankfully, those days are behind the game now. So yes, if you've been longing to check out its excellent Endwalker expansion or famous smooth grapes, you can! And from a new Oceania server too, because Squeenix now have room for those down under to sample Eorzea's delicacies.
There was cause for joy and concern alike when Intel revealed the Core i5-12400F, alongside loads of other new 12th gen Alder Lake CPUs. Here was a much more affordable, still gaming focused-alternative to the Core i5-12600K, yet it would lack the signature hybrid of fast Performance cores and flexible Efficiency cores that made that chip one of the best gaming CPUs ever made.
Turns out, the concern was for naught: the Core i5-12400F is a cracking slice of silicon, both for the money and for games specifically. Although the sole reliance on Performance cores (or P-cores) puts it behind the Core i5-12600K for desktop multitasking, if it’s just the frames per second you’re after, this cheaper chip can match and sometimes even surpass its big brother.
Firework actually came out almost exactly a year ago, but the English language version (translated from the original Chinese) was released just before Christmas. Which is a good thing, because Firework is well worth checking out if you have an interest in either horror games or puzzle games. The horror isn't blood-chilling, but rather twisted up with grief and sorrow in how inevitable it is. Similarly, the puzzles aren't going to stump you for long, but they fit very well with the story. These two strands of the game weave together and create a nice, thoughtful experience that's worth the four or so hours of having it.
According to From Software producer Yasuhiro Kitao, Elden Ring can be finished in roughly 30 hours. That's a really nice amount of time. Long enough to feel substantial, but not too long that it'll feel like a massive slog. No bloat, more riding on spectral horse-goat, as they say.
Now that Strange Horticulture is out, I would like to make a formal request to all game developers who may be reading this.
Please make a game that is basically Strange Horticulture, but about a weird book shop. Possibly a book shop with a small coffee shop attached. I'm not going to be too strict about it, you know, I'm not a monster. It could, for example, be a library. Or maybe there isn't another business attached, or the business attached to it is a bakery instead of a coffee shop. This isn't just my personal hobby horse, either. I'm pretty sure loads of people would like that game. And please, for the love of God, tell me if the Mystery Book Shop Game already exists. I'd be disappointed if it does, because nobody has yet brought it to my attention.
Age of Empires IV. WarCraft III: Reforged. Company of Heroes 3. The team at Blackbird Interactive has watched the recent return of the classic RTS games with interest - vested interest, in fact. Tasked by Korean developer Smilegate with transposing their Counter-Strike-style shooter Crossfire to the strategy genre, Blackbird believes it has identified a hole yet to be filled. A nostalgic need to be catered to.
“I argue that in the recent resurgence, we haven’t yet come across an RTS game that offers players an experience comparable to StarCraft or Red Alert,” says game designer Maurice Grela. “We’re hoping to fulfill that gap.”
I wish I could take credit for that strapline up there, but alas, I cannot. That's right, the creator of Final Fantasy, Hironobu Sakaguchi, really has created his own Final Fantasy XIV clothing label called sakaGUCCI - and he's been showing off his designs on Twitter with some truly great fashion poses.
Bang your gong, sing it from the rooftops, put your phone on full brightness and swing it to and fro. Elden Ring has gone gold, which means the game should be ready to release on schedule in February. Every NPC has rehearsed their ominous laugh and bosses their second and third phases, basically.
Everyone can agree that it is at least a little bit funny when scammers run fake NFT drops and cryptocurrencies to fleece idiots, but it's less funny when innocent people get caught up in a scam. The publishers of Outerverse, a game about building automation and battling bosses, say scammers are pretending to run a blockchain version of the game and using this to sell cryptocurrency. It seems an obvious scam, which can't be good for the game's image.
With the Steam Deck’s February rollout bearing down, Valve are still unveiling the portable PC’s new tricks. The latest, as per a Steamworks Development blog post, is Dynamic Cloud Sync: a variation of Steam’s existing cloud save feature that ensures save files can sync between a player’s Steam Deck and PC even when the former is only suspended, rather than fully powered down.
Two months after announcing they're buying Weta Digital, the CGI studio behind King Of The Hoops and that, Unity are now buying virtual skin. Today the makers of the Unity engine announced the acquisition of Ziva Dynamics, a company whose tech specialises in simulating skin and meat to make fancy facial animations and meaty muscle and such. Their tech powered the flappy flesh of the troll in a recent Hellblade 2 trailer, and has been seen on PlayStations in Spider-Man: Miles Morales.
There were a lot of games I played last year that could have been on our Best Games You Missed list at the end of 2021. I ended up going with Studio Pixel Punk's Unsighted in the end, but it was very nearly OPUS: Echo Of Starsong, a stunning visual novel adventure game from Taiwanese studio Sigono Inc. I'd seen a few other games journalists raving about it when it came out on Steam last September, and hey, over 3000 overwhelmingly positive Steam reviews can't be wrong either, so I took the plunge, and golly, it sure is something special.
As if Dark Souls wasn't dangerous enough already, Bandai Namco have temporarily taken every Dark Souls PC server offline following the discovery of a Dark Souls 3 security vulnerability that could harm anyone playing in online mode. A malevolent string of code threatens the many kingdoms of ash, so to speak.
With quality assurance workers at Raven Software preparing to unionise, the Activision Blizzard staff who have gone on strike to help secure better treatment for the team are looking to end the strike. The strike started on December 9th following surprise layoffs at the Call Of Duty: Warzone studio's QA department, with some other teams and Actiblizz people supporting them. Unused cash raised for a strike fund will be saved for future efforts.
Codemasters’ Grid series continues its resurgence after 2019’s decent-but-slightly-neutered reboot. This time, it’s going right back to Codemasters' TOCA Race Driver roots and adding in a full-fat story mode, complete with real actors. No Scotty, mind, but we suppose they have to save something for the sequel. It’s this story mode we’ve been given early access to, so let’s jump in.
Andorra Telecom, the only Internet service provider in the tiny European principality, has suffered a series of cyber attacks disrupting Internet access nationwide—and supposedly it's all over a Minecraft tournament. The Twitch Rivals tournament SquidCraft Games over the weekend included a number of players in Andorra, several of whom dropped out after their connections exploded. Trying to blast a whole country offline to ruin a Minecraft tournament sounds like the setup for a bad YA metaverse novel but may be a terrible vision of our future.
Last year it was reported that long-time Sega director behind the Yakuza and Super Monkey Ball games Toshihiro Nagoshi was in talks to leave the company and form his own team under NetEase. Now we know for sure it's real. Nagoshi Studio has officially launched and they've already begun work on their first game.
As spotted by VideoCardz, Nvidia have been bumping up the prices of their latest reference cards: the GeForce RTX 30 Founders Edition series. Here in the UK it’s only the RTX 3070 Ti Founders Edition that’s seen a hike, from £529 up to £549, but over in the lands of the Euro these graphics cards will set buyers back up to €100 more than before. That’s for the RTX 3090 FE, which now sits at a widowmaking €1,649, while the rest of the range has gained between €20 and €60 in wallet weight.
I mostly associate Yu-Gi-Oh! with its manga and anime and all its hairstyles you could cut your hand on. It's also, of course, an enormously popular trading card game, and its latest digital iteration, Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel, came to Steam this past week. It's currently the fourth most popular game on the platform by concurrent players.
Hitman 1-3 is a fantastic trilogy and, also, a curse upon digital storefronts. Hitman 3 frustrated players when it first launched on Epic, because their progress didn't carry over; Hitman 1 frustrated players on GOG last year because its internet requirements constitute DRM; and now Hitman 3 is back at it again on Steam. It currently has "Mixed" reviews after arriving on the platform earlier this week, with players cross about its price, its umpteen editions, and - yes, again - progress not carrying over for some.
Blizzard Entertainment head Mike Ybarra says their top priority is to "rebuild your trust in Blizzard." In a new blog post, Ybarra outlines the steps the company is taking, including new senior positions dedicated to improving their culture.
These moves come in the wake of several lawsuits alleging a culture of harassment and discrimination within the company. The post announcing the plans also comes days after Microsoft announced their intent to buy Activision Blizzard.
"Palworld looks like Pokémon until you see the guns and sweatshop", wrote Alice O last year. Palworld has now returned with a second trailer, which continues in kind. The pals are again seen crafting machineguns in a sweatshop - but also crafting space rockets, being strapped to beds in nightmare hospitals, and dragged while tethered to the backs of moving trucks.