Rock, Paper, Shotgun

The edgy animated adaptation of Valve's silly wizard war MOBA Dota 2 has returned, with the full second season of Dota: Dragon's Blood now live on Netflix. Dragon Knight, Mirana, and their friends return to fight Terrorblade, having committed the classic Dota mistake of letting a late-game carry farm uninterrupted until they're stacked. Should've kept ganking him before he ate all those dragons, nerks.

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A group of Foxhole players are going on strike to pressure the developers into address issues they feel ruin their chosen role in the war, logistics. The World War 2 sandbox MMO is a persistent battle where weapons, vehicle, and building rely on resources gathered, processed, and delivered by other players, without whom the war machine slows down. Our boy Brendy called logistics "the real heroes" when he rode with them a few years back. But many are unhappy with the current state of their role, so they've formed a union.

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Something is missing from Nobody Saves The World, a new action RPG from Guacamelee devs DrinkBox Studios. This is a dungeon-crawler that lets you shapeshift into horses, bodybuilders, and ghosts in your bid to save the world, but it's a quest blighted not only by a Calamity, but by repetition too. Charming characters and clever mighty-morphin' combat succumb to numbers, which reduces what could've been a rich world to a rather hollow dash between dungeons.

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Can I get a ‘woop woop’, or at least a ‘wololo’, for the spin-off strategy game? The Ensemble Studios swansong that was Halo Wars, an RTS so streamlined it was aerodynamic. The ballistic ballet of Gears Tactics, which piled extra biceps atop XCOM’s shoulders. Even when money has moved through the membrane in the opposite direction, it has resulted in projects that were - let’s not overstate this - endearingly experimental. Can I get an understanding nod for Command & Conquer: Renegade?

When I first heard about Wordle, I assumed it was an app, and went looking for it on various app stores. I didn't find it - Wordle is instead a website, and completely free.

It turns out I'm not alone. App developer Steven Cravotta explained on Twitter that a completely unrelated game he released five years ago, also called Wordle, has had a major increase in downloads over the past few weeks. And now he's donating the money he's made to charity.

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Diplomacy Is Not An Option looks pleasant and lovely, a bucolic town builder of the sort that would enrapture me for a lost weekend. There's a little combat, but not mu-- Oh, wow. Waitaminute. There's a moment in this trailer where it suddenly looks like one of those adverts for fake mobile games. The hordes. Seemingly thousands of enemies on screen, and the physics to simulate them being hurled about.

You can watch said trailer below, released alongside the news that the game has slipped into next month.

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Ubisoft are making a VR escape game set inside Notre-Dame cathedral. As reported by Variety, the one-hour long experience is being built to complement Jean-Jacques Annaud's upcoming docudrama about the 2019 fire that partly destroyed the cathedral.

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I stumbled across a stream of Jump King last week, a platformer that passed me by when released a couple of years ago. "Yes, I want to ruin my life," I thought, and instantly bought it.

Now just a few days later, my life ruined, I see jumps and punishing falls everywhere. Is indie developer Daniel Linssen's new free game Tumbledown Drive a Jump King and Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy-inspired platformer in which you are a car hopping up a mountain, or is this another hallucination?

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Even if you're not playing smash-hit word puzzle game Worldle, you'll likely have seen grids of green and yellow squares in your social media feeds from people sharing their solutions to the day's puzzle. A good way to share info in an abstract, but not the prettiest. So after some Wordle players started recreating their solutions inside the pretty town-building toy Townscaper, someone went ahead and made a tool which automatically does the work for you. The result, your solution built as a colourful building, for you to view in your browser.

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Apparently today is Blue Monday, the most depressing day of the year. I'm not sure what that means. Surely the first Monday we're all back at work would be the worst? Or is this the one where we've had a while to realise that the promise of hope in the new year is, once again, a terrible lie? Perhaps. Either way, I refuse to submit. Enjoy the heck out of this Monday. Have your favourite thing for dinner. Watch your favourite movie. Have a bath and put on a cool playlist of songs and sing really loud to annoy your neighbour.

Alternatively, play some cool video games! Here are the ones that make me smile when I'm feeling blue.

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As if ray tracing and DLSS weren’t big enough bonuses to owning a GeForce RTX graphics card, Nvidia has just dropped another toy in the chest: Deep Learning Dynamic Super Resolution, or DLDSR. It’s essentially an AI-fuelled upgrade to Nvidia’s DSR downsampling tool, aiming to more intelligently render the frames of your games so that they appear more detailed – without the same performance loss that comes with standard DSR. It’s an intriguing new feature that could make some of the best graphics cards even better, and I’ve been trying it out to see if it performs as effectively as Nvidia claims.

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Konami's first auction of NFTs concluded over the weekend, with idiots collectively spending the equivalent of £119,000 ($162k) in cryptocurrency to buy 14 database entries pointing to Castlevania artwork, music, and videos that anyone online can see for free. On one hand, thank god it was only £119,000 because if it was the millions that some ugly Twitter avatars have sold for, every other mercenary games company would ramp up their own NFT initiatives. On the other, oh god £119,000 is still so much money for basically nothing.

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The speedrunning fundraiser festival Awesome Games Done Quick ended in the wee hours on Sunday, with one of its most spectacular runs coming in the final stretch. A speedrunner beat Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice in just over two hours, which frankly is impressive enough to me. More than that, the runner known as "Mitchriz" was blindfolded from start to finish, guided by a combination of memory and feeling-out environments. In two hours! Ludicrious.

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I enjoy the sub-genre of meme about Sad Murder Dads as much as the next gal. Heck, I enjoy those lads themselves. From Kratos in God Of War, to Joel in The Last Of Us, and even less story-focused murder dads like Soldier 76, dudes rock. Successfully rehabilitated and reimagined as father figures struggling to inhabit that role and accept their emotions, in some very good games to boot. Developers who were hot young guns in the 00s are now tired middle-aged dads themselves, and as a result the art they consume and, more to the point, the art they want to make looks radically different. I'm not having a go at that; that's just life, is what that is.

But what I'm asking is, what's the mum equivalent? Because I really want to see someone give a mum story the same big budget, fun epic treatment that Kratos got in God Of War. At the same time, I also dread this coming to pass.

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Friday's long-awaited PC launch of God Of War was mostly received by people nodding their heads and muttering "Boy"—the highest praise a heavy heart can offer. A few would-be players, however, found themselves unable to play, with the game throwing up "out of memory" error messages when they really shouldn't be out of memory. The devs have been looking into the issue, and released a potential fix on an opt-in experimental branch on Steam. It sounds like it fixes the problem for some people, but not all.

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Sundays are for buying a Werther's Original from your local petrol station. Before you treat yourself, let's read this week's best writing about games (and game related things).

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Games Done Quick draws to a close tomorrow and one of the best runs from the past week was for Stardew Valley. Speedrunner Olenoname finished the farming simulator in 17 minutes by using a mixture of glitches and extreme skill.

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Sega has registered a trademark for the term "Sega NFT" with the Japan patent office. Sega indicated in an early 2021 Twitter post that they intended to sell NFTs last summer, although the company's president later said that if the move was seen as "simple money-making, I would like to make a decision not to proceed."

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GOG, the digital game store, has updated their homepage to provide new ways to search and filter available games. That includes sorting games by price, filtering by genre, and a brand new tags system.

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God Of War is out now, as of Friday at 5pm. This gives PC gamers their first chance to experience 2018's hottest memes, yelling "Boy!" at one another, and writing thinkpieces about videogame dads. It also gives them the chance to satisfyingly throw an axe through a lot of skeletons.

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Following a wee technical hiccup on my part, ladies and gentlemen, The Weeknd. I'm already thinking ahead to E3 2022 because a friend's planning part of their wedding celebrations for mid-June and I don't know if... how strange to be missing the steadfast, certain, reliability of E3. Anyway. What are you playing this weekend? Here's what we're clicking on.

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Popularity, I have learned from American teen television shows, isn't all it's cracked up to be. While Square Enix haven't been bombed by the local mafioso, joined a murderous D&D cult, or discovered their dad is a serial killer and they too have the serial killer genes (thanks, Riverdale!), they did find such overwhelming success with Final Fantasy XIV that they temporarily stopped selling the MMORPG. They couldn't expand servers quickly enough to meet demand, see, leading to login queues and frustration. But now things are settling enough to to start selling it again, and they have big plans to expand servers.

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I'm not sure I trust the Page of Cups. As imagined by Pamela Colman Smith and A.E. Waite in the 1909 Rider-Waite Tarot, he's a cocky young man in a floral tunic, standing by the seashore hefting a goblet. There's a fish peeking out of the goblet and the Page appears to be gossiping with it, perhaps sharing a joke about the artist, because honestly, what kind of artist paints a guy talking to fish. Or is he thinking about offering us the cup? The set of his jaw is ambiguous.

When drawn in an upright position, the Page suggests a flash of inspiration reeled from the mind's ocean, or a dazzling opportunity. In this guise, he's been a good friend to Ami Y. Cai, a game creator and illustrator from Kentucky - though in her first Tarot deck, Stephanie Pui-Mun Law's Shadowscapes Tarot, the symbolism has been flipped around a little, the Page depicted as a mermaid peering into a steaming bowl. “Sometimes sparks come to me through conversations, or while I'm doing something else,” Cai tells me over Zoom. “So when I see the Page of Cups, I know that a creative opportunity is coming my way.”

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Puzzle games don't need a plot, or even a theme or setting. When very abstracted ones throw one in it's often an indulgence, or just an excuse to hang the aesthetics around something the devs happen to like. Blink Planets seemed like this at first, and that was fine! A little sexy hexy is all you really need if it's done right, after all. I cannot believe I just said that.

Partway through though, I realised Blink Planets isn't just about connecting things with lines of tiles. It really is about the urban planning its setting suggests.

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Earlier this week, Nvidia quietly announced a kind of DLSS-adjacent downsampling tech: Deep Learning Dynamic Super Resolution (DLDSR). It aims to improve image sharpness and quality on GeForce RTX graphics cards, using AI to reduce the performance loss of Nvidia’s existing DSR feature, and it’s now available to install and enable through GeForce Game Ready Driver 511.23.

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Over the holidays, I decided to treat myself to the gift of funk, and bought myself a neat little acoustic bass. The guitar arrived as promised; I am still waiting on the funk. Any day now. In the meantime, I’ve taught myself the riff for Valley Of The Fallen Star, better known as the Cosmo Canyon theme from Final Fantasy VII. I’m not sure if I can adequately put into words how the original composition of the track makes me feel, but I am certain I’m not the only one.It is sonic nostalgia for a simpler time, where following a talking dog’s weeble uncle to the projection of the cosmos he kept in his loft did nothing to shatter my emotional investment in a story.

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With each of us being little more than a kilogram of meaty slop and a stringy nervous system which would fall vaguely into the shape of a human if slapped out on a table or hung from a doorframe, it's fascinating to see how other people interpret the world and its complexities. So hey, look, here's Democracy 4, the latest in the government simulator series from Positech Games. After 15 months in early access, it's now out in full: a detailed model of how Positech think politics works, for you to try to gain and keep power.

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Fear not the fate of the Steam Deck, Valve’s ambitious, SteamOS-based handheld gaming PC. While the Deck’s release date was originally planned for sometime in December 2021, a Steam Community update from Valve has assured that they’re on track for the rescheduled launch next month.

“First and foremost, we’re on track to ship Steam Deck on time. Global pandemic, supply issues, and shipping issues notwithstanding, it looks like we'll be able to start getting these out the door by the end of February”, so says the post.

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EGX is returning to Birmingham this year, March 4th-6th, and tickets are on sale now. The three-day event takes the place of EGX Rezzed, which was formerly held in London, and runs from Friday until Sunday.

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Frontier's unrevealed Warhammer: Age Of Sigmar RTS has been moved from a planned early 2023 launch, to sometime in the back half of 2023. "This change will further improve the quality and longevity of the game," says Frontier in a trading report that mentions the change in release plans.

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Riot Games have outlined their strategy for their next five years, saying they think of themselves "not as a games company but as a gamer’s company." The lengthy post, credited to Riot CEO Nicolo Laurent, outlines not what they specifically intend to make, but the kinds of things they want to make and the internal changes designed to make it happen.

The post also acknowledges Riot Games' recent history, including their settlement last month of a gender discrimination lawsuit stretching back to 2018.

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Lockpicking is a frequently maligned component of many games, but as FPS minigames go I've always had a soft spot for it. I'd rather pick a thousand more locks in Oblivion than hack another Pipemania computer terminal in BioShock.

Enter Museum Of Mechanics: Lockpicking, a curated, playable exhibition of lockpicking minigames throughout the history of videogames. It's now available via Steam, with a bunch of new additions since we last wrote about it.

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The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The diary of Samuel Pepys. The movie Mary Poppins. For years, people have sought to understand English culture and history by consulting such artifacts. When future generations wish to understand what England was like in the early 21st century, they'll simply need to play a Duke Nukem 3D level. Since June 2021, Dan Douglas has been making a DN3D level which captures facets of the real England: town centres, Wetherspoons, Greggs, a sausage roll nativity, Michael Gove dancing, lads, absolute madmen, life under Covid, performative patriotism, the Brexit bus, and so much more. It's astonishing.

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Roguelike platformer Spelunky 2 is out now on PC Game Pass. I'm less excited and more angry, actually. This is because it's my nemesis, a game I know is good but I'm absolutely shocking at. Alongside it, the new Left 4 Dead-like co-op shooter The Anacrusis enters early access later today and will be on Game Pass from the start. Can't wait to fall into a pit of spikes with one, then blub about my misfortunes in the other as I pew pew aliens.

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It's been over a decade since a core game in The Settlers series last made landfall on PC, and during that time the real-time management landscape has arguably changed quite a bit. There have been some great building games that have risen up, and even developer Blue Byte (now Ubisoft Dusseldorf)'s own Anno series has staked a powerful claim to the city-building throne. But this incarnation of The Settlers isn't so much about connecting to the series' past as it is about laying down foundations for the future. It's had a slightly rocky road to launch, suffering several delays and refunded pre-orders after being postponed indefinitely back in 2020, but at long last this reboot of the classic city-building conquest-me-do is finally ready to beat down our door and come barrelling in. It's launching in full on March 17th, and I've been hands on with an early version of the upcoming closed beta build that will be running from January 20th-24th. So settle in, folks. Here's how it's shaping up.

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Happy 2022! New year, same old us. The Electronic Wireless Show Podcast will make no effort to change or better ourselves; this is our promise to you, listener. For our first episode of the new year we're doing the traditional "what games are we most looking forwards to" episode. Yes, our most anticipated games. There is very little crossover, and lots of orc chat.

Before that, though, we're lucky enough to have scored an interview with the "It's me, Blorko" guy. Yes, we have the man who came up with this winter's most fashionable Marvel-based viral tweet, live and on the podcast (I mean, technically he is on the podcast every week but this week we ask him about the Blorko thing for like 20 minutes).

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I wouldn’t call it a new year’s resolution – mine for 2022 are learning piano and using fewer dashes – but generally I want to try new things with my PC. And one such opportunity recently presented itself via the new Turtle Beach VelocityOne Flight yoke controller: I was going to learn how to fly.

In Microsoft Flight Simulator, obviously, but this honking great console of handles, buttons, joysticks and levers definitely looked like the right tool for the job. A simple flight stick this is not: there’s a full 180-degree yoke handle, an integrated display that can data like flight times, and a modular (but included as standard) throttle quadrant. The kind of thing you might own if your PC resembles a bisected turbine.

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On a stretch of futuristic tarmac, something clicked. Yellow quest markers hadn't built my relationships in Cyberpunk 2077. When a job needed doing, then they'd steer me in the right direction. But for those initial sparks of story, my cellphone had been key. Chats and texts buzzed into my brain at all hours. "Hey V", "V, got a minute?", "V!"

Characters would get in contact with me, not the other way around. And I liked that. In fact, I'd say it helped build a living, breathing world more than Night City's towering skyscrapers and moving billboards. More than, perhaps, any other big RPG I've played over the last couple of years.

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A new map, a new roguelikelike mode, PC VR, and a new take on one of Hitman's more controversial elements are all coming in Hitman 3's Year 2, developers Io Interactive detailed today. They've just held a stream revealing plans for the second year of support and content, giving a look at the new Elusive Target Arcade mode (this time, the murders are permanent, not ephemeral) and announcing Freelancer mode. That will give Ian Hitman a safe house again, and send him out to take down organisations through chains of missions with randomised elements. Plus, the whole trilogy is coming to Game Pass. Lots of news.

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In an industry known for grinding workers to dust even when not subjecting them to institutional discrimination, good news is always welcome. Armor Games, a browser gaming titan of yore and more recently a conventional PC publisher too, have announced they're switching permanently to a four-day working week of 32 hours. They join a small but growing group of companies in switching, most notably Eidos Montreal who announced last year that they were going to four-day workweeks. Alright, who's next?

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