Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Remedy are making a four-player co-operative spin-off to Control. Codenamed Condor, it's a long ways off and only the concept art above has been shown so far, but it's in the works alongside another new "bigger-budget Control-game."

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We've been writing about Death Trash since 2015, and it'll launch in early access at last on August 5th. You don't have to wait five weeks to play it, though. The demo - one of the best of the Steam Next Fest - has been made permanently available.

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If you're in the market for a gaming laptop and you're in the US of A, we've got a great deal for you. The Lenovo Legion 5, one of the best reviewed gaming laptops on the market, has been discounted to $1269 at Newegg, compared to $1549 elsewhere. That's for a model that comes with an RTX 3060 graphics card, Ryzen 7 5800H processor and 512GB NVMe SSD storage - a very solid spec!

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Magic: Legends is closing down. The action RPG entered open beta just three months ago, but its servers will be switched off for good three months from now, on October 31st 2021.

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Forza Horizon 5 was announced during E3 2021 and is due this November. In the latest Forza Monthly update, developers Playground Games have spoken about future plans for the previous game in the series, Forza Horizon 4. Mainly, that the next update will be the last to add new content to the three-year-old game.

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Housemarque are best known for developing PlayStation exclusives like Returnal, Matterfall and Resogun, but among those they also released stellar arcade shmup Nex Machina on PC. Now the Finnish developers have been bought outright by Sony.

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For those of you lucky enough to own an RTX capable graphics card and a copy of Doom Eternal (I assume there's a decent amount of crossover there), the ray-tracing update promised since the shooter’s launch has finally arrived. Nvidia’s tech has added a final level of polish to the game’s surfaces, and also brings DLSS support to balance out the power-hungry enhancements.

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Eh, I'm not convinced by this HD remaster of hack-and-slasher No More Heroes. This is as barebones a port as you can get, really. And even if you can get past that, I'm not sure the game holds up 14 years later, on a new platform and with a new control scheme. Unless you're powered entirely by nostalgia, I'd say it's a middling time.

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Slime Rancher 2 was a bit of an unexpected announcement this E3, albeit a very welcome one. I'm always up for being pleasantly surprised by adorable slimes. The sequel to the slime-corralling sim is set to release in early access next year, and it'll feature a vibrant new world to explore, and some excellent bat slimes. Naturally, I needed to find out more about these good squishy orbs, so I caught up with Nick Popovich, Slime Rancher game director and CEO of developer Monomi Park. We talked about the game's art direction, the pressure of making a follow-up to a much-loved indie, and how the sequel has the potential to be a hell of a lot bigger than the original.

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This is delightful. Most games struggle through the tangled thorns of PR, marketing, and that one dude who spots errors from seven miles away, before getting a single screenshot to you. But this little glimpse into Kerbal Space Program 2’s progress is via their show and tell sessions on the official forums, where the team gathers up what they’ve been working on and shares it with the community. In April and May, the clouds got fluffier, the terrain more specular, and the Mun really embraced its impact craters.

There’s not a lot here, but what there is has made me very happy. I’ve officially given up trying to mod Kerbal Space Program after watching the work being put into the skies and terrain for the second game. I’ll happily wait to split these clouds with my best attempt at a rocket.

The Mun really caught my eye. It’s gorgeous. Every shade of grey imaginable, covered in overlapping impact craters, shadows piling up in every scoop of dirt. I'm going to spend weeks admiring it as I work out how to get there without sacrificing my grinning little Kerbalnauts.

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After eight years on the shelf, many are saying the smart money is on EA announcing a new Dead Space game at the upcoming EA Play in July. Given the fact that EA have gone back to Mirror's Edge and they're in the process of reviving Skate, it's not a bad shout.

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As a VR user and a Sniper Elite enjoyererer, I’ve been genuinely looking forward to the upcoming Sniper Elite VR. Immersing my face into a decent open-world stealth game has been a dream of mine since VR started, and the previous two Sniper Elite games have been excellent examples of that type of game. So, yes, I will watch 12 minutes of it in action, thank you very much. I need to know just how much excitement I’ll allow myself to feel.

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The latest model Razer Blade 15 Base has been heavily discounted on Amazon, dropping from £2049 to £1499 in a matter of weeks. Today saw another drop of £100, with the laptop now costing just £1399 - an outstanding price for a svelte RTX 3070 laptop with a 2560x1440 165Hz display, 10th-gen Core i7 processor and 512GB of NVMe SSD storage.

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Cruelty Squad didn't click with me, not because of its grinning antagonism or brain grating lofi, but because I didn’t find it all that interesting. I’m sort of rooting for it, still, thumbing its leprous nose-cavity at inexplicable Steam bestsellers that won’t be out for six months.

Still, I signed up to have awful soup, made from Clippy’s wire entrails and melted immersive sim floppy disks, spooned on my eyeballs. What I got was a reasonably tense shooter with some extensively labyrinthine level design and, to be fair, a very good shotgun.

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Though it’s still in beta, Xbox Cloud Gaming is now available for everyone subscribing to Games Pass Ultimate on the PC. The cloud streaming service has previously been closed off, but if you have the top-tier subscription you can play over 100 console games in your browser without any additional downloads. If you don't have that sub, you can grab three months for £1 right now.

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Windows 11 is still in the workshop as engineers tinker with its rounded corners and Android app support, but if you're a Windows Insider, you can give the preview build a whirl right now.

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Zombie parkour 'em up Dying Light 2 finally announced its December 7th release date last month during a livestream by developers Techland. They've queued up another of the sort of this Thursday to share more about the sequel. Here's hoping they dive a little deeper than last time.

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Look sharp, anime game likers. Demon Slayer -Kimetsu no Yaiba- The Hinokami Chronicles, which you'll forgive me for shortening hereafter, is getting a western release in October. Sega have announced that the action battler adaptation of the Demon Slayer anime is also coming to PC, where you'll be able to play through the storyline or battle other demon slayers in versus mode. You can catch a look at the story and some of that combat in a new trailer right here.

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Graphics card prices remain sky-high, so the best way to pick one up near RRP is to buy a prebuilt system. Today we spotted this deal at Scan, where you can get a RTX 3060 PC with a Ryzen 5 5600X, 16GB of RAM and a 1TB NVMe SSD for £1150. That's a pretty good deal, given that RTX 3060 graphics cards on their own are selling for £500 to £700 on Ebay right now.

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The BenQ EL2870U was one of the first truly affordable 4K HDR monitors, debuting for a price of £300 back in 2018, and now it's down to an even lower price: just £200. That's £50 under RRP and £25 under a deal price we spotted last year.

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Marvel's Avengers recently gave a longer look at its upcoming War For Wakanda expansion coming in August, but Square Enix have now updated their roadmap with additional plans for July's update. Mega Hives are going multiplayer and players will now be able to suit up as the same hero in multiplayer as well. No more quarreling over Thor's hammer, then.

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Surreal Metroid-y platformer Grime has polished up all those creepy caves and creatures and gotten ready for release day. After crawling out of the bones of the earth, your black hole-headed protagonist proceeds to suck up other rocky baddies, equip them as weapons, and use them against even bigger boss boulder folks. You can catch a bit of its grim and grimey world down here in the new trailer which reveals it's August 2nd launch date.

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Square Enix’s historical re-enactment (remaster) of their 1999 RPG Legend of Mana has been released. It was actually released last week, so though we’re a little bit late with letting you know, there are a lot of good vibes and happy thoughts out there for the Mana series. Besides, I told a friend it was out and he was surprised that he’d missed its release, and was delighted he could play it, so now I’m telling you.

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On September 18, 2010, Minecraft version 1.1.1 was released with a bug that could lead to a grey screen. It was live for a period of only 3 hours and 25 minutes before version 1.1.2 was released, fixing the bug. For most people, that’s fine, the game now works and we can move on. But there’s a group of Minecraft cataloguers called Omniarchive who are trying to preserve every byte that ever passed through Mojang’s game, and version 1.1.1 proved to be an elusive target. It had been missing for over a decade.

That was until an Omniarchive member discovered a tweet celebrating the launch of a new Minecraft update within the timeframe they knew it was live. They got in touch with the tweet author, Luna, asking her to check for a backup of that specific version of the game. Could it be possible that they’d kept that file for this length of time?

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The surprise announcement last week that Windows 11 would support Android apps was tempered by fact that Microsoft is using the Amazon app store to deliver them. Thankfully, you won’t be tied to the Amazon store. A Microsoft engineer has confirmed that you can ‘sideload’ apps in Windows 11, meaning you can install games and more from anywhere.

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River, the gorgeous German Shepherd who played Dogmeat in Fallout 4, has died. She was owned by Joel Burgess, former lead level designer on the game, who would bring River into the studio so the developers could learn from her behaviour. In a lovely Twitter thread that's made me a bit teary, he talks about River's role and how she wasn't just Dogmeat's in-game model, but a companion to both the player and team.

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It's been a while since we last heard from a group of modders who decided they'd make their own Dark Souls "sequel", Nightfall. But they've re-emerged with more details on the project, as well as a release date. I am ready to return to Lordran, but I am scared.

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This weekend I have been playing and absolutely loving Laybrinth City: Pierre The Maze Detective. It's an animated, interactive puzzle game that's sort of a cross between Where's Wally and Hidden Folks. In it, you (Pierre, the Maze Detective) must hunt down the mysterious Mr. X, who has stolen the Maze Stone from the local museum and is using it to turn everything into a maze. This is causing no small amount of havok.

It's a beautiful game, with the mazes growing in complexity and size as you go. You start off in the museum, where the exibits have come to life. The city streets are overrun with a festival. Later you enter a magical forest, and run around the giant trees. There's also a magical city-castle, where the statues have come to life and are rebelling against being statues. It is - perish the word - absolutely charming, and full of details. But after playing for a few hours, I realised it didn't remind me as much of Where's Wally as it did of the Usborne Puzzle Adventures.

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Team Fortress 2’s population apparently soared following a patch that took aim at the game’s bot infestation. The June 22 patch had some specific tools to deal with the non-playing spambots that were flooding the game with abusive chat and game-breaking bugs. Now server owners can block new players from immediately launching a votekick, and limit the number of name changes during a match (to mimic other players). The update was followed by a new peak of 151,253 people in-game, the largest number since December of 2020.

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After the events of Far Cry 5, Ubisoft rightly turned up the volume for its regularly scheduled stopgap game. Rather than place you in the role of gun-wielding saviour, it allows you to become a superhero... who also happens to be quite handy with firearms.

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Sundays are for smiling to yourself, because you know Love Island day is tomorrow. Before you ready the popcorn, let's read this week's best writing about games.

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GOG are giving away the Shadowrun Trilogy - which includes Returns, Dragonfall and Hong Kong - if you signup to their newsletter before Monday. That's a lot of quality cyberpunk RPGs for free.

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I have had two large burgers in the space of about 12 hours so I'm struggling to think about the present, let alone what I might be doing in the next couple of days. But there are a whole lot of games around the place aren't there? Especially with that there Steam Summer Sale. Why I'm sure we can find something to play between the lot of us.

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With Halo Infinite's still non-specific "holiday 2021" release window creeping closer, 343 Industries are continuing to put out their big chat blogs on what to expect from the newest Halo adventure. This time they sat down to talk about their planned seasonal model and battle passes that so many online games come equipped with now. The big difference is that 343 say their battle pass reward tracks won't actually be limited time. You'll be able to play them forever, which sounds pretty stellar to me.

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Colonial sword and sorcery RPG GreedFall announced plans for a story expansion last November and oh look, you can spot its sails on the horizon now. The De Vespe Conspiracy expansion will add a new area and new diplomatic tangles to the BioWare-alike action RPG. Spiders have just released some details on what else to expect from the expansion when it makes landfall alongside a Gold Edition that it comes bundled into. Both are pulling into port on June 30th.

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Assassination sandbox Hitman 3 has gone and made another of its levels available free for a limited time. As it did with the Dubai level back in March, the free Starter Pack version of Hitman 3 is currently giving players access to one of the best levels from the first game in the trilogy. You can murder your way through multiple Sapienza missions from today through July 4th if you own the starter pack or the full Hitman 3 game.

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Konami have announced that they're cooking up a social deduction game with an extra helping of deductive reasoning. Their PvP mystery game Crimesight is a simulated battle bewteen AI Sherlock Holmes and Moriarity, played out by their pawns all snowed in together in a rather large cottage. This turn-based strategy game has you attempting to unmask Moriarity's chosen puppet without knowing who it is they're trying to kill. Konami have given some clues on how it plays down here in Crimesight's reveal trailer.

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It's very hard to praise or admonish a game that's in Steam Early Access. If you want to be one of the cool kids and jump in before anyone else, you can, but you have to remember that the devs are basically telling you that the game isn't quite ready yet. But we're not concerned with those video games that are still in the oven. We're here to feast on some 1.0 goodness.

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Borderlands 3 is celebrating summer with another free game update and a few other goodies. The big new get is cross-platform multiplayer for almost every platform that Borderlands 3 is on, meaning you can group up with most of your console pals. Gearbox have also brought back their seasonal Revenge Of The Cartels event and have gone and made all their other seasonal events available year round. Here are the details on all of those changes that have now launched in the latest game update.

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A couple of years ago, in 2019, Failbetter Games were thinking about a new DLC for their historical-gothic, RPG-with-a-flying-steam-train Sunless Skies. They were starting pre-production on their next game, but wouldn't need a full team's worth of resources on it. It would be, said CEO Adam Myers, "economically useful" to have something to work on that didn't have a deadline. They wanted it to transform the game, in the same way that the Zubmariner DLC had transformed Sunless Sea. It involved exploring history, and accruing a kind of meddled-with-time score for being a very naughty little time meddler.

By summer 2020, they'd swept the DLC off the table.

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