Rock, Paper, Shotgun

I've written before about Luck Be A Landlord, a deck-building roguelikelike where you create a fruit machine that'll hopefully pay your ever-increasing rent. It feels an inevitable endpoint of an often-random genre yet is more complicated than it might sound, with the many different symbols and items buffing, changing, and destroying each other. This leads to strange and wonderful situations like the latest patch notes explaining that Billionaires no longer leave Spirits because, and I quote, "they don't have souls." Possibly true.

Read more

E3 has officially started, and the first big stream of the marketing blast will be Ubisoft, coming up at 8pm UK time (noon Pacific). It's preceeded by a wee pre-show that's now live. Ubisoft say to expect the recently re-announced Rainbow Six Quarantine, Far Cry 6, Riders Republic, and news on For Honor, Trackmania, Watch Dogs: Legion, Rainbow Six Siege and Assassin's Creed Valhalla. Plus surprises?

Read more

As much as Brendy shouted how great OlliOlli is and as much as I trust him on virtual skateboarding (not on real skateboarding, not after he broke his collarbone), I never really put time into it. The look just didn't grab me. Yeah, I know, okay, but don't pretend part of your interest in skating isn't how cool it looks. So hooray that the upcoming third game in the series, OlliOlli World, looks totally wikkid sick, rad nasty, and other such terms skaters don't actually say. Nice. It looks really nice. Check out the new trailer below.

Read more

E3 officially starts today, after a lively unofficial warm-up. Today has Ubisoft, Devolver, Gearbox, Wholesome Direct, and more, then Sunday will bring Microsoft and Bethesda and Square Enix and... see our E3 stream schedule for info on those and the rest. But those are futuregames, what about nowgames? What are you playing this weekend? Here's what we're clicking on.

Read more

The Tribeca Film Festival has nothing to do with E3, aside from the fact that it's going on right now. Oh, and they invited eight upcoming narrative-focused games to be involved this year for their first game award category. Several of the bunch, Sable, Harold Halibut, Kena: Bridge Of Spirits, and more are games we're quite looking forward to around these parts. Regardless of opinion on video games at film festivals, Tribeca put together a neat showcase with some new trailers and developer interviews for all eight of the entries.

Read more

Netflix are hot for video games lately, with their number of animated and live-action adaptations now into double digits. Their E3 stream today brought news of even more, including announcements of a Far Cry: Blood Dragon cartoon and casting for their live-action Resident Evil. It has Lance Reddick! But by and large, their stream was a weird shrug with so little information that all they had on one show was a logo. But hey, here's what they had on Cuphead, Castlevania, Splinter Cell, League Of Legends, and others.

Read more

We're sure spoiled for upcoming skating games right now, but as a person who doesn't know the first thing about skating, there's only one that speaks to me. Yup, SkateBird, the one where "pulling off tricks is nice, but doing your best is really all that matters," is the only one for me. The little winged skaters have just announced a release date with a new trailer full of tricks. SkateBird is launching in August, which gives me just enough time to study up on my skate sesh before school's back in sesh.

Read more

The sequel to rather good rogue-like Unexplored is exiting the development dungeon and heading out into the world of early access today. Action RPG Unexplored 2: The Wayfarer's Legacy continues with Unexplored's excellent generated worlds but with a new legacy system and a very, very pretty look. It's just launched in early access with plans for new quests and other content. I admit that small fellas holding up torches in front of giant doors is one of my favorite game genres so Unexplored 2 is really calling my number here.

Read more

On the list of E3-like summer events you didn't know you were getting, go ahead and write down WitcherCon. CD Projekt Red and Netflix have just announced that they're partnering up for their own online event to talk about all things Witcher in July. Well, not all things Witcher. They won't be announcing The Witcher 4 or anything like that, they've already warned. This all came out alongside a rather tiny new teaser trailer for Netflix's The Witcher season 2. Perhaps WitcherCon will reveal a longer one of those, at least.

Read more

A lot of people play video games to escape reality. And, what better way to escape the boredom of every day life than to hop on a spaceship and play astromurderer. The Mystery Steam Reviews boys are heading to space.

Read more

E3 is a time for marketing, and this year even E3 has an E3 trailer to remind you that E3 will be at E3 when E3 starts Saturday during E3. Perhaps the ESA are worried about their diminishing profile and relevancy, given that a raft of other events sprung up to replace the show after they skipped 2020. So, uh, this is E3's E3 trailer? Look, just see our E3 schedule, which includes events they won't tell you about because they're not officially part of E3.

Read more

Hardware company Colorful announced this week that they are opening "the first GPU history museum" in China, recording and celebrating decades of circuit boards making pictures on your computer. I was excited! My head filled with thoughts of what I'd put into a GPU museum, everything from tech demos to ghastly box art. Then I saw what they put in their GPU museum. Oh. No, this is no fun at all.

Read more

AMD's Ryzen 9 5900X processor is the best high-end CPU on the market, trouncing Intel's flagship Core i9 10900K and 11900K parts in most games while drawing less power and offering significantly better content creation performance thanks to its 12-core 24-thread Zen 3 design. That's perhaps why this CPU has been almost impossible to find for a reasonable price for months following its release.

Today though, Overclockers in the UK has dropped the price of the CPU to just £449, a solid £60 below its RRP (!!) and considerably cheaper than you'll find it at other retailers like Scan (£489), Amazon (£508) or Ebuyer (£529).

Read more

The fight between Sol Badguy and Ky Kiske resumes today with the launch of Guilty Gear Strive. The fighting games series has staged a final encounter with The Man, though if you're already worn out of getting beat up by The Man you can just get wailed on by your pals instead. The latest extreme fighting game is out now with all the heavy-hitting and heavy metal from creator and composer Daisuke Ishiwatari that the series is known for.

Read more

Get ready for some body-swapping, galaxy-travelling, and interdimensional shenanigans, because the third-person narrative-driven adventure Last Stop comes out on July 22nd. The release date was announced last night during the Day Of The Devs stream, and we got to see a new trailer showing all sorts of supernatural weirdness happening to some Londoners. It's hard not to compare it to Doctor Who, it's English sci-fi! I can't tell if there are aliens in Last Stop, though there might be some interdimensional beings. Oh! And it's made by the developers of Virginia.

Read more

Every year, Geoff Keighley is drawn to our world like a great extradimensional lamprey, lured in from the outer dark by the scent of fresh games. From the moment he shimmers into reality, deep within a black ziggurat under the city of Los Angeles, he cares for only two things: Summer, and Games (and invariably in the winter, Awards). Thus transfixed, he works without pause, hoarding more and more trailers as the Earth hurtles towards perihelion with the sun.

This year's Summer Game Fest had a strangely messianic tone. In reality, the Fest is a pretty simple marketing instrument, a two hour ad break, if you will. But from Geoff's heart-deep thanks to all the companies without whom it could not have happened, you'd be forgiven for thinking it was a charity gig. I have nothing against Geoff Keighley. He seems to be a very hard-working, affable fellow, who merely wants to nurture his strange and ever-swelling son, Gamesummer.

Geoff Keighley the brand, however, is weird.

Read more

First things first, I don't care about the precise legal definition of Pringles. But there was a fiasco a few years back about whether they could be described as crisps rather than processed starch snacks or whatever. The point is: Pringles are blatantly crisps. Or at the very least a kind of crisp. And so to Tiny Tina's Wonderlands, revealed last night at the Summer Game Fest with the following trailer, and a chat between Geoff "the ref" Keighley and voice actor Ashly Burch, in which it was claimed that it was not going to be a Borderlands game. Only, it completely is going to be one.

Read more

Ebay UK are doing one of their semi-regular 20% off sales right now, making it a great time to pick up games, monitors, peripherals and PC components at a discount. To qualify for the discount, you'll need to buy from participating sellers (full list here), spend more than £15 and use the code SHOP4LESS at the checkout. You can get a maximum of £60 off this way, so anything up to £300 will get the full discount.

Read more

We were treated to a lovely live performance of music from Sable last night, during the Summer Game Fest while footage of the gorgeous upcoming open-world game played in the background. It's looking as lovely as ever, with charming deserts that rival that of Journey. And now, after two years of delays, we'll finally be able to explore its beautiful environments ourselves when Sable launches on September 23rd.

Read more

As the E3 2021 mega machine whirs into action, the season of new game announcements is upon us - and as a lover of lovely, hand-painted action platformers in the vein of Ori And The Blind Forest and Hollow Knight, the next twelve months is looking like it could be pretty special for folks such as myself. We haven't even hit the main E3 press conferences yet and already I've seen five games catch my eye. So, if you too are a fan of fluid action sidescrollers and want more of that Ori and Hollow Knight-style goodness piped into your hype brain, here are my top picks so far. Get those wishlists at the ready.

Read more

Last night, Cyberpunk 2077 developers CD Projekt Red posted an update about data leaks following the cyber attack they experienced earlier this year. This news really doesn't fit in with last night's Summer Game Fest celebrations however, because CDPR are concerned that current and former employee data might now be circulating online, in addition to game data.

Read more

The reaction to the trailer for Elden Ring, which capped off last night's Summer Game Fest, was inevitable. All through the show, the side-mounted chat swamp festered with a single, copy-pasted block of lore from FromSoftware's upcoming extravaganza, and Geoff Keighley took on the air of a besieged Denethor, desperately trying to ignore the chant of "Grond, Grond, Grond," from beyond the walls.

So long as Elden Ring looked even remotely like Dark Souls, those folks were going to be ecstatic. And needless to say, it looked exactly like Dark Souls. But if you think I'm easing into some jaded, aloof dismissal, think again. I would have been just as excited as all the lore-roarers were, but for one tiny difference. I wish it had been revealed that Elden Ring was going to be a management game.

Read more

The long-awaited first Elden Ring gameplay trailer arrived last night, along with a release date. It looks incredibly Dark Souls, and I am stoked. But between the landscapes of ruins and mournful monsters, I saw perhaps my favourite new monsters: ambulant urns, limbed pots - the vaseboys. I know nothing about them yet I adore them. They seem a delightful escalation of FromSoftware trying to use your knowledge of their games and fantasy tropes against you.

Read more

Two years after Fallout 76's battle royale mode launched, Bethesda are shutting down Nuclear Winter. The MMO's 52-player free-for-all mode is a little more Hunger Games-y than other battle royales, purely because of Fallout's survival aspect. It seems that wasn't quite enough to make it a popular mode, though. In September, the devs are getting rid of Nuclear Winter because, from the sounds of things, not many people are actually playing it.

Read more

The first gameplay trailer for Evil Dead: The Game arrived today, giving a peek at Ash Williams's ongoing struggle to not get kicked in the dick by zombies. It reminds me a bit of Dead By Daylight and Hunt: Showdown, with artifacts to find, monsters to mash, and one player out there on the side of those face-biting Deadites, able to possess them to come deliver a battering. But what if I just want to taunt Ash by possessing household objects?

Read more

If you can't beat 'em, localise 'em. That might be Amazon Games' new motto, since after multiple failed attempts to make a game of their own, they've decided to instead publish existing Korean MMO Lost Ark in the west. There's a trailer for the massive action RPG below - and, in fairness, it does look flash.

Read more

I do so love it when games let me think about Halloween this early in the year, so big thanks to Supermassive Games for announcing the release date for The Dark Pictures Anthology: House Of Ashes today during the Summer Game Fest. The next instalment in their spooky narrative-driven game collection is set to arrive on October 22nd, and in the new trailer they showed some of the scary beasties we'll be up against.

Read more

The RTX 3070 Ti graphics card launched today - or more accurately, it appeared in vanishingly small numbers that quickly evaporated before most gamers even realised they were available to purchase. One of the few ways to reliably get your hands on one of these GPUs is to pick up an entire gaming PC, as system builders actually make a bit of margin on these compared to almost nothing on standalone graphics card sales. That's why we wanted to tell you about AWD-IT in the UK, who are offering a couple of RTX 3070 Ti prebuilt desktops that are still in stock.

Read more

E3 2021 has now officially kicked off, with the new unoffocial semi-official mascot of video games Geoff Keighley presenting the Summer Game Fest. It was a glut of new game trailers, and they whizzed by so quickly that you might have missed some. But we've got them all here.

Read more

Season 4 of Call Of Duty: Warzone and Black Ops Cold War kicks off next week on June 17th, and at tonight's Summer Game Fest Treyarch revealed a little of what to expect. The big reveals were a satellite crashing into Verdansk, and a handful of new maps coming to Cold War's multiplayer mode - including Hijacked, an old favourite 6v6 cruise ship map that's returning from Black Ops 2.

Read more

Metal Slug was a run and gun arcade game series, about you and a co-op pal blasting your way through crisp sprite art and blowing up buildings with tanks. The series is now returning with a new genre: Metal Slug Tactics is an isometric, turn-based tactics game, announced at this evening's Summer Game Fest. Check out the announcement trailer below.

Read more

Along with the long-awaited new trailer and release date for Elden Ring, today has also brought a nice little batch of screenshots. 17 frozen images are here for your perusal, and frankly I've been waiting for the Dark Souls studio's new game long enough that hell yeah I'm cooing over screenshots. Especially the one which shows URNS with ARMS AND LEGS. Best new baddie. The other screens are nice too, come see.

Read more

I know when a man like Geoff Keighley stands on a stage like the Summer Game Fest and talks about supporting indie developers, that he's about to introduce a cinematic platformer. There's a formula here, right: an emotional story, stunning artwork, stunning animation -- oh, wait. Planet Of Lana looks stunning.

Read more

Ubisoft have taken a leaf out of Epic's book, as they're offering coupons worth $10 / £10 which can be used on all carts worth $15 / £14 and up. To get the discount, just get your cart to the minimum level (with either a single game or multiple games) and then use the code FORWARD at the checkout.

• Get $10 / £10 off at the Ubisoft Store with code FORWARD

Read more

The Hyper Light Drifter sequel Solar Ash got a new gameplay trailer at tonight's Summer Game Fest, and it's looking as zippy, vibrant and downright cool as ever. In the short video, we see the player character skate their way up a tower to launch themselves onto the back of a futuristic-looking flying dinosaur thing, and glide across its wings to take it down.

Read more

Indies! It's nice to see the littler games take the spotlight during all the E3 festivities, a pleasant break from Ubisoft trying to make me care about Watch Dogs or something. This years' Day Of The Devs stream took place during the Summer Game Fest kickoff, giving some fresh glimpses at games like Axiom Verge 2, Unbeatable, The Wandering Village and more. If you missed the stream, fear not, here's a big list of everything shown at the Day Of The Devs showcase.

Read more

I grew up in a 200 year old weaver's cottage, but it had very little in common with the life depicted in The Sims 4 Cottage Living expansion trailer. I didn't get to hug any llamas, for one, but they play a prominent role in the trailer below, alongside farming, foxes, and a quaint village setting.

Read more

As well as the announcement of a new co-op FPS from Left 4 Dead writer Chet Faliszek's new studio, the Summer Game Fest stream today brought news of Back 4 Blood, the new co-op FPS from the studio who originally created L4D. Back 4 Blood's open beta will run August 12-16, publishers Warner Bros. confirmed today, with a chance for "early access" if you pre-order or get lucky The recent closed alpha looked decent, from what I saw on streams, so I'm certainly game to batter some zombies.

Read more

For those who crave more 2D Dark Souls in their lives, Ska Studios announced Salt And Sacrifice during the Summer Game Fest today. The hack 'n' slash metroidvania looks very much like its 2016 predecessor, Salt And Sanctuary, but with more character classes, new areas to explore,and my personal favourite: proper online co-op. It's coming out at the start of next year, check out the trailer below.

Read more

I am glad that Amplitude Studios have not ditched their connected world of 'Endless' games. Today during the Summer Game Fest, they showed the first in-game trailer for Endless Dungeon, which shows the perils of defending a crystal from aliens in the "rogue-lite tactical action game".

Read more