I've only dabbled in a couple of Final Fantasies, and I often forget which game is which in the sprawling JRPG series. If you showed me a screenshot of Edge Of Eternity, and said it was Final Fantasy 12, I'd probably believe you.
It's not, though. It's a turn-based JRPG that just finished two years in Steam Early Access to launch in full today.
I was utterly hooked on Desert Golfing for about a year, tapping through a thousand or so levels of 2D, side-on golf. Then I pretty much forgot it existed until I saw Golf Club Wasteland. It's a side-on golfing game, too - but one in which you're playing through a decaying earth devoid of human life.
EGX Rezzed is the best game event around, and although circumstances stop us from gathering in the Tobacco Dock's dank tunnels for elbow-to-elbow games and conversation, Rezzed Digital will take its place this July.
If you'd like to go a step further than just watching the event unfold, you can get involved by giving a talk of your own. The submission deadline for panels is this Friday and there are instructions on how to submit your ideas here.
E3 2021 is approaching faster than I'm comfortable with, and yet I'm also eager for it to just hurry up and start already. Another step towards that happening: Capcom announced (a presumably partial) line-up for their showcase.
On Moday, June 14th at 2:30pm PDT/5:30pm EST/10:30pm BST, you'l be able to watch news on The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles, Monster Hunter Stories 2, Monster Hunter Rise, and Resident Evil Village.
Minecraft's Caves & Cliffs update is one of the biggest ever updates to the aging blockbuilder - so big it's been split into two. Part one adds 91 new blocks, including powder snow, collapsible vine platforms and copper, alongside fighty wildlife like goats and axolotls. It's making me want to reinstall Minecraft again for the first time in years.
Ahead of Ubisoft's June 12 'Forward' E3-adjacent live video game announcement stream, the company has discounted its popular Far Cry franchise games by up to 85%. This makes it a good time to play the earlier games in the series - and you still have time to beat one or two titles if Far Cry 6 releases in October as planned.
If you're on the lookout for a new gaming monitor, then this 27in example from MSI ought to be on your radar. The Optix G27CQ4 hits the sweet spot between price and performance with a 1440p resolution and 165Hz refresh rate, and today it's been discounted from £349 to £259 - a £90 reduction.
At the centre of Slipways' galaxy is a black hole, and on the other side float the seconds, minutes, and hours this treat of a puzzler has effortlessly siphoned from my weekend. The 4X games this one shares a postcode with can be slow burners, but Slipways' joys are distilled, immediate, and schedule-shatteringly moreish. It’s hyperspace bypass: the game, but thankfully far more thoughtful and pithy than Vogon poetry.
Multiplayer medieval melee murders resume today with the release of Chivalry 2, the sequel to 2012's fine bloodbath. Developers Torn Banner Studios took a detour into wizard violence with Mirage: Arcane Warfare, but it flopped. So here they are again, inviting soldiers to get medieval on their pals with swords, hammers, axes, and arrows in first-person action.
Yes, it’s that time of the year when everyone speculates wildly about what kind of products companies will peddle to potential customers during livestreams rife with forced banter and lols. E3 is exciting, isn’t it?
An important part of having a lovely time with something is setting your expectations correctly. Just ask the two old ladies who I once saw going into a screening of Zombieland and leaving after approximately seven minutes. So in that spirit, it seems important to tell you that Backbone is not the point and click detective adventure game with all puzzles you might have thought it was.
It's more accurately described as a grim, philosophical, story-focused noir game about collectivism vs. individualism, dressed up in the tropes of a detective puzzle game. Like The Good Place with more depression, or Disco Elysium with raccoons.
Apparently something has gone wrong with time, because Ubisoft have confirmed that the Prince Of Persia: The Sands Of Time Remake is now due in 2022. Considering the remake of the pleasing time-rewinding stab-o-platfomer was supposedly three months away from launch when they announced it in 2020, yeesh, someone at Ubi must have dropped their magical hourglass. So no, they won't be showing it at their E3 showcase this week either.
Last night, the Mass Effect Legendary Edition got a new patch, nerfing Commander Shepard's bank account and reducing the noise from those deafening Mass Relays. Sure, it got some performance tweaks here and there, but more importantly, you'll now find an imported Shepard from Mass Effect to Mass Effect 2 might have considerably fewer credits than before. Perhaps it's all linked to the Mass Relays, I wouldn't be surprised if Shep splashed out for some sound proofing on the Normandy.
What happens when three farmers go on an adventure together? I've got no clue, because in Wildermyth it's a bit different each time. The tactical combat RPG tells procedural stories, allowing your characters to develop their own histories and relationships in each playthrough. Wildermyth is nearing the end of its own adventure, with a full launch planned for next week to cap off its time in early access. The developers have post launch plans, as so many do these days, but folks seem to have already been having a grand time with it throughout early access.
Sable is one of those beautiful-looking indie games that brings out the worst in me. "I want it now," I whine when the first, enticing trailer crops up, knowing perfectly well that's not how these things work. Sable has now gone and revealed a longer look at the first 13 minutes of the game, a good bit more than we'd seen previously. I still want it now, in all its Moebius-inspired loveliness. The new video shows off a fair bit of chatting, a bit of hoverbike riding, and how Sable first learns to magically glide.
The folks behind Broforce have a new game on the horizon that is not at all about running, gunning, or blowing stuff up. Quite the opposite, Terra Nil is what they're calling a "reverse city-builder" about rehabilitating an environment that's been completely decimated. You'll turn it green again with the power of irrigation and renewable energy sources to fix the climate and the wildlife. It looks quite lovely and chill in this new trailer and even has a free demo coming up this month if you'd like to try out your planetary green thumb.
Koumajou Densetsu Scarlet Symphony, a Touhou game dubbed 'Touhouvania' by some fans, is getting a shiny new remaster later this year so this time you can see those spiky anime hairstyles in glorious HD. A fanmade project first released in 2009, it's a side-scrolling platformer that takes characters from the popular shoot 'em up series and pairs them with the gothic horror action of classic Castlevania. Catch a glimpse of Koumajou Remilia Scarlet Symphony's remastered look in the trailer below.
It's an old video game development problem: how do you make a world look large while keeping players out of unplayable areas? Some games block players from places they shouldn't go with impassable terrain, or barricades, or with the traditional invisible wall, or by straight killing you for straying too far. So I'm fascinated by one upcoming game's solution: train tracks along the edge of town with crossing barriers that are usually raised, but will always close just in time for an endless train to trundle past when you get near. Have a look!
Hello and welcome to another PrE3 post where I get to tell you the name of something that will be shown off during this next week of trailers and announcements and all. We were already planning to hear about about the next Clancy 'em up during the Ubisoft Forward event, and now we've been given its title. Mr. Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Extraction is the new name for the game formerly known as R6 Quarantine. Ubi say that they'll be doing a big full reveal for the next R6 game this weekend.
The digital clouds have darkened and E3 looms, promising an absolute downpour of trailers starting this weekend. In among all the other announcement blasts kicking off in short order is one from Warner Bros., who are having the first E3 presser of their own on Sunday. The Bros. forecast promised 100% chance of zombie slaying Back 4 Blood. We'd also anticipated that perhaps we might hear about some other upcoming WB joints. Not so, it turns out. If you were hoping for some DC news, I'm sorry to tell you that Batman's been left for dead. At least as far as WB's own showcase this Sunday is concerned.
With the launch of Nvidia's GeForce RTX 3080 Ti this month, the vanilla version of the RTX 3080 is no longer Nvidia's flagship gaming GPU. Traditionally, Nvidia's Ti models have offered substantially more performance than their non-Ti siblings, as we saw last generation with the RTX 2080 and 2080 Ti, and the generation before that with the GTX 1080 and 1080 Ti. But can the same be said of Nvidia's RTX 30 series? Is the RTX 3080 Ti really the best graphics card for 4K gaming, or does the vanilla RTX 3080 still manage to hold its own against its more expensive Ti sibling? Let's find out via the medium of some lovely graphs.
Double Fine's most treasured son (apart from Jack Black, who is not a real man and was obviously designed by a committee of wacky game developers some time in the late 90s) is undoubtedly Raz, protagonist of their 2005 cult hit Psychonauts.
Psychonauts is classic Double Fine. It's a 3D platformer with some puzzley bits that sees Raz training to be a psychonaut at a secret government facility disguised as a children's summer camp by having adventures that take place inside people's subconscious brains. This premise, you will note, is a cracker, even if not that many people thought so at the time. It's become more popular in recent years, though, and every so often I go back and give it a look, most recently being this weekend. So let me be the latest in a long line of people to say, "Blimey, it's still a bit good, isn't it?"
I'm beginning to notice a trend of developers making games based on things I studied in school, and I'm not sure how I feel about it. Last year it was George Orwell's Animal Farm, and now this year Alfred Hitchcock's 1958 psychological thriller Vertigo is getting a game adaptation. Developers Pendulo Studios showed a teaser trailer during Saturday's Guerrilla Collective indie game showcase, which is rather trippy and dramatic. It made me feel a bit uneasy too, which is how I felt when I first watched Vertigo, so they must be doing something right.
Everything I know about mountain climbing came from a corporate team-building day where management hired a banker who’d scaled Everest to tell us how he left most of his group to die in order to reach the summit. This wasn’t a guilty confession. Apparently there comes an altitude where halting becomes so dangerous that it dooms any dawdlers. You carry on going or expire on the spot. As the then editor of a failing games magazine I couldn’t see any reading of the metaphor where I wasn’t the struggler and my website peers weren’t being told to leave me. Hilariously, this was not the bleakest moment of the day (that was some nervous guy from IT bellowing “Show me the money!” to win book tokens or similar bullshit).
What stuck with me is how all or nothing a climb could be, something you commit to until you either get a killer anecdote or end as another speck of colourful polyester in Rainbow Valley. In this sense, Insurmountable’s decision to equate mountaineering with a survival roguelike is astute: one life, one run, all the while coping with the random luck or misfortune dealt by an unpredictable landscape. This is not a polite hobby where you bank your progress for another day, and in this sense the do or die of a roguelike run feels more honest than the hilly simulations of Death Stranding or myriad VR climbing walls currently available. Just as a concept, I want to celebrate the cleverness of it all.
When Palworld's trailer starts, it looks a whole lot like a fancy 3D Pokémon. This lasts nine seconds, until you see someone hanging from the talons of their bird Pokémon Pal while spraying bullets with an assault rifle. Soon, you're seeing Pals made to work in fields, then in a sweatshop assembling new rifles. Then someone picks up their sheepy Pal to use as a shield in a gunfight. Then... it is a trailer of endless surprises, a marvel you must watch.
I’ve been yearning to talk about turning lately. This might be because it’s a big part of Dorfromantik, the top-down, early access puzzle game from Berlin based studio Toukana Interactive. Turning tiles, turning the camera, turning my life into that of a full-time city planner. Maybe the cogs in my brain have been turning too much. Dorfromantik has a steady grasp on my life and I’ll tell you a secret – I absolutely love it.
In Ynglet, you play as a spindly, floaty jellyfish, zooming around a gorgeous doodle-filled world searching for your pals. Developed by Nifflas, the creator of Knytt and NightSky, you'll be platforming without platforms, and jumping about like "a space dolphin". It almost seems like playing through someone's sketch book, all filled with pretty drawings and bursts of colour. And if you fancy a go, it's out right now.
FMV is a curious beast. Whenever you see someone doing a game with FMV bits in it you assume it's kind of a retro oddity and they're almost doing it as a joke. Like, when they were a kid they really liked that weird 70s animated version of The Lord Of The Rings that had some FMV, and it stuck with them, or something like that. But FMV games are much like vegetables in smoothies, or venereal disease in Floridian pensioners: there's a lot more about than you might expect.
I wrote about the Guerrilla Collective indie game showcase earlier today, and mentioned one game stood out to me from the mix. El Paso, Elsewhere was it: a Max Payne-inspired shooter about diving through a haunted motel to stop Draculae, the vampire you loved.
No More Heroes was an almost instant cult-classic when it was released for Wii back in 2008. That had less to do with it being an alright hack-and-slasher in which you fight assassins with a "beam katana", and more to do with its unusual sense of humour, otaku protagonist, and the fact you saved your progress by doing a poo.
Time to do a poo of your own. No More Heroes and its sequel No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle are coming to PC this week on June 9th.
Devolver Digital's yearly showcase streams have become a highlight of E3. Alice0 argued last year that their "self-indulgent and money-wasting spectacle" was particularly welcome in among the otherwise flat, endless expanse of notE3.
It's good news that Devolver are returning this E3, then. They'll broadcast an event during Summer Game Fest on Saturday, June 12th at 1:30pm PT/4:30pm ET/21:30pm BST.
An artist has filed a lawsuit against Capcom alleging that the game developer used her photography in games including Resident Evil 4 and Devil May Cry without permission. Polygon report that the lawsuit includes over 100 pages of documentation highlighting places in different Capcom games that allegedly use these photographs, including the Resident Evil 4 logo.
The Guerrilla Collective is a two-day livestream offering trailers and announcements of indie games. Its first day is happening right now, as I type this, while day two will happen next Saturday, June 12th. If you are looking for new indie games to be excited about, there's oodles and oodles of them here - for better and worse.
Alright, this is it, the first kinda-E3 weekend. While the big show doesn't begin until next Saturday, a few pre-E3 gameblasts are on today. See our E3 schedule for more on them and so, so, so much else. But those are futuregames; which nowgames are you playing this weekend?
You might not know that Ubisoft, like EA and Microsoft, has its own game subscription service called Ubisoft+. The idea here is that you get full access to the ultimate editions of Ubi games as soon as they're released, as well as the 100+ games in the publisher's back catalogue - including Assassin's Creed, Far Cry, Rainbow Six and many more franchises and one-off games.
Normally this costs $15/£13 per month, but until June 22nd your first month of the service has been reduced by 60%. This makes it one of the cheapest ways to "rent" new Ubisoft games like Assassins Creed Valhalla and Immortals Fenyx Rising, letting you try these games for a month for just $6/£5.20.
Indie game developers on Itch are once again offering up their games in a massive bundle benefitting humanitarian aid. The Indie Bundle for Palestinian Aid is offering up over 1,000 games for $5, with all profit benefitting the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. The bundle has so far raised $45,000 of its $500,000 goal for the week it will be available.
Samsung's gaming monitors at the company's UK store have hit all-time low prices thanks to a brand new 20% off code, which works on discounted items too. This includes their latest Odyssey G5, G7 and G9 monitors, which are up to £250 off for this weekend only. Here's what you need to know!
Castlevania spiritual successor Bloodstained: Ritual Of The Night is getting its own actual successor, publishers 505 Games have confirmed. The side-scrolling demon-whipping series will continue with a sequel, though it's currently in the early planning phases. In the meantime, 505 say that finishing everything planned for the first Ritual Of The Night takes priority.
June is here and the smell of E3 is in the air. Social media managers are making vague, cheeky posts about their games that don't yet have release dates. Fans are wondering if the 23rd entry in their favorite series will be announced. In among all that excitement is always bound to be a reality check or so. Deep Silver have helpfully popped up to name four things that you don't need to get your hopes up for during any of the upcoming summer showcases. Saint's Row, TimeSplitters, Metro, and Dead Island are going to be keeping their collective heads down, they say.
As the 40K fellowship are known to say, "you'll have my hammer" and also my hammer and that hammer and anything vaguely hammer-shaped hidden in the kitchen cabinet. That's right, Games Workshop hosted their yearly Warhammering announcement event and there was an entire hammer parade. They announced upcoming Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate - Daemonhunters, the final DLC for Total War: Warhammer 2, a closed beta for Blood Bowl 3, and a whole hammerful of other things.