Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Warzone

’s new Haunting of Verdansk lets you go trick or treating around Downtown. If we’re unable to go spooking out friends this Halloween, dressing up as Sexy Captain Price, then at least we can do it in Call of Duty. Here’s how to go trick or treating in Warzone.

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From Nuka Cola and Tediore to Umbrella Corp and Spacer’s Choice, video games are full of fictional products and brands. Some are narrowly dodging trademark infringement, some have full lines of products with distinct style, some are jokes, and some have complex in-fiction histories. Reader dear, which is your favourite and why? Mine is a cat food.

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The Atari you knew and loved is long-dead, and perhaps one day you might sleep inside its corpse. The company currently wearing the skin of Atari have licensed the name to people wishing to build Atari Hotels, who recently revealed their big dreams for sleep-in mausoleums in Las Vegas and Phoenix. They are: big. They are: flashy. They are: absurd. They are also far from open, so don’t go packing your copy of Ready Player One in your Atari-branded backpack with your Pong pyjamas and Centipede toothbrush just yet.

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EA have partially revealed the newest expansion pack for The Sims 4 – showing a modest glimpse of shoulder, if you will. But friends, it is a cold shoulder. The expansion is called Snowy Escape, and until a trailer is revealed later today, that’s pretty much all we have to go on. That, and a screenshot collage of cheery Sims doing winter sport activities like they’re all in an advert showing how being on your period doesn’t have to stop you living your life to the max.

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Wheelman

is a game in which Vin Diesel rampages around Barcelona in an assortment of beefed-up muscle cars. It came out at around the same time as 50 Cent: Bulletproof. I can only assume Vin played it and grunted “I can do that” through a mouthful of six-dozen eggs.

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The Game Band are presently known as the orchestrators of Blaseball, an odd democratic simulation of a baseball league that I gather folks are quite fond of. For a slice of something quite different, the studio is releasing Where Cards Fall, a puzzle game originally prototyped a decade ago. It’s already out on Apple Arcade and is coming to PC and the Nintendo Switch early next year.

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Well well, Call Of Duty: Warzone is jumping in on spooky time with its very own horror-themed update. The Hunting Of Verdansk is a biggo event beginning tomorrow, October 20th. It’ll bring new limited-time game modes, treats to hunt down, and apparently cosmetic skins from Saw and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Well I won’t accuse them of doing anything in half measure.

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Co-op ghost hunting game Phasmophobia has enthralled a lot of players and I am one of them. It’s a total riot to play with pals—which I’ve done almost every single night for a week and a half. In that time, I’ve already progressed from tiptoeing meekly through haunted houses to boldly taunting ghosts by name as soon as I cross the threshold. For those like me, good news then that Phasmophobia is planning some changes to make ghosts a bit scarier and trickier to pin down.

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In Assassin’s Creed Valhalla you’ll be in charge of building a Settlement (with a capital S) called Ravensthorpe for your comrades, which’ll act as a base of operations and somewhere to relax post axe throw. When you first invade England you’ll start small with a few folks in tents, but as you progress and invest in its development, it’s meant to expand into a thriving community offering many benefits.

I recently got hands on with Valhalla and I was able to see for myself what the Settlement actually had to offer. Although I’d should mention that I was dumped at least a few hours into the story, so I’m not absolutely certain what buildings you’ll start off with. Either way, I had a good mosey about all the buildings, got a fresh trim, some new tats, and had a feast with my Viking buds. All in all, I reckon I got stuck in enough to give you the lowdown. And you know what? It’s alright.

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Amazon’s bang bang ’em up FPS Crucible has certainly been through—well a crucible, I suppose, though it hasn’t emerged stronger and reformed. After a messy launch and retreating back to closed beta, Amazon Game Studios announced that the game wouldn’t be making a return. As a last hurrah, Crucible has given players the ability to host private matches now that the matchmaking queue is shut off. You have until November 9th to enjoy some last shootouts with your pals, after which Crucible will be gone for good.

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Prime Day may be over, but the deals train just keeps on rolling, resulting in some lovely big discounts like this Gigabyte Aero 15 gaming laptop that’s currently $500 off at Newegg today. Normally $2099, this 15.6in laptop is down to $1599 at the moment, which really isn’t bad considering it has an 144Hz display, a brand-new 10th Gen Intel Core i7 processor and that all-important RTX 2070 Super graphics chip.

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The ongoing multiplayer open beta weekend for Call Of Duty: Black Ops Cold War has given both treats and tricks to fans seeking to uncover its secrets. Some people solved another ARG puzzle, which has resulted in the devs extending the beta by another day. Hooray! And other people rooting around in beta files have been rewarded with hidden YouTube links to Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up. Oh no! Curiosity is a double-edged sword. But hey, the beta will run until Tuesday. And damn the meme, it’s honestly a fair song.

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A while back I was saying that so many horror games these days are about either babies or Catholicism (and obviously there is some crossover there), and Alice0 pointed out that actually they were mostly about a Protestant’s idea of Catholicism. This was obviously very correct – as are most things Alice0 says – and we had a short discussion about this and about how it would be nice to have different themes come up more often.

Do you feel Spelunky 2 seeds have been a bit more generous these past few days? A little less keen to murder you the second you cross the cave’s welcome mat? That’s not luck with the RNG, that’s the blessing of designer Derek Yu. After talking last week about plans to tweak the first few levels, turns out he quietly released a patch doing just that the next day with less fanfare. Surprise!

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Genshin Impact

has a comical number of different types of currency. Unlike most free-to-play games with multiple currencies, Genshin Impact has a bizarrely large number of ways to buy things in-game. It’s okay though, I’ve got you. Let’s explain all the different currency types in Genshin Impact and what they’re useful for.

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Watching Return Of The Obra Dinn‘s creator build the game’s levels is like watching the work of a serial killer who’s obsessed with the detective chasing them, artfully laying out corpses and tweaking gruesome scenes for maximum surprise and mystery. A torso here, a pair of shoes there, and oh the detective will kick themself when they realise what they actually happened here. Lucas Pope has released a time-lapse of modelling the ship, see, condensing three years of work into an hour of video. I do like a good time lapse video, and this is one.

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Donut County

is like Katamari Damacy, but tidier. Instead of rolling everything up into an ever-increasing ball of mess, you’re sucking everything underground until the surface is bare.

As an expanding hole, you eat bricks, chairs, cars, until eventually you’re able to gobble up entire houses. And who doesn’t love some tasty brickwork for their tea?

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Screenshot Saturday Sundays! Unlike certain sea-dwellers on the site, I’ve already caved and cranked up the heating for a long, cold winter – so why not get yourselves toasty too and wrap up for another batch of lovely videogame screenshots? This week: picturesque platforming, sentient seeds, Welsh country horror, and trilobites.

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Between karaoke, crime drama and shareholder meetings, it’s safe to say Yakuza is about so much more than just fighting. But you do punch a lotta blokes in those games. If you wanted to punch a whole lot more, Streets Of Kamurocho reimagines the Sega series as a side-scrolling brawler. Just be quick – the free demake is only available ’til Monday.

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Now here’s some properly “breaking” news. Dennis Gustafsson’s delightfully destructive smash ‘n’ grab Teardown finally has a release date, and will be breaking its way onto Steam’s shelves by the end of the month. After all, what better way to roll into the end of 2020 than smashing it all into tiny, satisfying voxel chunks?

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Somehow, there is still more work to be done on Stardew Valley before Eric “ConcernedApe” Barone is finished farming. Update 1.5 has been ticking along for some time, and now it appears the next big pastoral patch will add split-screen farming for up to four players. While Stardew’s had co-op for some time now, you’ll soon be able to make sure none of your fellow farmhands are fiddling with the crops while you’re not looking.

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Comb your hair, spray that perfume and suit up for a night of high culture, readers – the third edition of the Game Music Festival is underway. Starting last night, you can already tune into a full evening of orchestral rearrangement of scores from Bastion, Transistor, Pyre and Hades, with Larian Studios picking up the mic tonight for a more high-fantasy swing at the concert scene.

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Truly the Basement Jaxx of videogames, shooty wobbly platforming sequel Gonner2 is almost ready to start asking where your head’s at. The sequel to Ditto’s absolute stunner of a side-scrolling roguelite, Gonner 2 dives into the underworld next Thursday, promising an even greater explosion of colour that threaten to knock the skull right off you.

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I will not give in and turn my heating on, not until November. You cannot make me. Okay, maybe on Halloween, because it’d be nice to be all roasty-toasty drinking hot chocolate and watching horror films. Alright, maybe the 30th, so I can warm my flat up a bit first. Or the 29th to get the first-heat-of-the-year stench of burnt dust out. Or the 28th to help with the humidity. But no sooner. I refuse. I’m no coward.

What are you playing this weekend? Here’s what we’re clicking on!

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The gaming history buffs of the Video Game History Foundation have unveiled a new project called the “video game source project” for preserving content from game development. They’re kicking it off by going to the human source of The Secret Of Monkey Island. On October 30th they’ll be hosting an event where Ron Gilbert, one of the original creators, will dig into cut content and stories from yon old adventure game.

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Fall Guys

season two is trucking along with new surprises each week. Today, the gauntlet playlist has been thrown out and been replaced with the Slime Survivor show instead. Mediatonic have also bumped up the rate at which you’ll see the new medieval rounds in rotation. They’ve mentioned some other requested features coming next week as well.

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Demon exorcising detective game Lucifer Within Us has arrived with its mysterious tech utopia plots. As an exorcist for the Inquisition, it’s your job to banish digital daemons after sussing out who’s been possessed. You can jump in now to figure out who’s been wreaking havoc in the last city of humans.

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Marvel’s Avengers

has been out for over a month now, during which time the superhero service game has been bracing through some speedbumps. Since launch, Crystal Dynamics say they’ve been taking on feedback while solving bugs, matchmaking issues, and game stability. They’ve outlined some player-requested features and raid-style missions currently in the works, though the addition of Hawkeye Kate Bishop is getting pushed back. Oh, and they’re handing out some freebies as a thanks for your patience.

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Fast and loose, or tight and controlled? That’s the question I ask myself at the start of any run in a game with permadeath – that is, a game that sends me back to the beginning upon death. On this particular life, am I going to try my hardest, and aim for deliberate progress toward a specific goal, or am I going to throw caution to the wind, leg it as fast and as far as I can, and see what I learn from the chaos?

When it comes to chaos, no game does it better than Noita.

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As is, the Frog Fractions: Game Of The Decade Edition had secrets aplenty already. That’s not just an amphibian with a gift for mathematics and that hat DLC is more than a fashion choice. It turned out that the Hop’s Iconic Cap DLC was sort of another Frog Fractions sequel. Talk about bigger on the inside. Quite a cap. The game’s developer says that as of today, Hop’s Cap has gotten stuffed with even more secrets.

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Ten years after the StarCraft II saga started and five after its final episode, Blizzard have announced they’re winding down development. They still plan to tweak balance, but won’t be making new paid content. Not putting a pillow over its spaceface, but shuffling it off to a spacehome. Their announcement also muttered about thinking about what’s next for StarCraft, though I wouldn’t take that as them announcing a sequel or anything just yet.

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Call Of Duty: Black Ops Cold War’s multiplayer open beta kicks off this Saturday on PC and as you’d expect, it presents quite the hefty download. Thankfully you can preload it right now regardless of whether you’ve pre-ordered the game or not.

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Our ultimate guide to The Sims 4 cheats contains everything you need to know about how to enable cheats, and how to use said cheats to fulfil your sims’ every need… or brutally murder them. We don’t judge.

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Genshin Impact is available on several platforms, including PC, PS4, and mobile devices, and players are finding the free-to-play Breath Of The Wild-like super fun, especially for the asking price of £0. Still, does Genshin Impact have crossplay?

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To fully defox the following enlargeable geofoxer, identify all twelve locations plus the theme that links them. (more…)

If days were centimetres the sequel to this site’s favourite tactics game of 2014 would be about this far away (I’m holding my hands out in front of me like a person illustrating the leg span of the largest giant huntsman spider ever recorded). Poke your spycam under yonder jump and you’ll spot an interview with Door Kickers 2’s designer, Dan Dimitrescu, plus a blow-by-blow account of my second attempt at “Why We Fight”, one of the 40 missions destined for the first Early Access build.

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Why does Steam’s front page show you the games it shows? Some of it’s algorithms, obvs, but why those games for you? And what about the rest? If you’ve ever wondered, do watch this twenty-minute video where two fellas from Valve’s Steam team explain it all. It is interesting to see which parts are curated and which are pure datamunching.

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Here’s a free tip for you, if you keep fish – you’re probably feeding them too much. Small fish, like guppies and tetras, might have big appetites, but they only have little tummies, so they prefer to eat little and often. Now: what if… video games?.

There is a new indie dev collective called 10mg – named, I assume, after a small amount of… some drugs? – and they have today released a collection of ten games, each taking around ten minutes to play, and available as a collection on Steam for ten quid. Our Nat wrote about them at the top of the month, and in the words of 10mg themselves, “at worst, they waste 10 minutes of your time on a buck-wild idea that didn’t pan out. At best, they provide you with 10 minutes that you’ll reflect on for 10 years”. I am intrigued. So here’s the plan: I’m going to review them all in one sitting, right now. I’ll take ten minutes for each one, and then a further ten minutes to write as much review as I can, potentially with a very abrupt finish. I’ve got a stopwatch and everything. Ready? Let’s begin.

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Tis the season to be spooky, so you might fancy grabbing a free copy of Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs from Epic to keep you quivering until Amnesia: Rebirth launches next week. Piggy-wigs was quite different for an Amnesia follow-up, having been made by Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture developers Thechineseroom rather than series creators Frictional Games, but it does have some jolly unpleasant parts. Defs worth a poke for the price.

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