Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Half-Life: Alyx is so close I’ve started rearranging furniture in my house so I’ll have more space to play it. I don’t need to wait any longer if I want to visit a couple of the game’s environments with my headset, however. Last night, Valve released two areas from HL: Alyx for use in SteamVR Home – that’s the staging area you appear inside when you first load SteamVR, before you choose what game you’re going to play. I’ve had a wander around a City 17 backalley, gazed up at the unfinished Citadel, and am more ready for the game than ever.

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TV shows usually suck at portraying videogames. I think we can all agree on this.

When they’re not busy pressing random buttons on controllers linked to the wrong consoles, typical TV players spend their time being awkward around girls, rambling about the nature of reality, or murdering people because videogames make you evil.

Being a nerd-adjacent hobby, comics tend to portray videogames in a more sympathetic light, giving space to nuanced stories about games and the people who play them. So lo and behold! Comics about people playing games. All nice. No murders, I swear.

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I imagine death is anticlimactic for most people. Maybe even more so for kings. There you are, with your whole life’s confusion and doubt and pain cooming to a head, everyone turning against you for unclear reasons, all your efforts accumulated at last, and you still just sort of… stop. After that, all you get is an image of a mildly sad, grey face, and a sentence or two saying you blew it.

But what happened to everything you’d been working on? How did the people around you cope? Did anyone really notice? I don’t suppose any of that matters. At least King Eryk is given a reason, I suppose. Eryk is you, by the way, assuming you’re playing Yes, Your Grace like I have been. And he probably has more reason to complain than I do.

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Psyonix have hit the breaks on Rocket League‘s upcoming World Championships. Scheduled to take place from April 24-26 in Dallas, Texas, growing concerns around the Covid-19 situation have convinced the developers to cancel the event, move the rest of Season 9’s championship games online and offer full refunds to anyone who’d pre-purchased a chance to see some world-class car footy.

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The Glorious Model O- was one of my favourite gaming mice of 2019, so you can probably imagine how thrilled I was when I heard they were making another, more ergonomic lightweight gaming mouse, the Model D. Priced at an identical £50 / $50 as the symmetrical Model O, the Model D brings all that honeycombed holier than thou greatness to an even comfier, right-handed chassis, weighing in at a mere 68g in both matte and gloss finishes. It’s a beautiful bit of kit, and it’s quickly become one of my new best gaming mouse champions of 2020.

It is, however, a little disconcerting at times, as every now and then I’ll hear an audible ‘squeak’ from its mouse wheel. If my cats didn’t already think this was a new tasty treat to sink their teeth into, they certainly will now.

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Riot’s new tactical FPS, Valorant, has already shown that it can deliver some tense gunshoots. But what about the faces behind the iron sights? A hero shooter’s gotta have heroes that inspire, both in their loadouts and their charming, fanfic-ready personalities. Today, Riot gave us a brief look at Phoenix – a hot-headed English lad whose firey arsenal is more about control than simple, thoughtless arson. He’s snappy, he’s technical, but I’m not sure I’m ready to love him quite yet.

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A new generations of warlords will rise with the next Total War: Three Kingdoms DLC later this month, Creative Assembly announced today. A World Betrayed is its name, and it’s one of those ‘Chapter Pack’ DLCs bringing new factions, story events and missions, and units. It’ll have a new starting date too, kicking off in the year 194 when, the developers explain, “Lü Bu himself has just assassinated Dong Zhuo, Sun Ce is beginning his conquest of Jiangdong, and Liu Bei has succeeded Tao Qian.” Plenty to fight about, then. You can see some of their griping in the announcement trailer below.

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If there’s been one constant in Google Stadia‘s time on Earth, it’s a notion that it’s not really delivered the games. If I were Google, kicking about with more money than God and wondering how to pack more games onto my streaming platform’s catalogue, I would simply develop my own. To that end, Google are setting up a new studio in Los Angeles, nabbing established local talent by putting long time God Of War studio head Shannon Studstill in charge of the development house.

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The Longing takes 400 days to play. Not like, in-game days, I mean 400 full rotations of our actual real-life planet. The game launched today, so if you make a start right now you should have it finished by Friday 9th April 2021. It’s a sort of adventure/idle game where you look after a Shade trapped underground whose only goal is to wait.

There’s lots of things you can do in the game other than wait, of course, you can explore, make your Shade a little home, paint, or even try to escape if you’re feeling brave. Alice Bee is doing a Diary Of The Longing and, in her most recent entry, she made her poor Shade (who she named Burnsy) trip out on mushrooms.

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After the flurry of new GPU releases from AMD and Nvidia last year, our best graphics card list finally seems to have quietened down a bit – at least for now, anyway. With most of AMD’s next-gen [cms-block] GPUs out the door, all we’re really waiting for is their big 4K GPUs. It’s a similar story over at Nvidia as well. Almost all of their Turing-based [cms-block] cards are out the wild now, and the only one that hasn’t been given a Super-fied refresh is their top-end RTX 2080 Ti. After that, the only place left to go is a whole new set of RTX 30-series GPUs – although quite when that will happen is anyone’s guess.

Instead, the biggest disruption to our best graphics card list this year is likely to come from a different company altogether: Intel. With their upcoming Intel Xe graphics cards due sometime this summer, we see quite the shake-up in the world of best graphics cards over the coming months, with not only a lot more choice available for those thinking about upgrading their PC, but also more competitive prices, too. For now, though, here are my best graphics card recommendations that you can buy today. Whether you’re after something for playing games at 1080p, 1440p or 4K, we’ve got you covered.

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EGX Rezzed fast approaches. Demos are being tweaked, wristbands printed and an army of organisers scratch their heads about how to get a bazillion PCs to work in a 19th century dockland warehouse. For the uninitiated, Rezzed is a celebration of all playthings virtual, with a distinct lean towards the indie scene compared to its bigger EGX brother. And it’s held in the Tobacco Docks, the 19th century dockland warehouse mentioned above. I wasn’t just being odd. You should definitely get tickets and come along, but if you can’t, we’ll offer a snapshot of the show floor in our returning stream, Indies Uncovered. Hooray!

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Xbox Game Pass for PC continues to please, as they’ve just announced this month’s lineup. Ori And The Will Of The Wisps will be available on Game Pass as soon as it launches on March 11th. Then we have the likes of Pikuniku, Train Sim World 2020, The Lord Of The Rings: Adventure Card Game and Mother Russia Bleeds.

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I believe it was Dr Ian Malcolm who first spoke those iconic, halting words: “Life, uh, finds a way.” And it turns out he was right, because with our ARK: Survival Evolved admin commands and cheats guide you can “find a way” to do pretty much anything you want. God mode, infinite stats, spawning items and dinosaurs out of thin air… You name it, we can teach you how to do it.

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It’s a little-known fact that the “ARK” in “ARK: Survival Evolved” is in fact short for “arsebark”. And that’s fitting, because that’s exactly what its latest DLC, Genesis, is like: a fart. And what a fart. Not an abrupt, spluttering guff, nor an undulating trouser howl that reduces its culprit to ever more contorted grimaces of shame as it continues. No, ARK: Genesis is a proper, merciless, nine-tins-of-beans ripper, unleashed in a crowded lift on a wet Monday morning.

I wouldn’t be half so childish if the developers hadn’t already made a fortune from pre-orders, or if Genesis wasn’t so bloatedly overpriced. I’d be reasonable, even, if it seemed they had attempted something beautiful and ambitious here and fallen short. But they haven’t. After hyping Genesis to high heaven, they’ve released an expansion that manages to negate everything that conceivably made it possible to call ARK a flawed masterpiece, while retaining every iota of the game-busting jank that made it feel like a shoddy, never-ending beta test.

We’ll see Death Stranding on PC in June, Kojima Productions announced this week, but that doesn’t matter any more. Today saw the launch of Walking Simulator, a free game about roaming the post-apocalyptic wastes of the near-future, delivering packages and chugging energy drinks. If you squint, imagine Norman Reedus’s locks brushing against your ear, and huff the gas from an old fridge, it’ll be almost exactly like you’re playing Death Stranding. Walking Simulator is clearly some sort of piss-take, though even after playing I’m not entirely sure what’s joking and what’s broken.

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Remember Roller Champions? It was, by far, one of the coolest games announced at E3 last year, and now Ubisoft have organised a closed alpha on PC starting next Wednesday to give players a chance to check it out. Roller Champions is basically a 3v3 roller derby with some basketball thrown in, and it looks so colourful and different to a lot of the other stuff Ubisoft are trying to sell us, I personally can’t wait to give it a go.

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As part of Failbetter’s 10th anniversary, the studio has made an overhaul to Fallen London. Its first game, and the one on which subsequent, exceedingly polite steampunk-ish exploration games Sunless Sea and Sunless Skies were based, Fallen London is a browser-based story game that takes place almost entirely in text form. But a little less so today, since after some downtime yesterday, it has reappeared with a brand-spanking-new map.

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It’s been over a year, and I still have yet to find an idea in any game that comes close to matching the brilliance of the interlocking hex-tablet-drone system in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive‘s battle royale mode, Danger Zone. It belongs to the extremely select class of new ideas in games that not only offers several compelling points of departure from the tried-and-tested genre formula, but also solves almost every single one of the problems that have plagued the genre since its inception.

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Make America Mailman Again simulator Death Stranding is coming to PC this summer and the details keep rolling in on what special goodies are coming with the second launch. Earlier this week it was the headcrab hat for Sam. Now, it’s a photo mode. Mr. Strand himself, Hideo Kojima, posted a video today showing off a few shots being taken with the new action shot creator.

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Hot on the heels of the Resident Evil 2 remake from last year, Capcom are releasing the Resident Evil 3 remake in April. Capcom have now shown off the first few minutes of gameplay in an official livestream. I’ll warn you now: it’s a pretty dang short session. That means no spoilers, if indeed you can spoil a game remake, but not a lot of information either. If you’re hungry for zombie killing, it may hold your appetite ’till April.

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Ain’t technology a beaut’? You press one wrong button and suddenly things just leak all over the floor—names and pictures and prices and dates mostly. This leak, courtesy of a Twitter bot that tracks updates and releases added to the PlayStation Network, has two of the four. It’s a (possible) name and an image for a new Star Wars game that we’re probably not meant to know about yet. (more…)

We didn’t start the fire. It’s always burning since the wheel’s been turning. Oh yes, the flames rage on in Sea Of Thieves. Last month’s update added that flamin’ angry chest and ashen skeletons and whatnot. Next week, the silly pirates game is getting another update and yup, things are still hot around here. This time ’round it’s fire traps, a knockback bomb, and new Tall Tale quests setting the course. Rare’s new video gets into some of the details we can expect next week in the Heart Of Fire update.

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I did level four on my first go. That’s my crown and none of you can take it. Level three was a bastard’s hump and I struggled to get through it for hours, before I realised that I already had the supplies I needed to repair my ship. Those same supplies are also a requirement for the best weapons. That’s just mean, man.

Savage Vessels is a top-down roguelike survival game that’s openly inspired by Teleglitch, 2012’s harrowing pixelly survival horror, but it’s doing enough differently do stand out. In fact, I prefer it. (more…)

Nvidia’s G-Sync Compatible monitor list continues to get bigger and bigger every month. At last count, there are more than 80 FreeSync monitors that have been officially approved to meet Nvidia’s strict G-Sync Compatible standards, allowing Nvidia graphics card owners to take advantage of a monitor’s variable refresh rate tech for super smooth gaming even if it isn’t a full-fat G-Sync screen. Read on below to find out exactly what screens meet Nvidia’s G-Sync Compatible requirements, as well as how to enable G-Sync on any FreeSync monitor.

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The games industry (and the games press) have always had a weird relationship with old games. From the open hostility of publishers in the 2000s to the overdone retro stylings of the 2010s, we remain in an uneasy entente with our ancient past. Many will insist that very old games were better. Others have played them since, and found them wanting.

There is a way to reconcile these factions. That way is being pioneered by the unsung master of modern rebuilds of archaic arcade ar…cology? No that doesn’t work. The point is, Hijong Park makes brilliant games based on hits from the 1980s, and you should play them.

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Overwatch‘s very first Experimental game mode has come to an end. Over the last week, the game featured a Triple Damage mode as a way for Blizzard to test how they could reduce queue times for folks who want to play damage heroes.

For starters, what a great feature the Experimental card is! It’s a lot more accessible than the Player Test Realm (PTR), which requires downloading an entirely different version of the game. Having a quick new limited mode to try out for a week is a nice way to keep the game feeling fresh too, and letting players participate in something that will likely help Overwatch improve in the future is a great way to get the community more involved.

For seconds, oh my god please don’t bring Triple Damage into the live game.

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All you many Scrooge McDuck fans will be pleased to hear DuckTales: Remastered has returned to Steam. Remember when it just kind of, went away, last year? It was pretty weird, Capcom told everyone it was getting delisted from all the digital stores, then they put it on sale for 75% off as a “farewell price drop”. They didn’t even give us a reason. They also haven’t given a reason as to why it’s suddenly returning. Weird.

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This weekend you can breach walls without also blowing a hole in your wallet. Ubisoft’s multiplayer shooter Rainbow Six Siege is having a free-to-play weekend where you’ll be able to take a spin on all its maps and modes. Pre-loading has already started, so you can queue up a download right now if you’re looking to hop in on the free weekend starting Thursday.

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As someone with dinkier hands than most, I love a good lightweight gaming mouse. I love the 80g Logitech G Pro Wireless, and I especially love the 58g Glorious Model O-. I’m also a big fan of the 69g Razer Viper that came out last August, which has the added bonus of being ambidextrous so its featherlight design can be enjoyed by righties and lefties alike. You’ll find all three of them in my best gaming mouse list, because they’re great mice. However, it seems that 69g wasn’t quite light enough for those snakey rainbow enthusiasts over at Razer, as they’ve now come out with the even lighter 61g Razer Viper Mini.

It is, of course, still a couple of grams heavier than the Glorious Model O-, but its super skinny chassis really is for the teeniest of tiny hands. Dare I say… too tiny? Here’s wot I think.

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Rumour has it that the Valve Index will be back in stock on Monday, March 9th, and Valve expect their VR headsets to sell right back out the same day. They sold out months ago and manufacturing has been disrupted by the Covid-19 virus, see, and now demand is extra high thanks to the impending launch of Half-Life: Alyx. I am surprised to learn demand is so high that some people plan to stuff their Steam Wallets in advance with enough store credit to buy one outright (that’s £919, cashcounters), to reduce the risk of checkout hiccups making them miss their chance. Wild. Wild times.

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AMD’s Radeon RX 5500 XT is one of the best graphics cards for 1080p gaming right now, but if you buy one from MSI right now, then you get another tasty treat alongside it: a £15 Steam voucher to be precise, and that’s on top of the two free games that come with the card as part of AMD’s current Raise the Game bundle. Don’t mind if I do!

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Good old Halo: Combat Evolved. It’s like that one character archetype from American bro comedies, of the guy who’s sailing rapidly into his thirties, but can’t leave behind his jock glory days and keeps showing up at frat parties, whooping and getting messy-drunk despite not really knowing anyone there. Actually, that might not be an archetype at all – I think it’s just the plot of the 2003 movie Old School. Well, anyway. Halo is that guy. With the difference being that everyone still kinda loves Halo regardless, and indulgently pours beers through its motocross helmet whenever it shows up.

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It’s quite rare for a composer to be offered as the spokesperson for an upcoming game, but it’s also quite rare for a game to sound as good as Ori And The Will Of The Wisps. So good, in fact, that it was Gareth Coker’s tinkling ivories that were first used to announce the game at E3 2017, where he sat at his piano and played a live accompaniment to that incredible footage. Okay, it doesn’t have the star factor of a Keanu, but it’s breathtaking in its own way.

With Ori 2 releasing on March 11, we got to chat to Coker about what makes the new soundtrack, and the game underneath, tick. Turns out it’s not just about playing the hits – although I am dying to hear “the most emphatic” version of the main Ori theme – but showing character psychology through subtle tweaks, and establishing a larger cast of characters without driving ears insane with repetition. And you thought Ori’s job was tough.

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System Override, Apex Legends‘ new two-week-long Collection Event started last night, bringing a flurry of new skins and weapon charms, and treating us to a new game mode with some fancy-sounding shields. Respawn have also decided to give Octane a knife – it’s a part of his shiny new Heirloom set, and there’s some changes to the way these Heirlooms work, too.

New pretty event things aren’t the only interesting updates to the game, however. The developers have also fixed the awful muzzle flash problem, so now you can actually see who you’re shooting at when you aim down sights.

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Paradox Interactive have formally announced the next Europa Universalis IV expansion, named Emperor. It will bring new powers for the Pope, livelier revolutions, some troubling incidents for the Holy Roman Empire, and more. And as is customary for Paradox strategy games, the expansion will be accompanied by a free update overhauling bits and pieces.

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Santa Claus got into my taxi last night. Not some bloke dressed up as Santa. The Santa. With the reindeer and the sleigh and the presents. I wasn’t even aware it was Christmas Eve when my gruff taxi driver rolled out of bed that day, but there he was, his large hat slung over a tired, booze-addled eyelid and his beard all messy around the edges.

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Surprise! With little warning, Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary launched on PC today. This is the remake of Bungie’s very first game in the first-person shooter series, the one which started Master Ian Chief’s adventures on Xbox way back in 2001. I never played it but my god, the things I’ve heard about its powerful pistol… maybe I’ll finally see for myself. It is only £7, after all. You can snook a look in the launch trailer below.

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The “roguelike” mode touted as a stretch goal on the 2015 Kickstarter campaign behind Bloodstained: Ritual Of The Night will not be made, the developers have announced, to be replaced with a smaller feature. Roguelike Dungeon was the stretch goal for $5m (£3.9m), and the campaign hit that. The mode would rebuild the Castlevania ’em up as a a roguelikelike, sending players to plunder procedurally-generated dungeons. But now, eight months after the finished game launched, the devs say they can’t make that and have binned it. Instead, they plan to make a Randomizer Mode shuffling item locations. The mode doesn’t sound bad in itself but ditching a funded stretch goal isn’t great.

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The next season of Destiny 2 starts next week, and Bungie today revealed more of what we’ll be doing in the Season Of The Worthy and why. Turns out, the dregs of the Cabal who survived our latest drubbing have a spiteful last-ditch plan to straight-up crash a miles-long superweapon spaceship into Earth. That’ll be a problem. So off we’ll go, powering up the defences of the cranky ancient AI, Rasputin and looting all sorts of new shinies along the way. This season will not benefit from Bungie’s recently-announced intent to cut down on FOMO but hey, I’ll take any newness for now.

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A side-scrolling roguelike with a pixel art style and an adorable little skull person protagonist, Skul: The Hero Slayer could easily be mistaken for about seven thousand other early access games. After all, we’ve long since hit peak pixel, reaching the stage in society where lovely chunky squares are the mainstream rather than the exception, and aliased edges and bezier curves have to cower and beg in the street for hovering roast chicken sprites.

Does that make any sense? I’ve got a touch of fever this evening and I’m writing this introductory paragraph in a state of delirious hypochondria, so my usually astute and cutting edge observations have reverted back to PC gaming circa 2007.

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