Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Microsoft have announced what’s coming to Game Pass for the first two weeks of June, which includes games about cute childhood summers (Dordogne), a bunch of stacking dolls (Stacking), and a horrifying monster chasing you in the shadows (Amnesia: The Bunker). Something for every type of person, then, from those that suffer from summertime blues to sun-loving extroverts.

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Tetris gobbled up so much of my time during the early years of university, partly because it functioned as a quick break between writing essays. Those quick breaks soon became trances though, as my eyes stayed unblinking and my fingers snapped across the keyboard with a mind of their own. The best game of all time, some might argue. Professional procrastinators can now rejoice as there’s a new way to play the blocky puzzler: Setris, or Tetris with sand.

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Developers Iron Gate have been receiving questions about Valheim mods, and “what we as a company approve of - as well as what we don’t approve of.” So the team decided to clear up their stance on mods, and most notably, their stance on paid mods which is what they’ve been asked about the most.

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Every weekend, indie devs show off current work on Twitter's #screenshotsaturday tag. And every week, I bring you a selection of these snaps and clips. We're running late again because of Monday's holiday, but the games are still just as good. This week, my eye has been caught by big spaceships, some sort of Looney Tunes logic take on Hitman, and a game about the very real lives of the video games media. Come see!

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For a certain sort of PC gaming fan, System Shock is where it all began. 30 years of immersive sim development started here, as Looking Glass escaped the restraints of the RPG genre and embraced thoughtful first-person action. SHODAN broke free, and the world was never the same. Without System Shock, there would be no Thief or Gloomwood, no Prey or Dead Space. Bioshock was conceived as its sequel. The creative figureheads behind Deus Ex and Dishonored were wrapped up in its creation, and forever changed by contact with Looking Glass and its unique philosophy.

Countless studios have used Citadel Station as a star to steer by, measuring their own work against System Shock’s commitment to simulation, dense atmosphere, and method-ish refusal to break character. This was not so much a game as an alternate reality. As one of our interviewees tells us: “We were trying to build the holodeck.”

Here’s the story of how it was made, as told by the people who made it.

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Two weeks ago, the up-and-coming farmlife sim Roots Of Pacha was pulled from Steam following a rights dispute between the publisher Crytivo and developer Soda Den. The prehistoric Stardew-like has now returned to storefronts after both parties agreed to “amicably part ways under conditions that are mutually beneficial.”

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Back in February 1991, Capcom released Street Fighter 2 to arcades. Unbeknownst to Capcom at the time, Street Fighter 2’s massive success would cause it to become the blueprint for fighting games - a genre the game effectively created upon its release. This blueprint proved to be so influential that even some of Street Fighter 2’s most underwhelming elements are still being parroted in fighting games today. As a result, more than 30 years later, one constant in the fighting game genre has always remained true: the story mode is gonna suck.

There have been some valiant attempts at rectifying this in the last decade, but the core issue has always remained the same; fighting games are inherently designed to be played against other people, and back-to-back fights with AI controlled characters will never be able to properly match the competition of the real thing. Yet, with Street Fighter 6, Capcom have seemingly done the impossible. Street Fighter 6 has the best story mode in any fighting game I’ve played. Admittedly a low bar, but still, Capcom could have easily half-assed the story mode, just as so many other fighting games still choose to do, and still have been widely praised based solely on the strength of its multiplayer. Instead, Capcom are offering fighting game developers a new blueprint to copy - one that prioritises teaching new players above everything else.

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Noctua's fans are legendary in the PC space, offering exceptional performance and reliability in a love-it-or-hate-it brown and beige colourway. Their premier 120mm fan is the NF-P12, and this model has now been discounted to £12.95 at Amazon UK. That's a lot to pay for a single fan, but these fans normally cost double - think upwards of £22 for a single fan! - so this is actually a heck of a bargain.

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Samsung's T7 Portable SSD is one of the best performing options on the market, offering 1050MB/s reads and 1000MB/s writes in a portable USB-attached form factor. It normally costs around £130 for a 2TB size, but today you can pick up this model for £104.96 - a great deal for an external SSD of this calibre!

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Today is another out of sync Bank Holiday for me. It's not one in Ireland, so I'm the only one rattling around in here at the moment. And it occurs to me that the vast, vast, vast majority of you will never have met me in real life. The evidence that I exist in physical space is comparatively minimal! How do you know I'm not an AI? An AI could probably replicate my writing style quite thoroughly, because there are at present many thousands of my - mine, my own - words on the internet, and they and everything else have and are being scraped by AI. This thought process is as a result of a few AI things intersecting with my workspace at once recently. Several of them are quite funny, and also not. If you think AI tools are actually good for writers then I have to assume you don't really think much about either.

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Sometime before SHODAN’s ethical constraints were removed and the rogue AI set about converting the people of Citadel Station into cyborgs, a researcher named Stacy Everson found a smoking gun hidden among the blinking servers of the spaceship’s library. Not an assault rifle or mini-pistol, but a decades-old email chain between her TriOptimum bosses and a psychologist named Jeffrey Hammer. In the early stages of Citadel’s construction, Hammer suggested that each level of the station be designed in such a way as to induce stress and anxiety, so that experts could study their impact on the human psyche during space travel.

“I always knew something was off about this place!”, wrote Stacy to a colleague. “We are just rats in a maze.”

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Sundays are for using an old receipt as a bookmark. Before you remind yourself of how much you spent on that McDonald's breakfast, let's read this week's best writing about games (and game related things).

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Crowdfunding platform Fig will go offline on Sunday, May 28th, and all pages related to previously funded campaigns will disappear along with it. That means that creators who were continuing to use the platform to communicate and deliver rewards to backers are currently scrambling to transition to alternative methods, including the likes of Double Fine and Gearbox.

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Sons Of The Forest is about crash-landing on a remote island described as a "cannibal-infested hellscape." If you've played the early access survival game and thought, "Hellscape? More like swellscape," then Patch 06 might be for you. Released yesterday, it adds a "first pass of hard survival" mode, alongside cooking improvements and the ability to craft custom effigies. Lovely.

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Daedalic Entertainment have apologised for the "underwhelming experience" players are having with Lord Of The Rings: Gollum. In a statement shared on Twitter, the developers say they "deeply regret that the game did not meet the expectations we set for ourselves" and say they're working to address bugs and technical issues.

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Nintendo have sent Valve a DMCA takedown notice related to the GameCube and Wii emulator Dolphin. Dolphin has been in development for nearly 20 years, but in March its developers announced their intention to bring the free emulator to Steam and opened a store page.

Dolphin's developers now say that the Steam release is "indefinitely postponed".

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When my Sleeper escaped their ramshackle life on the fringes of Erlin's Eye at the end of last year, they left behind a lot of unfinished business. I had to stop short my efforts to help Bliss make a go of her repair bay business, and Tala was left to finish making her brand-new distillery on her own. Yatagan agent Rabiyah probably has my name on an employment blacklist, too, after I upped sticks without telling them, and the spores of mushroom algae I'd been cultivating for Riko over in Greenway were no doubt left to rot and moulder somewhere. Instead, I jacked that all in to smuggle myself, my engineering pal Lem and his tiny daughter Mina onto a ship headed for some far-flung star out in the void. The Sidereal ship wasn't going to wait. It was now or never.

After the unspeakable horrors of a five-day working week, what a relief for people in the UK to be back on another three-day weekend. We'll be mostly quiet Monday then return properly on Tuesday. The weather's been absolutely glorious out here so I'm aching to spend quality time outside. But what are you playing this weekend? Here's what we're clicking on!

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Minecraft’s next big update is called Trails & Tales. We already knew about most of the new features coming with the 1.20 update, but now we’ve also learned the release date: June 7th. The additions to the perennial voxel favourite include a pretty cherry blossom biome, an archaeology feature, adorable rideable camels, and the fan-voted sniffer mob. Developer Mojang announced the date in their Minecraft Monthly video series.

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The Asus ROG Ally was, in hindsight, inevitable. After the Steam Deck proved that handheld gaming PCs could flourish outside of a microscopic niche, it was surely only a matter of time before one of the big PC hardware movers would have a crack at the concept. This time, with more powerful internals, and none of the SteamOS compatibility problems that led to Valve creating a whole new verification system.

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Most video games are too big. Their lands are too expansive, their histories over-explained, their playtimes too long. Most of everything is too long (songs, books, movies, everything) but it's especially felt in games, where the magical "What's next?" feeling of discovering a world often fades to leave the "What task must I complete now?" drudgery of playing a video game. So I hugely admire Cosmo D's Off-Peak series, which has built the feeling of a huge and fascinating city through only four tiny locations visited across four games with a combined playtime of under eight hours.

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It is entirely irrational that I can see a hundred largely identical online shooters and not blink, but see a single game cover similar ground to something unique can make me go, "Oh, it's a Grounded knock-off".

It's also extremely unfair on Smalland Colon Survive The Wilds, a lovely survival game about being a teeny tiny person in the wilderness, where bottlecaps serve as tabletops and beetles are a deadly threat. It is absolutely comparable to Obsidian's garden adventure, but a peer rather than a pretender. I even prefer it in some ways, but they have such a different vibe that there's plenty of room for both.

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On any given day, you can find me either thinking about, praying for, or playing cute pixelated games with some old-school charm. Luckily, we have a pretty promising one of those on the horizon with Cross Blitz, a deckbuilding RPG that follows some furry animal pirates across the high seas, digitally represented on a grid-based map this time around. Cross Blitz was announced two years ago, but the indie team at Tako Boy have secured a publisher and are now ready to launch into early access later this year.

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Every week, the Epic Games Store gives away one free game for everyone. This week that freebie is Fallout: New Vegas - Ultimate Edition, available to keep forever from now until June 1st. So, if you somehow missed Obsidian’s post-apocalyptic postal service sim, now’s the time to get stuck in the wasteland. Just hop over to the Epic Games Store to add the game to your account. The giveaway ends at 4pm BST on June 1st, at which point New Vegas will be replaced with another mysterious free game.

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RTS threequel Homeworld 3 has been delayed to February 2024, flying away from its previous "first half of 2023" release window. The developers say they need more time to live up to the series’ standards, presumably with more epic spacefleet shootouts. For those missing the series’ galactic megastructures, the devs have promised to share their biggest “progress update” yet later this summer. Possibly at one of this year’s NotE3 showcases.

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Survival horror reboot Alone In The Dark is coming out on October 25th, publisher THQ announced last night. This new game reimagines the haunted Derceto Manor from the 1992 original, this time with a fancier coat of paint, a third-person camera view, and some famous faces. And if you’d like an early teaser of what’s in store, there’s a free prologue chapter available now, letting you explore a slice of the Southern Gothic mansion.

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Both Nvidia and AMD's latest graphics card releases, the RTX 7600 and RTX 4060 Ti, have crashed and burned - so who's going to actually make a well-priced GPU? If you had Intel on your bingo cards, congrulations - their Arc A750 8GB graphics card is down to £230.98 on Amazon UK, marking a £20 price drop that brings this option way below the £300 RTX 3060 that it comprehensively beats.

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Wow, this is a good one. The 1TB WD SN850x, our best PCIe 4.0 SSD for gaming, is down to £64.99 at Amazon UK - after costing £95 earlier this month! This is by far the cheapest price we've ever seen for this model and an incredible deal for the level of performance it provides.

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2023 has seen the closure of more big multiplayer games than, well, any time I can recall in recent memory. One after the other, developers' dreams of making the next big Destiny-like have gradually collapsed in on themselves. Like a deflated concertina, their last honks of life have been crushed down to desperate, fizzling squeals as servers lie empty and the cost of maintaining them spirals out of control. Some are still hanging in there, sure, but the genre as a whole feels like it's at a tipping point - and I couldn't help but sigh as five more multiplayer shooters joined the fray last night as part of Sony's PlayStation Showcase.

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A hefty new Warhammer 40,000: Darktide content update arrives in the next week, adding two new missions as well as possibly preparing to let players on Steam and the Windows Store (that's you, Game Pass gang) play together. It won't fix the fundamental flaws of the grimdark Left 4 Dead 'em up but these are welcome changes. Darktide is also adding new cosmetics to earn by playing (yeah!) and resuming the release of new cosmetics sold for real money (yeahhh).

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Well, this isn't what I expected to see at tonight's Warhammer Skulls stream. The 2018 board game Warhammer 40K: Speed Freeks is being turned into a free-to-play racing multiplayer shooter game, and there's an open alpha playtest available over on Steam right now. Developed by Grip: Combat Racing studio Caged Element, the reveal trailer for Warhammer 40K: Speed Freeks looks absolutely incredible. Come and shout dakka dakka with me below.

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Tonight's Warhammer Skulls event showed off a new trailer for Warhammer 40K: Rogue Trader this evening, which not only revealed several new locations, enemy types and party companions, but it that a closed beta for the Warhammer CRPG will be arriving on June 1st. The beta will be available to anyone who's already pre-ordered the game, and it will run until the game's release. We still don't know when that final release date will be just yet, but if you're keen to see how 40K translates to a good old-fashioned classic RPG, at least you should have a fair old while to see what's up.

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Warhammer 40K: Space Marine 2 offered another gameplay trailer today as part of the Warhammer Skulls Showcase, and this one finally shows off the waves of Tyranids you’ll need to stomp through in this surprise sequel. There’s a solid view of both the shooty parts and the stabby parts of combat, as our superhuman hero rips through enemies with the mechanical teeth of his chainsword. Wholesome fun below.

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After publishing the excellent Warhammer 40K: Chaos Gate - Daemonhunters last year, Frontier Developments are now making their own Warhammer strategy game in the form of Age Of Sigmar: Realms Of Ruin. Developed internally at Frontier, it promises to be a modern take on the classic RTS, giving you four unique factions to play with, including the Stormcast Eternals and Orruk Kruleboyz, across a single player campaign and 1v1 and 2v2 competitive multiplayer modes. I got to see a little bit of an alpha build of Realms Of Ruin in action ahead of tonight's Skulls stream, and if you're a fan of tabletop miniatures, this is definitely an RTS you'll want to keep an eye on, as Frontier have gone all out on making this look as close to Age Of Sigmar's TT origins as they can. Here's what you need to know.

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Mere hours after I said "even a return to Titan can't bring me back to Destiny 2," Bungie showed something that might just do it: a really big, weird triangle. During last night's PlayStation Showcase, they revealed a teaser trailer for The Final Shape, the upcoming expansion which will end the MMOFPS's decade-long main story arc, and a very good big triangle is involved. Oh, also fan-favourite character Cayde-6 is back, voiced again by Nathan Fillion. But you need to see this big triangle.

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Amazon Prime subscribers can claim 13 free games during the month of June. Well, at no extra cost to their Prime subscription, anyway. That’s on top of the recently announced extras that are available for the next few weeks, including Turnip Boy and Calico. But next month’s lineup of freebies - which includes the ever-lovely SteamWorld Dig 2, Neverwinter Nights and Autonauts - starts on June 1st, with more free games being made available every single week after that, so be sure to check back every Thursday.

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This week, inspired by Doom running on teletext, the Electronic Wireless Show podcast investigates: what other devices, mechanisms, or live animals can join the immortal shooter’s vast empire of unlikely ports? Despite not even being on the show this week, Alice Bee tasks us with finding the best, worst, or weirdest cases of Can It Run Doom from across the internet. And, sometimes, inside Nate’s mind.

We also discuss what we’ve been playing this week, with a double bill of disappointment in The Lord of the Rings: Gollum and Darkest Dungeon 2, before Nate transforms the Tower of Jocularity into a marketplace of Dark Bargains. Capitalised for terrible, terrible emphasis.

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If Dead Cells is a 2D roguelike with a focus on melee combat, Ultros looks similar, except it's ingested a wad of magic mushrooms and runs a vape store on the side. Revealed at last night's PlayStation Showcase, Ultros not only looks gorgeous and action-packed, it has a peaceful side where you nurture lots of lovely plants. For now, I'm sold.

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I'm a sucker for any game with a gorgeous art style, so guess which announcement caught my eye at last night's PlayStation Showcase. Neva is a new puzzle platformer from the creators of Gris that tells the story of a red-capped swordswoman named Alba and her faithful wolf pup as they "embark on a perilous journey through a once beautiful world as it slowly decays around them." That's not much to go on, but feast your eyes on the stunning animated trailer below. It's a looker.

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My happiness comes at a small price: give me a paraglider that I can whip out at any second and a strangely beautiful open world, and there you go, I’m a happy bunny. It's the Zelda formula. Or the Tchia formula. Or the Just Cause formula. Either way, it's good fun. That’s why Towers Of Aghasba caught my eye when it debuted a stunning trailer at last night’s PlayStation Showcase, offering a glimpse at an alien open world and some settlement-building.

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