Month: October 2024

Relic Entertainment’s 2004 and 2009 real-time strategy magnum opuses, Dawn of War and Dawn of War 2, have been re-released as anniversary editions for their 15th and 20th years of real-time-strategerizing. The new anniversary editions, available on Steam, include all the DLC and extras released for the two games over the years. That’s especially nice for Dawn of War 2, which had a metric ton of DLC and skins and codes and wargear and exclusive bonuses by the end of its life cycle.

Both games are also on sale, at 80% off—or $7 and $10 respectively.

So far the two games have released on Steam in this new edition—no word on whether or not people who own them via other platforms like GOG will get an upgrade. Also I really doubt that Sega is going to honor an upgrade on my 20-year-old copy of Dawn of War—that one came on three CDs. I still have them.

“The fan-favourite and legendary release of Dawn of War and Dawn of War 2, originally developed by Relic Entertainment in 2004 and 2009 respectively, have just turned 20 and 15 years years old! To celebrate, we’ve put together two Anniversary Editions, collecting the original game with all its …

Brave soul that I am, I’m about to embark on a perilous quest. Over the next however many paragraphs this potentially rambling feature ends up being, I will say some nice things about Dragon Age 2. I have done it before, and I may do it again. I am aware this is upsetting to some readers. Please know that I respect your decision to be completely wrong about this misunderstood RPG (while also acknowledging that, yes, in some regards it’s a bit of a stinker). OK, hopefully you are now properly prepared.

Although, a cursory glance at the internet suggests that my appreciation of DA2, at least when it comes to this specific element, might actually see me placed in the majority. I’m talking about the qunari, of course, and how the crew that caused a big ol’ ruckus in Kirkwall was so much more badass than the defanged version introduced in Inquisition. I am, I should emphasise, not including Iron Bull in this slight, who of course is wonderful and, yes, weirdly hot.

Every time we get a new Dragon Age, it’s a starkly different RPG. Dragon Age: Origins remains the GOAT, and it’s where we meet our first qunari: Sten. He’s a big brooding lad who largely just looks like a blo…

Cooperative shooter Deep Rock Galactic will soon let players take its old seasons of stuff out of the closet and take them for a spin. That means the first four rounds of themed extra stuff to do in Deep Rock will be available as their own game modes alongside a separate Vanilla module that can spit out events and game modes from every season—and all of that’s coming as part of DRG season 5 this June.

As part of that, every single season’s tree of unlockables, their Performance Pass and Cosmetic Tree, will be put back in circulation as part of their own seasonal play mode. If you played that season before, you’ll get set back to where you were on that tree.

It’s an approach we’re seeing more and more limited-time-experience live service games adopt as time goes on: There’s a lot of game to play, so why restrict it to a limited amount of time when people might not be able to play it? With the notable exception of genre-leader Destiny 2, of course, which routinely removes big chunks of stuff to keep the game install at a reasonable size.

A cooperative shooter about science-fiction Dwarven miners on a funky-shaped asteroid planet, Deep Rock Galactic has had …

Watch On

The ever-growing genre of games that mimic the old top-down Zelda titles has another entry with Ogu and the Secret Forest. Releasing on Steam at the end of last month, Ogu has gotten a fairly positive reception from early players. The hand-drawn 2D art and characters are certainly pretty charming, as is little hat-wearing net-swinging platypus protagonist Ogu.

Gameplay emphasizes exploring the world to find puzzles, secrets, and mysteries in order to recover some magical doodads or other. Trailers and gifs show a pretty cool variety of puzzle types. I can see push-object puzzles sokoban style, some mazes made of gates that rise and fall in  patterns, even a match-the-tones style pattern puzzle using musical instruments.

Unlike some other entries in the genre, Ogu does still have the combat elements that were key to older top-down action-adventure games.

That means little enemies for sure, but it also seems like Ogu has an emphasis on some pretty tough bosses to beat. Battles against those bosses are unforgiving, requiring you to really learn how they attack to avoid the pattern and get in your hits while you can. 

There are also cute th…

Sorcerers are Diablo 4’s ultimate chameleons with the number of builds they have capable of crushing the RPG’s upcoming leaderboards. Last time, it was a lightning build that was so fast it made the game a slideshow, and now it’s a build that fills your screen with bouncy fireballs.

Diablo 4 streamer Rob2628 is back with a build that uses the same structure as the Arc Lash build, but ramps up the damage by using Fireball in combination with a Unique pair of gloves.

The Gloves of the Illuminator, which you can find pretty easily, turn your Fireballs into basketballs and cause them to bounce and explode for slightly less damage than usual. With loads of attack speed, you can dump buckets of them out as you jump from room to room with Teleport. Enemies instantly turn into ash with this setup, so you don’t even need to worry about having defensive gear on.

There are a few key parts of the setup that make it work:

• Gloves of the Illuminator make Fireballs bounce
• Flickerstep boots lets you spam Teleport and reset your Ultimate skill cooldown
• Tibault’s Will leggings give you a huge damage increase and refill your mana when you Teleport

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A Reddit thread by user zerger45 is swearing that Diablo 4’s rats will lead you to legendary loot, which wouldn’t on its own be news, except for the fact that over 8,000 people seem to agree with them. That, or they’re just throwing their voices into the new rat cult for kicks, hoping some rodent genuflection might result in one of Diablo 4’s mega-rare loot drops. Either way, I’m concerned we have another cow-level pipedream on our hands.

“Okay this is going to sound really bizarre, but you need to follow the rats for good loot. Don’t follow the predetermined path in any dungeon, instead, just follow the rats. The rats smell the cheese! I’m telling you it’s real,” types zerger45 in a somewhat religious trance. “I found multiple legendaries doing this within a span of maybe 10 minutes.”

Fellow co-conspirator LuxSolisPax comments: “I know most of us are joking, but following the animals has led me to [plant resources]. Following the rats doesn’t sound that ridiculous in that context,” they add: “There’s other things too. Every time I’ve seen an NPC at the beginning of a dungeon crawling and screaming about how the place is doomed that I can’t interact…

The dream of any sci-fi fan is a functioning holodeck. Just step into a humble room and be transported into another world, time period (probably in 1930’s Chicago, if you’re one particularly popular sci-fi TV show), get up to hijinks, and come crashing back into reality when it all goes dreadfully wrong. Well, sci-fi fans, you’re in luck because Disney just showed off a floor that looks incredible for limitless traversal in a small space.

In a video homage to Disney Research Fellow and Imagineer Lanny Smoot, who is set to join the prestigious ranks of the National Inventors Hall of Fame, the inventor showed off the incredible floor. It’s called HoloTile, and it’s one of the sleekest VR flooring solutions I’ve seen.

“It will automatically do whatever it needs to have me stay on the floor,” Smoot says.

“Multiple people can be on it and all walking independently. They can walk in virtual reality and so many other things.”

Disney actually shows a clip of multiple users walking on the device at the same time. It’s pretty impressive, if a little dangerous if you’re not careful. Though it’s not often you see a VR walking solution that works for two or more peopl…

It’s still common for big-budget games to launch with Denuvo’s Anti-Tamper anti-piracy software, and it’s also common for those games’ performance problems to be blamed on said DRM. Irdeto, the digital security company that bought Denuvo in 2018 (and previously tried to force Overwatch porn offline), has denied its software is responsible for those issues, most recently in an interview with Ars Technica. 

Steve Huin, chief operating officer of videogames at Irdeto, claimed that comparisons using cracked versions of games that load faster and run more smoothly are inaccurate, because they’re rarely based on the exact same version of a game. “There might be over the lifetime of the game a protected and unprotected version,” Huin said, “but these are not comparable because these are different builds over six months, many bug fixes, etc., which could make it better or worse.”

Huin is aware that simply saying this won’t prove anything to the legion of players who blame Denuvo for every framerate drop they experience. “Our voice is unfortunately not sufficient to convince people because we’re not trusted in their mind as a starting point in that debate,” he said.&nbsp…

Diablo 4 has been in the wild for over a week now, and one of its occasional delights is the wild: the glimpses of fauna amidst the hell-beasts, the cute little bunnies out snuffling for food as the battle twixt good and evil unfolds around them. Inevitably, as you and the forces of hell are splashing AoEs across Sanctuary, there is collateral damage. And while you’ll never weep a tear for the thousands of ghouls slaughtered, seeing the corpse of a fluffy thing caught in the crossfire surely melts even a Demon Hunter’s heart.

For reasons best known to itself, Blizzard decided this was just the job for what I’m going to call the game’s worst achievement: Endangered Species. The achievement gives a list of various wildlife in the game that players have to work their way through and, presented with such instructions, the deadliest min-maxers in Sanctuary set out to hunt down innocent wildlife that has nothing to do with heaven or hell.

Diablo 4 launched on June 6, and the only thing we can say for our animal friends is they had a good run. Over the first few days sheep, roosters, goats and donkeys were shanked by the truck-load, but a few hardy animals managed to avoid …

I suppose it was only a matter of time before Taskmaster got its own VR game. The game show, in case you’re unfamiliar with it, is about giving celebrities and comedians increasingly absurd tasks to fulfil—with very few clues on how to get those tasks done.

Similarly, a lot of great VR games offer an experience that’s basically just that: a vague task, a physical space to muck about in, and absolutely zero training. Most of the physical comedy in VR Games is decidedly Taskmaster, they’re just based around figuring out how to reload a gun, rather than throwing something over a fence.

I’ll be honest: I don’t think Taskmaster VR is going to set the world on fire. It’s a licensed TV show game. It does, however, look like a bit of clean fun, fumbling about in 3D space while Greg Davies (a British comedian and actor known for being dry, witty, and very goddamn tall) critiques your performance.

Uh, speaking of—the art style really is something. Like, actually pretty good for a low-stakes licensed game. It’s trying to veer away from the uncanny valley of other TV show adaptations, which is good. But it’s also a little too good. Seeing Davi…

September 2023 provided a prime example of why we can’t have nice things, as an anniversary collaboration between Amsterdam’s Van Gogh museum and the Pokémon Company descended into scalper-fuelled chaos. The event was intended to celebrate the museum’s 50th anniversary and featured Van Gogh-inspired art of Pokémon by key series artists: but the big mistake was that attendance came with a limited-edition Pokémon card.

As soon as the exhibition opened, it was flooded by unscrupulous individuals looking to get as many cards as they could, and sell them online at a huge mark-up. The card in question is Pikachu with Grey Felt Hat, inspired by Van Gogh’s Self-Portrait with Grey Felt Hat, and currently goes on eBay for anything between $100-350. Just over two weeks after opening, the Van Gogh museum threw its hands up, and stopped distributing the cards entirely.

The exhibition nevertheless continued as scheduled until its closing date on January 7, 2024. And now one further twist, first reported by the Dutch paper Het Parool, is that four employees of the Van Gogh museum were suspended in relation to the Pokémon exhibition i…

Ask a Final Fantasy 14 diehard what mods they use and many of them will say GShade, a fork of Reshade that lets you customize the game’s visuals. GShade has long been the tool to make the MMO (and several other games) look pretty for screenshots, allowing you to add shaders for a more vibrant or avant-garde aesthetic.

GShade, at least for the moment, is gone. Its creator, Marot Satil, announced in the GPOSERS Discord that it “will not receive updates for the time being.” But at the time of this writing, GShade’s GitHub page, including Satil’s account, have been removed.

Over the last few days, Satil has been battling another modder, NotNite, who made an alternative version of the software called GeezShade. GeezShade is essentially a fork of ReShade that uses a workaround to download and install most of the custom shaders from GShade.

“[GShade’s] installer is a total mess that also is not open source,” NotNite wrote on their blog. “Of course, monkey see and monkey get idea – let’s install ReShade with the GShade shaders!”

NotNite also made an online tool to patch GShade and fix how it works when there’s a new update available. Usually, GShade disables itse…

Dwarf Fortress just can’t stop winning. After blasting through its two-month sales estimate and hitting almost half a million copies sold in under a month, co-creator Tarn Adams came out yesterday and told players precisely how much money the game has earned since its December Steam release: $7,230,123, and 58 cents.

That’s around £5.9 million or €6.6 million, and it’s just slightly more than the $15,635 (£12.7k/€14.2k) that Dwarf Fortress earned in the month prior to its release on Steam. That’s more than a 46,000% increase, by my reckoning (and by my reckoning I mean the reckoning of this online calculator I used to do the sum, so I’m blaming that if my figures are wrong). That’s a life-changing shift, and not just because it’s allowed Adams and his brother Zach to hire an unprecedented second programmer. 

“The appreciation you give us is part of our being now,” wrote Adams, “It carries us in the cars we drive. It sustains us as the food that we eat. There is now no longer any existence except the one that you have provided”.

It won’t all go to the creators, of course. Adams says that a “little less than half will go to taxes,” as w…

Look, I’m not one to stifle creativity, but someone probably needs to restrain the world’s marketing departments until we figure out what’s going on. As spotted by PCGamesN, CCL Computers—a UK PC parts company—has ginned up the most baffling Starfield-themed competition yet. It’s launched a gaming PC to “the outer edges of the Earth’s atmosphere” over the UK to celebrate the launch of Bethesda’s long-awaited space epic, and then used it to dump a bunch of golden tickets across dear old Albion.

Those tickets, which “contain vouchers for free products” on CCL’s store, are expected to land in “the midlands and south of the UK,” so I guess those of us up north shouldn’t waste time combing the woods this weekend. One of them, the so-called “star prize,” will also net you a trip to Bethesda. Not the company, no. Not the place in Maryland either. Instead, this ticket will take you to Bethesda, Wales, which, hey, close enough.

Honestly, except for the fact that the PC is kinda, sorta, almost going to space (which is where Starfield is set, don’t you know), I’m not sure what relation Starfield has to the CCL competition. Perhaps the PC parts you c…

Bungie composer Ella Feingold, who has been orchestrating Destiny since 2015, has posted an image on Instagram of a score sheet with a notable name on it: P. McCartney (spotted by VGC). The title of the composition has been obscured, while the orchestration is credited to Feingold and Jordan Cox, and lest there were any doubt, Feingold’s caption reads “Yeah that P. McCartney. That’s all I can say for now.” 

Paul McCartney is one of the most prolific and influential songwriters and performers of our time, and best-known for being the driving force of The Beatles. He composed several tracks and motifs that went into shaping the original Destiny’s soundtrack, with credits on five of the eight tracks that feature in The Music of Destiny: Volume 1, and various other credits on the full OST. Most notably McCartney composed and performed Hope for the Future, released as a single, and seen by some as Destiny’s theme.

Paul McCartney for Final Shape”

Unfortunately, Bungie and its longtime composer Marty O’Donnell had a major falling out in 2014, the repercussions of which have been ongoin…

I feel like at this point, it’s a rite of passage to spend hours in a character creator, meticulously tweaking every slider, colour picker, and back-and-forthing between two voice options, their battle cries echoing in your skull for the next several hours… only to get into the actual game and realise you hate everything about them. It’s an even more mortifying occurrence when it happens in an MMO, a genre that traditionally wants you to cough up a couple extra bucks for the pleasure of changing your character.

As someone personally guilty of forking out for an extra Fantasia just to make my Viera slightly more tanned, I’m very grateful to the change Final Fantasy 14 is making which will give Fantasia-heads a 60-minute grace period after using one. It’ll be implemented with upcoming expansion Dawntrail, which is set to release on July 2 (with early access on June 28).

The change was announced during the most recent Letter from the Producer livestream, where director and producer Naoki Yoshida said: “You want to see your character in action in locations that you have gotten familiar seeing your character in, and we did receive a lot of feedback about how ‘we wa…

It’s been a long time coming. But 4K gaming panels are edging inexorably towards genuine affordability. And that includes premium models, like the Dough Spectrum One.

At launch a few years ago, this was an $800 panel. Now it’s yours for just $369 from NewEgg. There are two fairly obvious catches. First, like all variants of the Spectrum One it doesn’t come with a stand. If you already have some kind of VESA arm, you’re good to go. But Dough’s own stand will cost you $100.

The other snag is that this is the OG matte version, not the glossy follow up. Generally, we love glossy for the heightened impact and sense of contrast. But not everyone agrees.

What’s more, if you use your monitor in an environment with lots of ambient light, a matte anti-glare coating can be a godsend. So, you pays your money and you takes your choice.

Either way, what you are getting is a sweet 27-inch IPS panel with crispy 4K pixel density and 144Hz refresh. The Spectrum One is also HDR600 certified, so it’s extremely punchy when it comes to brightness.

It’s also much more nicely built than your average budget monitor and sports a USB-C interface with fully 100W of power deliv…

Each new season of fantasy football parody Blood Bowl 3 promises a new Blood Pass and a new team that can either be unlocked by paying for said Blood Pass or earning your way up to the top of its free tier. The first season’s team, the Lizardmen, were given away for free, while the subsequent teams—the Underworld Denizens and now the Shambling Undead—will cost you either time or money.

The Shambling Undead will be familiar to players of the previous Blood Bowls, where they were simply called the “Undead”. Presumably the new name helps differentiate them from the Vampires and Necromantic teams, though there’s nothing shambling about a ghoul pissbolting into your endzone. The Shambling Undead also feature mummies, high-strength blockers who don’t suffer from weaknesses like stupidity or a tendency to put down literal roots like a lot of equivalent big guys do, and wights, who make solid blitzers. The rest of the roster is filled out with skeletons and zombies, cheap chaff whose main benefit is their resilience.

The Shambling Undead are a top-tier team, but whether you think they’re worth forking out 1,000 warpstone to get via the Blood Pass is another matte…

First reported by Eurogamer, a couple of modders on the Nexus have already started finding ways to curtail the Dragonsplague in Dragon’s Dogma 2, with remedies ranging from clearer signs of the disease to out and out removing it from the game.

For the uninitiated, the Dragonsplague spreads through Dragon’s Dogma 2’s pawns, the little henchmen you can create, pick up, or trade via asynchronous multiplayer. Sometimes you’ll notice a pawn has a headache and glowing red eyes⁠—from there it’s just a hop skip and a jump to them turning into a dragon and murdering NPC quest givers. One infected pawn can spread it among your crew, who can then take it to other players’ worlds through the online sharing system.

It’s a genuinely scary, innovative simulation of a disease’s spread, complete with a sense of dread and incomplete knowledge as to who’s infected or not. Dealing with Dragonsplague requires purging your pawns with extreme prejudice, kicking them out of your party, killing your main pawn—it reminds me of the quarantine platform bit from MGSV. Some players have even tried devising ways of signaling that their pawns are infected.

But let’s say you’…

More than six years after its release, Guilty Gear Xrd Rev 2 is finally getting rollback netcode on Steam.

The feature for Arc System Works’ 2D fighter first went into public beta testing back in October 2022, lasting for a few weeks. It clearly went well, as it’ll be officially rolled out into the game on January 20, bringing it in line with its newer sibling Guilty Gear Strive. It’ll allow for a much smoother experience online, bringing it a little closer to how playing offline feels. It can be one of the biggest make-or-break features for a fighting game—bad netcode can kill a game’s community faster than anything else. Just ask the remaining three SoulCalibur 6 players. (Kidding!)

It’s nice to see Arc System Works continuing to support Xrd, and retroactively fitting fighters with rollback netcode has been a fairly common thing as of late. At EVO 2022, both Dragon Ball FighterZ and Samurai Shodown were announced to be receiving rollback netcode. At the time, both games were around four years old and one year old respectively. It’s definitely a feature that’s preferably boxed in with the game at launch, however. Street Fighter 6 has already announced it’ll be…

There’s no PVP in survival game Enshrouded, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t ways to hurt other players. Despite the 100% co-op nature of player interaction, there have been reports of some dastardly deeds being done in multiplayer sessions. No one’s died yet, but friendly co-op vibes have definitely been hacked to death.

Enshrouded works a lot like Valhiem, where the characters you create aren’t tied to servers you created them on. You can take your character and their belongings to any server or world you like, and whatever you collect there—weapons, gear, resources, even skills—all comes with you when you disconnect. 

This sort of system is useful if you decide to take all your stuff and play somewhere else, like a friend’s server, or if you choose to leave a multiplayer server and play somewhere else. The problems begin when people start abusing the system by taking stuff that doesn’t belong to them and vanishing forever.

It’s just like Michael Corleone said in The Godfather: Keep your friends close but your enemies closer, and keep your multiplayer servers password-protected.

“Just had two f*cks come into me and my partners world a…

Still basking in a post-BAFTA sweep afterglow, Larian has shared an update on Steam detailing what to expect from Baldur’s Gate 3 in the immediate future, and from the studio further down the line. The marquee inclusions of Baldur’s Gate 3’s upcoming Patch 7 are the game’s expanded evil ending cutscenes, a corollary to the feel-good party all the well-adjusted and happy gamers already got. Spoilers for all those endings ahead.

The post shared three teasers of what the new endings entail. They seem to be extended cutscenes instead of the small playable segment of Withers’ Party, but that fits the tone and the content I think⁠—who are you going to be chatting up after the dust clears when you’re the dark lord of everything? The first visual teaser is a brief shot of Absolute Tav dominating a crowd of innocent Baldurians with their new brain god mind powers. Pretty sick, pretty evil, makes sense.

The second visual was way up my alley though: it’s almost assuredly from the Dark Urge’s Bhaalist ending, where you embrace your heritage as a child of the god of murder and harness the Absolute in the name of some kind of brutal, omnicidal apocalypse. The …

As a wise man once said: Bigger. Any school child can tell you that the worth of a thing is directly commensurate with its size, and that expands to Diablo 4 too. How else do you explain the fervent interest generated by Reddit user Ironheart_777’s discovery (via Icy Veins) of the world’s biggest Butcher, a recklessly large version of one of Diablo’s most infamous and deadly enemies?

So uh… anyone know why we found a Giant Butcher? He appeared this big from r/diablo4

Look at that guy! You thought the default Butcher was bad? Get a load of this lumbering stack of meat. Ironheart_777 says they were running nightmare dungeons with some friends when the world’s stompiest boy careened from the shadows, putting the fear of god in all of them and sending them stretching for the screenshot key. If you want a scale comparison, you can see PCG’s Andy Chalk go up against the default, relatively puny Butcher over here, and here’s a full-size version of the voluminous chap that Ironheart_777 ran into.

What made this particular Butcher so substantial? Fans have a convincing theory. Reddit user swissarmywolf reckons that nightmare …

Bethesda’s “next gen” update for Fallout 4 continues to cause problems. Released in April, two years after it was announced, the 14GB patch was impressive due to how little it actually changed, aside from breaking everyone’s precious mods. The timing couldn’t have been worse, either, coinciding as it did with the planned arrival of the gargantuan Fallout: London mod. The team had to then delay the mod’s launch while it figured out how to fix what the update broke. 

The good news is that the end is in sight with the team and GOG, which is helping to distribute the mod, just double-checking that everything is working as it should. But there’s a catch. See, the issues created by Bethesda’s update proved to be insurmountable, and even after patches things like ultrawide support and VATS are still broken. So the team abandoned the current version of Fallout 4, and to play the mod when it launches you’ll need to downgrade the post-apocalyptic RPG to an earlier version.

This shouldn’t be a big problem for most players. GOG is offering a rollback feature for the version sold on its store, as well as working on downgrading options on Steam—either via a dedicated to…

Final Fantasy 16 is almost here… well, not for us. But you know, for PlayStation 5 owners it’s almost here. We’re going to have to wait a little bit longer for the latest entry in Square Enix’s long-running RPG to grace our beloved PC setups, unfortunately. How long, you ask? I dunno. I’m not even sure director Naoki Yoshida knows. First, we weren’t getting a PC port at all—please buy a PS5 wink-wink nudge-nudge—now the answer seems to be that we’re definitely not getting it as soon as console exclusivity lifts, but it’s happening at some point. 

Perhaps one of the benefits of missing out for an undetermined amount of time is being privy to all the reviews and initial reception far in advance. Am I coping? A little, but the reviews are in from a ton of sites and while general critiques are aligning across sites, there seems to be quite the score spread. There’s a bit of a mixed response to its Game of Thrones-esque story and the side quests haven’t quite hit with everyone. It definitely errs on the higher end of the scale though, and with Final Fantasy 16 currently sitting at a very impressive score of 88 on Metacritic, here’s what some…

Been sitting at your desk thinking thoughts like “Man, I really wish I could play Ninja Master’s: Haoh Ninpo Cho again” or “Gee, will they just put Top Hunter: Roddy & Cathy on PC already?!” No? Well, maybe someone out there is, and it’s their lucky day. GOG just threw a whole load more SNK games on its platform and popped them all on sale along with the rest of its SNK catalogue.

Okay, I will be fair and say it’s not just the obscure games that have made an appearance. The King of Fighters ’97 (Global Match) and The King of Fighters 2003 have been added, along with Samurai Shodown 4: Amasuka’s Revenge, Over Top, and Metal Slug 4. They’re all available for less than $5 right now too, as are most of the games currently on sale.

You can nab some of the newer KOF games for anywhere from $2.99 to $8.99, while the original Metal Slug is going for a measly $1.99 right now. If sports games are more your bag, you can grab Soccer Brawl or Super Sidekicks for $4.79, while Baseball Stars 2 is going for $1.79 during the sale. 

If you’re looking to get some real bang for your buck, the SNK 40th Anniversary Collection is currently 80% off in the sale, down from $29.…

Final Fantasy 14 producer Naoki Yoshida has issued an apology for some prominent technical issues that have arisen during the early access test period for its latest expansion.The Dawntrail expansion has been overall very well-received, but the prominent performance issues—especially on Xbox—led to Yoshida sharing an apology on FF14’s website.

The biggest issue right now is Dawntrail’s Xbox version, which will sometimes stop responding when transitioning between different areas like leaving a city or hopping between field locations. The developer’s investigation indicates it might be a memory fragmentation problem, so for now they recommend players stick to low-population worlds to better avoid it. A fix for that is in the pipe.

There is also an issue with how animations play and how certain characters display, as well as a problem with the freezing mechanics in a few dungeons, like the Syrcus Tower alliance raid. Those fixes are in the works as well, with a client patch to be deployed knocking them out.

“Despite our efforts to correct and fine-tune the graphics in the final moments before the release of Dawntrail, these issues were unfortunately id…

Update: That was fast! Over 10,000 requests are in the queue, and codes are being emailed out now in the order they were requested.

Welcome, PC Gaming Show viewers and anyone else who had the good fortune to stumble into this little trove of treasures: If you’re looking for a free month of PC Game Pass, you’re in the right place! Show sponsor Microsoft has provided us 10,000 codes to give away.

A PC Game Pass membership grants access to a big library of games that includes classics like Fallout: New Vegas as well as brand new games such as Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2 and Little Kitty, Big City.

Other notable games available on PC Game Pass right now include Manor Lords, Diablo 4 (the latest season is great), all the main Fallout games (including Fallout Tactics), Palworld, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, Minecraft, and Starfield.

New games are added monthly, and PC Gamer’s most anticipated game, Stalker 2, is one the list of upcoming additions—it’s scheduled to launch in September, and will be available day one on Game Pass. Brutal city building survival sim Frostpunk 2 will also hit Game Pass after it launches in J…

The science-fantasy 4X Endless Legend is free on Steam until May 23, or until they run out of their supply of nebulously free games. That’s free to keep, forever, by the way—apparently when they gave it away for free earlier this year they considered it a real success and so they’re doing it again.

As part of the sale all of Endless Legend’s expansion DLC is on sale from 50-80% off, meaning you can grab the complete edition it including all DLC for just $16.

Endless legend is a Civilization-like 4X game, but the twist is that it’s on a science fantasy planet that’s sliding into what may well be a permanent ice age. The other twist is that the factions you play as are wildly divergent. One’s made of conflict-averse nomads that can just up and move their cities. Another’s some smooth-talking dragons that are so good at diplomacy they can just un-declare any war you start with them. A third is made up of weird magical vampires that don’t eat food at all.

PC Gamer has been on team Endless Legend for nearly a decade now, since an 89% review back in October 2014, and it remains on our list of the best strategy games on PC. A position that it’s likely to retain …

Intel’s struggles have been going on for so long that this was kind of inevitable. But it’s still somewhat notable that it’s happened. The first somewhat substantive rumour that the company is giving serious thought to spinning off its chip production fabs has emerged.

Business news outlet Bloomberg is not a font of infallible wisdom. Not everything it reports always comes true. But it’s a major news outlet, and very well connected. 

With that in mind, Bloomberg reports that Intel is currently weighing up the pros and cons of spinning off its fabs. In other words, Intel is considering whether it should sell the factories that make all of its CPUs (well, that used to make all of its CPUs before those fabs ran into troubles and Intel was forced to ask TSMC to make some of its chips, like Lunar Lake).

Intel would then be more like Nvidia and AMD, companies that only design chips and do not actually manufacture them. Actually, it would be very much like AMD, since AMD once had its own fabs and then sold them off into a separate entity known as GlobalFoundries.

GlobalFoundries remained a major manufacturing partner for AMD for a time after the spin off. B…

January 25, 2024: The developer has now announced the official name Sunkissed City, which you can find and wishlist on Steam.

While the list of games like Stardew Valley just keeps growing, the list of games made by Stardew’s creator is still percolating. Eric “ConcernedApe” Barone’s own next game Haunted Chocolatier is still deep in development, but it turns out that a former Stardew contributor is also working on a new life sim that may even arrive this year. The as-yet-untitled game definitely looks like a Stardew descendant, but this one’s set in a city and has a lot of its own neat ideas on expanding the typical life sim script.

As spotted by RockPaperShotgun, freelance game developer Arthur Lee (who’s credited as part of the Stardew Valley team during development of the 1.5 update) is working on an untitled new life sim and sharing weekly details about development on X. Though it remains untitled at the moment, he’s expecting it to involve the name “Apollo City” after the game’s main setting.

Though it’s definitely set in a city, with a ramen shop and city blocks and so on, it’s still very much a farm sim where you’…

If you’ve ever played Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, then you’ll probably remember just how rhythmic and fluid the fighting is. Armed with a samurai sword and a prosthetic arm, there’s more of an onus placed on precise timing and dancing around your opponent than you may find in other souls games. But this style isn’t as much of a one-off as it may seem. While later souls games like Elden Ring certainly share some DNA, studio president Hidetaka Miyazaki believes the future of souls games will build off what Sekiro tried to perfect. 

In an interview with Game Informer, Miyazaki talks about how the relationship between offense and defense during battles has changed: “It’s become something much more fluid and active, I think, which was a very defining characteristic of Sekiro, and it’s something I’ve been thinking about since Bloodborne.” 

I found that one of the most significant changes to combat in Sekiro is the posture meter, which fills up each time you block an enemy’s attack. If you just block without taking a break, then the meter will fill up and leave you vulnerable to an attack. At first, I opted to back up and try to slow fights down from my end, but th…

I’ve always maintained that if you don’t have an original character (OC) you’re obsessed with when you start playing Final Fantasy 14, you’ll definitely have one by the time you finish it.

Despite the fact that the Warrior of Light is a blank slate, the game somehow manages to give you a big narrative arc over its massive runtime. I love hearing how other players interpret those story beats, often coming to completely different conclusions about which moments were significant to their characters. It’s a narrative act of sleight of hand I’ve not yet seen repeated.

So while someone making a 5ft statue of their OC might seem a touch over the top, if I had half the talent as Reddit user Incanit, I’d definitely consider immortalising my hyur in bronze.

It took me nearly 450hours through half a year to sculpt and cast, and now i am presenting you my FFXIV character’s 150cm bronze statue – Warrior of Light Yoko Akatsuki from r/ffxiv

According to Incanit, this thing weighs 135kg (just shy of 300lbs), owing to a hollow construction. Sculpting isn’t even their main line of work, as they write in a comment on the ensuing thread:…

Fans of part-time battle royale and full-time brand chimaera Fortnite are in an uproar right now, following an update to the game’s Creative mode islands that’s left players unable to equip some of their paid cosmetics.

The update in question is Fortnite’s introduction of island age ratings. Released yesterday, the new patch has made it so that the game’s islands—spaces mostly created by players where they have full creative reign—can now be given their own age ratings. That means island makers can, if they so choose, set a rating lower than Fortnite’s own T for Teen ESRB rating on their created spaces.

All well and good, except Fortnite’s head-spinning array of cosmetic items also have their own age ratings now. Try to equip a cosmetic rated T for Teen on an island with a lower E10+ or E rating, and you’ll find that it’s been replaced by a dull and miserly default skin, no matter how much you paid for it.

A lot of players are outraged by the change. Sure, Fortnite’s main modes are still rated Teen—meaning you can equip whatever cosmetics you want in them without fuss—but there are still plenty of players who spend a bunch of ti…

Long gone are the days where you couldn’t leave your designated server in Final Fantasy 14. A patch in 2019 introduced the ability to hop between servers within your data center, before an update in 2022 went one step further and let folk hop between data centers within their region. Players hoped that it would extend to cross-region travel, but that hasn’t been the case. Until now. Kind of.

Here’s the good news: Cross-region travel is being trialled, beginning on March 25 and continuing until Dawntrail releases. Here’s the potentially bad news: You can only hop over to the Oceanian data center. That means that players on Japanese, North American and European servers will be able to travel over to Oceanian servers, but Oceanian players are stuck right where they are. 

It does make sense to use the Oceanian data center as a guinea pig. It’s by far the least populated of the four regions—it was only added in 2022, and while some folk migrated over, many chose to stay behind in their already established communities. It’s the perfect testing ground, and it looks like if things go well it’ll be used to ease congestion when the upcoming expansion Dawntrail relea…