Новости за 15.05.2024

We’re just a couple of days away from Ghost of Tsushima’s PC release date, as the former PlayStation exclusive prepares to drop its Director's Cut - including its expansion and multiplayer DLC - on Steam. Having recently cleared up the question around whether you’ll need to sign in with a PSN account after the Helldivers 2 debacle - yes, if you want to play the co-op mode - developers Nixxes and Sucker Punch have now revealed that the login requirement will mean multiplayer won’t work on Steam Deck. Читать дальше...

After teasing an upcoming chapter inspired by Dungeons & Dragons, Dead by Daylight has revealed its next killer pulled from the pages of the fantasy pen-and-paper RPG: Vecna, long-running mega-baddie and inspiration for the Stranger Things villain. He’ll be voiced by Critical Role dungeon master Matthew Mercer and haunt a new dungeon map, where you’ll be able to do battle as new elf and bard survivors able to roll a literal d20 when they crack open treasure chests.

After being unceremoniously thrown into the spotlight yesterday with a pre-reveal leak, Assassin’s Creed Shadows has been given a proper unveiling via a flashy cinematic trailer, confirming both its leaked November release date and revealing that we’ll be playing as two protagonists for the first time in the series since Syndicate almost a decade ago. One of those heroes will also be the series’ first playable real-life figure: the African samurai Yasuke.

Alzara Radiant Echoes is a clear love letter to golden age JRPGs, pulling inspiration from the likes of Golden Sun and Lost Odyssey for a 3D turn-based RPG set in a Mediterranean fantasy world. Dark Souls composer Motoi Sakuraba is on board, along with Genshin Impact and Fire Emblem artist Yoshiro Ambe. And if that hadn’t already sold me already, developers Studio Camelia are also paying tribute to the best Final Fantasy game: FFIX, obviously.

Remember when Control came out and your mate Terry appeared out of nowhere to rant endlessly about how they’ve always loved brutalist architecture? Come on, Terry. No you haven’t. You spend weekends eating custard creams and watching Bake Off. You haven’t thought about brutalism since undergrad, be honest. Anyway, my version of that is Starship Troopers. As in, I’ve been waiting for a videogamey excuse to bang on about it in public for ages. Helldivers 2 is obviously as good an excuse as any, but really, I needn’t have waited so long. Читать дальше...

Graham said he wanted someone to write about Little Kitty, Big City, asked if I liked cats, at which point my soul was possessed by some kind of deep animus. "I really like cats, I just hate the internet UWU nonsense about cats," I said. "God it's awful, I can't stand it, Jesus Christ it's just an empty and terrible way to talk about cats, cats don't deserve to be the internet animal-" at which point Graham managed to interrupt and said I was exactly the person who should write about Little Kitty, Big City. Читать дальше...

Nic reckons Homeworld 3, the long-awaited spacefaring RTS, is mostly pretty good. Qualified hoorays for that, as well as for the fact that it doesn’t make especially mad demands of your hardware: besides netting a Steam Deck Playable badge from Valve, its minimum PC specs only list the likes of the Intel Core i5-6600 and Nvidia’s GTX 1060. Easily doable, for most aspiring galactic admirals.

The characters in Read Only Memories: Neurodiver are deeply into anime. They love manga and figurines and trashy movies and horror novels. The interests of the game's creators have not so much leaked into this fictional world as they have been generously pumped in with an industrial hose. Even the visual novel's loading screens take the form of those two-second intermission panels that flash up to signal an anime's commercial break, complete with random characters announcing the game's name ("Neurodiver!"). In moments like that... Читать дальше...

Last week, I watched one of my favourite badminton players Kento Momota play his final match. As he stepped off court for the last time, I found myself welling up. He doesn't know me - of course he doesn't - and I don't know him. But for ten years I'd watch him at every opportunity and see him grow into one of the all-time greats. For me, his retirement wasn't only devastating in the sense he was a great ambassador for the sport: a positive soul, a good speaker, a hard worker. No, it also spelled... Читать дальше...

I have a couple of takes on Nico Papalia's new RPG Athenian Rhapsody, which launched on Steam yesterday and still has a demo. The first is that it's a brighter, glitzier version of Toby Fox's Undertale that looks like it belongs on Gameboy Advance - a retro parody created in GameMaker whose turn-based combat houses many an inventive minigame, and whose writing doesn't so much break the fourth wall as moonwalk along the parapet, showering the player in poop, anime tropes and off-colour mental health advice. Читать дальше...

Wayfinder, currently a free-to-play RPG developed by Airship Syndicate, is undergoing a pretty drastic change in its upcoming Echoes patch. Right now it's a live-service game with microtransactions, but soon it'll continue as a paid co-op RPG with no in-game monetisation. And that's alongside promised tweaks to how progression works, too. Huh. It's often you see paid games go free-to-play, but this is an unexpected switcheroo.

The Sims 4 is nothing if not a teetering jenga tower of updates and add-ons and DLC packs, and the latter half of 2024 will be no exception for EA's life sim king. Yesterday saw the release of an update to the base game's swimwear, kicking off the updates teased in the recently-revealed new roadmap, Season Of Love. The roadmap video's vibe is that it and its partner saw you from across the bar and wondered if you'd be interested in joining them, and it kind of weirds me out.

I think most would agree that the artist formerly known as Twitter has never been in more need of a thermonuclear cleansing. The Musk era has transformed what was already fondly known as a hellsite into something at once more obnoxious and sadder, whether you're talking about the web3 grifters or the resurgent debate-me cryptofascists or the recommendation algorithm's perceptibly greater enthusiasm for quote-tweet flamebait.

Old-school FPS adventure The Explorator contains much more intense shooty violence than the adorable lizardy folk that populate it might immediately suggest. I really want to use the word ‘zany’ without irony here to describe its hand-drawn 2D style and animations, but I’m afraid that ship has long since sailed into the sun. I’ll go with ‘caffeinated’ I think. Like the Adult Swim cartoons it reminded me of, it’s got a sense of the sardonic and a penchant for violence, but still comes from a place... Читать дальше...