Posts

Take-Two announced yesterday that they’re looking to snap up all Zynga shares, paying a mixture of cash and Take-Two stock to shareholders. That’ll value the company at $12.7 billion, which frankly is an imaginary quantity of money. At this level of business, what even is numbers? Take-Two and Zynga’s boards have approved of the deal, though it’s still dependent on shareholders and regulators giving the go-ahead. They expect to complete it sometime from March to the end of June....

While the patch notes don’t offer a single standout change to get excited about, in aggregate they represent a substantial improvement. Some of the fixes included are for years-old bugs, such as “the Iron Bomber’s projectile collision size not matching other projectile collision sizes.” Other changes include updates to localisation files, new console commands to help server operators, and fixes for substantial bugs in the Mann vs. Machine and Arena modes....

Frankly, it’s a crime neither Dontnod nor the moneymen at Xbox Games Studios never licensed the Backstreet Boys for at least one of Tell Me Why’s trailers. I’d want it that way, is all I’m saying. In line with the studio’s stable of supernatural small-town American narratives, Tell Me Why follows the Ronan Twins, Tyler and Alyson, as they dig into childhood memories back in their Alaskan hometown. Beyond folksy family drama and a magical world known as “The Book of Goblins”, however, the key here is that - following Life Is Strange’s focus on queer relationships - Dontnod are now taking on a trans narrative with lead character Tyler....

You can play the demo for yourself on the game’s site. It lets you experience the first part of the story, making choices and doing a little bit of combat to give you a feel for it. It kind of resembles those old bedtime story things the BBC used to do, you know, if the BBC had challenged you to escape a dungeon full of orcs. The demo can be a little off-putting at times because the choices you’re given always include one that just says “buy the full game”....

Keep reading for our list of the very best Factorio mods for 1.0 out there, along with instructions on how to get started downloading mods of all shapes and sizes to augment your game. The best Factorio mods Factorio has been in Early Access since 2016, and playable for quite a while before that, too. In that time, a great many different kinds of mods have sprung up to help expand the game....

Looking for a broader mixture of games? Check out our regularly updated list of the best PC games you can play right now. Best non-violent games Primarily we’re talking violence-free games here, but I wanted to drill a little deeper than that - so nothing that generally requires a competitive streak. I’m chasing a certain feel rather than a certain category. Flying, walking, puzzling, driving, building, dreaming, climbing, stretching, swinging (not like that), swimming, wondering: these are just a few of the ways in which flashing pixels can make you feel a very different sort of accomplishment....

I must admit, it’s a bit of a lonely one this week, as the man who looks suspiciously like Guillermo del Toro told our Sam (in the shower, no less) that BB is actually a bit ill and needs a bit of R&R before we can continue our trip. We try to have fun on our own, but it sure ain’t the same. We miss you, BB.

Get the LG Ultrawide 25UM58 for £110 (was £170) This monitor should be a pretty awesome choice for slower-paced games like Civilization or Forza Horizon 5, where you’re enjoying the atmosphere and taking your time to choose your next move. The IPS panel assures good colour accuracy and wide viewing angles, and the 5ms GtG response times and 75Hz refresh rate mean that faster-paced content shouldn’t fare too badly. Contrast will be lacking, in common with other IPS panels, but you can at least rely on 99% sRGB coverage which should allow you to use this monitor for light content creation workloads too....

The most significant digression this week is how Matthew is a serial killer who makes his victims into chocolate-coated mannequins, which runs throughout the whole episode. And how many sharks would Aloy from Horizon Zero Dawn strangle at the London aquarium? Probably a lot. You can listen above, or on on Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, or Pocket Casts. You can find the RSS feed here, and you can discuss the episode on our Discord channel, which has a dedicated room for podcast chat....

Which brings me to Wattam, a game of action, exploration and puzzles, and like Untitled Goose Game, it’s an offline game that could be viewed as a microcosm of online spaces. Think of each of Wattam’s sandbox islands as a server and the hundred-odd objects around the world as its users. While the core of Wattam is about building connections with each other, it’s also about explosions and poops, sometimes at the same time....

It’s one of many outcomes made possible by the grab button - in retrospect, the finest part of Assassin’s Creed 2’s busy, experimental moveset. This was back when Patrice Désilets still held the reins, and pursued a strange strategy whereby the face buttons on a controller corresponded to parts of the protagonist’s body. Square and Circle represented the arms, and so the latter could be used to gently push through a crowd in ‘low profile’, or deal rather more forcibly with the citizenry in ‘high profile’....

You can build some fairly small, standard-looking starships to begin with in The Last Starship, but it looks like that’ll expand to let you create some bloomin’ great hulking space vessels later on. These seem to be in pretty much whatever shape you like, too. The trailer shows gigantic, scarab-shaped monstrosities propelled by rows of giant engines, and some truly giant lads that could give Homeworld’s carriers pause for thought....

“Lord Of The Rings is about large areas, then a castle at the end or a fortress - what’s like that?”, asks Callisto Protocol director Glen Schofield in the video below. “Tiger Woods”, he answers. Huh. We know this thanks to Wired, who’ve made a vid where they put questions from Twitter to Schofield. Skip ahead 30 seconds for the Golf reveal. In response to someone asking why developers are too lazy to make their own engines, Schofield explains that creating engines from scratch is, obviously, hard and time-consuming....

For UpperCut, Grace Curtis spoiled Life Sim games forever. She’s managed to describe the listlessness that crept into my Stardew Valley farm so eloquently that the prospect of ever booting up something similar now fills me with dread. Thanks, Curtis. For Polygon, Kazuma Hashimoto demonstrated how Ghost of Tsushima doesn’t grapple with the nuanced depictions of samurai that the developers were inspired by, and is a worse game for it....

I’m excited to report that I spent over an hour with the game alongside Shiny Shoe’s CEO Mark Cooke and creative director Andrew Krausnick, who were not only lovely but put up with my incredible ability to fumble my turns. Still, I was impressed by how the game’s speedy combat matched its roguelike needs, as it pushed us through even the trickiest of scenarios - as opposed to other strategy games which can feel like trudging through a sea of glue....

It seems EA and Koei Tecmo’s partnership is helping to bring the game outside of Japan. “Adding the global resources of EA with our own will help us introduce a new kind of hunting game to a global audience of players and expand our reach into global markets,” Koei Tecmo’s Executive Vice President, Yosuke Hayashi, said. A spokesperson for EA said that the new game showed Toukiden 2 developer Omega Force’s “proven talent for combat gameplay”....

Twelve months later, the roster of RTX 30 series GPUs – all built on Nvidia’s Ampere architecture – has grown to nine models, including more powerful Ti versions of the original RTX 3080 and RTX 3070. Actually buying one, sadly, is only a marginally less awful experience than it was on the RTX 3080’s big day. Considering Nvidia’s tendency to launch new architectures every two years, is it even worth holding out for RTX 30-series stock?...

Sony DualSense controller - Black (£44.99, was £60) Sony DualSense controller - White (£46.99, was £60) Sony DualSense controller - Cosmic Red (£44.99, was £60) Sony DualSense controller - Nova Pink (£44.99, was £60) Despite being ostensibly a PS5 controller, the DualSense has received a fair amount of coverage here at the good ship RPS thanks to its popularity amongst PC gamers for its comfy design, precise thumbsticks and adaptive triggers....

Skyrim Together Reborn is available for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Edition, and was developed by a group of mostly student modders in their free time. The team announced on the project’s subreddit last week that they were almost ready to launch, despite initially planning for today’s release to be a beta. However, they “were able to make some last-minute improvements, and we are now ready to do a full release instead (version 1....