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In a New Year’s letter, Square Enix’s president Yosuke Matsuda expressed the company’s enthusiasm for eye-rolling tech like NFTs and blockchain and the metaverse. He does touch on cloud and AI gaming, but a large portion of his gushing is reserved for “token economies”. Matsuda acknowledges that the majority of those opposed to “play to earn” trends are people who “play to have fun”. Even so, he believes that those who “play to earn” are key to their dystopian future....

If that talk of space pirates caught your attention, here’s the gist of the game’s story from developers 1CC Games: “Betrayed by her cut-throat crew, Luna Starr - former Space Pirate captain turned Bounty Hunter - has a score to settle. As Luna, travel to 5 exotic planets to track down your mutinous mates, and face them in Bullet Hell dogfights to the death!” When you start, you take on the role of Luna Starr, hopping into her ship to fight through wave of enemies before facing off against a big bad named Dol’Arr....

The new trailer has no action. Instead, it shows a meeting between the team and the very buff Lady Hellbender. Like a lot of people standing off in the side-quest spiral of the Marvel universe, she collects things. Monsters, in fact (someone should invent a CCG for the Marvel characters to focus on, it would save a lot of kidnappings). The GotGs need money to keep their ship and plan to con Lady Hellbender by “selling” Groot or Rocket to her....

If there’s one thing I admire about management sims set in space, it’s that they’re usually very colourful. I like the look of Starmancer because it doesn’t look too futuristic either. In lots of the rooms there’s just normal wallpaper, and you can even spot a jukebox in the bedroom. Not everything has to be metallic and harsh-looking in space. In Starmancer, you play as an AI overlord who must grow humans to populate a space station, and then look after them so that they don’t get eaten by aliens....

I was really rooting for it, too. Primarily because, by some exceptional fortune, I had the opportunity to interview Adams about the game before its release. Yes, it’s a massive namedrop, but you would too, wouldn’t you? It was a telephone interview, for my university newspaper, for which I was the “comedy editor”. I got to talk to Douglas Adams, for what felt like ages, and it was utterly wonderful....

While there have been more genre-specific sales on Steam this year, this one of the broad seasonal events where all kinds of games receive discounts. It’s an excellent opportunity to buy a game you intend to play one day while it’s cheap and then to feel guilty when you don’t play it for three years, by which point you could have picked it up for even cheaper. November 22nd also sees the start of Steam’s annual awards, which this year includes a new category called “Best Game On The Go”....

Fntastic’s explanation for the delay is that the name wasn’t actually trademarked back when The Day Before was announced in January 2021. An application to trademark The Day Before was made by one Sun Jae Lee of Seoul, South Korea in May 2021. That application was subsequently approved and registered in November 2022. Fntastic explained that they weren’t aware of the trademark registration until they were contacted last week by the holder, and said they “will definitely solve everything”....

“We are constantly examining how the growth of Steam affects new titles and what it means for developers,” Valve say in the Steamworks blog post aimed at folks selling games on Steam. “Usually, our own internal questions mirror those of many in the development community.” The unspoken implication is that this time they’ve looked at whether concerns ober whether Steam adding more and more games to its catalogue has scuppered developers’ chances of success....

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, here are the deets for the beta. If you sign up for it before September ends then you’ll have the opportunity to play as eight characters: Ryu, Chun Li, Jamie, Luke, Kimberly, Juri, Guile and Ken. That’s a decent batch of classic characters and fresh faces. You can try out character creation in the game’s Battle Hub, but it’ll only be possible once for this beta....

Some intriguing speedruns are lined up on PC over the rest of this week. The wee hours of tomorrow morning see a versus Any% battle between the original and definitive edition of my favourite GTA, Vice City. I’d wholeheartedly recommend the Any% runs of classic FPSs Star Wars: Jedi Knight II – Jedi Outcast and Powerslave Exhumed on Wednesday, along with adventure game King’s Quest V on Thursday. There’s some newer games featured in this year’s event too, such as an Any% Tunic run later on Wednesday and a 100% run of the always entertaining Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion on Thursday....

As the name suggests, the Tourism Update is focused on people coming to your colony to coo over how curious spacelife is. Rather than slap down their cash upon arrival, Tourists now have a Satisfaction stat which tracks how much they are enjoying their spacehols, then they pay based on pleasure at the end. This system seems incredibly prone to scamming (“Oh I had just the worst time, I hated seeing another planet, here’s a one-star review and five moonbucks”) but hey, maybe humanity have become more honest in the future....

What is a simulation? According to the imaginary dictionary I keep on my desk next to my imaginary bust of R. J. Mitchell, it’s a game that offers users the chance to operate “a digital facsimile of a real-life vehicle” or participate, from a first-person perspective “in painstakingly recreated historical events”. For me a sim isn’t defined by the length of its controls list or the complexity of its HUD, it’s a diversion inspired by something, usually a machine, that’s tangible, researchable, and incontrovertibly Real....

So when I got hands on with The Ascent, I was surprised to find I felt quite indifferent about it all. I’d expected to coat walls with human bolognese and clog up machinery with cooked frags, but the kitchen wasn’t quite as frantic as that. Instead, I’d say everything was at more of a simmer as opposed to a rolling boil. I spent time with the first two hours of The Ascent, which was enough to graduate from shooting cybernetic pups in clanking tunnels, to taking on sidequests in the game’s bustling hub space....

This guide will show you how to create the best Diluc build in Genshin Impact. Below we’ll cover everything you need to know about Diluc, including wishing, weapons, artifacts, ascension materials, talents, abilities, and constellations. Best Diluc build: Weapons Diluc’s best weapon is by far the Wolf’s Gravestone, which boosts ATK especially well when dealing damage to enemies with low HP. Another 5-star option for Diluc is Skyward Pride, which increases Energy Recharge and offers a bonus vacuum blade effect that deals some extra damage....

Turns out, it’s Sega’s 60th birthday this month. To celebrate, the Japenese publisher is having a blow-out sale over on Steam. While that means some very good games like Total War: Warhammer and Alien: Isolation are going for a fraction of the price, the highlight of the event is naturally the giveaway of 1992 sequel and series high-point Sonic The Hedgehog 2. As Alice O correctly noted in the RPS treehouse, Sonic 2 is the best of the lot....

If you have not seen, Bugsnax was revealed during Sony’s PS5 steam last night, but it’s also coming to PC via the Epic Games Store. It is by the developers of Octodad and is set on an island populated by animals made of sentient food - a crab of apple segments, rack-of-rib centipedes, and so on. When you eat one, your limbs will take on the properties of that food....

Below you’ll find out the very best places to look for Pale Ivy Blossom across both maps in The Cycle: Frontier, and the amounts you need to gather it to make various useful components and powerful bits of gear. Where to find Pale Ivy Blossom in The Cycle: Frontier Pale Ivy Blossoms in The Cycle: Frontier are small flowers which are most often found partway up the trunks of trees or cliffs....

I’m able to win Nate around on at least one of my desperate bids to classify things that aren’t eras as eras, although he does promptly shut me down on the most ridiculous one. It may surprise you to know that we don’t actually talk about too many history games (although time travel comes up a lot). And stick around for a thrilling Cavern Of Lies. Will the Red Baron (me) be shot down at last?...

The news comes from Reuters, who say their sources confirm that the EU is “readying a charge sheet known as a statement of objections, setting out its concerns about the deal which will be sent to Microsoft in the coming weeks”. They’ve set a deadline for April 12th on whether they’ll OK the deal. According to those sources, there are “ongoing informal discussions on concessions” between Microsoft and the EU, though they’ll only be formally open to negotiations once they’ve sent over that charge sheet....