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Thor hauled out onto a slipway in Scarborough habour late on Friday the 30th of December, as the British Divers Marine Life Rescue report (with extra info and nice photos in this Twitter thread from one member). He hung around and rested until Tuesday the 3rd of January, seemingly oblivious to the huge crowds who gathered to see him (from a distance, behind a police cordon). Scarborough council even cancelled the New Year fireworks display to avoid startling him....

Look at this trailer for a sense of what its combat will be like to play, and of what sort of world you’ll be exploring. OverBorder, a Taiwanese development team, have been posting videos of the game for a couple of years, but the trailer above announces their publishing deal with Team 17. Only seven people work at OverBorder, so it’s no surprise they’ve partnered up. Key to the game’s world is that it has been ravaged by a plague, and Corvus, the game’s protagonist, is able to seize “enemy diseases and [use] them as weapons against his adversaries,” according to the press release....

Twarhammer 3 sees factions fighting over the remains of a dying bear god, for various reasons. Along with the forces of Chaos, this one introduces the armies of Kislev and Grand Cathay, who previously existed in the fiction but have been massively fleshed out to appear in the game. And the game’s a good’un. “Though best considered as the final part of an excessive strategy megagame, [it] is a heavyweight in its own right,” Nate’s Total War: Warhammer 3 review said....

A Steam release is mostly a convenience (and to fend off undersupported unofficial releases) but hey, maybe it’ll introduce more folks to the game too. We have called it one of the best building games as well as one of the best management games. Would those categories combine to make it one of the best gaffer games? While the official word is that “OpenTTD is not an abbreviation of anything”, the Steam page is quite open that it “is an open-source remake and expansion of the 1995 Chris Sawyer video game Transport Tycoon Deluxe....

Paradox claimed today that March saw Stellaris hit “an all-time high for monthly active users” as well as pass three million units sold. I suppose the best time to play a Paradox strategy game is a few years after launch, once they’ve refined it. The Anniversary Update (codenamed “Wells”, after Fredrik Wester’s favourite sort of hole) is live now. It’s a fairly broad one, with perhaps a minor focus on sound and vision....

Alice Bee was quite pleased when she played Fenyx Rising in a lengthier preview version. She said it is “something you could happily give to your slightly older child, or play with a younger one sat on your lap helping you out. Importantly, you can also play it as a grown adult who pays rent and makes their own spaghetti, and still have a blast. Because I did. For hours....

In a statement released on Twitter (and in a translation provided to Kotaku), Solidaires Informatique wrote that the “complaint targets Ubisoft as a legal entity for institutional sexual harassment for setting up, maintaining and reinforcing a system where sexual harassment is tolerated because it is more profitable for the company to keep harassers in place than to protect its employees.” Yves Guillemot is reportedly named in the complaint not for specific acts, but because as CEO and co-founder he is ultimately responsible for what happens within the company....

Here’s what Skull And Bones looked like when we last saw it back in 2018: It’ll have changed a lot since then, however. A post on the Ubisoft news site says that Thursday will offer “an in-depth look at the upcoming open world multiplayer pirate game inspired by the Indian Ocean during the Golden Age of Piracy.” It’ll be broadcast on YouTube and Twitch on July 7th at 11am PT/7pm BST/8pm CEST....

And for our theme, we ask, if the Olympics hosted an FPS tournament, what game would we like to see there? We both know the IOC would probably pick Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, so we purposely don’t go down that avenue. Instead, we pick things that are colourful and fun and… still quite similar to CS:GO, but that’s okay! It was my turn to hit Imogen with some weird player names, and once again, I take this opportunity to fill the glaring holes in my knowledge banks....

On this page: Valheim Yagluth boss location How to summon Yagluth in Valheim Valheim Yagluth boss fight walkthrough Yagluth Forsaken Power & loot drops Valheim Yagluth boss location If you’re going after Yagluth, that means you’re probably well-versed in how to discover the locations of bosses’ Mystical Altars. But just in case: to find out where you need to go, you’ll need to search for a Vegvisir - those small glowing red runestones - in the same biome as the boss will spawn....

This type of hack called a “remote code execution flaw”. These allow hackers to run scripts on other players’ devices to gain full control of their system, which could then be used to nick data, wipe hard drives, or do whatever other harmful things hackers like doing with other peoples’ stuff. Secret Club show how this exploit could be triggered through a Steam invite in the Tweet below. It seems the hacker can send another player an invite, and when that player accepts, the hacker can open whatever they want on that player’s device....

The Steam Deck dev kit program will allow developers to feed back to Valve on the hardware, while this blog post provides the rest of us with the first official snaps of the Deck since the surprise reveal back in July. There are no visible changes to the dev kit units since then, as far as I can see, and the post states that the dev kits are “functionally identical to what will ship”, so it’s very possible that this is the final design, even with the imminent collection of developer feedback....

Even in undeath, nobody is free from the financial pressures of funding a videogame. Nighthawks is your usual True Blood / Vampire: The Masquerade style neckbiting affair. Dim lights, seedy bars, smog-filled backstreets and societies of the undead simmering beneath the unsuspecting world of the living. You know the deal. Only here, humans know what the deal is too - they know there are bloodsucking ghouls stalking the nights, they know their necks are up for grabs, and they’re having none of it....

It may be one of the best strategy games on PC, but Warhammer 2 could still stand for some tweaks. Creative Assembly say that the beta branch of Warhammer 2 will let them try out more radical changes that they wouldn’t want to subject the live version of the game to. They also stress that this is not meant to replace their existing update betas that are used to test nearly-finalized features which are all intended to wind up in the game....

Warhammer 40,000: Battlesector first launched in July 2021. It’s made by Black Lab Games, the studio behind Battlestar Galactica: Deadlock (the Battlestar game Alec dreamed of having in 2005). It’s set in the aftermath of a big dramatic moment in Warhammer history, the ‘Devestation of Baal’. Ravenous Tyranid hordes almost ate the homeworld of the Blood Ravens, a chapter of the Space Marines, until some Chaos lads opened a hole in the universe plus the Ultramarines’ long-comatose dad returned with reinforcements in the shape of chunky new Primaris marines....

In Wartales, you take control of a group of mercenaries making their way through a plague-ridden medieval world. Your goal is to survive, as well as feed and pay your mercenaries, though you can do that in any way you please. “You’ll take on missions, fight, trade - you can pretty much play the way you want. You can explore, fight bandits, or be bandits yourself,” game director Nicolas Cannasse tells me....

“Right now, animal companions don’t hang around if you dismiss them, but with the Kennel they’ll have a home they automatically return to,” Inxile say. “That lets you build up a cadre of canines and cats, and pick and choose as you need.” Even if the human they’re assigned to dies, your precious pals will head back to the kennel after a fight, they say. Also the parrot has gotten a buff, which is an uncommon series of words even in video games....

“We’ve identified an issue in the PC version that can cause the game to crash for players with certain GPUs,” they posted on Twitter. “The team is working on fixing the issue as quickly as possible, and in the meantime, we’ve made the decision to wait to launch the PC version until this is fixed. We will communicate the launch date as soon as possible.” They don’t give any detail as to exactly which GPUs are causing the problem, though it must be a pretty big deal considering they’ve not provided any sort of timescale for when it’ll be fixed....

That’s right. Watch Dogs Legion’s ray tracing effects take quite the toll on your overall frame rate compared to other ray tracing games, regardless of whether you’re playing at 1920x1080 or above. Whereas other ray tracing games such as Shadow Of The Tomb Raider and Metro Exodus are just about playable on higher-end RTX cards without the aid of DLSS at lower resolutions these days - especially if you’ve got an RTX 3070 or RTX 3080 inside your PC - Watch Dogs Legion is a lot more taxing, making DLSS pretty much mandatory for all ray tracing graphics card owners....