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So, tower defence: hordes of enemies are charging towards your base, trying to bash it down. You can pop down turrets at predefined points on the map, from machineguns and mortars to flak and flamethrowers. You can also take over units to aim manually, or sometimes hop into vehicles like biplanes and clockwork tanks. It’s themed around a World War 1 toy box, see, with little toy men and toy vehicles and oh, it’s quite cute for something which does still capture some of the horror of WW1 forces charging into machinegun fire or gas....

In Microsoft Flight Sim’s multiplayer you’ll be able to fly alongside both real world air traffic and your fellow virtual pilots. Real world pilots are simulated based on air traffic data, Asobo say, and augmented by AI. Even if data for a particular plane falls off for any reason, in-game AI should continue flying it to its destination. As for the real pilots, Asobo show how you can choose filters to control who you’re actually flying alongside without having to swap sessions or any other usual multiplayer faff....

That looks great. One of the more exciting games I’ve seen at E3. Love a bit of dystopian posthuman living. And in the game etc. It’ll go day by day, with us deciding where to go, what to do, which systems to hack, who to talk to or help, and so on, with only limited time to spend each cycle and timers also ticking on the rhythms and events of other people’s lives....

While our Surviving Mars review at launch in March 2018 was a bit lukewarm, mere months later Alec Meer was impressed by how it felt after a few patches. He said, “Subtle changes have massively refreshed Surviving Mars - with the game feeling this much better after three months, I’m so excited to see what it’s like after a year.” We’ve since called it one of the best management games and the best building games....

As always, the trailer for the expansion has a banger Simlish track in the background, but it also highlights a few key additions that are part of the update. We don’t have a full run down, but planned events like slumber parties and spontaneous milestones like a midlife crisis can shape your Sims and their relationships. At least Sims don’t need to worry about the real-life, annual midlife crises. Social dynamics for friends and family are also getting a bit deeper....

“Jesse is alerted by the Board that a situation has arisen in the Foundation, the bedrock of the Oldest House,” the blurb says. “A mysterious structure called the Monolith has been damaged, resulting in the Astral Plane leaking into the Foundation. If Jesse does not find a way to stop it, the entire Oldest House, along with the Bureau, will be consumed by this invading dimension.” Ugh, but I cleaned out the dimension’s litter tray last week - can’t someone else have a go?...

For a hot second, I thought that AWE might stand for Alan Wake Expansion, because that would’ve been a bit of a laugh. But no, it actually stands for Altered World Event, which is a thing that happens when paranormal forces make their way into the game’s world. I’m still choosing to believe it stands for the Alan Wake thing, though. In AWE, you’ll need to head into one of the abandoned sectors of the Oldest House: the Investigations Sector....

I said when I first played it that Potion Craft had cured my crafting woes. I think making things in games is neat, but I’ve grown weary of the “crafting” paradigm which asks you to cut down trees and then toss stacks of items into a processing interface. Potion Craft puts all the tools in your hands and there is genuinely a bit of an art to using them. You’ll mash up ingredients yourself with a mortar and pestle, stir your cauldron, and pour water in to nudge your potion into the perfect recipe....

The Past Within was announced back at the start of 2021. Your aim, and that of your accomplice, is to find out what mysterious goings on have befallen someone called Albert Vanderboom. He’s been important in the series, y’see. You don’t need to know anything about the other Rusty Lake games to play The Past Within. However, if you have played previous games in the series, then you might be intrigued to encounter some of Albert’s relatives during your time travel puzzling....

Now we know that these additions are coming this week alongside the Northern Lords flavour pack, which adds Norse-themed content including new events and viking hair styles. Announced during this evening’s Paradox Insider stream, Northern Lords is a “flavour pack” rather than a full expansion. It adds new art for Norse characters, including clothes, hairstyles and beards, new music, new ship models, and new events inspired by Norse culture. The free update is the more substantial part of what’s coming, but the addition of winter obviously ties in quite nicely with a focus on the frigid north....

CDPR confirmed the news in a comment given to Games Radar, with PR director Radek Grabowski saying that “as for the expansion’s pricing - we have not revealed exact details yet, but it will be a paid one.” Apparently the confusion is because The Witcher 3 had several free “DLCs”, and a handful of larger paid “expansions”. Cyberpunk 2077 has had free DLC, such as recent updates which added the Sandevistan from the Cyberpunk: Edgerunners anime....

Sorry, Keanu. CD Projekt clearly have pretty lofty ambitions for Cyberpunk 2077, throwing around modest phrases like “crowning achievement for this generation.” As it happens, three months wasn’t enough time to make those expectations a reality, so they’re buying themselves a few more. Our own Matt wasn’t quite as enamoured with Cyberpunk when he got his mitts on it at E3 last year. From what I hear, the hacking’s shaping up alright, but the shooting sounds like it could use a few more months of tweaking and tinkering....

“We are hard at work on the next-gen version of Cyberpunk, scheduled for release in the first quarter of 2022, alongside another major update for all platforms,” CD Projekt Group president Adam Kiciński said in the business blast. “There is also ongoing work on the next-gen version of The Witcher 3 and the Cyberpunk expansion.” He also noted that they are “[carrying] on with the transformation of our studio, which is affecting more and more production teams....

This is because when you look at ground level you see all the vans with pop-in textures, duplicate NPCs, NPCs spawning in and then disappearing again when you turn your back, cops that start shooting at you if you bump into them and then forget where you are if you move 30 feet away, palm trees that lean over like they’re screaming, and so on. Mostly, ground level is where the AI happens, and the AI is currently… not great....

The trailer doesn’t reveal much about the DLC, but the game’s Steam page gives us some snippets of info. The DLC will have 51 Castelvania songs, 14 iconic weapons (including the throwing axes, the Vampire Killer whip, and holy water), 20 outfits, a whole new enemy roster, three bosses, and a new storyline. That’s a lot of Castlevania. You’ll get to explore the innards of Dracula’s gothic castle which will be filled with all sorts of new ghosties and ghoulies for you to brawl with....

“I’ve always been interested in online ‘shared spaces’, but I know how much work it takes to build them,” droqen says. “It’s easy to make a spreadsheet and invite people to it, but the problem there is that there’s no ‘game’ for people to engage with on the side of socializing.” When you first open Demon Deleter (which you can play for free through Itch.io), you land in Purgatory (aka Google Sheets)....

The Witch Queen will see Savathûn, the Hive god of cunning and lies, gain the ability to bless her brood with the same powers as us. They even have wee Hive Ghosts, and it looks like we’ll have to crush them in our hands to finish off their fallen. Neat. We’ll be busting into Savathûn’s throne world, the pocket universe which she can retreat to when her physical form is crushed, presumably to give her a sound kicking....

Update 2.7.1 launched at 5pm on Tuesday, and many players noticed instantly upon logging in that they’d lost all their Glimmer spacebucks, their earned Bright Dust for cosmetics, their paid Silver microtransaction cash, and upgrade materials like Enhancement Prisms and Ascendant Shards. Some of those upgrade materials are super-rare and Silver costs real money so this was a huge problem. Bungie announced at 5:31 that they were investigating the issue, then at 6:05 that they were taking the game offline for emergency maintenance....

While they haven’t explained the precise cause of the delay, Bungie’s socials yesterday announced that “due to a recently discovered issue”, Trials won’t be running for the next few weeks. “Hate to see it, but this was necessary,” Bungie community manager dmg04 added on Twitter. “A bug was identified that would negatively impact the competitive experience. As such, we’ve decided to push the first Trials weekend back to Nov 27....

Valve remained coy about what F-Stop was in the hope of eventually using it, but they never did. In an unlikely twist, a developer using the Source Engine for their own game were given permission to show off F-Stop’s secrets. It was based around the “Aperture Camera”, which could copy, paste, and rescale items in the world. LunchHouse Software have been working with Valve’s official code in their own Portalish puzzler Punt, but have released a small documentary about F-Stop on their own site....