Checking the Steam page after the update had been out for a few hours yesterday, my eyes were drawn to that damning red “mostly negative” reviews text hanging out in the side panel. Taking a look at those reviews to see what all the fuss was about, and the general theme of these user reviews looks a lot like this: Since last night the review score has evened out to a less threateningly coloured “mixed”, but there are still hundreds like these....
This is one of the many reasons I respect and admire gorillas. It’s also why I had gigantic mixed feelings about gorgeous platformer Stela. Because although it’s as pretty as anything and dripping with atmosphere, it’s opaque enough to make J.J. Abrams’ Lost seem like a childrens’ story about a pig looking at an egg. It’s a beautiful puzzle box with nothing inside it, and spends its entire, wordless length asking questions whose answers never arrive....
Stray, BlueTwelve Studio’s cat ’em up explorathon, puts you in the paws of a similarly savvy feline protagonist. The cat itself is a marvel of digital observation, fully inhabiting all of the best cat-isms I know and love. You can scratch the backs of sofas and knead and shred carpets with alternate squeezes of the trigger buttons, meow at will, lap from dripping water bowls, topple piles of carefully stacked books and push paint cans off the edge of ledges - and, if you leave them idle long enough, they’ll stretch and catch flies too tiny to be caught by the human eye....
Honestly, who can say that they’ve played a video game set on a space station and not encountered at least one deserted corridor plunged into darkness, but with one spotlight tipped over onto its side to cast ominous shadows? Raise your hands. Terror in space has never gone out of fashion, really, but the source of the terror does seem to go in cycles. In the 2010s a lot of the danger came from an AI gone a bit sinister and funny....
Squad officially launched yesterday, and the Version 1.0 update was a big’un. It bumped the player cap up to 100 soldiers per server, added a new map set in Fallujah along with the new Middle Eastern Alliance faction, put in the new 4v4 vehicle deathmatch mode Track Attack, and fixed and tweaked and optimised a whole lot. See the v1.0 patch notes for everything. The developers, Offworld Industries have also laid out their plans for the future on Squad’s public roadmap....
Tales From The Borderlands stars a bunch of misfits and grifters getting into all sorts of misadventures in pursuit of power and wealth on the wacky planet of Pandora. But while the jokes in Borderlands are insufferable, I laughed out load while playing Tales. And in the usual Telltale way, you make choices across episodes which are reflected in future episodes, though apparently this new release is missing the feature that let you compare your choices to other players’....
None of these game are porn, though. They’re a collection of fun Pico-8 games you can play in browser, and my other abitrary way of linking them this time is that I really liked the what-it-says-on-the-tin approach to naming that the developers have employed for all of them. Makes me think they’re fun, devil-may-care jaunty types of people. (I haven’t got a video of them in action this week because capturing browser games that play out on a little square is just an exercise in futility for me and my limited AV skills....
This week, I have collected three different puzzle games with very different vibes. I know I’m biased in favour of puzzle games more than the usual reader, but these ones are very good and worth a punt, and at least one should pique the old interest. And they all gave me that happy-sad feeling. Like, I want to wrap up in a blanket and play these games and maybe think about my granny a bit....
For starters, what a great feature the Experimental card is! It’s a lot more accessible than the Player Test Realm (PTR), which requires downloading an entirely different version of the game. Having a quick new limited mode to try out for a week is a nice way to keep the game feeling fresh too, and letting players participate in something that will likely help Overwatch improve in the future is a great way to get the community more involved....
Get the Corsair MP600 Pro NH for $155 (was $200) The MP600 Pro isn’t currently in our list of the best gaming SSDs, but that’s more a function of hardware boffin James’ limited time and the surplus of high-end PCIe 4.0 drives that have been coming out of the woodwork over the last four years. I have the slightly fancier Pro XT version of this drive in my test bench, and it provides excellent performance - so I wouldn’t expect anything less of this model, which is within a few hundred megabytes in terms of peak transfer speeds: 7000MB/s reads and 6500MB/s writes....
As that old saying goes, though, all good things must come to an end, so come and join us for this final leg of our BB Boys road trip. We have a real whale of a time in the last instalment of this now ten-part photo series - and I do mean that quite literally. Whales (and spoilers) abound as we head toward the finish line here, so please do proceed at your own risk....
Of course, if you’ve suddenly emerged from your lockdown hole and are wondering what all this E3 nonsense is about, why not catch up on all the big headlines by watching vid bud Colm’s handy E3 2021 recap video above? Alternatively, you can also immerse yourself our big E3 round-up lists for a blow-by-blow breakdown of everything that got announced. After all, there were 75 new games at the Wholesome Direct alone, not to mention the hundreds of other accompanying indies unveiled by the Guerrilla Collective, Double Fine’s Day Of The Devs, Devolver and the PC Gaming Show)....
Get the Fnatic Streak from Best Buy on Ebay - $50 (was $110) That’s an outstanding deal for our current best gaming keyboard recommendation. In her full Fnatic Streak review, Katharine praised the slim yet strong aluminium design, soft adjustable wrist rest and convient volume wheel. Combined with real Cherry MX mechanical switches and a convenient full-size layout, the Streak impressed her enough to warrant ‘an immediate recommendation’ that has persisted right up to the present day....
This guide will show you how to create the best Yoimiya build in Genshin Impact. Below we’ll cover everything you need to know about Yoimiya, including wishing, weapons, artifacts, ascension materials, talents, abilities, and constellations. How to build Yoimiya as a main DPS in Genshin Impact Best weapon: Thundering Pulse 4-star alternative: Rust Released during the 2.0 update, Thundering Pulse is an incredibly strong bow that works to increase different aspects of damage with a focus on normal ATK....
It’s fair to say we’ve gone for a fairly conservative interpretation of the genre, sticking to games that represent the classic model of a large game world to explore, with areas unlocked and returned to as new abilities are gained. We’ve done our best not to conflate things too much with games that better fit into the ‘roguelike/lite’ category, nor indeed those that are better described as simply ‘platform games’....
In this case, though, what’s already there is pretty brilliant. It’s Diablo II, for crying out loud. By my estimate, it’s one of the best games ever made, and it’s hard to serve me a bad version of it. Admittedly, I was only running about in single player, so can’t comment on the lack of decent multiplayer features (and I did actually run into a couple of annoying lag problems even by myself), but by and large, Resurrected is the Diablo II experience we were all expecting....
The patch release was announced via Twitter: “Thanks for your patience,” starts the tweet. “A PC patch is now available to improve gameplay stuttering issues due to shader compilation. After updating, you may see temporary stuttering in the game menu the first time you launch the app. We are working on further optimizations in the days ahead.” Callisto Protocol’s stuttering issues were apparently the result of it not pre-compiling shaders, meaning they were instead compiled as players visited each new area for the first time....
Jess is invited to the spiritual retreated (on, of course, an isolated island) by Kim, both having lingering issues over the accidental death of Jess’s sister when they were all children. There Jess joins Kim, Maya, Sonny and Hannah under the spiritual tutelage of Tyler, a bearded bro whose dialogue might as well be “Everything is cool, nothing sinister is going to happen here, [wink wink]”. Tyler, whose family owned and operated the island previously, has thrown up a couple of white tents that look like the Fyre Festival disaster relief ones and called it a day, not bothering to clear any of the nearby buildings of alarming skeletons, weird ritual leavings, and terrifying bestiary notes....
“Tom Clancy’s The Division: Heartland is a free-to-play survival-action multiplayer shooter set in small-town Middle America,” the store page read, which you can see for yourself in a video tweeted by user Unknown1Z1. It also details a 45-player PvEvP mode that’s called Storm Operations, where you’ll be battling a faction called the Vultures with a deadly viral outbreak as the backdrop. There’ll also be PvE Excursion Operations to scrounge gear and “prep the battlefield”....
Panzer Marshal Nicu Pavel’s gratis, browser-friendly* Panzer General homage flourishes that Alan Partridge shrug gif whenever it hears Panzer Corps 2 bragging about a “massive branching campaign including around 60 scenarios”. Available in downloadable form too, if you prefer. Incorporating many of the mission trees created for Open General*, it offers a far larger selection of outings, theatres, and units than the spriteless wonder released yesterday. Equally free, but slightly less convenient....
