It’s quite satisfying to watch a game go from “oh, that GIF features a neat mechanic” to “oh, it’s a proper game now with levels and giants and several enemy types and weapons and other game bits.” Still, the best thing in the trailer above remains the thing that was best in the GIFs: drilling through solid ground, bursting out, grappling to a corner and swinging around to the next piece of drillable ground....
The game’s campaign will have you building up important cities in different time periods in Ancient Mesopotamian history, leading up to the Persian conquest of Babylon in the 6th century BC. I reckon the coolest part though is the game’s monument editor, which allows players to completely customise an iconic monument that will one day make historians say things like, “cor, whack that one on the seven wonders shortlist”. You could recreate history if you fancy, and make a big old Ishtar Gate (wot King Nebuchadnezzar II himself did) or grow some lush Hanging Gardens....
The ghost hunting simulation sends you into haunted houses either alone or with friends to suss out what manner of dead jerk is hanging around the place. Armed with a book of notes on the differences between Shades and Wraiths and other spooks, you and your pals wander in with flashlights and crucifixes and other tools to stay safe. The real kicker seems to be the voice recognition the game uses to allow you to holler at ghosts directly....
Phasmophobia’s most recent update to the main game was at the end of September, but a look at recent additions to the beta branch and notes in the public Trello board tracking its development can give us some clues as to what’s coming next. The spirit box, that radio-like device that some ghosts can talk to you through, is getting a few noteworthy updates. If you activate the beta branch via Steam right now, you should be able to see text readouts on the spirit box’s screen that let you know what a ghost says when it answers....
The answers are “Siemens” and “after”, respectively. These are things I have learned today while playing WikiTrivia, a free browser game by Tom Watson which pulls historical dates from WikiData and challenges you to put them in the correct order. The historical events are represented as cards, telling you the subject (“Bosporan Kingdom”, “Russian Civil War”, “Nero Claudius Drusus”) and the type of date it’s looking for (“Created”, “Ended”, “Born”)....
Here are games that either contain or combat an air of disquiet, paranoia, and discomfort. Perhaps there is one (or more) among them that you will find comforting. The Old City of High Walls from JohnLee Cooper You have taken the train to The Old City of High Walls and must find an inn, or something just as suitable, where you can stay the night. No one here speaks English with much fluency, and the walls of the city curl inwards in a confusing labyrinth of downtown sprawls and piers and barracks full to bursting....
Legend of Mana is a very strange beast. A fragmented story that the player pursues at their pleasure. It’s really a vast collection of side quests. You’ll barely encounter anything resembling a main quest until you go out of your way to find it. The map is similarly fragmented, and you build your own world as you play. Each completed quest lets you place another area down onto the map wherever you choose, adding another story or stories to continue along....
It got us thinking about other video games that feature playable characters with special mind powers. There’s no shortage of these folks, so that’s what we decided to focus on for this week’s Mystery Steam Reviews. A bit more broad this week: both of us had to choose three games that feature playable characters that have some form of psychic abilities. So, anything from hypnosis to telekinesis to astral projection....
I really, really like that hub level. The shapes! The ominous blocks for selecting difficulty level! The cross-crossing! The effigies of benches and bins! The secret playground buried in the depths! What a perfectly unsettling opening. Organised by “Makkon”, the Quake Brutalist Jam map pack was made by 34 mappers across two-and-a-half weeks. That leads to a wide range of styles and experiences that I’ve enjoyed exploring. Step through a white door, and who knows what you’ll find?...
Like a bouncy Crusader: No Remorse: Or Orcs Must Die! without the need to build the traps yourself? All this terrible, wonderful violence is justified by the environment being a “satanic Y2K cultist compound” you’re fighting your way through. There’s very little sign of minions fighting back in the trailer above, but presumably they built all these mincers for their own nefarious purposes. There are costumes to unlock, a scoreboard to climb and an automatic GIF maker for sharing clips, according to the game’s Steam page, but I’m really just interested in it for the ability to destructively toss people about....
Apparently not, according to Ubisoft’s new gameplay video. You just missed him actually. He went and got thrown in a snake pit just a couple years back. They did show off some mythical monsters you’ll go up against instead. Instead of Ragnar himself, Eivor will be able to come across a side quest where they find six of his listless drengr warriors. They’re quite sad without leading lad Ragnar around and really wish they could have a good fight....
Games were so damned hard in the ’80s. Rainbow Islands, to all intents and purposes, looks like a children’s game. Bub, or Bob, former dragon-shaped stars of Bubble Bobble, are returned to their human form and on a quest to climb ever-upward via their magical rainbow bridges, to rescue the Rainbow Islands from the clutches of the Dark Shadow. It’s almost insufferably cute, with its array of adorable enemy creatures, sweetie and pudding pick-ups, and chubby-faced protagonists....
That’s pretty rare for a 14in gaming laptop. Normally, these slightly smaller gaming laptops max out at an RTX 3060 tops, with many more making do with Nvidia’s considerably slower GTX 1660 chips. After all, when you’re dealing with a smaller chassis - especially an ultra thin one - there’s less room to vent those hot GPU chips and keep everything nice and cool. Even the latest model of Asus’ ROG Zephyrus G14 doesn’t go higher than an RTX 3060, but Razer want to change this state of affairs and deliver the ‘ultimate’ 14in gaming laptop with zero compromises....
It took almost 70 levels for Reiterate to do that. That’s a recommendation.
Pharaoh: A New Era was revealed as part of Gamescom this year, in the wake of the Gamescom Opening Night Live show (and we have rounded up every trailer from that for you already). The trailer is almost entirely just nice scenes of life in Ancient Egypt that bare no relation to the game, but we did get, conservatively, about five seconds of the game in action, which is enough to get me very excited....
I used to sit up reading these in the 90s and 00s, a little goblin who wasn’t yet good enough to complete these games without help. You reached out to me, guides writers, and you never even knew it. And the true marker of the dedication of these artisans can be seen in one thing: the ASCII art of game titles they put in at the top of their work....
Jndeed, Capcom take great pains to point out at every available opportunity that their currently announced frame rate targets may fall during particularly graphics-intensive scenes, and that their system requirements for Resident Evil Village may change as we get closer to release. While it would be unusual for PC requirements to change this close to a game’s launch, it wouldn’t be the first time this has happened in recent memory....
It’s promptly been taken offline, but as we all know, the internet never forgets and all the juicy details were quickly captured by the community. So, what do we know? The next Agent’s called Killjoy, an engineer type who can deploy bots to hunt down enemies, plant turrets to defend parts of the map, and detain enemies with big AoE gadgets. Redditor OmoiReddit helpfully rounded up all of Killjoy’s abilities and pika_chutp put together a short clip over on imgur which shows them all in action....
Road 96’s trailer debuted at The Game Awards and it shows how your road trip can veer from the beautiful and serene, to the highly dangerous depending on who you stumble into on the open road, or hitch a ride with. “You play as a broken teenager, trying to get freedom and safety past the country border,” the devs said in a press release. “As you get closer and the summer passes, the plot intensifies, presenting deep moral dilemmas, dark and intense moments, lots of encounters, places, means of travels and crucial choices that might change your initial goal....
Here’s the “launch” trailer from June 2021, which I guess in retrospect was a bad name for the trailer: At a glance, Rocksmith looks like Guitar Hero, with the screen showing a guitar neck stretching towards the horizon while coloured notes zoom towards the bottom of the screen. The difference is that you use a real guitar to play - acoustic, electric or bass - and the software detects whether you played the correct note or chord....
