Capcom has updated its list of Platinum Titles, games that have sold over one million units as of September 30, 2024. The list includes 122 games with sales over one million units, 64 over two million units, 14 over five million units, and six over 10 million units sold.

Resident Evil 4 remake sold 400,000 units to bring lifetime sales to eight million units, Resident Evil 2 remake sold 300,000 units to bring sales to 14.5 million units, and Resident Evil 3 remake sold 200,000 units to bring lifetime sales to 9.2 million units. 

Resident Evil 7: biohazard sold 300,000 units to bring lifetime sales to 14 million units and Resident Evil Village sold 400,000 units to bring sales to 10.5 million units.

Monster Hunter Rise sold 600,000 units in the quarter to bring lifetime sales to 16 million units. Monster Hunter Rise: Sunbreak sold 400,000 units to bring lifetime sales to 8.8 million units.

Monster Hunter: World sold 400,000 units in the quarter to bring lifetime sales to 20.9 million units, while the Iceborne expansion sold 600,000 units for a total of 14 million units.

Dragon's Dogma 2 sold 300,000 units in the quarter to bring lifetime sales to 3.3 million units. Street Fighter 6 sold 400,000 units in the quarter to bring lifetime sales to 4.1 million units. Devil May Cry 5 sold 300,000 units to bring sales to 8.7 million units. 

Check out the complete list below:

A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can contact the author on Twitter @TrunksWD.

Full Article - https://www.vgchartz.com/article/463020/capcom-updates-its-best-sellers-list-monster-hunter-world-at-209m-re4-remake-at-8m-more/

Sony president Hiroki Totoki in a Q&A session with investors was asked about the failure of Concord, which was shut down less than two weeks after it released.

"Currently, we are still in the process of learning," said Totoki (via VideoGamesChronicle). "And basically, with regards to new IP, of course, you don’t know the result until you actually try it.

"So for us, for our reflection, we probably need to have a lot of gates, including user testing or internal evaluation, and the timing of such gates. And then we need to bring them forward, and we should have done those gates much earlier than we did.

"Also, we have a siloed organisation, so going beyond the boundaries of those organisations in terms of development, and also sales, I think that could have been much smoother.

"And then going forward, in our own titles and in third-party titles, we do have many different windows. And we want to be able to select the right and optimal window so that we can deploy them on our own platform without cannibalization, so that we can maximize our performance in terms of title launches. That’s all I have."

Sony senior vice president for finance and IR Sadahiko Hayakawa discussed the success of Helldivers 2 and the failure of Concord.

"We launched two live-service games this year," he said. "Helldivers 2 was a huge hit, while Concord ended up being shut down. We gained a lot of experience and learned a lot from both.

"We intend to share the lessons learned from our successes and failures across our studios, including in the areas of title development management as well as the process of continually adding expanded content and scaling the service after its release so as to strengthen our development management system.

"We intend to build on an optimum title portfolio during the current mid-range plan period that combines single-player games – which are our strengths and which have a higher predictability of becoming hits due to our proven IP – with live-service games that pursue upside while taking on a certain amount of risk upon release."

Concord released for the PlayStation 5 and PC on August 23, and it was shut down on September 6.

A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can contact the author on Twitter @TrunksWD.

Full Article - https://www.vgchartz.com/article/463026/sony-discusses-what-lessons-can-be-learned-from-the-failure-of-concord/

ublisher Bethesda Softworks and developer MachineGames have released a gameplay deep dive video for Indiana Jones and the Great Circle that is nearly 15 minutes in length.

"From locations and puzzles to gear and combat, MachineGames Audio Director, Pete Ward, takes us on a whirlwind journey through the world of The Great Circle," reads the description to the video. "Get ready for launch with this look at Indy’s grand adventure."

View the gameplay deep dive below:

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle will launch for the Xbox Series X|S, PC via Steam and Microsoft Store, and Xbox Game Pass on December 9.

A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can contact the author on Twitter @TrunksWD.

Full Article - https://www.vgchartz.com/article/463033/indiana-jones-and-the-great-circle-gets-gameplay-deep-dive/

Publisher indie.io and developer Maple Powered Games announced G.I. Joe: Wrath of Cobra will launch for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch on November 21.

The game is currently available for PC Steam, Epic Games Store, and GOG.

View the console reveal date trailer below:

Read details on the game below:

Cobra rears its ugly head yet again and it’s up to G.I. Joe to save the world! Embracing the 1980s era of the iconic universe, Wrath of Cobra is a retro side-scrolling beat ’em up. Play as one of the legendary G.I. Joe characters, including Duke, Scarlett, Roadblock, Snake Eyes, and more. Defeat hordes of Cobra troopers, Vipers, Crimson Guards and more of Cobra’s malevolent machinations.

Bring Cobra down, striking back at the likes of Destro, Serpentor, Baroness, and Cobra Commander himself! Fight your own way: Rely on your fists and get up close and personal using each character’s unique combos and special moves or keep your foes at a distance with a variety of weapons!

Retro Gameplay in a Modern Era

Wrath of Cobra takes the classic arcade beat ’em up and brings it into the modern age: Easy to play, hard to master, and smoother than a ride in a H.I.S.S. Want to play with your friends? The game supports local multiplayer (eg. from your couch) and online co-op!

Play as Classic Heroes

Fight Cobra as your favorite G.I. Joe heroes, painstakingly recreated in beautiful pixel art. The differences between characters aren’t just cosmetic: Each hero has different movesets and unique abilities. From the fast and nimble Snake Eyes to the rough and tumble Roadblock, each character is true to form!

Battle Iconic Villains

Cobra isn’t just the Cobra Commander, it’s also its legions! Face hordes of troopers, armored Alley Vipers, artificial B.A.T.s, armed with some of the most iconic weapon systems in the franchise, including the H.I.S.S., C.L.A.W., and the notorious Trubble Bubble.

Retro-Infused Soundtrack

Foil the Commander’s plot to the beat of classic G.I. Joe themes, reimagined by industry veterans at Kid Katana Records, bringing a modern twist to classic arcade music!

Post-Launch Support

Like Destro’s plots, Wrath of Cobra will continue with extensive post-launch support, bringing more G.I. Joe heroes into the fray, adding new game modes, levels, and more to keep the G.I. Joe legacy alive!

A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can contact the author on Twitter @TrunksWD.

Full Article - https://www.vgchartz.com/article/463047/gi-joe-wrath-of-cobra-releases-november-21-for-ps5-xbox-series-xs-and-switch/

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 in its third week remained in first place on the Steam Weekly Top Sellers chart (excluding revenue generated by free games) for Week 46, 2024, which ended November 12, 2024.

There were two new releases in the top 10 this week. Planet Coaster 2 debuted in fourth place, while Farming Simulator 25 came in fifth place.

Steam Deck is up two spots to second place, while Baldur's Gate 3 re-entered the top 10 in third place. EA Sports FC 25 is up two spots to sixth place, Cyberpunk 2077 re-entered the top 10 in seventh place, and Dragon Age: The Veilguard fell from second to eighth place.

Ahead of its release next week pre-orders for S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl came in ninth place.

Here are the Steam Weekly Top Sellers by revenue for the week (excluding free games):

1. Call of Duty: Black Ops 6
2. Steam Deck
3. Baldur's Gate 3
4. Planet Coaster 2 - NEW
5. Farming Simulator 25 - NEW
6. EA Sports FC 25
7. Cyberpunk 2077
8. Dragon Age: The Veilguard
9. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl - Pre-orders
10. The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth

Here are the Steam Weekly Top Sellers by revenue for the week (including free games):

1. PUBG: Battlegrounds
2. Counter-Strike 2
3. Call of Duty: Black Ops 6
4. Apex legends
5. Throne and Liberty
6. Steam Deck
7. Baldur's Gate 3
8. Dota 2
9. Planet Coaster 2 - NEW
10. Farming Simulator 25 - NEW

The Steam charts are ordered by revenue, include pre-order numbers, and hardware. If a game appears multiple times it is because it has multiple editions.

A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can contact the author on Twitter @TrunksWD.

Full Article - https://www.vgchartz.com/article/463048/planet-coaster-2-and-farming-simulator-25-debut-on-the-steam-charts/

Billionaire Bill Ackman spent days after the ABC presidential debate promoting false claims that a network “whistleblower” had allegedly uncovered collusion between ABC and Kamala Harris’ campaign. Now, a month and multiple denials later, he sees the claims differently.

“It seems pretty clear that the alleged @abc whistleblower debate story claiming that @KamalaHarris was given questions in advance and other advantages was a fake,” Ackman posted on X alongside a blog post by Megyn Kelly discussing the dubious claims.

What Ackman, CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management, did not acknowledge, however, is that he was one of falsehood’s early boosters. After an X account named “Black Insurrectionist” claimed it had been in touch with a whistleblower who alleged the Harris campaign had been given debate topics ahead of the showdown with Donald Trump and had demanded Trump—and Trump alone—be fact-checked.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

A collective gasp echoed like a thunderclap in a valley in our Daily Beast newsroom late Wednesday afternoon at the news that singer Liam Payne, who became famous as a member of the group One Direction, died at age 31.

TMZ reports that Payne fell from a hotel balcony in Argentina, where he had reunited with bandmates at 1D-er Niall Horan’s concert. He had, according to the site, been behaving “erratically,” earlier in the day, and was spotted smashing a laptop in the hotel lobby and having to be carried back to his room. He had been in headlines on gossip blogs over tension with his ex-fiancée Maya Henry, who, TMZ says, alleged “he'd left her after asking her to get an abortion.”

In the shock of his death, fans couldn’t ignore the eerie nature that Payne had just connected with his One Direction bandmates. Dark questions emerge when a celebrity dies so young: What role did the often horrific toll of fame have on a person like Payne, who has been open about addiction and suicidal ideation? But there’s also an impulse to go back to the roots of a person’s talent, to revisit what it was that we all fell in love with—and was their passion—in the first place.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City is TV’s best soap opera, week after week offering twists more shocking than secret twins and characters returning from the dead. That’s because it’s all real, happening in the most haunted suburb in the continental United States.

Where else do two women connect over knowing the long-lost birth father of one’s child? Is there another city where women squabble over body positivity in a parking lot off the side of a snowy mountain? Surely, there’s no other place on Earth where Lisa Barlow could come across anywhere near a voice of reason.

But that all happens here in Salt Lake City. Five episodes in, Season 5 has continued to evolve into the most captivating season in modern Real Housewives history, carried by the ever-changing bonds between our OGs and a team of wonderfully bizarre newbies.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

Liam Payne was seemingly having a “lovely day in Argentina” just hours before his death on Wednesday, according to what appear to be a series of final posts made to his Snapchat account.

The former One Direction member was found dead in the courtyard of a Buenos Aires hotel, having apparently plunged 13 to 14 meters from his balcony, according to local police. A cause of death has not officially been determined, and it was unclear whether the fall was accidental or intentional.

On his Snapchat Story, however, it would have appeared to any fan that Payne was having a relaxing vacation. In since-deleted posts in the hours before his death, he posted a front-facing video in which he told followers, “It’s a lovely day here in Argentina. This is the breakfast table. Just enjoying coffee and breakfast even though it’s 1 p.m.”

Read more at The Daily Beast.

CNN anchor Anderson Cooper was flabbergasted Wednesday by a surrogate’s defense of Donald Trump, calling his explanation for the former president’s bombastic statements literal “bulls---.”

On AC360, former California Lieutenant Gov. Abel Maldonado, a Republican, said that Trump’s recent comments calling for the military to “handle” Democrats were simply his way of expressing his inner New Yorker. “He’s a fighter,” Maldonado added.

The conversation began when Cooper brought up Trump’s former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, who, alongside other military leaders, have begun to warn of the dangers of re-electing the former president. Milley has called Trump a “fascist to his core.”

Read more at The Daily Beast.

Movies can’t, by definition, be all things to all people, and yet Anora—winner of the Cannes Film Festival’s highest honor, the Palme d’Or—manages to vacillate between assorted registers with stunning, and ultimately affecting, aplomb.

Another of The Florida Project and Red Rocket writer/director Sean Baker’s tales of marginalized individuals struggling to survive and find themselves in an often-unforgiving world, the film is a character study, romance, crime saga, screwball comedy, and vérité drama all wrapped into one unique and dexterous package. More impressive than its nimbleness, however, is its poise and empathy, the latter of which is chiefly bestowed upon its protagonist, whose life is thrown for a rollercoaster-grade loop-di-loop thanks to a chance introduction.

Ani (Mikey Madison, in a star-making turn) is a Brighton Beach 23-year-old who lives with her sister and earns a living stripping at a local club. Anora, which hits theaters Oct. 18, introduces her at the end of a long pan along a bench where men are receiving lap dances from erotic professionals. Fixating on Ani’s face as she flashes the fake smile that her customers crave and her superiors demand, Baker’s camera creates immediate, intimate engagement with the young woman, and that continues as it presents snapshots of her daily (or, rather, nightly) routine at her place of employment.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

Online interactions are based on trust, since there are few definitive ways to certify the identity of the person with whom one is communicating. Naturally, this situation can lead to deception and manipulation, as it has—to tormenting effect—for Tegan and Sara, the popular indie rock duo whose lives have been turned upside down by a mysterious bad faith actor who, for more than a decade, has impersonated Tegan with fans, friends, and business partners.

Fanatical: The Catfishing of Tegan and Sara is an investigation into the myriad means by which the internet can be wielded to nefarious ends. More than that, though, it’s an anatomy of a crime and the complicated wreckage wrought by it, not just for the famous artists but also for the innocent admirers who were tricked into believing that fiction was reality.

Premiering on Hulu on Oct. 18, following its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, Erin Lee Carr’s documentary is a chilling snapshot of the unholy marriage of corrosive fandom and online duplicity. At its center are Tegan and Sara, the identical twin songstresses who began making a name for themselves in the early 2000s both for their talent and for being openly gay. This earned them a loyal fanbase of queer women and men who saw themselves reflected in Tegan and Sara, and that bond was strengthened by the siblings’ active interest in interacting with fans in person—Tegan would chat with show attendees in line and at the merch table—and on LiveJournal and other budding message-board platforms that afforded a previously unavailable degree of contact.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

A hotel worker called 911 to request urgent assistance before musician Liam Payne fell to his death from the third floor of the building in Buenos Aires on Wednesday.

The 31-year-old British singer and former member of the boy band One Direction died after he “jumped from the balcony of his room,” Buenos Aires Security Ministry Communications Director Pablo Policicchio told the Associated Press. He added that police had been called to the Casa Sur Hotel in the Argentine capital after receiving an emergency call shortly after 5 p.m. local time about an “aggressive man who could be under the influence of drugs or alcohol.”

A transcript of a 911 call published by the BBC shows a worker at the hotel telling the operator that they have “a guest who is high on drugs and who is trashing the room” and the staff therefore “need someone to come.”

Read more at The Daily Beast.

One of my favourite satires is the Screwtape Letters, an epistolary novel by Narnia scribe C.S. Lewis. It consists of messages from an oily elder demon to his nephew about how to correctly groom the soul of an unsuspecting human being. It's a claustrophobic send-up of managerial politics and nepotism, with World War 1 unfolding in the background. A real pick-me-up. Sintopia is the Two Point incarnation of that premise - in other words, brighter and breezier and definitely more slapstick than Christian. It puts you in charge of a world divided between Earth and hell, and challenges you to ensure a steady movement of optimally sinful souls between one and the other. Say your prayers and watch the trailer.

Read more

Today in "person you already like says something you already agree with, but it’s still good to hear them say it" news, Arkane founder and im-simmy RPG studio WolfEye head Raphael Colantonio has spoken on Microsoft’s decision to shutter Prey (2017) studio Arkane Austin - alongside a handful of others - back in May.

Colantonio, who founded Arkane in 1999 and departed in 2017 to form Weird West studio WolfEye, recently chatted to Jeremy Peel for PC Gamer about Arkane’s closure, saying:

I think if you look a little bit, it's obvious that Arkane Austin was a very special group of people that have made some cool things and that could pull it off again. I think it was a decision that just came down to, 'We need to cut something.' Was it to please the investors, the stock market? They're playing a different game.

Read more

Stationeers and Icarus developers RocketWerkz are making a spiritual successor to beloved space sim Kerbal Space Program, which is currently titled "Kitten Space Agency" in a flagrant display of adherence to wholesome internet trends. It's based on an actual Kerbal Space Program 2 pitch the studio threw at Take-Two subsidiary Private Division back in the day. RocketWerkz CEO and original DayZ creator Dean Hall has hired several former KSP and KSP2 developers to work on the game, and is describing it on social media as a "KSP killer".

Read more

Inflexion Games are closing their UK office, laying off staff and restructuring their main Canadian studio after failing to find commercial success with their Victorian fantasy survival game Nightingale. Reportedly, at least 22 people have been let go.

Read more

Part of the fun of Dragon Age's fantasy is that it's inconsistent - or at least, inconsistent by the standards of fantasy RPGs, which often break down into a million neatly organised and interlocking codex entries. It all rides on who you speak to. The humans believe one thing about the origins and workings of Thedas, the elves another, the qunari something else entirely. These differences are the basis for many factional disagreements and thus, many core series plot developments. According to former lead writer David Gaider, however, there's an "uber-plot" behind it all that may one day be resolved and bring the series to a close, assuming BioWare continue to refer to his original (and closely guarded) narrative documents.

Read more

The Steam Deck is something of a talisman for gaming on Linux, its popularity and penguin-powered SteamOS having almost singlehandedly dragged it past MacOS as the second-most-used operating system among Steam users. Sadly, this also means the Valve handheld is the primary casualty when developers decide to stop bothering with Linux support, as Respawn Entertainment have decided to do for Apex Legends.

Read more

Some extremely fresh vintage workwear that I bought for entirely practical reasons aside, I’m not exactly a fashion person. I have nobody to impress most days but my cat, and the only item of clothing she appears to have an opinion on is my Oodie, which is very comfortable for both of us and also smells like a chicken shop, which I imagine is more pleasant for her than me.

This aside, I found myself taking a whole bunch of Dragon Age: The Veilguard screenshots as I played just to capture the RPG’s various outfits. They are ridiculous. Incredibly intricate and detailed, as well as being obscenely impractical for the most part. I do not like any of them in the sense I would wear them, but I like all of them in the sense that they display artists allowed to run free like caffeinated weasels and indulge their every whim.

Read more

Remedy's Alan Wake 2 has now "recouped most of its development and marketing expenses", CEO Tero Virtala has announced in a business review for January-September 2024. Speaking as somebody who would quite like there to be more Alan Wake games - or at least, moderately weird and pretty decent blockbuster singleplayer horror games - I am both pleased by this news and a little troubled that Remedy's eldritch forest fable (which came out in October 2023) has yet to break even.

Read more

Stroll on down to Uncle Capcom's garage, girls and boys, because it's time to meddle with a cat's voicebox, ride a combat peacock and meticulously injure a vast, blubbery teddybear. By which I mean, the Monster Hunter Wilds beta is now live on Steam through to 4th November at 2.59am GMT. That's 2.59am sharp. If you're hurrying along at 3am on Monday absolutely desperate to polish the aesthetics of a small enslaved catperson, you can sod off and play Dragon Age: The Veilguard instead.

Read more

Like a plague doctor delicately administering another handful of leeches, Ice Pick Lodge have shared a bit more about the recently announced Pathologic 3, explaining how their plans for the cult epidemic-battling series have progressed since the release of Pathologic 2.

Read more

Okay, look folks, I'm terribly sorry you've been trapped in the bubble of silence for this weekend while comments are still un-fucking themselves. I'm expecting some really juicy catch-up comments next weekend! In the meantime, this post will stay up as usual so you can at least hear what we're getting up to in the treehouse.

Congratulations on making it to another checkpoint, fellow traveller. Please spend your hard-earned coin on one of the following bonuses: either a weekend of games but no sleep; a weekend of sleep but no games; or a weekend of health and activity but nothing to post in the comments below? Your choice! Here's what we're all clicking on this weekend.

Read more

Sunday is cancelled. Book for now!

Read more

SCENE. A Video Game Website At Sunrise.

Enter A Reader Of News

A Reader Of News I wonder whither there be'est any new PC games on sale this week, perchance?

Enter A News Editor, With Alarums And Excursions

Read more

Put your hand up if you'd forgotten that every Assassin's Creed game is, strictly speaking, set in the present day. I know I had. That's not the actual distant past you're parkouring through. That isn't actual Renaissance architecture you're clambering on. It's a holographic Animus simulation, conjured from ancestral memories flash-frozen within your DNA - convenient, inasmuch as it means that any inconsistencies are your DNA's fault, not Ubisoft's. If the ledge-mantling animations are glitchy, that's simply because you have bad genes.

We can both be forgiven for losing sight of Assassin's Creed's modern day narrative frame. Ubisoft themselves have downplayed it since the era of Desmond Miles, the watery Peter Parker figure who served as puppetmaster protagonist for AC games up to Assassin's Creed 3. In Assassin's Creed Shadows, however, they're planning to bring back the modern day setting in a big way, though details are scanty.

Read more

One of my lesser quality tests for an RPG is whether the shopkeepers complain at you for not buying anything. Grumpy shopkeepers, good RPG. This most specific of litmus tests has served me well, although I must admit that I’d happily upgrade it to ‘shopkeepers you can attack’, would that not disqualify 99% of games. But not turn based dungeon crawler Thysiastery, it turns out. This “dungeon crawler RPG featuring traditional roguelike and turn-based gameplay” apparently trusts you enough to let you recklessly batter its friendly wandering lizard merchants. You’d be a monster for it, of course, but it’s nice to have options.

Read more

I didn’t get much further in the extremely popular beta for the haute-couture-asaurus action of Monster Hunter Wilds than perfecting the exact orange-to-white ratio of my cat. Not because I wasn’t having fun, but because I immediately started looking up GPU prices after playing for ten minutes. As such, I didn’t spend enough time with the combat to get a proper feel for it. Cultural osmosis has once again allowed me to form an uneducated take, however, and I’m getting the sense there’s been some mixed reactions re: bonk quality. According to a clip shared on X by user Blue Stigma, there's a good reason for those misgivings. It's all about frames, you see.

Read more

I was excited for Slitterhead, an action adventure game by Bokeh Studio, a studio founded by none other than your boy Keiichiro Toyama: the creator of Silent Hill, Gravity Rush, and the Siren series. And within that first hour, Slitterhead's body-possessing and Hong Kong-inspired streets had me thinking, "Is this it, the sleeper hit of 2024?!"

No, sadly not. It's no doubt built a compelling universe filled with brain-sucking aliens that masquerade as humans, and it attempts plenty else besides: bouncing between bodies as you stealth around dingy apartment blocks, fighting with blood katanas, and gorging on pools of red plasma to refuel skills, many of which require more body-flitting. Thing is, they are ultimately just attempts, attempts that fall victim to an emptiness and jitteriness that quickly reveals Slitterhead's true, irritating form.

Read more

When nightmarish sci-fi extraction shooter The Forever Winter launched into early access in September it was somewhat messy. Bugs and maddening enemy spawns diminished the tension of being a fleshy human scavenger in a mech battlefield. But one feature annoyed some players much more - fresh water. See, you need to keep your headquarters stocked with water, as it gets steadily used by your settlement's inhabitants. The catch being that this water diminishes even while you're not playing the game. If it runs out completely, then everything you've collected gets wiped. The developers have listened to complaints about this most Farmville of mechanics, and they've answered in an interesting way. Water thieves! Now, on top of the usual downward trickle, burglars will come to steal your H2O as well.

It's not as bad as it sounds.

Read more

The mystery surrounding Deadlock, Valve’s work-in-progress MOBA shooter, has largely evaporated. Its freely extendable invite system is about as effective at controlling player headcount as a disinterested football steward, meaning pretty much anyone with a clued-in Steam friend can get in and start poking around its secrets. And yet, being a lane-pushing wizard fighter in the Dota 2 vein, it’s already a vast tangle of interplaying abilities, items, strats, and often unspoken rules, of the kind that even experienced gankists will take hundreds of hours to learn. It’s been too much for poor Brendy, at any rate.

Still, Brendy is but one man. What if we had but four men, working in tandem to crush lanes and flatten Patrons just as Gabe intended? To find out if Deadlock is indeed more comprehensible as a team sport, Graham, Ed, Ollie, and James joined forces, promptly getting fucked up yet emerging from the warlock hospital with a deeper understanding of its workings. Or, at least, if anyone would keep playing.

Read more

It’s tempting to frame Straftat as a throwback to an older, better time for the multiplayer FPS, when the lingo was coded in frags and gibs and sucking it down, when satisfaction was drawn entirely from performance rather than some convoluted, artificial system of progression. Not only would this be inaccurate, but it would also do a disservice to what Straftat truly is, namely a wild overcorrection in response to the direction of modern multiplayer gunfests, one that careens straight through retro stations to arrive somewhere new and exciting.

Read more

Twitch have introduced a new "Politics and Sensitive Social Issues" label for streams that "focus" on topics like "elections, civic integrity, and war or military conflict". As with the streaming giant's existing labels for M-rated material, sexual themes or depictions of gambling, the idea is that viewers can filter out such streams in advance by altering their settings.

Advertisers, similarly, can "make better choices about the content they want to advertise next to" - in other words, pull their ads from a whole swathe of material if they don't want to be associated with anything controversial. Twitch's hope is that "the labels will allow advertisers to have more context to inform which types of streams they show their ads alongside, which we expect to increase brands’ confidence in running ads on Twitch, and could bring new advertisers to our service."

Read more

Minor spoilers for the first few hours of Veilguard and heavy spoilers for Baldur’s Gate 3

For all the things I ended up enjoying about Dragon Age: The Veilguard, it isn’t much of an RPG. What little roleplaying it does offer revolves around what flavour of supportive hero you prefer, and you can count the number of impactful dialogue decisions on a three-fingered hand. This might sound utterly damning in the wake of Baldur's Gate 3’s incredible reactivity, and if I approached games as some sort of tedious comparative intellectual exercise rather than just, y’know, seeing how I felt about them, then I suppose it would be. Weirdly, though, the recent memory of Baldur’s Gate 3 didn’t diminish my time with Veilguard at all. It was actually the opposite: it freed Dragon Age from having to carry the torch for a certain period in Bioware’s history, and let me enjoy Veilguard for what it was.

Read more

Beloved roguelike traumatic-childhood-em-up The Binding Of Issac: Rebirth turned 10 yesterday, and it’s half off on Steam to celebrate. What’s more, maker Edmund McMillen has announced that the foretold online co-op update is due on the 18th of this month, alongside a “considerable” balance update. Consider me considering the considerability of said considerable update!

Read more

Much the same as anyone with a soul, I find ants deeply fascinating and, much the same as anyone who occasionally drops small pieces of sandwich on the floor, I will continue to uphold my respect for them as long as they come nowhere near my feet. Yes. I admit it: I am a bug hypocrite, loudly extolling their virtue and beauty at a distance then getting irritated if they decide to come sit on me.

Fortunately, real time strategy Empire Of The Ants understands that the best place for insects to be is inside a screen, where they can be appreciated but cannot under any circumstances touch you. It’s out this week, as it happens, and here’s a new launch trailer to celebrate. Follow your pheromone trail to the video below.

Read more

I have zero archaeology experience or knowledge, but I bet archaeologists really love their jobs (for the most part). They get to analyse and discover cool artefacts and educate us on the histories of forgotten civilisations. That's dreamy stuff, that is. But I do wonder what it's like for archaeologists to discover and study something they shouldn't have; something with a disturbing secret - a curse, maybe. Bite-sized horror game The Children Of Clay explores this idea and I'd like more of it, please.

Read more

As a yearly blockbuster, Call of Duty, through sheer expense and effort, would like you to think it is the Die Hard of video games. Or, depending on the setting, the Saving Private Ryan of video games. But it is barely Black Hawk Down. This latest campaign in Call Of Duty: Black Ops 6 reminds me more of the forgettable Netflix shootfests that thumbnail their way across your TV screen as you try to find some gritty nothing to aid you in zoning out of life. Still, there is an anecdotal contingent of casual sofa sitters for whom Call Of Duty is the game. A balls-to-the-wall shooter to return to every winter and rinse through in a weekend. Ed has already gestured at its multiplayer, announcing: "yup, it's COD", like a deeply tired Captain Birdseye inspecting the day's catch, wondering when his life will change. But never mind that. How does the single player story mode hold up? Some are calling it the best campaign in years. And I guess that's true, in the sense that it is the least worst.

Read more

I've spent quite a lot of today trying to figure out why, exactly, some of the monsters in the Monster Hunter Wilds beta looked like bundles of copulating pyramids slathered in crocodile gravy. Nic clued me in on this reddit thread earlier, which cites unnamed Chinese players who've allegedly data-mined the beta's monster models, and learned that they are extremely large, encompassing hundreds of thousands of polygons.

If every monster in Monster Hunter Wilds were that fancy all of the time, your computer would become a volcano. As such, the game resorts to loading-on-demand systems to ensure that you only see those gorgeous details when the monsters are close by and, as the case may be, angrily sitting on you. When they're further afield, the flourishes fall away to free up memory and processing power. The popular Redditor explanation for the presence of monsters that look like Henry Moore sculpture is basically that the LOD systems are being forgetful, and neglecting to load the additional polygons at proximity.

Read more

Enshrouded has received what developers Keen Games are calling the survival game's "most sizable" update yet, sizable being an appropriate word for mountains. Expect a new playable area, the Alabaneve Summits, with its own enemies, resources, non-threatening wildlife and quests. The maximum character level has risen to 35! There are new townsfolk to find and place in your poorly built houses! You can tame animals, and make them live in poorly built houses too! You can get hypothermia!

Read more

Steam's built-in game recording feature has been usable in beta since the summer, but it has now been properly launched for every user, following a client update to Steam yesterday. It's basically another method of capturing funny ragdoll glitches and posting them on the "lol-games-are-dumb" channel of your friend's Discord. Or for posting that flukey knife throw in Call Of Duty to Twitter, as if you really meant to kill the man from across the map all along. Or saving a clip for your personal records, like the footage of that time you yeeted an innocent citizen off the 50-foot wall of a castle town in Dragon's Dogma 2. We all do that, right? Right?

Read more

Back in the misty reaches of time (March) popular farming sim Stardew Valley got a big update that added more pets to the game (it also let you drink mayonaise but let's not get sidetracked). Those new cats, dogs, and turtles had the cute distinction of being able to wear hats, should you choose to kit your wee friends out. Now, following many months of smaller updates to the game, it seems those hats are causing a problem. "[If] you are experiencing performance issues in Stardew Valley 1.6, remove all hats from pets," said creator Eric Barone in a xeet. When asked the lore-accurate cause of this problem, he blamed: "a strange rash".

Read more

We'll have a review of Planet Coaster 2 soon, but I keep making Brendy do other tasks so he's not had enough time yet to ride the rails. That means it falls to me to at least let you know that Frontier's theme park builder is out now.

Read more

Foxhole is one of my favourite games to read about, even if I don't play it. It's a massively multiplayer World War 2 game, viewed from above, where battlefield logistics matters as much as aiming and flanking. Its developers have just announced a major new update coming next summer, Foxhole: Airborne, which adds planes to the game for the first time.

Planes, in a topdown MMO? It makes a little more sense if you watch the trailer.

Read more

Putting aside my natural annoyance at Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater for almost beating out the Twarhammer series in the headline real estate wars, I am more than a little excited to play. Some days, you simply must feast on a tree frog, and while we still don’t have a solid release date, that day doesn’t feel too far away. Good news for stealth fans, and perhaps gooder news for a dozen strapline writers sweating profusely, soiling themselves in anticipation of using “kept you waiting, huh?”.

Until then, I at least have a steady drip feed of new information to keep me sated, the latest of which is the substantial hint that there'll be some new dialogue in the game, as per the video below. Alongside that, the previously pseudonymous Suzetta Miñet - who was credited with voicing EVA in MGS3 and Peace Walker - has revealed herself to be Jodi Benson, the voice of Ariel in Disney’s The Little Mermaid. Cheers for the spot, Automaton West.

Read more

There must be hundreds of typewriters in the hall, their collective clacks a tidal wave of soulless automation, rising up to greet agent Kiran Estevez as she enters, pistol and flashlight in hands. Exploring rooms to the side, Alan Wake 2: The Lake House’s star finds whiteboards and documents revealing the typewriter’s purpose: to mimic Wake’s writing. Pages are graded along criteria such as ‘style’, ‘tone’, and ‘content’, then “fed into the algorithm” as references until “near-identical stories” to Wake’s can be produced.

“If Jules could simply cut the painter open and pull the painting out of him, he would,” reads one of the real Alan’s typewritten pages. That’s Jules Marmont, the obsessive head of the titular FBC centre. The Marmonts - Jules and his wife Diana - are running experiments to forcibly and synthetically create works of art, aiming to mimic creative passion convincingly enough for the paranatural entity inside Cauldron Lake to respond, as it has in the past.

Read more

When I was a competitive long-distance runner at school, breath control was paramount. We were never really taught this, mind. It was an art you picked up through practice: how to breathe before the race, saturating your blood with O2 without dizzying yourself; when to permit the shorter, emergency breaths and when to apply restraint; when to deepen your inhales and charge yourself up for an attack on a hill.

And then, how to organise your body around your breath, straightening your posture to expand your lungs without tipping back too far and squandering muscle power; how to breath in time with your stride and the movement of your shoulders, so as to firm up your momentum and shave a miraculous-feeling minute off your finishing time. All this, plus various daft psychological war gambits of my own devising. When overtaking or being overtaken, I used to seal my lips shut on that side and breath through the other corner of my mouth, to make it look like I was hardly out of breath at all.

Read more