Valve has announced Steam Deck OLED: Limited Edition White.

The handheld is a limited edition white version of the Steam Deck OLED that will be available in limited quantities for $679.

Pre-orders will open up on Steam on November 18 at 3:00 pm PT / 6:00 pm ET / 11:00 pm UK.

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/463040/valve-announces-steam-deck-oled-limited-edition-white/

Nintendo has announced its Black Friday 2024 deals. 

Dozens of games will be discounted including The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Super Mario Maker 2, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Pikmin 4, Nintendo Switch Sports, Kirby and the Forgotten Land, Super Mario Odyssey, Pikmin 1 + 2, and more.

The Neon Red and Neon Blue Joy-Con controllers and the Nintendo Switch Pro Controller will be discounted by $20, while the Nintendo Switch Carrying Case & Screen Protector - The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Edition will be discounted by $10.

The Nintendo Switch: Mario Kart 8 Deluxe Bundle will once again return for $299.99, while the new Nintendo Switch – OLED Model: Mario Kart 8 Deluxe Bundle will be available for $349.99. Both bundles include a digital download of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe and a 12-month Nintendo Switch Online Individual Membership.

The Nintendo Switch Lite: Hyrule Edition with Bonus Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack will be available for $209.99. The bundle includes a 12-month Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack Individual Membership.

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/463045/nintendos-black-friday-2024-deals-revealed/

Sony Interactive Entertainment in a new video posted to YouTube revealed the PlayStation 5 Slim Digital Edition has been discounted by $70 and will be available for $379.99. The deal runs until December 24 "while supplies last."

No word yet if the standard PlayStation 5 or the recently released PlayStation 5 Pro will be discounted. The standard PS5 is priced at $499.99 and the PS5 Pro is priced at $699.99.

As of the time of writing, the discount isn't available yet at retailers or through PlayStation Direct.

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/463046/ps5-slim-digital-edition-discounted-to-379-in-the-us-until-december-24/

WASHINGTON CROSSING, Pennsylvania—At a campaign rally in the most important swing state in the country, anti-Trump activist George Conway told the Daily Beast why he thinks Kamala Harris can win over Republicans.

“She’s kind of done it already,” he said. “Look at all those people who voted for [Nikki] Haley when she was already done. I actually think there’s kind of a hidden Harris vote for Republicans who are just exhausted by Donald Trump.”

Turnout is another factor that plays to Democrat’s advantage, Conway predicted. “I also think that even the people who are still for Trump and won’t vote for Harris, I don’t think the turnout’s going to be great for him.”

Read more at The Daily Beast.

Liam Payne, a former member of the boy band One Direction, was found dead in a hotel courtyard in Buenos Aires, Argentina on Wednesday evening, according to CNN and La Nacion, both of which cited local police.

The singer died after an apparent fall from the balcony of his third-floor hotel room. Argentinian authorities told Good Morning America that Payne had been staying at the hotel CasaSur in the upscale neighborhood of Palermo.

He was 31.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

Journalists at CNN, including some of the network’s biggest personalities, are living in fear of “inevitable” layoffs and pay cuts as its new CEO looks to shore up finances amid declining ratings.

That’s according to The Ankler, which reported Wednesday that 77-year-old Chris Wallace—whose already been relegated to a weekend program—is among the network’s most well-known names whose future is in limbo.

Wallace’s $8.5 million contract, signed by the ex-CNN boss Jeff Zucker to recruit him away from Fox News three years ago, is reportedly up and he was spotted in CEO Mark Thompson’s office on Tuesday.

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.

Prior to his untimely death in Argentina on Wednesday, One Direction’s Liam Payne, 31, was in the middle of a legal spat with his ex-fiancée Maya Henry.

On Monday, The Sun reported that Henry, 23, had lawyered up in an attempt to stop Payne from constantly messaging her family and friends.

“Maya Henry issued a cease and desist last week to Liam Payne following the emergence of new and concerning information…She has retained attorneys Marco Crawford and Daniel Cerna to represent her. At this time, that is her only comment on the matter,” a spokesperson for Henry told the tabloid.

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.

Donald Trump praised Fox News chief political anchor Bret Baier for a “great job” in his interview with Democratic 2024 presidential hopeful Kamala Harris on Wednesday night, claiming Baier had “showed how totally incompetent Kamala is” while himself demanding she undergo a cognitive ability test.

Trump joined his campaign in calling the interview a total disaster for Harris. During the interview, Harris and Baier engaged in multiple back-and-forths; at one point, on the topic of immigration, Harris clapped back at Baier as he interrupted her: “May I finish responding to you?”

Immediately after the interview aired, the campaign—notably advisers Stephen Miller and Steven Cheung—took to X to decry Harris’ responses.

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.

Former President Donald Trump said Wednesday that Jan. 6, 2021— the day his supporters occupied Congress in a failed insurrection to try to stop lawmakers from certifying Joe Biden’s election victory—was a “day of love.”

Trump made the baffling claim during a televised election town hall hosted by Univision.

Ramiro González, a construction worker from Tampa, told the meeting he deregistered as a Republican because he found Trump’s “inaction” during both Jan. 6 and the COVID-19 pandemic “disturbing.” He asked Trump to square his controversial behavior during the attack on the U.S. Capitol—and the fact that many of his own former administration officials don’t support him any longer—with why he should be re-elected.

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.

Relatives of Lyle and Erik Menendez spoke in an interview Wednesday about their long-running fears that the brothers had been abused for years before they killed their parents.

After a press conference in which they’d called for the imprisoned siblings’ freedom, the family members told Chris Cuomo on NewsNation about how their suspicions only deepened as time passed.

“Over the years we really did know that there was abuse at gut-level. But as time goes on and we all talked to each other more and more, it validates the fears and the gut-level reactions that we had,” the brothers’ cousin Karen VanderMolen-Copley told Cuomo. “That solidified the knowledge that the sexual abuse actually did occur, because that’s not something you want to believe, and then once you talk to each other it becomes more and more obvious.”

Read more at The Daily Beast.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell called his party’s presidential nominee, Donald Trump, a “stupid,” “ill-tempered,” and “despicable human being,” according to his own records.

McConnell made the withering assessments in a series of private “personal oral histories” that he gave to Michael Tackett, the deputy Washington bureau chief of the Associated Press, who has a forthcoming biography about the Kentucky senator called The Price of Power. The AP conveniently reported the book’s juicy details.

McConnell’s remarks were made after the 2020 election that Trump lost, and the senator was apparently elated to see the backside of the former president, musing, “it’s not just the Democrats who are counting the days” until he leaves office.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

Donald Trump pulled out of another mainstream interview Thursday–this time nixing a sit-down with NBC News.

The interview, CNN reported, would be in Philadelphia with NBC News' senior business correspondent, Christine Romans. CNN’s Brian Stelter said one source suggested that it had only been “postponed.”

It was the second time in a week that he had canceled a scheduled appearance outside the conservative news sphere, CNN’s Reliable Sources reported Thursday. He had canceled an in-studio appearance on the CNBC flagship show, Squawk Box, which was due on Friday.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

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.

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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".

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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.

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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.

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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.

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People have asked me, a Call Of Duty liker, "How's the new COD?" - such is the mass appeal of Call Of Duty that even a lot of my non-industry pals are invested in whether Black Ops 6's shooty really does bang. And every single time my brain clunks into gear and I turn inwards, where I struggle to come up with anything meaningful to say. So much so that a fog develops and out of the fog emerges a figure - it's me. I'm holding an M4A1 with an extended barrel and a vertical foregrip. My brain and body perform a pincer movement of physical response: 1) I shrug 2) I say, "It's like Call Of Duty".

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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.

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The Elder Scrolls: Legends, the free-to-play card game set in Bethesda's fantasy world, has been removed from sale on Steam. Its servers will shut down for good on January 30th, 2025, after which it will no longer be playable. The closure comes five years after the game was last updated.

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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.

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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.

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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."

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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.

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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!

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To say that Factorio: Space Age throws out the rulebook is an understatement. It'd be more fitting to say it's somehow automated the whole process: an inserter plucked out the rulebook from my brain and deposited it in hot magma, while a new rulebook was churned out in a nearby machine and plopped into my brain from the other side - only for that to be immediately plucked out and incinerated as well. With each new planet and each new phase, Space Age reinvents itself. I'm battling hyperbole here, but ah hell, I admit defeat. Factorio: Space Age is a masterpiece, the final form of perhaps the most well-crafted building game I'll ever play.

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Hori's latest addition to its controller lineup, the "Horipad Wireless for Steam," is now available for preorder on Amazon. After already releasing in Japan at the end of October, now the gamepad is coming to the US.

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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.

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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.

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Ogres, Orcs, and Khorne are all on the way in the upcoming expansion for strategy game Total War: Warhammer 3, and Creative Assembly have just released their latest dev vlog with a few more details on what to expect. There’s still no word on the exact title, although given the established naming convention (Shadows Of Change, Thrones Of Decay), I’m tentatively calling it “Sniffers Of Glue” in honour of the No Think, Only Krump faction selection.

You’ll find the vlog in its full glory below. What’s interesting about this one is that vlog mainstay director Rich Alridge has brought along some new faces: battle designer Josh King and audio director Chris Goldsmith. And, yes, so no-one can accuse me of burying the lede: that audio design involved the enthusiastic, deeply disgusting slurping of porridge and yoghurt, and the jangling of real bones. The source of the bones is not revealed.

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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?

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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".

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Halo Infinite recently received a big update in the form of Delta Arena, a playlist that features recreations of Halo 2's most popular maps and a special third-person mode. The true highlight, though, is yet to come. And that's through an entirely different Halo game: The Master Chief Collection. Soon enough, you'll be able to play Halo 2's lost E3 demo on it, thanks to some lovely modders.

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I would never have predicted there'd be an isometric tactics game based on run-and-gun series Metal Slug, yet here Metal Slug Tactics is, and I am here for it. We've been following its development for a while but it's out now on Steam, and seemingly as strong as its demo suggested.

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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.

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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.

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A few months ago, the rumour took root that GTA 6's release date would slip back from 2025 to 2026. An anonymous insider averred that studio heads were "worried" about the new open world game's progress - hence, perhaps, Rockstar's decision to mandate a full return to in-office work. Pshaw, say publishers Take-Two CEO. They announced a fall 2025 launch in March and have just doubled down on it in their latest financial briefing, with CEO Strauss Zelnick subsequently going on the tellybox to say that Take-Two are "highly confident in the timing", though he still has nothing to share about GTA 6 on PC.

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Back in the mists of 2021, No Man's Sky revealed its very own Normandy SR1 space frigate. "The Normandy in No Man's Sky?" you cry. "Why, that's a Mass Effect vessel. Some mistake here surely?" 1) My name's not Shirley, and 2) Indeed it is a Mass Effect ship, but HelloGames struck a time-limited deal with BioWare to create a version for their own space sim.

"Blast, if only I'd noticed this at the time and acquired one," you mourn. "Ah, so many years I have wasted." Be of good cheer, my friend, for No Man's Sky has a Normandy once again, just in time for the latest N7 Day of assorted Mass Effect celebrations. For the next two weeks, you'll be able to get a-hold of it by way of a revised version of 2021's Beachhead Expedition. Tray-tray, away!

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Life simulation game Inzoi will launch on PC via Steam early access on 28th March 2025, publishers Krafton have announced. Billed as a potential Sims 4 usurper, and equipped with syrupy Unreal Engine 5 visuals, it was originally slated for launch this year.

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Roblox is making changes in an attempt to keep younger players safe in the online platform. Beginning later this month, children under the age of 13 will no longer be able to search, discover or play unrated experiences within Roblox, and will be unable to access social hangout experiences.

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I first played Taiko no Tatsujin in an arcade (in Japan, because I am very cool), where it's controlled by hitting a recreation of an actual taiko drum. It was fun enough that I wish there was a taiko drum peripheral available for PC now the series is on our platform.

Taiko no Tatsujin: Rhythm Festival is out now via Steam, where it offers over 70 songs to drum through, and a subscription service through which to unlock over 700 more. Maybe I should try to get my Donkey Konga drums working on PC, but I'll probably settle for playing it with a gamepad.

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Amplitude Studios, developers of many a game with "Endless" in the name, have split with publisher Sega to become independent again, with ownership of the studio reverting to its original founders and "other members of the team". The developers say everyone is parting "on good terms" and that the last eight years of getting published under Sega has been "amazing". But there are other businessy reasons, of course. Namely, Sega have been trying to trim down their European studios for the past year, and Amplitude is just the latest bunch of devs affected by that.

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Palworld developers Pocketpair have finally revealed which patents Nintendo and the Pokémon Company are suing them about. It looks like they're focusing on the act of throwing capsular items to catch or release monsters, together with the usage of monsters as mounts.

If you've somehow yet to encounter Palworld, it's a bestselling survival game that takes hefty - some would say, scandalous - inspiration from Pokémon, with players poaching Pokésque critters using magic spheres, and deploying them as soldiers and minions.

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