There are 137 Pals in Pocketpair’s monster-catching simulator Palworld, which might sound like plenty, but the serial Palworld player is an insatiable creature, always clamouring for new beasties to capture, pet and exploit, even as the developers encourage fans to play other games while they wait for the next Palworld update. If you’ve already bagged all the available Pals and are hungry for more, you might be interested in Palworld mod Breed Unreleased Pals, created by ShameIHaveNoFriends, which grants access to three animals who exist in the game’s files but are not, strictly speaking, available to players.
Who is Jeff Minter? Unless you’re a long-term fan of his work, you might have asked that upon hearing about Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story, the latest interactive documentary from Digital Eclipse (following on from The Making Of Karateka and Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration). You might have heard Minter’s name in connection with the remake of the unreleased Atari arcade game Akka Arrh in 2023. Maybe you played his mind-warping shooter Polybius in VR. You might remember as far back as the Atari Jaguar and Minter’s phenomenal Tempest 2000, the unexpected highlight of the console’s library. Or perhaps you recall his work from the 8-bit glory days. You could just know him from the daily videos of him feeding his sheep on YouTube.
The point is that Jeff Minter has been making games for a phenomenally long time – more than 40 years, in fact. And in all that time, he has stayed true to what he believes in. “One of the things we say in the game itself is the idea of him being the last indie developer,” says Chris Kohler, editorial director at Digital Eclipse in California. “The last of the people from the early 80s who very consciously never sold out, never took the money, never looked to expand or do anything other than [be] just Jeff at his computer, making the sorts of video games that he wants to make.”
Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom already has a descriptive name, but its new trailer omits it in favour of a better encapsulation of its pitch: “You’re a N64 taxi and there’s no jump button?”. The video itself is sixty seconds of pure, colourful joy, and it ends on a release date: April 9th.
TopSpin 2k25 was announced in January, the first entry in the tennis series since 2011. It turns out there’s not long to wait before it’s served up either, as it now has a release date of April 26th.
Children Of The Sun instantly shot to the top of my personal most-wanted list when it was first announced at the start of February alongside its accompanying Steam Next Fest demo, and happily, publishers Devolver Digital have now set a release date. It’s coming real soon, with its single-shot murder bullet puzzles hitting Steam on April 9th – and to celebrate, there’s a flashy new release trailer to go with it. Come and be dazzled by its exploding headshots below.
An alleged trailer for Spider-Man: The Great Web has leaked online – Spider-Man: The Great Web being a cancelled Insomniac Games comicbook adaptation with a focus on co-op multiplayer. I am not going to embed the footage because I’m not sure if doing so would cause screaming Spider-Lawyers to crash through my window – best of luck finding tall objects to swing from in darkest West Yorkshire, webheads! – but I will do you the great honour of describing the footage below.
This weekend I said one of the games I was planning to be playing was Chasing The Unseen, and I did in fact do that. It is indeed a strange, dream-like experience where you leap floaty leaps onto thin, spindly crags of rock in a sage-grey void. Rather than finding it soothing, I found it it extremely stress-making. This was the opposite experience to what I had expected.
Having played Nightingale a bunch for early access review, I wasn’t entirely convinced by its mixture of survival and Destiny-esque power level grind. I also wasn’t too keen on its slew of bugs and tricksy interface. Still, the devs are hard at work fixing things, as the latest patch squashes major crashes, material losses when building, and further improves the UI.
Capcom announced last night that Monster Hunter Stories, a 2016 Nintendo 3DS spin-off from their megahuge monstermashing series, is coming to PC in June. They’ve remastered it with a wee visual refresh, fully voice acting, a concept art gallery, and more. We’ve actually already had the sequel on PC, 2021’s Monster Hunter Stories 2: Wings Of Ruin, so it’s nice to catch up.
It seems only fitting that Ghostbusters has become the movie franchise that refuses to die, returning for a smattering of so-so (at best) reboots and sequels on screen and elsewhere being relegated to another rich vein of nostalgia to be mined for cash. Speaking of, Destiny 2 is getting Ghostbusters cosmetics next week!
