Clean out Shinra in PowerWash Simulator’s upcoming Final Fantasy 7 expansion

PowerWash Simulator is heading on another unexpected mission, this time to Final Fantasy 7’s industrial city of Midgar. You’ll need to wait a little longer to help Cloud and friends clean up the city, as we don’t have a release date for the free Midgar Special Request DLC yet. The crossover pack’s announcement (via the Square Enix Extreme Edges Twitter account) did tease a few of the things we can expect to clean up, including the Seventh Heaven bar, and FF7’s first boss the Guard Scorpion. The teaser image also shows off the motorcycles from FF7’s mini-game, so I’ll be expecting to hose that down in time for a quick escape.

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Disgaea 7: Vows Of The Virtueless heading to Steam this autumn

Disgaea 7: Vows Of The Virtueless, the next instalment in the long-running JRPG series, is coming to PC this year. Disgaea 7 was actually released in Japan just a few days ago, but it’ll see an overseas release on Steam this autumn. NIS also announced rereleases for Rhapsody 2: Ballad Of The Little Princess and Rhapsody 3: Memories Of Marl Kingdom coming this summer.

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Thief developer Randy Smith says “immersion is totally incompatible with ego”

Thief: The Dark Project had a great director, in the form of Greg LePiccolo, who later became a pioneer in the world of music games with Guitar Hero and Rock Band. And before him, Ken Levine had laid down the cobbles of Thief’s setting, defining its noir-ish tone before heading off to work on System Shock 2. Yet Looking Glass games weren’t driven by a singular 90s auteur. In fact, the very absence of ego in the studio’s culture meant its many “bright stars” were happy to adhere to a shared vision.

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Shots fired as Microsoft and Sony reignite Call Of Duty parity debate

Call Of Duty exclusivity, and they’re not done yet. In a series of tweets published last Friday, Microsoft’s chief communications officer Frank X. Shaw said Sony were “briefing people in Brussels claiming Microsoft is unwilling to offer them parity for Call of Duty if we acquire Activision,” but added that “Nothing could be further from the truth.” I would have thought that a legal venue would be a more appropriate place to air these grievances, but I suppose this gets the job done quicker. Either way, it’s a toffee popcorn-worthy accusation in the ongoing drama.

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Over 12 minutes of early Horizon multiplayer game footage leaks online

Horizon Forbidden West‘s multiplayer alpha has appeared online. The leak surfaced on Reddit over the weekend, claiming to be from a “very old alpha” build from summer 2020. It’s an interesting watch, as while the world and robo dinos look like classic Horizon, the characters jumping around fighting them look a lot more stylised than their hyper-detailed mainline counterparts.

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Even after big fixes, the Dead Space remake can stumble on Steam Deck

Dead Space remake on my PC, and the Dead Space remake on my Steam Deck. It’s a belter of a refurb, and for me personally, has been like getting dessert after being forced to finish my Forspoken vegetables. Still, some lingering performance woes on the Deck mean I’m probably going to continue Isaac Clarke’s first and worst job on desktop alone.

To be fair, the remake is playable on Valve’s handheld. It’s not outright broken, despite having been so on launch day, with problems ranging from drastic FPS dips to outright hard crashes. Following some impressively fast work from Valve themselves, focusing on hotfixes for SteamOS’ Proton compatibility software, Dead Space’s Deck performance has become more or less manageable. But worthy of the best Steam Deck games? Nope, nein and non.

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