Despite AMD’s assurances to the contrary, Valve have announced that they’ve pushed back release plans for the new Steam Machine, Steam Controller, and Steam Frame VR headset. Alas, my curse of publishing news posts roughly 0.0045 seconds before a major situation change continues to ruin my life – sometimes I wish I’d never beaten the warlocks in that Titanfall 2 pub match.
Yapyap stands apart from other “friendslop” horror extraction games by giving you plenty of firepower to begin with. Airpower, anyway. You and up to four mates are the boggle-eyed, flap-jawed minions of an enormous, moon-masked wizard. You’ve been summoned to wreak havoc on a rival wizard’s procedurally generated tower. Over the course of three nights per round, you must smash as many fixtures as you can to fill up your quota of Chaos – tapestries, crates, paintings, statues, anything that isn’t nailed down. For this purpose, you are handed a range of magical artefacts.
Some of the artefacts have to be bought with gold, but there’s a tree in the game’s lobby area that grows wands of wind magic, pluckable for free. Wind magic is the Ringo Starr of the four elements, IMO, but the default wands are fun, especially given that you have unlimited mana. There’s a basic ‘Force Push’ style wind spell, used to blow the helmets off zombie knights, a levitation spell to enhance your parkour, and a summonable tornado that will happily engulf the caster.
Apex Legends season 28 launches on February 10th, and appears to add competitive glazing to the now 7-year-old battle royale. The game’s “newest tactical mechanic”, so says the announcement post, is Hardlight Mesh, a glowy, bullet-resistant window that teams can either throw up to defend a hidey hole or, with enough lead, rockets, and/or angry kicks, break down to form a new ingress point. Holes in walls? That’s old hat. ApeLegs is disrupting holes in walls. There’ll probably be a TechCrunch article on it.
While Amazon have been gradually dropping episodes of their Fallout show‘s second series,a timer has been ticking away. It’s been on the show’s website, which is a little interactive map. Surely this timer, set to expire once the final episode of the series went live, could herald the reveal of Fallout New Vegas or Fallout 3 remasters Bethesda may have in the works, some fans speculated.
Generative AI has played “zero part” in Rockstar Games’ creation of GTA 6, Take-Two CEOman Strauss Zelnick has said at the company’s latest financial numbers get-together, where he also indicated the game’s still on to initially release this November. Well, on consoles at least. Though, back in the AI front, the Z bloke also revealed that Take-Two have “hundreds of pilots and implementations” on the go involving the tech.
I have a strange affinity for brutalism. It sucks you in, engulfs you in its stature, kills your spirit in such blunt, obvious ways, that I can’t help but be wowed by in all its oppressiveness. As an architectural styling, it is also supremely opportune for sick parkour tricks, something Léonard Lemaitre (Babbdi, Straftat), Nathan Grange and Niels Tiercelin all deeply understand with the volumetric VHOLUME, a “first-person parkour adventure set in a dystopian brutalist city where bureaucracy turns a simple task into an odyssey,” which now has a demo.
It’s undeniable that for throwback 3D retro aesthetics, the original PlayStation and Nintendo 64 are the consoles that most people try to emulate. So I’m always quite chuffed to see a game that takes its visual cues from more recent consoles, like, say, Bel’s Fanfare, a very 3DS-era looking Zelda-esque game where you play as a little demon girl who works as a cleaner on a strange, massive ship.