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Alienware Area-51 gaming desktop is the kind of PC that makes console players jellous. It’s big, powerful, and costs as much as a used car. But if you’re dropping this kind of cash, you want to make sure you’re getting the best deal.
Teardown is one of those games that’s just fun to look at, with all of its completely destructible voxel environments. When it first got announced it kind of reminded me of those old Flash games where you had simple creatures you could shake around and chuck stuff at, the joy of it being to see how far you could push things.
Messing around like that is all the better with friends though, I reckon, and would you look at that, developer Tuxedo Labs have just announced today that a multiplayer update is on the way to the sandbox game.
Zen-like spout splasher PowerWash Simulator is getting a sequel, and you need to get some mates: it’s got both couch co-op and shared online campaign progression. It’s also self-published by FuturLab this time, which likely means less Final Fantasy motorbikes but more revenue for the developers to make their own gilded nozzles. Here’s a trailer.
The Sims players among us have been gazing cautiously at inZOI, a new neighbourhood and life management game from Krafton. I am cautious for essentially two reasons. One is that the game makes use of live generative AI: you can stuff its jaws with text, images and video to create items such as outfits and animate your pet humans, here known as Zois. Your Zoi’s “actions and thoughts” are also based on “small machine learning” tech, which as the name implies is a teenier species of generative AI that commonly runs live on the user’s own hardware. Going by the Steam page disclosure, the actual base game assets weren’t AI generated, but then again, Steam AI disclosures can be rather unrevealing.
We’ve published a fair bit about the risks and potential abuses of generative AI tools in video game development, so we’ll be looking at that in more depth when the game hits early access on 28th March. In the meantime, here’s the second reason I’m cautious: inZOI’s key selling point over its obvious (and massively updated) rival The Sims 4 is that it has photorealistic visuals, and frankly, they creep the hell out of me.
I love a game that features some kind of cooking element, so I was quite pleased yesterday when Humble Games revealed they’re publishing Town Of Zoz, a new action RPG that’s all about fighting off rats from eating your crops, taking down baddies to gather up ingredients, and using said ingredients and crops to make some tasty meals. It’s got wonderfully vibrant art and animation. The announcement trailer quickly won me over with the choppy, almost stop-motion-like quality of certain character models.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows will in fact be compatible with the Steam Deck, Ubisoft say, despite a previous tech Q&A on the sneaky-stabby ninja sim declaring point-blank that it won’t. Announced on whatever the fuck Twitter is these days, the confirmation that Shadows will play nice with the Deck comes as a pleasant surprise – even without that prior naysaying, games with a GTX 1070 listed among the minimum specs typically don’t cope too well on the handheld’s frugal hardware.
One thing this review can’t tell you is how exactly the MSI Claw 8 AI+ improves on the original Claw, for the simple reason that MSI themselves binned off the latter before I had a chance to try it. Three months, it lasted, before this do-over got announced. Three months! And people say the Steam Deck OLED came too soon.
The good news is that the Claw 8 AI+’s mostly-internal revamping – new CPU, new GPU, fatter battery etc. – has produced a handheld that not only thrashes Valve’s upgraded Steam Deck on games performance, but is up there with the best of its Windows-based brethren-portables on longevity. You know what, it probably is better than the Claw. Yeah.
Avowed‘s game director Carrie Patel has been on the blower to Eurogamer about why Avowed doesn’t have any romance in it, which is to say it does, actually, if you’re paying attention, and also, affairs of the heart aren’t supposed to feel like min-maxing your Wizard, Kevin. To put that another way, she has gently suggested that relationships are more relatable when they aren’t some kind of mechanic or system.
“While GTA lets players experience a fictional underworld of lawless enterprise, the entities behind PlayerAuctions own and operate a real one”. So claims a lawyer for GTA 6 and Borderlands publisher Take-Two Interactive in a complaint filed on Tuesday against third-party asset marketplace PlayerAuctions. They accuse PlayerAuctions – who have already faced similar accusations from Roblox – of selling modified player accounts obtained by hacking, via Polygon.
(I have no choice but to respect the hustle of trying to make GTA’s “fictional underworld of lawless enterprise” sound as cool as possible during a lawsuit. “While GTA lets players do cool and fun fake crimes…”)
“The website PlayerAuctions.com offers a vast online marketplace containing thousands of listings for unauthorized, infringing GTA V content – including heavily modified player accounts, in-game assets, and virtual currency – all gained by using hacking software, cheats, and technical exploits,” continues the complaint.
Verity Amersham’s pockets are overflowing. Her school uniform hides a paperclip, a safety pin, two school badges, two books, a bottle of wine, a bottle of chloroform, a handwritten note, and more. None of it will do any good, as I have failed once again. Verity will be expelled from school.
I have saved Verity from her fate previously. Expelled! is Inkle working in their Overboard! mode, which Alice B so enjoyed upon its surprise release in 2021. Here, again, you play and replay a short 45-60 minute story, trying new ideas and learning more each time. It also returns to the interwar years for a different kind of pastiche of golden age mystery fiction: the school story.
