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At the risk of being viciously cyberbullied for admitting I have a favourite power bank: I have a favourite power bank. It’s the Ugreen Nexode Retractable, and it’s perfect for topping up your Steam Deck, Windows handheld, laptop, headphones, wireless controller, portable fan, or overpriced electric toothbrush. It’s also going cheaper than usual in Amazon’s Prime Big Deal Days sale, shedding 25% off in the UK and 30% off in the US.
Alright, fine.
Amazon are currently running another Prime Day sale, of sorts – technically it’s Prime Big Deal Days, which is like Prime Day, but worse. Yes, you still need an Amazon Prime account to get the full discounts, and no, there isn’t nearly as much worthwhile PC gaming hardware with discount stickers as there were in the ‘main’ sale.
Still, this one isn’t entirely deprived of good finds. For one, there’s the Logitech G305 Lightspeed, probably my favourite cheap wireless mouse among all cheap wireless mice. It’s even less of a money sink with a Prime account, which currently snips it down to £28 in the UK and $28 in the US, with the latter getting a few different colour options as well.
Right, it’s time to get ahead of the game. Approach your router and force it to repeat the things Lightning McQueen says about speed at the start of Cars, because Battlefield 6 has a launch patch coming and it sounds like it’ll be weighty. EA say “over 200 changes” will be dropping as part of it and have also teased some potential future additions in their latest beta learnings post.
Mina the Hollower is quite clearly a Halloween game. The thing about Halloween is that there should always be a little bit silliness amongst the horrific and the scary, and Yacht Club Games’ next retro throwback seemed quite well fitted for the season. It was so appropriate that it was even planned to be released on October 31st! All of this to say, yes, Mina the Hollower is delayed, and it doesn’t have a new release date either.
Marathon lives! Well, of course it does, it would be quite shocking if PlayStation were to cancel it before it even got a chance to become Concord 2, but that’s neither here nor there. What is here, and soon to be there, is another playtest, of which sign-ups are now available. It is being dubbed a “closed technical test,” and plans to run for just a few days, between October 22nd and October 28th, but there are a few differences to be found compared to when we last saw it.
In the late ’90s, early 2000s, there were two distinct flavours of aesthetics: boomer shooters, and Y2K girlypop vibes (for the sake of this argument we will ignore every other aesthetic that existed at the time). Boomer shooters like Doom and Wolfenstein were bloody, gory, and had a real “video games are gritty and cool now kind of vibe.” Conversely, products aimed at young girls were often glittery, pink, featured leopard print, and were often about love and harmony. Don’t Stop, Girlypop! is a game that combines these two vibes, and it is very good (and stressful).
I dunno about you, but I usually dig a big Skyrim mod that threatens to make my number of hours spent padding around Tamriel even more ludicrous. Lordbound is the latest danger to the free time of poor folks like me, having just soft launched after ten years of development spent creating a fresh region bigger than the Dragonborn DLC’s Solstheim and filling it with stuff to do.
Oh boy. Unfortunately, it’s one of those days. You might remember that last week, Dune: Awakening developer Funcom laid off an unspecified number of staff. Yep, that same Dune: Awakening that appeared to be doing pretty well for itself. Go figure! Today, there’s more bad news, as it turns out that Metal: Hellsinger studio The Outsiders will be shutting down completely as part of said layoffs at parent company Funcom.
There is a belief that appears to crop up within the games industry that to work in it, you must be wholly aware of everything in it. You must live, breathe and die by games! That doesn’t always result in interesting games though, sometimes it’s actually quite useful to have outsiders come in to bring other perspectives. Admittedly that occasionally results in writers from the film industry waltzing in thinking it’s a one-to-one transfer, which is admittedly not great. But other times you get Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, whose writer, as it turns out, had not played a single video game in her life before writing it.
When Sega and Creative Assembly’s Alien: Isolation launched in 2014, I was deputy editor at Official Xbox Magazine. I remember getting the review copy from our contributor Alex “Game Over, Man” Dale, and asking him how long the game was. 35-40 hours, he said. WTF, I said. I can’t remember how Alex responded – possibly his transmission ended with a jangling scream and a burp of static, or possibly he agreed with me that 35-40 hours is indecently hefty for a horror game, even with the qualification that you can get through the main campaign in around 20. 35-40 hours? That’s a farking Final Fantasy, mate!
Over 10 years later, we finally know who to blame. Surprise surprise, it was the xenomorph all along. According to Alien Isolation writer Dion Lay, the Gigerbeast’s increasing capability during development made certain areas more time-intensive than they were originally supposed to be. There’s probably a relevant Alien quote to invoke, here, but I’m going to settle for that Jeff Goldblum line from Jurassic Park.
