Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Playside are pitching Game Of Thrones: War For Westeros as an RTS for Age of Empires lovers, but it may also hook your fancy if you’re into vicious bastard boardgames. Speaking to me shortly after the new strategy project’s announcement at this year’s Summer Game Fest, game director Ryan McMahon explored how the requisite filthy traitor element of this latest George R.R. Martin adaptation will percolate through the project’s main “sandbox” mode, in which four players vie for supremacy over the Seven Kingdoms.

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Howdy, pardner. Been a while, ain’t it? Red Dead Online‘s just gotten a fresh update that surprisingly adds some new missions, three or so years after Rockstar gave up on delivering major updates to the cowboy sandbox. Oh, and one of them looks to involve you investigating some zombie plague outbreaks.

Sounds a bit Undead Nightmare-ish to me, and these sudden new additions have folks wondering if Rockstar’s trying to bring the game back from the grave.

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To overcome the first enemy you meet in Key Fairy (a Bugle with big eyes and bat wings), you zip around the woods with a grapple, avoiding its circling and collecting the stars it dispenses. When you collect three, it turns friendly and apologises for attacking you. “Worry not, little bird”, I reply from a set of dialogue options. “My cloak is thick.” The next screen is inhabited by three cyclopean worms chanting about the “eels of creation”. I like it here very much.

Brought to life with spacious, enchanting and playfully layered electronic music and hand-drawn art (you can change the colour palette to something cooler or monochrome if you wish), Key Fairy’s forest is a place I want to live, and I’m very grateful for even a short opportunity to spend time in it.

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“Mark Tyburn dreams of building the perfect video game,” reads the sales blurb for Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser’s novel A Better Paradise: Volume One: An Aftermath, a title so resplendent with drive-by colons that you could easily guess this man spent thirty years working in videogames. “Kurt Fischer dreams of being a rich and successful executive. Daisy Tyburn dreams of having the ideal father. John Tyburn Smith dreams of fitting in. NigelDave just dreams of becoming human.”

PleaseDon’tLetThatBeATypo, I immediately prayed to every god I knew the name of, and a few I made up on the spot. Please let NigelDave be real.

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I’ve found some great deals on gaming laptops and prebuilt desktops for todays daily deals. Everything from brand new high-end Alienware laptops that mimick their higher end cousins without the sticker shock to HP Omen beasts with cracking discounts. There’s even deals on Windows handhelds from Lenovo and MSI. There’s a good mix of laptops, desktops, and portable rigs, and most of them come with pretty aggressive discounts or promo codes. Nice and simple, right? Let’s get into it:

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While I have not one but two Windows gaming rigs for testing and writing, they’re both desktops. For working on the go, I use a MacBook Air (boo, hiss), but these HP Omen laptop deals have me considering a swap.

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I had totally forgotten that Resident Evil Village was in development alongside a new Resident Evil multiplayer game, which (at the risk of yet again inflating my own importance) is perhaps why Capcom have just shut the latter down. As promised earlier this year, Resident Evil RE:Verse is no more. Capcom have burned down the game’s storefront listing, taken a shovel to its DLC pages, and now put a pitchfork through the servers. Run tell the peasantfolk that the beast is finally dead.

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Capcom have a tough fight on their hands at the moment. No, Arkveld hasn’t escaped from its lair to terrorise the non-OP masses. Monster Hunter Wilds has been suffering from some pretty nasty performance issues on PC.

While they don’t look to have the action game running as well as some kind of crash and stuffer-free Usain Bolt quite yet, the release of Wilds’ second title update has seen the studio try to curb some shader compilation and VRAM-related problems.

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The Alters is a sci-fi management game in which you remix your character’s life history in a “Quantum Computer” to generate a workforce of deeply disturbed, borderline non-functional clones. In a twist so on-the-nose I can feel its fingers plucking at my olfactory bulb, developers 11 Bit Studios may have used generative AI to spawn or auto-translate parts of the in-game lore – despite the absence of a generative AI disclosure on Steam.

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Yaaar, me hearties. Pull up a barstool and take another swig of grog. I be hearin’ fresh tales of a treasure that’s reportedly still in development at Ubisoft.

These whispers be comin’ from Matt Ryan, the voice actor behind Assassin’s Creed Black Flag‘s swashbucking stabber Edward Kenway. He’s cheekily told some landlubbers that they may have to beat the game again, prompting the parrots to start squawking about a return to the Carribean yet again.

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