Where You Buy Your Computer Cases?

[Administrator]

There is a new update on Steam which informs other players if a review left on a game's page was primarily played on Valve's handheld Steam Deck.
The news was shared via the Steam Deck's social media team on X, with the straight to the point wording: "We've just shipped a new feature on Steam that shows when a customer review was written by someone who played primarily on Steam Deck."
Valve asks that patrons look out for the Deck icon, to "see how these players reviewed the game". It shared an example of how this icon looks on a review, with a little Deck outline displayed in the upper right corner of the screen.
Read more


More...

[Administrator]

Good news, Nintendo fans - Super Mario and Pokémon products will be popping up in the middle aisles of Aldis everywhere this weekend.
Whilst some Teenage Mutant Ninja/Hero Turtles, Paddington Bear, and Hello Kitty stuff crept into Aldi earlier this week, from Saturday 24th August middle aisles will boast a selection of cut-price game-flavoured treats, including duvet sets, throws, and cushions.
Read more


More...

[Administrator]

It looks like people are quite keen to get their hands on the next instalment in the Nikki series.
As shared on social media platform X, over 12 million of us have already pre-registered for Infinity Nikki, the "cosy open-world adventure" follow-up to the highly successful mobile series of dress up games.
Infinity Nikki is helmed by PaperGames with Kentaro Tominaga - whose name you may recognise from his days at Nintendo - leading the project. Tominaga's other credits include designer on The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and director of its Expansion Pass, to name but two.
Read more


More...

[Administrator]

Development on the upcoming Tomb Raider game from Crystal Dynamics and Amazon is "going well".
Amazon announced it would be working alongside Crystal Dynamics on the next Tomb Raider game back in 2022, when it said it would provide its "full support" to the team as it works on "the biggest, most expansive" series entry to date.
Since then, details have been pretty sparse for the upcoming release. In fact, all we really know right now is that it is being made in Unreal Engine 5 and will have "mind-bending puzzles to solve" and a "wide variety of enemies to face and overcome".
Read more


More...

[Administrator]

Gearbox founder Randy Pitchford has admitted his long-term hopes for Epic were "misplaced or overly optimistic", having previously predicted Steam could become a "dying store".
For a bit of context, back in 2019, Pitchford wrote a lengthy post on social media discussing Gearbox's decision to make Borderlands 3 on PC a timed Epic exclusive. At this time, the exec said he believed Epic's "investment in technology will outpace Valve's substantially", and went on to suggest Steam could fizzle out and other store fronts would reign supreme.
Fast forward now to earlier this week, when Gearbox revealed Borderlands 4. The next series instalment is currently slated for a 2025 release across PS5, Xbox Series X/S and PC via Epic and... Steam. Needless to say, this revelation has caused Pitchford's earlier comments to resurface once again.
Read more


More...

[Administrator]

Brace yourself, Star Wars fans – early copies of Star Wars Outlaws are already out there, and some players have elected to livestream the game.
This means spoilers will likely follow, so if you'd like to keep the surprises hidden, it may be prudent to update your mute list and/or stay off social media for a few days.
Read more


More...

[Administrator]

Suspicious Developments' latest builds a witty, wonderfully generous adventure around a smart, rewarding, and endlessly imaginative turn-based tactics core.
Tactical Breach Wizards starts with a bang - literally. Each mission, and even the game itself, begins with a flash of magic and the splintering of wood as doors are blown off their hinges with an endlessly satisfying boom. It's a stylish opener that never loses its air-punch thrill, a wonderfully cool moment in a game brimming with them - and just one of the things that makes Suspicious Developments' turn-based tactics game positively crackle with wit, energy, and charm.
We should probably start with the wizards though. Welcome to a world where magic-wielders are, if not exactly commonplace, far from clandestine. It's a world where Freelance Storm Witches moonlight as private investigators, where Necromedics can cure anyone of anything as long as they kill them first, where the military employs Navy Seers for their surprisingly useful one-second foresight, where the church has its own oppressive anti-magic police force, and where Traffic Warlocks are called Steve. There's some stellar world-building in Tactical Breach Wizards, as it blends urban fantasy with taut espionage thrills and military conspiracy, and it's further enriched by its lovable cast of magical misfits, its warm, witty dialogue, and a surprisingly gripping central yarn.
Read more


More...

[Administrator]

Hello! Welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we've been playing over the past few days. This week, we enjoy Delta Force coming back in a big way; we try out the new character creator for pretty Sims-like Inzoi; and we wince a bit as Skyrim shows its age.
What have you been playing?
Catch up with the older editions of this column in our What We've Been Playing archive.
Read more


More...

[Administrator]

Amazon's latest crack at a Lord of the Rings MMO still needs to find its "hook".
That's coming from Amazon Games boss Christoph Hartmann, who in conversation with IGN said the team doesn't "just want to go and do the same thing over" with its Middle-earth game.
"While it's tempting sometimes with an existing IP, that's not the point of doing it. You've got to find a fresh twist, and we're still, I think, in that period where we really want to find out what could be the hook, what could be the thing which is different to all the other games out there," Hartmann said. "So it's a little bit early."
Read more


More...

[Administrator]

Has there been a more competitive time to release a video game? Possibly. Without resorting to blunt totting-ups of metascores and sales figures and some kind of dividing-by-gap-between-release-dates, it's not really something you can measure. One particularly rectangular section of my brain was tempted, mind, in the same kind of doomed endeavour as Civilization 7 designer Ed Beach trying to mathematically quantify whether his team was sticking to Sid Meier's rule of thirds. After a physicist who helped launch the Hubble telescope told me he couldn't make that work, I thought better of it.
Instead, then, we must go by vibes, and the vibe right now is it is a very competitive time to release a video game. Or maybe more specifically, a live service video game. This has been one of many big headscratchers for the people at the top of the games industry recently. At the risk of re-treading some already over-trodden ground, big publishers, as we all know, want big profits. Specifically, they want the kind of smash-hit, hobby-grade, zeitgeist-defining golden goose profits you get from a Grand Theft Auto or a Pokémon Go, or a League of Legends, a Fortnite, a Warzone, a Counter Strike or even just a good old Wordle. The catch is these hits more often than not are live service games, and live service games require not only vast amounts of players but now also vast amounts of those players' attention. They require time - time to be made, yes, but also time to be played - and as any painfully over-stretched modern human will have noticed, there is only so much time in a day.
This is why, I suspect, games have had so much trouble with their attempts to "grow". They've shifted from being a part of the entertainment economy - "Do I spend my spare Ł40 on a new video game, or on a couple of new albums?" - to a part of the engagement economy - "Do I tick off some daily objectives in FC24 while listening to Spotify and talking with friends on Discord, or watch another episode of Star Wars while scrolling through Tiktok with intermittent breaks for Twitter/X, and my partner's voice note about what I'm cooking for dinner?"
Read more


More...

[Administrator]

When Supermassive Games' Directive 8020 arrives in 2025, it will have been three years since the studio's horror anthology series The Dark Pictures saw its last full release. This new sci-fi story, the studio's first foray into the future, is the fifth main game in the franchise (or sixth, if you count 2023's PlayStation VR spin-off). But that extra wait seems to have been put to good use, and ensured that there's plenty now about Directive 8020 to make the series almost feel like it's starting afresh.
This is the beginning of a new 'season' of The Dark Pictures, one in which the anthology's branding seems a little less prominent - with the Directive 8020 title itself now centre-stage. Each game in the franchise has always been standalone, but there's a sense here that this game's real advancements should be made clear - that this isn't just another entry in a familiar formula.
After a half-hour look at Directive 8020 on the Gamescom 2024 showfloor, it's obvious that Supermassive has been busy. This is still a narrative-heavy adventure featuring a group of playable characters, each of which are just one wrong decision away from death. But Directive 8020 has also been given visual and gameplay upgrades, to enable it to better stand up as a convincing survival horror - one with definite shades of Dead Space and Alien Isolation - as you face a roaming predator on an infected spaceship.
Read more


More...

[Administrator]

Starship Troopers: Extermination developer Offworld Industries has shared more on the new features coming to its bug-stomping 16-player co-operative FPS when it leaves early access and launches for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC on 11th October this year.


Extermination, which entered early access last May, casts players as members of the Deep Space Vanguard, an elite Special Forces branch of the Mobile Infantry whose job it is to wrest back control of planets from their bug invaders. That involves a lot of first-person bug-blasting, as well as a smattering of strategic base building and resource gathering, with Extermination's calling card being its ability to show hundreds of bugs on screen at once, as well as its piles of persistent corpses that can both help and hinder players.


Come its full launch in October, Extermination's current early access core will expand with a range of new modes and features - starting with the new single-player focused Special Operations Group campaign, fronted by Casper Van Dien, reprising the role of Johnny Rico.

Read more


More...

[Administrator]

Following the launch of Classic Marathon 1 & 2 earlier this summer, Classic Marathon Infinity is now available on Steam, meaning all three games in Bungie's acclaimed first-person sci-fi shooter trilogy have now made it to Valve's platform.


Classic Marathon Infinity, which has been released on Steam with Bungie's blessing, comes from the team behind Aleph One - a fan-created engine based on the Marathon 2 source code. And as with the studio's ports of Marathon and Marathon 2: Durandal, the Steam version of Classic Marathon Infinity is available to download for free.


Classic Marathon Infinity features the complete 20-level Blood Tides of Lh'owon campaign, which brought the trilogy to a close when it released back in 1996. "Having defeated the Pfhor and reawakened the ancient remnants of the S'pht," teases Marathon Infinity's blurb, "the player now faces a world where friends become enemies and all is not what it seems..."

Read more


More...

[Administrator]

[Redacted] - that roguelike set in the Callisto Protocol universe announced under the codename Project Birdseye, which we reported on earlier this year - has landed itself a release date.
It will be coming to Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 5 and PC via Steam and Epic on 31st October, Striking Distance Studios revealed today.
Described as a "fast-action isometric roguelike", [REDACTED] will task players with fighting off monsters, reanimated corpses and more.
Read more


More...

[Administrator]

If you are partial to a freebie (or two), you can currently get your hands on both The Callisto Protocol and Gigantic: Rampage Edition over on the Epic Games Store.
The two games are available to claim until 29th August.
After this time, the store will switch up its freebies, and offer interested patrons the ability to claim the Fallout Classic Collection and Wild Card Football up until 5th September (honestly, where is the year going?!).
Read more


More...