Where You Buy Your Computer Cases?

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If it's freebies you're after, the Epic Games Store has another bunch for you to add to your calendar, with acclaimed photography puzzler Toem and zombie rogue-like The Last Stand: Aftermath both now confirmed to be getting the freebie treatment next week.


Starting with Toem, it's a game of chill beats and quirky characters that sees players setting off on an expedition across a gloriously presented black-and-white world. Along the way, there are gentle problems to solve, all requiring creative use of your camera.

Christian Donlan called Toem a "cheerful modern classic" in his Essential review, championing its "playful challenges and a warm sense of place".

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If you're looking for something to sink your teeth into this weekend (apologies), you could do far worse than take a look at developer Stunlock Studios' acclaimed vampire survival adventure V Rising - which is free to play on Steam for the next few days.


V Rising launched back in May after two years of Steam early access development, presenting players (and their equally elegant friends) with a rich, more-ish game of isometric survival, where the goal is to assert your vampiric superiority across a gloomy, gothic open-world.


It's got a bunch of neats twists on the survival formula, all playing into the whole vampire thing - including a blood-sucking mechanic that gives you specific abilities depending on the creatures you drain, and progress that involves sticking to the shadows during daylight hours (lest you sizzle to ash). Its most exciting feature, though, is that you get to building your own looming gothic castle - and who hasn't ever wished they had one of those?

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Goichi "Suda51" Suda says game companies are too hung up on how their games perform on Metacritic.
Talking to our sister site, GamesIndustry.biz, Suda said that whilst he will check scores when a game releases - "Sometimes a media outlet has given us zero. That makes me feel shitty - why go that far and give us zero?" - but apart from that, he "tries to avoid Metacritic".
"Everybody pays too much attention to and cares too much about Metacritic scores. It's gotten to the point where there's almost a set formula – if you want to get a high Metacritic score, this is how you make the game," Suda said.
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A modder who'd worked to turn cult hit Human Fall Flat into a VR game has revealed that the "creators of the game bought it".
In a handful of tweets on X/Twitter, modder Raicuparta said No Brake Games was "so excited" about the mod, they are now releasing it as an official VR port.
"You might remember some videos of my Human Fall Flat VR mod. And wondered why it was never released," said modder Raicuparta on X/Twitter.
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Palworld developer Pocketpair says it is "not changing [Palworld's] business model", assuring players it will "remain buy-to-play and not free-to-play or games-as-a-service".
The company was forced to clarify its position after a recently-published interview led some players to believe the team was considering adopting a live service model.
"We are not changing our game's business model, it will remain buy-to-play and not f2p or GaaS," the company said in a statement posted to X/Twitter.
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Evening Star, the studio behind Penny's Big Breakaway, has announced half a dozen layoffs.
CTO Hunter Bridges announced the redundancies on X/Twitter, saying, "this isn't a choice we wanted to make", but "due to volatile market conditions in the games industry and operational realities of our business, Evening Star is having to part ways with six team members".
"This is a post that I was hoping to not have to write, but Evening Star has been swept up in the same turbulence that has affected so many of our peers in the games industry for the last year and a half," added CEO Dave Padilla on LinkedIn.
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Final Fantasy XIV's first graphical overhaul since the release of version 2.0 in 2013 is here with version 7.0, including changes to lighting and ambient occlusion (AO), the addition of DLSS upscaling on PC, 120Hz support on current-gen consoles and a 30fps cap most useful for last-gen machines. It's a substantial effort that even includes reworked textures, models and shading work for some (but not all) characters and environments, helping the game feel a little closer to its modern contemporaries.
Most of what's here is impressive, but there are some definite trade-offs with some of the new options - alongside some features that don't seem to be working as intended as of version 7.05. This piece summarises the highlights and lowlights of the new changes, and offers some recommendations for the best balance of performance and visual fidelity on different classes of console and PC hardware.
Let's start with one of the most noticeable improvements between version 6.58 and 7.0, ambient occlusion. The new version moves to what's described as "ground truth" ambient occlusion, or GTAO, which comes in standard and quality flavours on PC and standard only on current-gen consoles. Like other AO methods, GTAO provides shading in crevices and under objects to make them look more natural and grounded, but GTAO is more accurate and affects more elements of a scene. The standard version misses out some spots that the quality version fills in, but otherwise the two variants look similar - and both look better than the HBAO+ quality mode which was the previous best option.
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Nearly a decade after its first announcement, Ubisoft's Watch Dogs movie has finally finished filming.
The commencement of filming back in July was revealed with a set photo with the caption: "Lights_Camera_Action.exe".
The end was celebrated in a similar way, only this time the set photo was accompanied by the text: "run film_wrapped.exe(#watchdogsmovie.mp4) … >Filming complete!"
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It seems odd, perhaps even unfair, to begin a review of a game grumbling about its technically wobbly launch. After all, the server issues that Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown has suffered with in its 'Gold Edition' early access period are hopefully fleeting in the context of the lifespan of the game, and nobody complains about the fact that it took Michelangelo a little longer than expected to get the Sistine Chapel right, right?
The problem is that not mentioning it in the bit of the review you read before getting distracted by something on the sidebar would underplay just how spectacularly badly it's all gone. Even with only the relatively modest population of Gold Edition purchasers, the servers crumbled faster than a dunked Digestive. Often, you'd be held at the login screen, unable to start the game at all. If you were lucky enough to hit the tarmac on Hong Kong island, you might still be unable to start a race, even against AI-controlled opposition, because of a mandatory check in with the servers before every event. Worse still, you might actually finish a race and still lose that progress as the game pings the server again before the results screen. I found myself having to play the game exclusively between the hours of six and nine in the morning to ensure a reliable connection, squinting at apexes through bleary, tired eyes. And, just to reiterate, this all occurred before the floods of new players arrived on the game's official launch day.
The other reason it bears mentioning early on in this review is that, even though the always-online service has become slightly more stable, it feels instinctively unnecessary. The game is perfectly capable of populating its races with AI cars rather than its preference of seamlessly adding other real world players, so why make the check for those players mandatory? What's more, unlike many games, including genre stable-mate The Crew, Test Drive Unlimited isn't hell bent on getting you to spend real money to top up your in-game balance, so it's not like there's a delicate real-to-pretend economy to doggedly police via a constant online connection. The lack of microtransactions should be something to be celebrated, but we've inherited a good chunk of the inconvenience that usually accompanies them. In fact the most damning thing is the existence of the original Test Drive Unlimited, which managed to handle the blend of online and online play far more elegantly nearly two decades ago in 2006.
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Close your eyes. It's an exercise we've all tried: navigating through touch, memory, and educated guesses. Invariably, we panic and open them immediately or run into something we were sure wasn't there. You can do the same in a video game and have a similar experience of playing chicken with obstacles, both real and imagined, in your path. Though that is the closest many sighted players will come to the realities of blind and visually impaired gamers.
A clutch of games exist, however, in which this is not the case. It's not a crowded field, but it received a new entry last month in Periphery Synthetic. A nonviolent, undemanding space exploration designed as, according to its developer shiftBacktick, "primarily an auditory experience to be playable without seeing the screen."
It's a meditative experience that sees the player roaming over vast plains in search of materials to visit other planets. All of which is represented visually by a succession of squares and audibly through the combination of two chords and their harmonics and inversions, to create a soundscape of over 100 simultaneous and unique sounds that make the game playable by sound alone.
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Just days after we learned that Flappy Bird is set to make a return later this year courtesy of the fan-made Flappy Bird Foundation, the original developer says he has "no relat[ion]" to the game.
In a tweet posted to X/Twitter earlier today (15th September), original developer Doug Nguyen publicly distanced himself from the project and its leader, confirming he has played no role in the game's revival.
"No, I have no related [sic] with their game. I did not sell anything," Nguyen announced on X/Twitter earlier today (Sunday, 15th September).
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Diablo 4 has reportedly earned Blizzard around $150 million from in-game microtransactions since it released in June 2023.
That's according to senior product manager, Harrison Froeschke, who stated in a since-nuked LinkedIn account that they had led the "monetisation strategy of the store cosmetics, pricing, bundle offers, personalised discounts, and roadmap planning which have driven over $150m [microtransaction] lifetime revenue".
Froeschke's LinkedIn account has now been removed from public view, but not before Game Pressure managed to snap a screenshot purportedly taken from Froeschke's account, which also alleges the product manager has overseen game sales "resulting in over $1bn total lifetime revenue".
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Marking the game's biggest upgrade since its launch, Crytek's online FPS, Hunt: Showdown 1896 is retooled and even retitled for today's hardware. Fundamentally the game migrates to CryEngine 5.11, complete with a suite of visual upgrades, DirectX 12 support, and most crucially, a release for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and S. At last, this means that consoles receive real time lighting via SVOGI - Sparse Voxel Octree Global Illumination - in an enhanced form that allows both diffuse lighting and a simulation of light across rougher, specular materials. There's improved hair rendering, noticeably in the game's loadout menu. We have support for upscaling technologies like AMD's FSR and Nvidia's DLSS - where FSR2 in particular is used on consoles. Plus, there's a 60 frames per second target this time, double that of the 30fps on all last-gen PS4 and Xbox One machines. So the questions here are simple: what's the state of this latest CryEngine effort on today's best consoles? How do the three versions compare? And how successfully does each hit a stable 60fps?
In terms of the basics, PS5 and Series console owners get a free upgrade much like PC and this keeps all progress from last-gen machines. Much of its winning PvPvE design stays intact as well. As a bounty hunter, you're unleashed in an alternate USA with a supernatural twist. From Louisiana's bayou to the rocky mountains of Colorado, eldritch horrors fill out a large, desolate landscape; each mine, mill and pit teeming with zombies and giant spiders. The goal? To track down your target monster, defeat it, and collect a bounty token from its corpse - all while avoiding other online clans of up to three players.
Hunt: Showdown effectively uses CryEngine to sculpt a photorealistic landscape, built on accurately lit materials - while its horror aspect adds genuine tension as you scan for clues, or avoid enemy players. It's earned something of a cult following for good reason. Playing today, I will admit there are rough spots on consoles though: texture and enemy pop-in are still noticeable. Also, the brightness level on PS5 is much too dark by default, and did need adjusting to be able to see anything at night. It has a few visual bugs in AI pathfinding as well, but the high points of CryEngine still shine through overall.
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The first time I crawled into a vent in Star Wars Outlaws and the camera changed from third to first-person, I thought to myself, "why can't the whole game be like this?". The level of detail to the scenery, props and the many alien life forms that inhabit the games' multiple planets is incredibly impressive and it makes the areas you explore feel alive and, most importantly, in-keeping with the Star Wars universe.
Even though I enjoyed looking it at all from my third-person perch above Kay Vess' shoulder, I was dying to inspect the assets in closer detail. It's such a well built world that I wanted to be in it, rather than observe it. While I haven't been able to manage that officially as, sadly, it's not an option in Ubisoft's game, that's exactly what I was able to do for this week's VR Corner thanks to a new update to Luke Ross' REAL VR mod.
As you'll be able to see in the video, Luke's mod for Star Wars Outlaws is a little different to others that I've featured because this one has a first-person camera toggle. The game can also be played in third-person VR and in fact, parts of it still are. During climbing sections, stealth takedowns and the occasional in-game cutscene, the camera will pull back to show Kay Vess doing her thing, before pushing back in again so you can view the world through her eyes once more.
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Yes, Valve is still working on an anticheat for its new shooter, Deadlock.
A developer for Deadlock - the hero shooter Valve wouldn't admit existed even after it had hit a concurrent player peak of over 16,000 last month - first confirmed on the game's Discord server that it was working on anticheat back on 11th August.
Since then, the development team has dropped several updates saying it "certainly considers [cheating] a very high priority in the long term", and had "a group of people working on anti cheat".
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