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It’s Valentine’s Day, and what better way to celebrate than trying to win a dildo of cosmic proportions?

I finally got around to playing The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood last month and it’s become one of my all-time favourite games. It’s gorgeously witchy and ethereal, all the vibes that I bloody love. The art and music are beautiful, I love the DIY tarot card system, and while the story isn’t the strongest it was still enough for me to plough through multiple playthroughs and get a couple of tears out of me.

I’m not the only one who loved it, either. The Steam reviews are pretty glowing for the game, but my favourite one is this: “cool game! Had lotsa fun with the card creation, gotta admit. one thing tho, wHY WONT YOU LET US DATE THE GIANT SHRIMP MONSTER. PLEASE. IM BEGGING ON MY HANDS AND KNEES”.

That “giant shrimp monster” is Abramar, a big ol’ snaking behemoth who gets summoned by protagonist Fortuna, a witch driven desperate by her millennium-long exile. He’s cool, witty, and surprisingly very kind-hearted for a forbidden cosmic entity. The Steam reviewer isn’t the only person begging to be able to date Abramar—there are Reddit posts, Vtuber shorts and, …

Millennia, that Paradox-published Civilization-like from C-Prompt Games, has gotten its release date. It’s coming March 26, giving you a shot at navigating 10,000 years of history in an orderly, hex-based manner across all sorts of ages and crises.

That also means you can pre-purchase it, if you’re so inclined. Millennia’s standard edition is going for $40 (£35) on Steam right now, while its whizzbang premium version is $60 (£50). Both pre-orders come with the soundtrack and, well, the base game, but if you’re already all-in then the premium edition also grants you access to a couple of cosmetics and the game’s first two DLCs—Ancient Worlds and Atomic Ambitions—when they hit in Q3 and Q4 this year.

You can probably guess what Atomic Ambitions has in store. It’ll add a bunch of nuclear-themed goodies and hazards to play with and promises “ways to turn the planet into a fallout-filled wasteland.” Ancient Worlds sounds a bit more interesting to my ear, though. That one will add a new nomadic game start option and give you a chance to play a civilisation before it’s, ah, civilised, letting you rel…

Have you heard of the Jam Man of Silent Hill: Ascension? You’re about to. In the third episode of what started out as a potentially interesting experiment and has quickly snowballed into a complete disaster, Karl Johansen (a Norwegian farmer) runs into the Jam Man. 

I’m just going to let this clip shared by VoidBurger on Twitter play out (you can also watch the full episode here. The Jam Man materialises at around 24:33).

Silent Hill: Ascension has some stilted dialogue, but this is a particularly egregious example. One which had the morbidly curious wondering if the whole thing was AI-generated: “This random NPC pops in, declares he’s berry hunting, says he’s seen weird shit and does not expound on it, provides no information, leaves for more berries. Goodbye forever, BerryMan,” writes VoidBurger in a follow-up quote Tweet with over 13,000 likes.

The character’s actual name is “Forager”, or CrimsonRain722. If you’re wondering why a Silent Hill character has numbers next to their name, that’s because Forager/Jam Man/Berry Man is a cameo, a side-character players can spend “tickets” on. This gets their name plastered next to them, and uses their customisabl…

The games industry is built on absurd, slavering, and often unfulfilled hype. That’s how it’s always been and, god willing, it’s how it will always be. From E3 (RIP) to Gamescom to Summer Game Fest, we all love working ourselves into a tizz trying to guess just what announcement this year’s slate of weirdly dressed execs and nervous devs will drop for us on the showfloor.

Ordinarily, that’s something the events welcome. It only generates buzz and an audience if the subreddits and forum posts have convinced themselves that this year they’re announcing Half-Life 3 for sure, bro. But apparently there is an upper limit, and Hollow Knight fans have found it. They’re so (understandably) desperate for info about Silksong, the sequel to the original beloved metroidvania originally announced in 2019, that Geoff Keighley’s Opening Night Live has come out ahead of the event to manage their expectations and avoid their wrath: Silksong will not be at the event, so please do not fill his inbox with betrayed wails of angst.

The Gamescom Opening Night Live occurs tomorrow, and you’d think ol’ Geoff would welcome the kind of feverish theorising that might get folks to tune i…

Ever wondered what it would be like to run around the maps of Armored Core 6 with your Elden Ring character? If not, why the heck not? I’m sure this modder who imported the AC6 maps into Elden Ring surely can’t be the only one interested in exploring them, sword drawn, and ready to fight mechs with magic.

Having posted the flythrough video on their YouTube account, there’s been quite a positive response to Dropoff’s idea to waltz around the Armored Core 6  maps with their Elden Ring character. Not least as it puts the maps into a human perspective, and manages to vindicate Redditors’ praise for the AC6 graphics.

You don’t usually get a chance to appreciate the detail when you’re speeding around in your mech going pew-pew.

Recently we wrote about Armored Core 6’s biggest boss being so unimaginably huge, it’d be its own landmark on Elden Ring’s world map, but I didn’t expect someone to actually combine the two games in some cursed sci-fi/fantasy mashup.

I am still trying to understand the reasoning behind putting Armored Core 6 maps in Elden Ring, but I suppose the game modding community never did need reasons to make anything other than a whim. <…

Update: The developer behind this Microsoft Hackathon project posted a message on Reddit last year saying that they were gaining “some support” for the project and asking for feedback. Today, they posted a new comment stating that the project “didn’t go much of anywhere” and isn’t something currently in development at Microsoft.

“Problem is—we just didn’t have the right engineers to do a lot of what we wanted to do in the short hackathon project timeframe,” they wrote. “Maybe this odd article [on The Verge] can help me pitch this to Microsoft again. Phil Spencer was very nice and tried to drive me to some people that could help, but everyone was tied-up at the time.”

Original story: A recent video leak shows Microsoft has been working on ways to improve Windows functionality on handheld PC devices such as the Steam Deck. Or, at least, it has been encouraging developers to come up with experimental ways to get Windows to play nice on handheld devices (via Windows Central). 

The leaked video gives a “rough and ready overview” of a Microsoft Hackathon project from September of last year covering a potential dedicate…

Five years after Valve kicked off the first Steam Game Festival—now known as Steam Next Fest—the company is making changes to how it handles demos. In short, it’s making them less of a chore to sniff out and deal with in your library.

In a blog post released yesterday, Valve announced that it was making changes to how it handles its appetisers based on “trends in feedback from both developers and players about the process and functionality.”

First up, adding a demo to your Steam library no longer means having to immediately install it (or, in my case at least, having to close the tab that pops up asking you to install Steam after you hit the play button to get the demo). Like any of Steam’s legion of free-to-play games, demos now have a handy “Add to Library” button to tuck them away in your games list without an immediate prompt to install. You can also now install demos for games you already own, if you just want the narcotic rush of a game’s most audience-enticing parts.

Beyond the Add to Library button, demos also behave more like free games in that they can now have their own distinct store pages. Up to now, demos were restricted to a dinky gre…

Walton Goggins plays The Ghoul on the Fallout TV show, who over the course of the series becomes a memorable and conflicted link between the world as-was and as it is in the present day. It’s a fantastic performance, which will be no surprise to those who’ve followed Goggins’ career, and while basking in the aftermath of the show’s success the actor revealed a surprising detail about one of the locations.

Some of the outdoor scenes in Fallout were filmed in Namibia, on what is sometimes referred to as the Skeleton Coast, including in an actual diamond mine (thanks, GamesRadar+). A new photograph released by Amazon shows The Ghoul at this location, looking downcast and moody as is his wont, but Goggins says the real explanation is a little more base. 

“[Amazon] just posted some film stills,” writes Goggins on Instagram, “this is one of them. It looks like I’m trying to look cool and all… but I’m not. See we were filming in an abandoned Diamond mine in Namibia. We weren’t really allowed to touch the ground too much. It’s still owned by someone and there’s still diamonds on the ground. The photographer caught me trying to find one.. withou…

Earlier this year Valve announced Counter-Strike 2, alongside a limited test that invited a small percentage of the playerbase in to smell the roses. Since then the developer has been using the test to, well, test things: rotating maps in and out, adding new features one by one, and generally fine-tuning this thing before the masses descend. And that time is at hand.

A new update brings an overhaul of the ranking system, a change in map length, a reworked version of the map Inferno, and opens up the limited test to a much wider range of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive players. 

The changes to the ranking system are considerable, with an all-new CS Rating determining where players stand on global and regional leaderboards which refresh each competitive season. This rating will only apply in Premier mode, which is clearly intended as the main competitive focus in Counter-Strike 2, and separate ratings will apply to the non-Premier competitive playlists. The latter use the existing skill rankings and are applied on a per-map basis: so you can be Global Elite in Dust 2, and silver on Vertigo.

On top of this comes a major change to the number of rounds in a co…

Fatshark said it would continue to support Vermintide 2 after the launch of Darktide and has done just that, with additions like new free levels and remastered levels from the original Vermintide. Next up, pyromancer Sienna will finally get her fourth career: the necromancer.

Each of Vermintide’s other heroes has had a fourth career added as DLC, with Kruber getting the option to become a grail knight, Bardin an engineer, Kerillian a Sister of the Thorn, and Saltzpyre a warrior Priest. We’ve been waiting a while for Sienna to receive a similar treatment, and design director Joakim Setterberg explained why in a recent dev blog. “Looking at the career designs it was clear that the Necromancer would be the most complex class of the bunch,” he wrote, “and that it made most sense for it to go out last”

What makes necromancer Sienna so complex is that she can summon skeletal minions with her career skill, Raise Dead. “Sienna’s skeletons are actually rather like a friendly faction of their own,” Setterberg went on, “sharing behavior and movement with Vermintide’s enemies. That meant a lot of work, both from a pure visual and combat behavior perspective but also balancing th…

It seems Microsoft has really upped the ante on advertising its own products recently. We’ve seen so many test builds in Windows 11 and a surprising amount of them seem to feature ads for other Microsoft products like Office or One Drive. For those who haven’t upgraded to Windows 11 yet, never fear because you can still experience intrusive advertising. Microsoft will make sure of it with these full screen ads encouraging users to upgrade to the newer system.

Windows Latest (via Hardware Info) is getting reports from Windows 10 users of a full screen advert that’s been doing the rounds after a recent update. It grabbed my attention because I’d just finished a conversation with a friend who was complaining about having to update to Windows 11 recently. When I told them I was pretty sure they could decline, they said they didn’t see the option, and after looking at the ad I can understand why.

The ad appears just after boot up, and at first glance only looks to have the option to either get it or schedule the update. You’d have to look for the smaller text at the bottom that says “Keep Windows 10” to avoid the update.

Of course choosing that option isn’t quite th…

And another finger on the monkey paw curls. A plan to remake The Simpsons: Hit & Run—the beloved PS2 GTA 3-like from 2003—has reached its conclusion. A joint effort by devs going by the names Reubs and Korylon, the project kicked off a year ago and was an attempt to recreate the original game in UE5 as a fully open-world (meaning all its maps combined into one) experience.

The project is now finished, meaning the first chunk of the game can be experienced in its entirety. Just not by you or me. Copyright law dictates that Reubs can’t distribute the remake without being lawyered into oblivion by whichever corporation happens to own the rights to The Simpsons: Hit & Run in 2023, so we’ll just have to settle for gazing longingly at a 22-minute YouTube video, which you can see above.

I’m not entirely sure if the devs have remade more of the game than they’ve shown off in their videos (though I suspect not). I’ve reached out to ask them about that, and will update this piece if I hear back.

It’s seriously impressive stuff. The cutscenes play seamlessly, missions move from objective to objective, Homer bombs around Springfield in that trademark pi…

World of Warcraft’s Cataclysm expansion was… divisive. In the case of the Barrens, it was literally divisive—cleaving the once-beloved levelling zone in two. A landslide of other changes to old world content meant that, while The Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King were pretty well-received, Cataclysm is the red-headed stepchild of Warcraft’s earlier history—and that’s to say nothing of its endgame content and patch cycle.

But, according to an interview by PCGamesN with executive producer Holly Longdale, the prospect of going back to Cataclysm isn’t as unpopular as you might think. “Much like many players, [we] were like ‘Oh, God, are they gonna do Cataclysm?’ And we were like ‘why don’t we just ask?’ … Then we got the survey data back, and it wasn’t bad.”

Longdale feels—like the player base, apparently—that most of Cataclysm’s bitter reception came from some secondary factors, admitting that their first swing at the bat “could have been better.” Which implies that, in the same vein as Classic’s Season of Discovery, changes are on the table.

For example, Cataclysm Classic will play out over th…

This week, I discovered a TikToker deliberately developing the worst game of all time—complete with impossible platforming, unskippable dialogue, and a rocket launcher that has to be reloaded 150 times between each shot. I ended that post anxious that creator Everywhere Nowhere might one day release their abomination into the world for people to actually play. I’m afraid that happened sooner even than I feared. 

You can now try Monster Sniper Season 3 for yourself on the developer’s itch.io page, and… wow. I knew it was going to be bad, but watching it in TikToks really didn’t do it justice. Actually getting your hands on it is a whole other world of pain.

Thanks to maybe the most ungodly control scheme ever devised—in which you control the hero’s movement with the mouse, and control your weapon with the keyboard—it’s almost impossible to steer through the ludicrously unfair platforming sequences. The music consists of one screeching, looping flute solo; every time you die, which is constantly, it starts over, meaning the soundtrack for my playthrough so far has largely been the first few tuneless notes repeated ad nauseum. 

I…