Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed is rightly seen as the pinnacle of Sega’s kart racers, but the follow-up that ditches your Joe Musashis and B.D. Joes in favour of Sonic’s irritating friends is a really solid entry in the series, too. In fact, Team Sonic Racing is one of the more unique kart racing games out there, because – as the name suggests – it’s about the team rather than the individual....

So I went and played the first one, and never got round to the rest. I really should though. For all its faults (which many acknowledged even at the time, so lord knows what 13 years have done to it), The Witcher was intriguing and showed the series’s potential early. It’s the decisions that distinguished it to me. Even today, RPGs are prone to offering Big Decisions that come down to being Jesus’s less aggressive brother vs Captain Genocide For Kicks....

I found myself longing to get to the end of the game so I could finish writing my guides and stop playing. But instead, the moment I finished the campaign I started again on the highest difficulty. And then again. And again. Over the course of its campaign, the game had taken a janky, unstable lightsaber to my heart and carved a Fallen Order-shaped hole in me with neither my knowledge nor my consent....

Given how powerful stopping or slowing time is in games, I love that both are usable so liberally as they are in Luna Nights. Your character, Touhou series longtimer Sakuya Izayoi, is essentially Part 3 Dio in a maid uniform, so can stop the clock on demand – most often to set up throwing knife barrages or navigate puzzle rooms. It’s no turkey shoot, though, as enemies will constantly attempt to close you down and box you in, making it nigh impossible to snipe from afar even in the safety of stopped time....

Wilmot’s Warehouse is the definitive “where did I put my glasses?” simulator. As the eponymous lovable quadrilateral, Wilmot, you are charged with the running of your own personal warehouse. Periodically, new products will be shipped in from the bottom of the warehouse, and new orders from customers will appear at the top. It is your job to organise your warehouse and its ever-increasing stock of infinitely reclassifiable products, so that your customers receive their orders as quickly as possible....

Shimada’s style is to pack the preceding pages with specific details - times, dimensions, weights, etc - giving you a vast pile of facts to combine into technically-minded solutions. Motives are suggested, briefly, but the emphasis is on the how rather than the why. The meat of the book, then, is all the gathered characters debating how the murder was done, getting so carried away in their excited hypothesising that they tend to forget that one of their number is the horrible killer in question....

Regardless, it could be neat. You’re poking around a sci-fi citadel gone bad, now “overrun by cruel interdimensional entities acting as puppets of the malevolent Cosmic Gods”. I wouldn’t call it a looker but I still like what I see. I’ve a weakness for universes that mash up magic and tech in interesting ways. In Hellpoint you’re an “organically printed” warrior tasked with unraveling an extra-dimensional apocalypse involving cultists, which counts....

The survey is completely anonymous and should hopefully take no more than 10 minutes of your time to fill out. It covers a pretty broad range of questions, including what types hardware you own and the kinds gaming content you find most appealing (such as reviews, interviews, podcasts, livestreams and whatnot), but the meat of it is based around the event stuff: the things you’d like to see there, for example, and what makes them worth going to in the first place....

Bay 12 are in particular showing off how terrain ramps look out in the world and some of the smoothed and rough stone tiles for dwarf dwellings. They say the shadows on ramps are key to help people “understand what has been traditionally a very confusing part of the game.” As for the fort in the screenshot up top, there’s a log pile and carpenter’s workshop outside and a mason’s workshop, a metalsmith’s forge, and a meeting hall inside....

Each team has to steal a treasure chest from The State, the oppressive government who’s hoarding all the wealth. Teamwork is key to both locating the treasure and escaping with it. There’s a small in-game moment in the trailer below (that’s otherwise heavily CGI-based) that shows a beast of a man holding up a gate as his team sprints on through it. If it’s full of moments like that, I’m into it....

Now, while it’s since become apparent that not all members of the press have had quite as smooth an experience as I have with Horizon Zero Dawn’s PC port, I can only report on my own experience of the game, which so far as been pretty plain-sailing. To test Horizon Zero Dawn’s ultrawide support, I used Asus’ ROG Swift PG35VQ, the same monitor that I’ve been using to play Death Stranding....

“We felt really good,” product owner Paul Keslin tells me. But that feeling soon changed. The game was beset by crash bugs and complaints of repetitive play, and its Steam review scores tumbled. For its small development team, the reception was a shock – “Immediately, the feeling was not a good one”. The post-launch plan was thrown in the bin, and so began the long job of turning the game around in the eyes of its players....

Going by Glassdoor reviews, Blackbird are doing a pretty solid job of not being Lynx. Blackbird recently adopted four-day working weeks, for instance, and strictly discourage overtime; Lynx force you to grind incessantly by billing you for everything from the dingy habitat that serves as mission hub to the oxygen you breathe on-shift. Blackbird have strong working class roots and plentiful experience of life at the “low end of the totem pole, dealing with decrees from corporate”, as game director Elliot Hudson describes his own time on the loading dock at one of Canada’s largest department stores....

On this page: How to spawn the Wither in Minecraft How to defeat the Wither in Minecraft Wither boss battle phase 1 Wither boss battle phase 2 What do you get for defeating the Wither How to spawn the Wither in Minecraft To spawn the Wither into your world, you need to create a specific structure using Soul Sand or Soul Soil and 3 Wither Skeleton Skulls. You can find all of these ingredients in the Nether....

Primary weapons are available to purchase at Buy Stations, but you can’t buy the rest of your loadout with it. So what’s the point of customising your secondary weapon, equipment, and perks between games? The answer is: you can get full loadouts in Warzone 2, and it’s a very good idea to do so, because it’ll give you the best chance of earning a victory royale. Below we’ll walk you through how to get loadouts in Warzone 2, to clear up any confusion you might have on the matter....

Below we’ve detailed exactly how to make a map in Minecraft, as well as how to get your hands on and use a cartography table. We’ll also explain the two different types of maps present in the game, and discuss third-party mapping tools that are available, if that floats your boat. How to make a Minecraft map The recipe to make a map in Minecraft is different between Java Edition and Bedrock Edition....

On this page, we’ll go over the five-step process you need to follow to force Elden Ring to pause. Yes, five steps is a lot, but fortunately they can be performed quite quickly, and in an emergency (parcels arriving, children crying, etc.) it could be the difference between life and death for your poor old Tarnished while you go and take care of real life for a few minutes....

Below we’ll break down how to unlock it as easily as possible. How to unlock the Crossbow in Modern Warfare and Warzone With the Crossbow, you’ll have the ability to deal ludicrous amounts of damage to your foes, with various special tips you can put on the end of your bolts. From explosives to thermite, you’ve got a whole lot of options with the Crossbow - just follow these steps to unlock it!...

So, then. No point drawing this out: is Humankind as good as Civ? Yes. I think. But honestly, I can’t think of anything less fun for me, less fair to either game, or less useful to you, than a long set of oblique feature comparisons, ramping up to an arguably worthless “better than/worse than” verdict. What I can tell you is that whenever I open up Steam, my brain starts moving towards the prospect of playing Humankind like a tray of nails sliding towards a giant cartoon magnet....

The first two were no surprise. As my dad entered his 60s, he got rather stuck in his gaming ways, frequently returning to those classics for his post-work winding down. But Escape Rosecliff Island? I don’t think I’d ever once heard him even mention it. Let alone that he’d been plugging away at this hidden object game for seemingly years. So what was going on there? I’m no stranger to Rosecliff!...