MSI hope to “redefine the gaming SSD” with their two TLC-based drives, offering top read and write speeds of 7000MB/s and 6900MB/s and maximum capacities up to 4TB. Alas, that was the extent of what MSI revealed during their press conference, so we don’t yet know how these drives will differ from each other, how much they’re going to cost, or when we’ll be able to get our hands on them....
According to Bloomberg (watch out for the paywall), within the year Netflix plans on putting games under their own category on the streaming platform, like how documentaries or stand-up specials have their little sections. Surprisingly, one of Bloomberg’s sources says Netflix don’t have plans to charge extra for the games - they’ll just exist alongside everything else, all included in your usual subscription fee. Though, this does feel like a way to simply increase the regular subscription price....
New World players will receive one token to transfer a character to another world in the same region (contrary to initial reports that you’d be able to swap regions). Your character progression, inventory, storage, currency, houses, housing decorations, and quest progress carry over. That server can’t be full, mind and you can’t move to a server where you already have a character. Your Company membership, active Trading Post buy and sell orders, and friends list cannot carry over either....
The English bit of the NHS are busy setting up addiction clinics for game-addled kids, but Murdoch believes they can’t fight against addiction alone. She called on the industry to “crack down on gambling addiction risks” by stripping their games of loot boxes and their ilk. “Frankly no company should be setting kids up for addiction by teaching them to gamble on the content of these loot boxes,” said Murdoch....
Among the discounted games is Nioh’s sequel, Nioh 2, which is 20% off at £40, but there are deeper discounts within. Hitman 3 is half price at £25, Grant Theft Auto 5 is £12.49, and Borderlands 3 is 67% off at £16.49. You can find all the deals at the link above. Comparing games to Dark Souls has become a terrible games media cliché, but sometimes it’s true. Nioh is Dark Souls meets Sengoku period Japan, with many overlapping systems, but it’s substantially different in lots of ways, too....
You might be saying, “This happens every year,” but you’d be wrong. Game releases used to huddle together at particular times of year like ducks in a rain shower, but that hasn’t been true for a while. For context, last February we reviewed Anthem, Ape Out, Apex Legends, Far Cry New Dawn, Metro Exodus, Crackdown 3, Yakuza Kiwami and Civilization VI: Gathering Storm. And January 2019 was no slouch, with Sunless Skies, Wargroove, Resident Evil 2, Slay The Spire, Catherine Classic, Below, and Hades in early access....
But the real magic of Yakuza lies in its minigames, one of the best being karaoke. And thanks to Game Informer’s interview with Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio, we now know why their games are obsessed with the beloved singsong. Game Informer chats to a number of Yakuza’s key development leads, including chief director Ryosuke Horii who reveals his love for karaoke. I mean, Horii’s spreadsheet more than explains why the Yakuza games take karaoke seriously....
Key features of Ada Lovelace, and thus these new cards, include 3rd Gen RT cores, 4th Gen Tensor cores, and a new streaming multiprocessor. These supposedly add up to twice the performance of Ampere (that’s the RTX 30 series architecture currently dominating our best graphics card guide) in standard rasterised games, and up to four times the performance in ray traced games. And since Nvidia were clearly in a ray-tracey mood, they also took the opportunity to reveal Portal RTX: a semi-official mod for the original Portal that upgrades it with RT lighting and reflection effects....
Available from September 17th (the same day the RTX 3080 launches worldwide) until October 29th (when Watch Dogs Legion comes out), you’ll need to buy a qualifying RTX 3070, RTX 3080 or RTX 3090 graphics card or desktop PC from a participating retailer to claim your game bundle. You’ll find a full list of said card models, PCs and retailers on Nvidia’s website. Naturally, you’ll have to wait until Watch Dogs Legions comes out before you can start playing your free digital copy of the game, but the GeForce Now Founders subscription will begin as soon as your bundle code is redeemed through Nvidia’s website (which must be done by November 30th, otherwise it will all be for nothing)....
The cheeky looters in question were StikiPixels, the very same team behind the art gallery sim Occupy White Walls, and now anyone who owns a PC and a copy of the game can hang these priceless paintings in their own private virtual collections. In OWW (officially pronounced Owouawwouaw if you have the time), you can build your own architecturally ambitious gallery and stuff it full of artwork. Riffling through a lavish catalogue, you can choose from hundreds of floors, doors, ceilings, windows, and furniture to create the art gallery of your dreams....
Proxi is… some sort of creation-focused thing. It was originally announced for mobile, though it’s not clear if it’ll exclusively be so whenever it does eventually arrive. Proxi will invite players to build 3D scenes representing pivotal memories of their lives, using 3D and 2D assets and sound. You have to define memories using keywords, and you link memories as roads on a world, which Wright says on its site “becomes a resource allocation game, much like SimCity”, whatever that means....
Not so, say Square Enix. In a press release today, they say the looter-shooter has had 3.5 million players in its first month, which is successful enough that they’re looking towards “expanding on Outriders in the future.” The stat - part of a set splurged in a Twitter thread - doesn’t reflect sales, mind. Outriders would have received a decent boost in players by being included with Xbox Game Pass from launch day....
Weirdly, they’re good thoughts. For as lonely as it might be in tank-land in OW2, I think the change makes a lot of sense. For context, Overwatch’s current matches are 6v6, with teams made up of two damage characters, two supports, and two tanks. Tank has been the least-played role for a while now (evident from the fact that role queue frequently rewards players for diving in as one of the beefy heroes), so chopping one out might help with queue times....
Kanezaka is a pretty new deathmatch map set near the fictional Japanese town of Hanamura. In the developer update above, you can spy some images of the Shimada castle (which you fight in on Overwatch’s Hanamura assault map) just peeking out over its walls. From today until January 25th, the game is inviting players to take part in the Kanezaka challenge too. Blizzard haven’t revealed exactly what it consists of, but if it’s anything like previous challenges, it’ll likely ask players to win nine matches to be rewarded with a new hero skin....
Let’s face it, it’s already pretty weird that actual Pokémon are pit against one another in virtual cockfights. It’s also not as if other games, such as the Monster Hunter series, don’t already partner you in fights with cute weapon-wielding kitty cats. Palworld seems weird mostly because there’s no attempt made to make it aesthetically cohesive. The pals look like cute, cartoon animal friends with giant eyes, and the player is running around carrying Counter-Strike-style submachineguns, throwing grenades and so on....
The game is based on a Pathfinder tabletop adventure of the same name, inviting players into a world where mortals and demons are at war. It’s an indirect sequel to the 2018 isometric RPG, Pathfinder: Kingmaker. Wrath Of The Righteous was crowdfunded on Kickstarter last year, raising a whopping $2,054,339 (£1.6m). Turns out, people sure love Pathfinder - except the person who wrote our Pathfinder: Kingmaker review, they thought it was overburdened with lore (a concept I cannot possibly understand because I am a lore monster)....
The dev, “Dknighter” of Kinetic Games, had on Phasmophobia’s public Trello board once mentioned a PvP mode where one player controlled the ghostie. That’s gone now. In an interview with Ian Games Network, they explained it wouldn’t be a good fit. “The second PvP mode was added to the Trello to see what everyone’s reactions would be,” Dknighter said. “Right now I have no plans to add another game mode, as it would turn the game into something completely different, and push the game away from what I want it to be....
It’s able to outmatch some classic great value gaming CPUs, like the Ryzen 5 3600X and Core i5 11400F, and even comes close to the powerful (and more expensive) Core i5 11600K. All this with PCIe 5.0 and DDR5 support, given the right motherboard - and this is a surprisingly great way to jump on 12th-gen, while leaving plenty of space to upgrade to a higher tier CPU down the road....
They aren’t the only one, though. “My kitty that passed away a couple years ago has now been forever memorialized,” says Reddit user “DoggoHarold”. Now they get to sail off into the sunset together whenever they want. Have a click on the tweet below to see the full-size images of “QuaidViktor’s” Captain Sansa. I’m a big fan of how the fur colour of the real-life cat looks like it’s already wearing an eyepatch....
Expect a lot of discussion of various incarnations of Jurassic Park, as you might expect. There is also a long tangent at the start about toilets because Matthew signed in to the recording as ‘Toilet Lawyer’, which is probably less expected, and a pretty credible impression of the Queen from Nate. Nate also recommends a bunch of early access or indie games that will be of interest to dinofans, although one of them is “I can’t remember what it’s called....
