Posts

Valheim’s update 0.145.6 is out today. It’s a relative short list of big fixes but solves what seem to be a few potentially gnarly issues. One is “extra tombstone checks (to prevent them from disappearing)” referring to the place that your loot will be stashed when you die. Like other survival craft ’em ups, Valheim makes you trek back to the spot that you died to retrieve your belongings. Players on had reported finding that their tombstones had vanished from existence, and all that gear along with it....

The lawsuit, which you can see in full on Polygon, says GatorCheats sell and distribute hacks that “enables players to manipulate Valorant and Destiny 2 to their personal advantage”. This includes things like automatic aiming (aimbotting) and revealing enemies through walls (wallhacks). What baffles me is the amount of money that was charged for these cheats. GatorCheats’ software for Valorant costed between $90 for three months, and $500 for lifetime access....

Escalation selects a random character for you when you start a game. You’re stripped of your abilities because it’s a very un-tactical team deathmatch, so it doesn’t really matter who you play. But each ability in the weapon pool still belongs to someone - Sova’s shock arrows, Raze’s Boom Bot and rocket launcher, and even Brimstone’s snowball launcher (which is usually for molotovs) from the winter event can be part of the cycle as well....

Fellow Steam Deck designer Lawrence Yang agrees: “Yeah, we wanted a device that would be powerful enough to handle anything that you threw at it, and if you wanted to play a really high fidelity game on it, you could,” he says, echoing Valve boss Gabe Newell’s comments late last month about finally giving PC gamers a great mobile hardware option. The thing is, “[putting] the Steam catalogue first” was easier said than done, and had it not been for AMD’s most recent line-up of low power, high performance APUs, the Steam Deck might not have come to fruition this year at all....

Once you receive your order email, which Valve say will start to be sent out from 10am PST on the 25th, you’ll have three days (72 hours, to be exact) to complete your purchase and order your Steam Deck. Order emails are sent in the same order that reservations were made, and you’ll only be able to buy the model you originally reserved. Miss that window (or end up deciding you want a different model) and your reservation will released to the next person in the queue, which will likely mean another lengthy wait if you ever decide to get back in line....

I’m not entirely sure what happened, but the software doing the remote link seemed dead set against my attempts to play the game. I don’t think it was a problem with the game itself, or anything any human hands were doing, but in the end it was decided the best solution was to let me have another crack at it later on. The upshot was that I got to play through the level twice, giving me a broader sampler of all the different ways you can approach it....

It’s a fantasy life sim that is very, very much like Stardew Valley, except everyone is wearing medieval-ish clothes and has a name spelled in a bit of a funny way. Currently it’s available for free via Itch.io, on the proviso that you understand it’s in an alpha state. Currently the Empyrean Vale, where you wash up without any memories and are promptly given a whole-ass farm, doesn’t have all its areas open, but when finished it’s going to be pretty big....

Trying to classify Victoria 3 is pretty damn important. Unlike, say, the Total War series, Paradox’s grand strategy titles are differentiated by a lot more than their time periods. Hearts of Iron its WW2 military ticker on its sleeve, while Crusader Kings (my personal fave) is secretly an RPG, just one that happens to cast you as the ruler of a country, rather than a random wandering murderer. Figure that out and you grasped the appeal of the game, especially for people who may lack interest in - or be downright put off by - the historical era it covers....

Hosted by Steven Spohn of the AbleGamers charity and podcaster and developer Alanah Pearce, with the help of a load of streamers and advocates and that Deadpool lad, the 2021 Video Game Accessibility Awards streamed live on Saturday. I have to watch a lot of awards shows for this job, and this is one of the few I’ve actually enjoyed. You can see the show archived here: Or if you just want to know the winners, we can run through those....

So, in tribute to The Land Of The Full and their recent holiday, we’ve made ourselves both very hungry and awfully thirsty by focusing on games that involve food and drink for this week’s Mystery Steam Reviews. I know you’re probably thinking, “but food and drink is in practically every video game ever!” and you’d be right, dear reader. But we’re looking for games where food and/or drink is more than just something used to replenish your health....

Developers Fatshark announced the news via the game’s Twitter account: “We have a responsibility to deliver the best game we possibly can, and frankly we need more time to accomplish this goal,” reads the post. “It’s no secret that building a game during a pandemic is a challenge and we are not immune to this. We are planning to use the extra time to both focus on the level of quality at release, as well as invest in more systems to support Darktide for years to come....

Rogue Traders, if you don’t know them, are human explorers and merchants in the 40K universe. They’re also the stars of the very first edition of Warhammer 40,000 back in 1987, although this Rogue Trader CRPG is based on Fantasy Fight’s Rogue Trader tabletop RPG from 2009. “We’re huge fans of Rogue Trader in its Fantasy Flight variation," Owlcat’s creative director Alexander Gusev told us when we spoke to him about the project earlier this year....

But the game also appeals to a primal, competitive side of me. The one that’s desperate to beat my rival Patrick, a bot who’s literally programmed to be really good, and Edders, a ghostly version of myself who either strokes my ego or shatters it to pieces.

In their third quarter earnings call for 2020, Activision answered some questions about Warzone’s future will look when hitched to Cold War’s horse. “Starting with the first season of in-game content in December, Black Ops Cold War will be integrated into Warzone,” says Activision Blizzard COO Daniel Alegre. “We’ll bring Black Ops Cold War’s characters and weaponry into the free-to-play experience along with substantial new content, ensuring that Warzone remains both a terrific experience and a powerful on-ramp for the franchise’s premium content....

When you reach level 16, you’ll have the chance to visit the Cheyenne mountain military complex. Do so and when you arrive, you’ll find two cults at war. They both worship a nuclear explosion that is frozen in time, and which could either provide a lot of power to the Colorado area or destroy it. inXile say the DLC features “new characters, enemies, challenging combat encounters, and powerful new weapons and armor....

He starts off by very sensibly flipping through the instruction manual for his motherboard, hopefully absorbing which bits do what and where everything’s meant to go. AMD’s 3rd Gen Ryzen CPUs can be a little harder to install than their Intel counterparts, you see, thanks to all those hundreds of tiny pins on the bottom. Accidentally bend one of those tiddly metal prongs by sticking it in the wrong way and it’s goodbye gaming CPU....

The original Counter-Strike is still available to play, but its final update, 1.6, isn’t the version I want either. I want beta 5.2, or thereabouts, from back before Valve bought the game and its rougher edges got sanded away. That’s me. But I’m here to ask you: what live service game would you like to see relaunch and preserve an older version of itself, as World Of Warcraft: Classic has?...

Big engines rising from the bonnet As you might guess from the fact that I used the term “big engines rising from the bonnet,” I do not know a lot about automobiles. I believe I mean the air intake for a supercharger? Possibly, if it’s really chunky, with the body of the supercharger rising up from a hole in the bonnet (the hood, if you must) too? What I mean is: the big impressive lump of shiny machinery rising from the front of cool modded-out muscle cars and rat rods, the holes and cylinders and maybe fanbelt....

Wall-running Parkour! A thrilling freestyle sport questioning architecture and repurposing it on the fly. Parkour! A rich source of ‘fail videos’. Parkour! Because to hell with it, crossing a gap by running along a wall is just cool, okay. I like unconventional movement in games enough that I’m willing to break parkour down into component moves for the purposes of this competition. Combined as a single discipline, perhaps it would be too powerful - the sort of force only mechs could rival....

For your budgeting convenience, I’ve ordered recommendations by price. Post Void - £1.56/€1.67/$2.00 (33% off) While Sin was well into Post Void, I never did get around to trying the FPS she called “a masterpiece of compulsive motion and hypnotic, irresistible sounds.” It wasn’t expensive in the first place but now it’s less so. So I’ve just bought it. Dépanneur Nocturne - £1.59/€1.59/$1.99 (60% off) On a rainy night, head into a Quebecois corner shop to find the perfect gift for someone waiting back home....