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One would think that the hugely enjoyable, multibillion-dollar Fast & Furious film franchise would spawn any number of similarly fantastic video game adaptations, but devotees of the Toretto family have been starved for quality racing games powered by NOS over the past 24 years. But you may want to put some Coronas on ice right now, because a very promising Fast & Furious game is just around the corner.
You probably don't need a reason to suit up and start throwing some smoke grenades in the Battlefield 6 open beta, but just in case: The next playtest is bringing a number of quality of life changes to the game, EA says. The tweaks address some major player concerns for Battlefield 6's full launch, while also offering more control over the experience that is currently available.
How many hot dogs do you eat per day? If the answer is anything besides "zero to one, on average," you may want to think about your diet. (Or don't, I'm not your doctor.)
The story around Battlefield 6 right now is that its time to kill is excruciatingly fast. You'll pop into a game only to die seconds later. The game feels aggressive in a way that everyone keeps comparing to Call of Duty. But what if I told you things in Battlefield 6 don't have to be that way? And that you might already have the secret weapon necessary to change your experience in your arsenal, just waiting to be used?
The summer of 2025 may not be one for the Marvel Studios history books: Thunderbolts* wrapped its theatrical run with $190 million in U.S. (big, but not Marvel big), and The Fantastic Four has cooled quickly since its release in July. Which may explain why Ryan Reynolds has swooped in to rekindle the embers of last year’s massive Deadpool & Wolverine and get the hype machines rolling for his next appearance as the Merc with a Mouth.
There’s a particular type of scene that’s familiar from any number of movies about haunted houses, haunted kids, or anything else supernaturally amiss involving a family. A concerned adult takes a peek at what a little kid has been drawing in their spare time, and instead of fun little cartoons or family portraits, they find... something else. Something disturbing, otherworldly, or darkly scribbly. Among the warning signs of demon possession or malevolent spirits in a formerly happy home, weird child drawings have to be among the top five, maybe even top three. Characters who suggest that these unnerving artworks might not be demonically inspired tend to be portrayed as in denial, and even those denials tend to downplay the artistic skill that might be involved. The touching and inventive family movie Sketch, which was quietly released into 2,000 theaters to surprising critical acclaim, addresses that trope head on, and in the process becomes a cliché-defying entry point for kid-friendly horror.
The streaming wars have a new front, as the leading players compete to woo Gen Z and Millennial audiences by building up their anime catalogues. Netflix is the biggest player in the field, with a catalog that includes some of the most iconic anime plus numerous successful original shows, but HBO Max is looking to catch up through its partnership with Toho International’s American distributor GKIDS.
Comics know nothing if not how to sell you nostalgia, and that's exactly what the upcoming Batman/Static: Beyond is providing. Kids growing up in the 1990s and early 2000s were eating well in terms of their cartoons, especially when it came to superheroes. Two of the most popular were Static Shock and Batman Beyond. Now, their protagonists are poised to crossover in a DC Elseworlds book.
Mortal Kombat 1 is arriving on the PlayStation Plus Game Catalog starting Tuesday, Aug. 19, allowing players to play the game for free on the PlayStation 5.
Ahead of Superman's home video release this Friday on digital services, Warner Bros. has released an hour-long making-of feature for James Gunn's reboot of the DC cinematic universe. The YouTube documentary answers a long list of "why?" questions, like "Why trunks?", "Why so much Krypto?", and "Why does Superman need to be 'huggable'?", while also offering plenty of behind-the-scenes filming footage. It's a fascinating look at an earnestly made Hollywood blockbuster.
Whack out your not-at-all-weird-to-own spreadsheet of teenagers with incredible left feet, a Football Manager thing has happened. Namely, Football Manager 2026 has been announced by developers Sports Interactive, with a quick trailer. There's no release date as of yet.
If you recall, Football Manager 2025 ended up being delayed and then cancelled, the studio admitting at the time that "the overarching player experience and interface is not where we need it to be." Refunds were issued to folks who'd pre-ordered the touchline-prowling sim, and the devs shifted their focus on to Football Manager 2026.
To me, the best part of Mafia: The Old Country is getting really into the idea of pretending you're living in 1900s Sicily and drinking in the gorgeous vistas that the game's world offers up like sips of wine. You can imagine, then, how keen I was to give its new first-person driving mod a go.
Having already knife-fought my way through the main story, I thought this sounded like a pleasant change of perspective to take in when motoring around the Valle Dorata, hoovering up the last of those Explore Mode collectibles. I wasn't wrong either, the mod's great. Well, when it's not accidentally showing you the back of Enzo's teeth and eye sockets.
Into the Unwell is a cooperative hack n' slash roguelite where your characters – cartoonish yet barely upright lost souls, one and all – draw fighting prowess from their vices. My vice, it turns out, is booting sentient pizza slices off cliff edges. It certainly makes me feel better.
If you've tried to pay for something on Steam via PayPal over the past month and a bit, only to be told you can't, Valve have now offered an explanation as to why, pointing to a bank that previously handled PayPal transactions in certain currencies as having suddenly terminated its support.
Folks in affected countries first noticed notifications informing them PayPal was "currently unavailable" in their part of the world around a month ago. There's been a steady stream of Reddit posts from folks who've gotten to checkout and been told this since then.
Subnautica 2 publishers Krafton have issued their response to the lawsuit filed against them by the game's former lead developers. If you're wondering whether things have cooled off a bit between the two parties now we're in Saul Goodmanville, think again, because the second paragraph of the response sees Krafton accuse the leads of having "resorted to litigation to demand a payday they haven't earned."
It's an almost impossible task at this point to sum up the Subnautica 2 saga in less than a War and Peace length novel, but here's my attempt to give you the abbreviated version. Krafton delay the game from a 2025 early access release to 2026 and fire three leads on it: Charlie Cleveland, Max McGuire, and Ted Gill. The company accuse those leads of abandoning their duties and argue the game wasn't ready for early access. The leads disagree and file a lawsuit. A big part of what makes the disagreement so noteworthy is a $250 million bonus to be paid to Unknown Worlds staff if the game hit certain targets by the end of 2025, which Krafton have now said they'll still pay out a fraction of. Annnnddd breathe.
We’ve covered a few keyboards recently, and while those are great for work and play, the Logitech G Pro X 60 is all about maximising your efforts in whichever competitive title you’re playing.
Still troubled by Monster Hunter Wilds’ stubbornly sedate PC performance, even after multiple patches claiming to grease its framerate gears? The good news is that Capcom have committed to pushing through performance and stability updates into, at the very least, Winter 2025. The bad news is that Capcom also say they won’t have finished their performance and stability improvements until, at the earliest, Winter 2025.
Update: Itch.io have responded to the report from Trans News Network on Bluesky, claiming the article is "full of misinformation". "I haven't had a chance to look up everything individually, but I do want to note that we have [an] existing set of indexing rules that can impact indexing," the storefront's account wrote in a separate reply. "There are circumstances where pages may get marked as requiring human review before being eligible for indexing. This is completely independent of the indexing eligibility change for adult works."
Original story follows:
Following Itch.io's mass delisting of adult games in response to pressure from payment processors, a new report includes claims from LGBTQ+ devs that safe-for-work titles with lesbian or yuri themes have also been affected.
Both Itch and Valve changed their rules on adult content last month, with the issue evolving into a complex pointing of fingers which traced from the storefronts, to credit card companies, and on to an Australian protest group. That group, Collective Shout, claimed responsibility for exerting the initial pressure that got the ball rolling. Itch.io have since allowed free adult games back onto the platform, but paid ones currently remain on the naughty step as the storefront seeks new payment processors.
Please, for the love of all that can be side-swiped into oncoming traffic, make a new Burnout game. This has been one of the five thoughts that fill my head on a daily basis for years at this point, and thanks to a website that's letting people draw pixel art all over Google Maps, I've been given yet another outlet via which to let it out.
That site is wplace, and it'll look familiar if you've been partial to the now defunct Reddit thread r/place at any point. Basically, anyone can hop into its map and colour in pixels to doodle over the top of any place on Earth, creating vast canvases of cool art and scrawled messages to whomever might be watching.
We’ve covered a few deals on the RTX 5070 from various manufacturers in recent days, but today we’ve spotted its big brother, the RTX 5080, up for almost 20% off.
Right, stop eating your mate for a minute. Peak's had a big update from developers Aggro Crab and Landfall Games, and it adds a new Monument Valley-esque location for you to scale the cliffs of.
Before you can go mountaineering among the sandy cacti and roaring tornadoes, though, you'll want to put on some suncream. Yes, I know you now do the cannibalism thanks to co-op climber's most recent patch, but you've still got to take your skincare seriously. Come on, at least take a parasol.
While admitting that FBC: Firebreak's launch on Steam "underperformed", developers Remedy have re-iterated their commitment to the co-op shooter in their latest financial report, saying that it remains "a solid game to build on" and confirming that a previously announced major update will arrive in late September.
The report also gives quick mini-updates on the development of Control 2 and the combined Max Payne 1 & 2 remake, both of which remain on course.
We’re always on the lookout for the best gaming mice, but it’d be fair to say the name conventions are a bit of a mess. The Logitech G Pro X Superlight 2 is a great example of this: Fantastic mouse, terrible name.
It’d be fair to say that PC gaming isn’t quite as accessible as console gaming for newcomers. Right off the bat, it’s obvious that a Nintendo Switch 2 is an upgrade over a Nintendo Switch 1, but while you, the discerning RPS reader, will have some understanding of processors, RAM, and those all-important GPUs, it’s not always easy for someone to jump in (short of grabbing a Steam Deck).
Former Dragon Age executive producer Mark Darrah has discussed pitching remasters of the first three games in the series to EA, and made clear in the same interview that he's encourage the developers of the next Mass Effect game to "scapegoat" Dragon Age: The Veilguard "as much as they need to".
Darrah's offered a lot of insight into life at BioWare since departing the studio back in 2022, with the veteran dev having done plenty of that via his own YouTube channel. This time, though, he was interviewed by YouTuber MrMattyPlays.
The Battlefield 6 open beta is over, and encouraging whispers of its oo-rahhable player count – peaking at over 500,000 on PC alone, so sayeth SteamDB – have been tempered with widespread reports of invading cheaters. That’s despite BF6’s new and unusual requirement to enable Secure Boot, a BIOS-level security feature in Windows, ostensibly to prevent such do-badding.
In response, a forum post attributed to EA’s anti-cheat team has played up successes in tracking and catching the beta’s cheaters, whose crimes allegedly range from classic wallhacks, speed hacks, and aimbots to cheats that reduce recoil or display enemy health and weapon info. However, it also concedes that Secure Boot "is not, and was not intended to be a silver bullet" – and in doing so, highlights the immense, perhaps impossible task that developers have of keeping cheater users out of their games.
The motor carriage noisily trundles down a dirt track in the Sicilian countryside. It’s a beautiful evening or morning. I’ve lost track of which, and I’m too busy thinking to double check whether the pale sun overhead is rising or retreating. How strange it is that something so new (at least in the context it’s being presented) can feel so inescapably ancient. These thoughts are about the impractical and inefficient curiosity Enzo Favara’s at the wheel of, but they’re also about Mafia: The Old Country itself.
If you get a relative or mate who’s unfamiliar with the Mafia series to play Hangar 13’s latest work, I’m fairly convinced that you’ll have an easier time convincing them that they’d just sampled a remaster of a game from the 2000s than a new release from 2025. That’s not a bad thing in and of itself, but at a time when games attempting to draw on nostalgia feel more unrepentantly nostalgic than ever, while new games often feel increasingly desperate to convey their newness, it’s certainly struck me.
Some upsetting news from the past weekend: Bithell Games, the Mike Bithell-founded indie studio behind Thomas Was Alone, John Wick Hex, Tron: Identity and the just-released Tron: Catalyst, are laying off 11 developers. That’s "The majority of our full-time staff," according to a post on Bithell’s personal Bluesky account.
Everybody stay calm. You're about to read about landlords and the prospect of paying rent. Don't worry, there probably aren't any landlords in the room right now. There are, however, new landlords in Cyberpunk 2077, should you choose to install this mod that introduces a whole bunch of expanded mechanics and details when it comes to cyberflats.
It's called Eviction Notice, and it's a substantial overhaul of how housing works in the futuristic RPG. Gone are the days of just living for free in Megabuilding H10, or walking up to one of the newer pads added in by the 1.5 update and paying a one-time fee for permanent access. Clearly these options are too idealistic, and your merc with a toaster transplanted into their face needs to battle their most terrifing foe yet: fiscal responsibility.
Edwin’s off for a few days – something to do with the thesis that he’s recently started using to make us call him "Dr Edwin" in meetings, turning his camera off and muting himself if we forget. So, for this week’s rundown of new PC game releases, you’ve got me, fresh from my recent encroachments into WAWAPW and the Sunday Papers. You thought AI would steal everyone’s jobs? Wrong. It was the hardware editors.
Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome back to Booked For The Week - our regular Sunday chat with a selection of cool industry folks about books! I'm obviously using regular in the metafictional sense here but my intentions are pure, I promise.
Sundays are for admiring for the nine different houseplants you successfully repotted on Saturday, a moment of quiet appreciation that lasts just long enough to forget that you willingly spent real money on bags of what could accurately be called dirt. You paid. For dirt. And now it’s back.
There's a fox in the back garden outside my window right this second, dragging its bum along the grass like Santa's Little Helper. Thankfully I love foxes, and care little for the garden. None of this has anything to do with games, of course. I just thought you'd like to know.
Now then: what are we all playing this weekend? We'll start, then you can follow in the comments!
If I went to hell, I can't imagine the first thing on my mind would be trying to pull off a bank job with a crew of fellow damned souls. However, in freshly announced tactical RPG Thousand Hells: The Underworld Heists, that's the sort thing you'll be doing, with plenty of choice and consequence if things go pear-shaped.
Thousand Hells is the latest cool thing from Six Ages and King of Dragon Pass devs A Sharp. While they're working with Kitfox Games as publisher again, there's plenty of different stuff going on, including a move away from world of Glorantha as a setting. That's in favour of fantasy pastures new, inspired by myths of the ancient proto-Indo-European, Norse, and Mesopotamian varieties. Oh, and a dash of Hieronymus Bosch's lovely paintings.
Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick has reaffirmed 2K Games' assertion that the reportedly troubled BioShock 4, currently in the works at Cloud Chamber, will make it to release.
The reassurance follows a report from Bloomberg earlier this week which reported that the game had failed a recent internal progress check, with the story specifically being tapped as an aspect that needs reworking, and some of the devs working on it have been reassigned to non-BioShock roles.
To speedily summarise a lot of very knotty reporting, last month a bunch of credit card companies and payment processors forced Steam and Itch.io to alter their definitions of acceptable sexual material in PC games. Seemingly faced with the prospect of having all transactions blocked, the two storefronts now require developers to comply with the extremely open-ended adult content policies of their financial partners. This has led to a spate of delistings or outright takedowns across Steam and especially Itch, with projects affected ranging from anime stepdaughter fantasies on Steam to bundles of self-described "games for girlthings with something wrong with them".
1000 Deaths, which released yesterday, primarily pitches itself as a 3D platformer with some tricksy plays on gravity – but the running and jumping only demands half your attention at most. The other half is dedicated to shaping the lives of four variously maladjusted losers (who, like the rest of their surroundings, resemble a child’s crayon drawings made flesh), the platforming challenges being punctuated by destiny-altering decisions to make on their behalf. Hints of VVVVVV, but with stronger notes of a Telltale adventure that’s been left in a microwave.
Waiting's been a bit of theme during the early stages of the Battlefield 6 open beta, which has otherwise been earning a lot of thumbs up from FPS heads. If you've recently run into an never-ending loading screen while trying to jump into a Conquest match, the good news is that the devs have been working to solve those issues.
While EA reckon the problem's specific to that game mode and the Siege of Cairo map, that doesn't look to have stopped plenty of players from running into it over the past 24 hours. Cue a number of frustrated Reddit posts that boil down to the word 'stuck' being yelled so loud it could bring down a helicopter.
I’m a bit of a sicko when it comes to keyboards, and have built the kind of collection that makes my wife duck for cover when I bring them up in conversation.
Wake up, it's the 90s again. Ok, so maybe I've lied to you there, but two classic shooters from the decade that I as a child of 1999 definitely remember fondly have been re-released as one handy bundle with some extra features. Heretic + Hexen is out now.
The surprise re-release of these virtual spell boxes came as part of QuakeCon, with Nightdive Studios and id Software collborating to revamp more old school shooty things after doing the same with Doom and Doom 2 last year.
The heatwave has won this time, readers. The plan this year... oh god, let's not talk about The Plan, it's too upsetting. For several years now, we've fought back the heatwave with a low-intensity strategy game, defying the evil fire orb with games that are manageable even for a brain composed partially of plasma. I'd hoped, this year, to move beyond, and fight back the sky with three such games. But. It warm.
Still, you're getting two. This year's Low-Intensity Games For To Do Strategy Despite Grotesque Hot are Hyper Empire and High Strategy: Oradros.
Microsoft have brought development work on Contraband, the co-op smuggling game that Just Cause developers Avalanche Studios announced back in 2021, to a standstill. That's the official line, while a report from Bloomberg claims the game's been cancelled outright.
Nothing had been been seen or heard of Contraband since its reveal to the world at E3 four years ago, and this sudden status update comes just weeks after Microsoft cancelled Perfect Dark, Everwild, and an unannounced MMO from ZeniMax as part of mass layoffs that saw around 9,000 staff lose their livelihoods.
As an old man yelling about deals at the clouds, I’ve often felt a bit jealous of these back-to-school sales. By my recollection, unless you wanted a new writing pad, some stationery, or a backpack, these deals didn’t really exist.
Folk Emerging describes itself as a turn-based 4X strategy game, but in practice, it's possibly more of a 2.5X strategy game, in that it puts you in charge of a nomadic hunter-gatherer community from before the rise of agriculture and the founding of towns and cities.
As this developer update suggests, it's like the turn or two at the very start of Civilization when you just have one Settler unit, but stretched out across thousands of years, with a social element and rustic spreadsheet aesthetics that remind me of King Of Dragon Pass. It's got somewhat doofy cartoon Stone Age muzak, but is otherwise the most intriguing Civlike strategy game I've laid eyes on since the one that looks like an octopus murder scene - and whadayaknow, by happy coincidence there's a public playtest running from right now till August 18th.
Oh, hello there, Is This Seat Taken? The logic puzzler with a name that's real awkward to stick midway through a sentence has surprise-released today, August 7th, right off the back of an appearance in a Nintendo Indie World showcase.
When we woke up this morning, all we knew was that this game about telling people where to stick their bottoms would be coming out in August - a vague window previously announced during June's Whole Direct. Now, it be here.
Apex Legends launched its Season 26 update this week with the new Wildcard mode, what must be its fourth or fifth attempt at a 'battle royale but faster' sideshow. If anything, Wildcard – with its tightened safe zones, generous respawn allowances and automatic loot pickups – is the most ferocious, cage fightin'est variant yet, its matches routinely playing out as breathless slaughters as crammed-in squads fight, die, and resurrect over a condensed selection of strongholds.
Still, while I’ve enjoyed ApeLegs' previous action-favouring tweaks, something about Wildcard underwhelms. It’s not the shooting, which is as crisp and dynamic as in any other Respawn FPS. And it’s not the simplified gear gobbling, which is fine for a supplementary mode. It’s that at the end of a Wildcard round, even the ones I’ve won, I’ve never felt that I’ve really gone anywhere or done anything except aim down my sights and left-click. In chasing nonstop drama it denies you something that good battle royales, and their progenitors, can so effectively deliver: a journey.
Promise Mascot Agency, Kaizen Game Works' thing about running a business that revolves around costumed weirdos, fairly intense menu shuffling and a lot of driving around, has gotten a free update that adds in a host of new features. The ability to grind along rails like Michi's truck's a skateboard, for instance.
Sure, you can already unlock the ability to fly said truck around the spooky Japanese countryside, but come on, if there's something every management game needs, it's tricks from the X Games.
I am neither a wrestler nor a wrestling fan. I have never attended a cage fight or hit somebody with a folding chair. I have never had a blowoff or no-sold somebody's attempt to lay the smackdown on my randy ass. I cannot smell what the Rock is cooking. I cannot. Nonetheless, I think a Hades-style roguelite built around grappling sounds like a fun time, especially when it's set in a cursed Byzantine citadel. This is Realm Of Fame from Black Cube Games. Can you smell what the trailer is cooking?
Sony remain confident that Bungie's live service shooter reboot Marathon will launch within their current fiscal year - that is, before March 31st 2026 - and are fairly sure they'll be able to share an exact release date this autumn. They've factored it into their financial forecasts, see.
They're also pretty upbeat about their live service business at large, which accounted for around 40% of first-party software revenue in their last financial quarter, though they acknowledge that they screwed the pooch with Concord, which got to exist in public for a whole couple of weeks before Sony kicked it into the sun.
I'm sure Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 and Battlefield 6 won't be exactly the same game, despite their obvious bullet casing-littered common ground. However, they are opting to mirror each other in one manner - both will require you to enable secure booting on your PC.
As if summoned to do so by EA letting everyone know that this week's BF6 open beta would necessitate a delve in your BIOS to click yes on a thing in the name of eliminating cheating, Activision have revealed Blops is doing the same thing.
A new joint investigation between the Guardian, Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine, and Hebrew-language outlet Local Call has claimed that Microsoft have worked with the Israeli military to store surveillance data on Palestinian civilians in Azure servers overseas, with some of that data allegedly being used to research and identify bombing targets. The report has led to renewed calls for game developers and players to join the recently launched Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions campaign against Microsoft and Xbox gaming products and services - in particular, Minecraft, Call Of Duty, Candy Crush, and Game Pass.
If you've tried to hop into the Battlefield 6's open beta's early access period this morning and have ended up sitting a queue behind thousands of other folks in camo gear, then don't panic. Or at least that's what EA say, as their wrenches slam against the game's servers in an attempt to let more people in.
With players stuck twiddling their thumbs in lines that can stick you as far away as 240-something thousandth from the front, the developers have been jolted into action. After all, you don't want to anger the sorts of folks who're up for shooting some blokes on an otherwise chill Thursday morning.
Some dataminers digging into Elden Ring Nightreign's files following the arrival of its Duos update claim to have uncovered some details about an endless mode.
As reported by PC Gamer, said new mode is allegedly called 'Deep of Night', and will see you grouped with similarly skiller nighfarers to fight your way up through the ranks of a new rating system that players reckon could work similarly to Armored Core 6's rankings.
Lenovo’s Legion 5 lineup has been getting consistently better in the last few years since James took a look at the 2022 model, and it’s now an OLED gaming laptop that packs a Blackwell GPU.
If you failed to swipe an early access key for this week's Battlefield 6 beta, because you neither signed up via the Battlefield Labs programme before 31st July nor watched Your Favourite Creators play the game during the recent multiplayer reveal, then Don't Sweat It, Soldier, because Drill Sergeant EA Have Your Back in the shape of a last-gasp code giveaway.
We’ve already shown you how you can save almost $400 on the Lenovo Legion 5 Gen 10, but if you’re looking for a little more from your gaming laptop then there’s a saving on the Legion Pro, too.
Former Dragon Age executive producer Mark Darrah has posted a sprawling video about the development of Anthem, EA and BioWare's ill-fated mech RPG shoot-me-do. We've heard about this remarkably torrid period in the RPG developer's existence from other ex-BioWare honchos and anonymous sources, but perhaps never quite this extensively: the video tops out at an hour long, and this is just part one.
Look, I know there's an anime fan in a top hat at the top of this tower. I know he'll chuck ninja stars at me if I go up there and disturb him, but that's why I've downed fifteen cups of coffee. I'll just show him this chainsaw and these mail bombs, then we'll get on famously. Oh, come on. I'm the reason this building has water coolers, you know. Fine, I'll wait in the lobby.
Right, is anyone sitting here? Good. You here to see the giant purple mecha-execs that loom over the building too? Ah, you're in for a treat. I've had the pleasure a few times now, after first opting to enter their corporate servitude the other day. They'd already lightninged me off the roof the first time, because I told them to stick their offer up their stick-bottoms. Let's just say it was a persuasive recruitment tactic.
It’s a good month to be subscribed to Humble Choice, and not just because you get eight Steam keys for the price of one lukewarm Deliveroo. August’s headliner is Persona 5 Royal, and honestly, that’s enough on its own.
Valve, perhaps newly wary of financial transactions after being put over a barrel by Steam’s payment processors, have elected to give away a bunch of Dota 2 cosmetics for free – and are employing the kindliest, definitely non-murderiest of fellas to handle the goods. Sharply dressed satyr Quartero was added to Dotes yesterday alongside the 7.39d balance update, and now that he’s stuffed a Witch Doctor bauble into my hands for nothing, I can safely say that the chances of my burgled body being found behind the remains of his hastily abandoned shop are almost zero.
Stardock and Oxide Games have announced Ashes Of The Singularity II - or Ashes Of The Singularity 2, as people who hate unnecessary extra keyboard presses may prefer - sequel to the sci-fi real-time strategy game Brendy called "gorgeous, but plain", adding "there's nothing here that hasn't been done before and done better". The new RTS aims to improve that verdict by introducing: humans. It's a bold strategy, Cotton, but perhaps it'll work out for them.
League of Legends: Wild Rift executive producer David Xu has said Riot "can and will do better," after sharing an anniversary video to the game's account on Chinese social media site Weibo that very much looks to be AI slop.
However, Xu hasn't confirmed that the video did use AI in this sort-of-apology, instead claiming this was a "creator-made" video that'd found its way onto the League of Legends' spin-off's official channels.
I'm not the first journalist to accuse Battlefield 6 of failing to read the room. The new Battlefield's single player story explores a near-future in which NATO has collapsed, a dastardly private military corporation has filled the power vacuum, and the USA's somehow-outgunned military must fight to reunite old allies under the Stars and Stripes. The campaign includes an invasion of New York, with street battles waged against the balaclava-huffing scoundrels of "Pax Armata" in the shadow of Brooklyn Bridge. Many valiant helicopters lay down their lives in the process, and the soul of Bob Dylan is flown from every flagpole.
Update: A Valve spokesperson responded that "Steam has never allowed games with sexual depictions/images of real people". They pointed to item two in the rules and guidelines regarding what should be published on the platform outlined in its onboarding document as the reason Vile: Exhumed was taken down, specifying that this isn't a "new rule".
A spokesperson for DreadXP has reached out with the following response to Valve's statement: "Everything in the game is censored and implied, which is the opposite of ‘explicit’ as pointed out in the guidelines. The content of Vile: Exhumed falls within compliance of this rule referred to by Valve in their statement to RPS, which is why we called the ban as ‘unjust’."
Original story continues below:
Horror game Vile: Exhumed, which sees you delving into a 90s computer to uncover a man's obsession with an adult film actress, has launched as a free download after being "wrongly banned" from Steam over sexual content, according to developer Cara Cadaver of Final Girl Games.
Initially released via Itch.io (where that version remains live), the game was set to to debut on Steam on July 22, but had its page on Valve's platform pulled down. Cadaver and publisher DreadXP say "sexual content with depictions of real people" was the reasoning given for this by Valve, despit the game featuring "no uncensored nudity, no depictions of sex acts, and no pornography".
If you're planning to hop into Battlefield 6's open beta later this week, you might have to do some digging around in your PC's settings in order to get in. EA have elected to make enabling secure boot on your hardware mandatory, as part of an effort to limit cheating.
It's not that surprising a move, given the publishers opted to make it a hard requirement for Battlefield 2042 earlier this year. EA's not alone either, with the likes of Riot having already done the same with fellow online shooter Valorant. You see, the real war isn't about nations, resources, or petty rulers' personal grievances - it's to ensure you don't get sniped by a Terminator with permanent x-ray vision or auto-aim.
Got three (or maybe four) monitors and want to condense things into one, suitably massive canvas for your work or the best ultrawide games? We might just have the deal for you.
Peak developers Aggro Crab have taken issue with an imitation of their game created in 100% non-problematic kiddy funhouse sim Roblox, saying that they'd prefer people pirate their creation than play its predatory WonkoVision double.
Helldivers 2's warp pack sounded like great fun as soon as it was announced as part of last month's Control Group warbond, and it's warped its way into many players' hearts. This is thanks in part to some cool tricks and glitches you can use it to pull off, with the game's latest patch having seen Arrowhead opt to outlaw the cheekiest of these.
You see, for the uninitiated, each mission in the shooter kicks off with you descending onto a planet and therefore ends with you being extracted via shuttle back up to your ship. It's the circle of Helldiver life and it moves us all. Well aside from folks who'd taken to using a well-timed warp to escape their ride home as it took off.
In an ideal reality, power banks for the Steam Deck would not exist, and we’d all be able to play our portable PCs uninterrupted from sunrise to sunset. World peace, I imagine, would follow shortly thereafter. For now, however, there are plenty of games that will cut a Steam Deck and/or Steam Deck OLED’s battery life to a couple of hours or less, so it’s worth getting them some help – especially for lengthy travels that would deny you the use of their own chargers.
A brace of Silent Hill f reporting has treated us to the first details of the game's combat system. Here are the headlines: counter attacks, weapon degradation and an energy bar that lets you perform power moves and dodge in slow motion. It's apparently reminiscent of Dark Souls in that you have a stamina system and the dodge and counter timing can be tricky - a summary I would say also describes Punch-Out! from 1984, if I wanted to be a snarky little shitlord. There are no guns, just melee weapons that range from scavenged baseball bats to naginata polearms, looted from a spirit world of shrines and masked figures.
A stickfellow in a top hat's just burst through a twentieth story window, taking a fatal tumble down the corporate ladder, and all because I lobbed a parcel at him. This kind of thing happens all the time in Stick It to the Stickman, the roguelite beat ’em up that Anger Foot devs Free Lives are set to release in early access form later this month.
It's glorious enough to forgive any frustration you might have been left with when publishers Devolver Digital announced late last year that the corporate slapfest had been delayed into 2025.
I'd love to say that Bloodgrounds plunged me into a crimson mist, but in practice, this arena tactics RPG with town-building feels as cosy as a pair of soft leather socci on a frosty Saturnalia. The setup: you are a gladiator from a Roman-themed fantasy world, who has recently won his freedom in the arena. How is he celebrating his freedom? By becoming a gladiator manager himself, as he continues his quest for vengeance upon the Emperor who slaughtered his father.
The Stop Destroying Videogames citizens' initiative, the petition asking EU lawmakers to look into the issue of publishers rendering online games unplayable when official support runs its course, hit its deadline at the end of last month looking like it'd amassed more than enough signatures. With that phase over, the Stop Killing Games campaign that's vocally supported efforts like this is left to await the outcomes, whatever they might be.
That's given YouTuber Ross Scott, who's become the loudest voice publicising this worldwide push for action on consumer rights when it comes to these sorts of server shutdowns, a chance to take stock of how things have gone to this point. He's keen to take a break, but will first have to see how things pan out with the multiple irons Stop Killing Games and their adjacent groups have in the fire.
Battlefield 6's open beta kicks off later this week, and EA have now painted a picture of what you can expect maps/modes-wise, as well as in terms of the changes the devs have made based on Battlefield Labs playtest feedback.
Plus, there's a new trailer that features yet more folks in camo running about amid booms. I'm glad to report that no helicopters, at least at a glance, look to have been harmed in the run up to this one.
The Steam Deck (and other handheld PCs) are fantastic devices, but there’s no denying they can chomp through battery pretty swiftly if you’re playing AAA titles.
Imagine Tetris but played in a bottomless ocean shaft, with linked tetronimoes serving to continue your journey down that shaft, providing you keep earning enough points to play them. This is Podvodsk, a free game jam experiment from Loop Hero developers Four Quarters.
Not played Tetris? 1) you bloody liar, and 2) let me frame this differently, then. The idea here is that you're trying to construct a tapering underwater city out of random clumps of building blocks, dangled from the bottom of a miraculously unsinkable surface platform. Each building both costs points and also, earns points based on different scoring criteria, and every time you play a piece, the screen scrolls irreversibly downward.
A group of QA workers at Call Of Duty studio Raven Software have officially signed off on their first union contract with parent company Microsoft and COD publisher Activision-Blizzard, in the run-up to the launch of Call Of Duty: Black Ops 7. The contract is the result of years of negotiations, and offers some protection against the treatment of QA workers as disposable staff - hired to quash bugs shortly before release and laid off soon afterwards, with minimal odds of personal development or progression to other roles.
It’d be fair to say 8BitDo knows a fair bit about peripherals, but this one still caught us by surprise. The 8BitDo Retro 87 Xbox Edition is a mechanical gaming keyboard inspired by Microsoft’s original, monolithic black box.
I’ve been liking, even occasionally loving ghostly bicycle racer Wheel World, for several reasons. One, it’s relaxing enough for post-work decompression; two, it’s just competitive enough that I can enjoy winning without necessarily undermining point one; and three, it’s far enough outside my usual interests that the culture and lexicon it celebrates feel fresh and interesting to learn. Those of cycling, to be clear. I obviously know loads about ghosts.
Nonetheless, I’ve struggled to engage with its parts system, which isn’t ideal given it both determines the performance of your haunted bike and, outside of the story, acts as Wheel World’s primary measure of progression. I agree with Brendy (who doesn’t?) that once you earn enough metal bits to replace the rusting starter parts, there’s very little to be gained from fine-tuning towards a particular spec – an all-rounder bike can win anything. And, given the game’s gentle difficulty, probably will.
The new Bioshock game in development at Cloud Chamber Games is in difficulties, according to sources of the multiple and anonymous persuasion. Announced in 2019, the game has reportedly failed a recent internal progress review, with its narrative found to be in particular need of revamping.
Techno-loving hollowtooth Blade has joined the playable cast of Marvel Rivals, but he's not what I find most interesting about the free-to-play shooter's latest update. Developers NetEase Games have introduced a new system of penalties for ragequitters, keyboard-away-frommers, and other craven scumbags who abandon a competitive mode match early on because the dishwasher's overflowing, or similar.
I was munching crisps while watching a showcase of upcoming games from THQ Nordic last week, letting the likes of a new Spongebob Squarepants game and the Gothic Remake wash over me like barely flavoured fizzy water, when Fatekeeper showed up. I straightened up, just a little. It is a fancy looking first-person RPG made with all the hyper detail and vivid lighting you might expect of a game developed in Unreal Engine 5. It is also conjuring a game worth conjuring: the heavy hitting fantasy brawlabout Dark Messiah Of Might And Magic. As I watched the below trailer, I became more and more cautiously hopeful. Looks slick, but where's the kick?
August 2025 now has as many Skyblivion developer diaries as there are modern The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion reimaginings: two, which in both cases remains a weirdly high number. But while last week’s Finishing Skyblivion focused on one volunteer’s attempts at getting the ambitious Cyrodiil-in-Skyrim mod over the line, this other vid makes a very specific pitch to those whose interest may have been diverted by Bethesda’s official Oblivion Remastered, showcasing how Skyblivion looks to more aggressively expand and rework the original RPG.
We enter week one of RPS Post-Graham. The office Slack echoes like the Great Hall of Durin after a Balrog teaparty. Horace coils about the foot of the Treehouse like a sullen Viking serpent. The Maw seems peevish and incontinent, spurning any news we offer it. The wifi network keeps changing its name to "Execute Order 66".
It is time to smash the emergency glass and bust out a few favourites from my personal collection of morale-boosting videogame intros. Here's Red Alert, to put some spring in your step; Okami to let the light in; Colony Wars for the WRAAAOW noise at the end. And here are this week's most interesting new PC games.
Financial service giants Mastercard have denied accusations that they sought to influence the recent removal of adult/NSFW games from Steam and Itch.io, claiming that they have "not evaluated any game or required restrictions of any activity on game creator sites and platforms," and that they allow all lawful transactions. It’s a brief and unequivocal statement, but Valve themselves have since suggested it might not be entirely accurate, telling PC Gamer that Steam’s payment processors objected to the availability of law-abiding adult games by citing one of Mastercard’s specific rules.
Sundays are for trying to find and exile the giant house spider that ran under my bed yesterday. I slept with the lights on and wrote most of this round-up standing on a stool. If any part of my body touches any other part of my body I assume it's the spider, and hit myself with a dustpan. I may have to dispose of any shoes I'm not currently wearing.
Let's take our minds off the spiders with some writing about gooners. I've lobbed that word around in articles as though it's just a synonym for lonely guys who want to jack off. I gather there's more to gooning than that. Here's a rich brew of thoughts from Sam Bodrojan.
It's been a funny old week for us at RPS, but the games will continue. The games must continue. Or else, what was this all for?
If you’re looking for a new PC that’s packing a recently-released NVIDIA 5070 GPU, then Lenovo’s new ‘Doorbuster’ deal might be just the thing.
Dell’s back-to-school deals have a whole host of laptop savings, but look a little deeper and there’s another Alienware deal.
Beware minor spoilers for Chairbound in this piece. I think they're minor. I have no idea what's truly significant in this dreary purgatory of flourescent lights and rippled glass facades. Only one thing seems guaranteed: I have to get out of here in 10 minutes or I'm doomed.
I met the weird little girl again. She was loitering in the shadow of a pillar on the eighth floor. I found her goblin-esque during our first meeting, but up close she seems relatively ordinary, a pale 10-year-old in a nightie with shoulder-length hair. At least, until she burbles distorted sounds at me and runs away into the darkness. I gather she is looking for her "toy". I don't think it's the rubber duck I'm holding.
Dell’s back-to-school deals are here, and they’re pretty great if you’re looking for a 2025 laptop.
Graham is gone. The longest-running editor of Rock Paper Shotgun worked his last day on the website earlier this week, and has leapt quietly into the mysterious realm of the games industry proper. The emotional fallout of this departure is roughly the same as any other time RPS has watched a writer swan-dive out of the RPS treehouse and into the mist far below. There is sadness tinged with hope. "There goes another one," you think, smiling through a single tear and imagining their future life far from these branches.
Only this time, well, it's Graham.
Right, if your hearing's recovered enough from the sheer blaring blastiness of yesterday's Battlefield 6 multiplayer reveal, I'm here to tell you a couple of things you'll probably be happy about. Well, unless you're planning on buying it from the Epic Games store.
You see, amid last night's info drop, EA have revealed at least an estimate of the specs your hardware'll need to have to run it, as well as the very important detail of whether you'll need to fire it up via (whispers) the EA launcher.
Battlefield 6 releases on October 10th with the unenviable task of being both a quality combined arms FPS, and a successful apology letter to those burned by the series’ previous missteps. To try out its multiplayer ahead of yesterday’s big reveal event, I had to pass through two separate metal detectors at the venue’s doors, which I can only assume were there to prevent infiltration by disgruntled Battlefield 2042 players armed with tins of orange paint.
Still, try it out I did, with most signs pointing towards BF6 being genuine about its promised return to Battlefield staples. The classic four classes instead of specialists. Destruction that has a point beyond spectacle. And most importantly, large-scale multivehicular warfare that isn’t nearly as organised and cinematic as the choreographed trailer.
With unofficial Oblivion remake Skyblivion aiming to arrive this year, one of its developers has kicked off a new dev diary series documenting the work they've been doing to get the massive Skyrim mod ready to emerge through the release gates.
While the folks behind Skyblivion certainly haven't been shy when it comes to regularly showing off their progress, it's always cool to see more of the blood, sweat, and tears that's going into finally getting such a gargantuan undertaking into players' hands. Then again, maybe I'm just partial to trippy glimpses at Uriel Septim's detached head floating in the development void.
It's time for another bulletin from the exciting world of desexindexification. Itch.io have re-listed a bunch of free adult-themed games that were taken down as part of a recent massive cull of supposedly licentious materials under pressure from payment processors. Itch are still, however, working out whether and how to restore paid NSFW projects that were removed from public channels as part of their efforts to stop the payment companies suspending store purchases in general.
In a further mild twist, one of the firms behind Itch.io's delistings, Stripe, have now informed the site that they themselves are acting under pressure from one of their own banking partners, without naming names. They'd like "to support adult content in the future". Nonetheless, Itch are still looking for new payment partners who are happier to process this kind of material.
We have all known the profound sorrow of getting two hours into an RPG and deciding that actually, Mum, I don't want to be an elven druid anymore. Being an elven druid sucks ass. There's barely any plantlife in the opening dungeon, so half my support skills are useless, and the only animal companion I'm qualified to conjure right now is a cranky squirrel. I'd much rather be a rogue. Look at all these elevated paths and pickable locks hereabouts! Look at all these shadows I could be skulking in, these precarious chandeliers directly opposite crawlspaces with rusty grills! Ugh, if only I weren't a stupid diluted floral wizard!
Avast, fellow salty sea-dogs. Some legally-minded landlubbers may have had words with Edward Kenway, captain of The Jackdaw and protagonist of Assassin's Creed: Black Flag. Well, Kenway's voice actor Matt Ryan at any rate, who's been filmed at a convention saying that Ubisoft threatened to sue him over a previous video from another convention in which he teased a remake of the game.
If you're out of the loop, this is the Black Flag remake the publisher haven't confirmed is coming, but has been reported to be in development several times over the past couple of years.
Between fifty game releases a day, and among them official successors and open source remakes, most 90s games your grandma bangs on about have some modern equivalent that somewhat fills the gap.
But not The Settlers. There hasn't been a Settlers game since 1996. Whether they were good or not, its many sequels, as early as 3, started missing the point of the design. It's the roads, man. The roads!
This isn't about iconography for its own sake. It's a design thing, an ethos. The heart of The Settlers was that your towns lived or died based largely on how well you designed your transport logistics. It was all about the roads. It doesn't even fit into a genre really, let alone the lopsided RTS the sequels collapsed into. It sounds like a typical town builder, especially today when there's a wealth of games about placing a woodcutter and a farm, but I'm tempted to say it's not even about gathering resources.
Right, so. It's supposed to go as follows: Yakuza 0, Yakuza Kiwami, Yakuza Kiwami 2, Yakuza 3 Remastered, Yakuza 4 Remastered, Yakuza 5 Remastered, Yakuza 6: The Song Of Life, Yakuza: Like A Dragon, then off into full-blown Like A Dragon land, and on to Like A Dragon: Pirate Yakuza. Easy. Except right now in my Steam library, it's not. The Kiwamis are cheekily lurking behind Yakuza 6, and the LADs are before all of their more Japanese gangsterly-named siblings.
It's chaos and anarchy. I can't live like this. The good news is that thanks to the update Steam's Client Beta has just gotten, it looks like I'll no longer have to.
EA have given us our first proper look at Battlefield 6's multiplayer, after revealing the game with a single player trailer last week. They've also confirmed the new shooter's release date - 10th October 2025 - and announced dates for a series of beta weekends in August.
The game they're pitching is a return to the contemporary warring of Battlefield 3 and Battlefield 4, after the mildly futuristic disappointments of Battlefield 2042. It's got four familiar classes, the old Battlefield mode trinity of conquest, breakthrough and rush, and maps that incline towards close quarters combat or wide-open vehicular blasting or some blasphemous hybrid of the twain. It seems fine. And loud.
$2,099.99 (was $2,499.99)
If you've ever fired up Baldur's Gate 3 and wondering why the likes of Shadowheart or Lae'zel's portrait shows them glaring at you like they've been summoned into some kind of video call, I bring good news. Larian's rectified this and one other infamous issue as part of the game's latest hotfix.
Don't get too excited, though. The devs are so keen to make sure no one gets their hopes up for any more major additions to the RPG now that its final patch is out of the way that they've dubbed this a "room temperature fix".
Punishing my tendency to never bother watching Nintendo Directs, Bandai Namco used today's Switch 2-focused showcase to announce Once Upon a Katamari: the first mainline, non-remake Katamari game since 2011. It’ll be out on PC as well, come October 24th 2025, and while you’ll once again be rolling up entire societies around a swelling sticky ball, this one will span a range of time periods - so you’ll be able to knead whole new planets out of feudal Japan or ancient Greece.
Yesterday, we shared how you could save on additional storage for your Steam Deck with some microSD deals, but if you’re looking for more of a project, today’s deal is for you.
Square Enix have announced Octopath Traveler 0, a prequel to the genteel 2019 RPG Katharine Castle hailed as... "a bit of a slog"?? "A big old anticlimax"??? I thought it was quite good!
This is an outrage! I'm going to tell Katharine she sucks at writing and is terrible at video games. What do you mean, she doesn't work here any more? Well in that case, I'm going to tell Graham he should never have hired her. What do you mean, he doesn't work here any more? Who does work here any more? Oh screw it, just roll the trailer.
Some people don't like cockroaches. I've always found them to be reliable mounts for the tiny gnome army via which I'll one day conquer the world. Anyway, forget I wrote that. Grounded 2's come out this week, and as such folks have fired up their modding machines and got to work tweaking the garden survival extravaganza to their liking.
Let's see here, we've got some of the usual useful changes, texture swaps, and...ah. A mod designed to help folks who're afraid of cockroaches. It'll do just that, provided you're not also terrified of clowns, or bugs vaguely dressed like them.
The next big patch for Dune: Awakening's now out there via Steam testing client, as devs Funcom look to test out its various tweaks before pressing go on full deployment next month. If you've been desperately screaming for the ability to slop out a bunch of blood and/or water at once, or have recently be chased by a swarm of griefy ornithopters, this is the patch for you.
In fact, the devs make clear that they'd really prefer it if you were to dedicate the bulk of your two-week-long patch testing time to those two things in particular. They're also turning off taxes and sandstorms, the latter very much being the tax equivalent of the natural world, for the first week so bases won't be at risk.
Yesterday, we highlighted a steep deal on one of the best gaming monitors from Alienware, but if you’ve been looking for more screen real estate, you’ll be glad you held off.