Playing Paladins is like walking into a supermarket in another country: you recognise most of the stuff in there, but everything is slightly wrong. But where exotic hypermarches have tubes of Prângles, cartons of Jiffy Cakes, and peanut-flavoured toothpaste, Paladins has bizarro versions of characters from Dota 2, Team Fortress, and Overwatch. (more…)
Back in the summer, I boldly declared that ‘I will play XCOM 2: War Of The Chosen’s daily challenge mode every day.’ Er. Whoops. I’ve only played a handful since then, and I’m not alone there. Though the mode still pumps out a new challenge every day, it hasn’t blossomed into a new religion in the same way The Binding of Isaac and Spelunky’s daily random-o-map scoreboard challenges have for those communities.
So, what happened?
When Electronic Arts turned off microtransactions in Star Wars Battlefront 2 over that whole stinking loot crate progression system mess, they said they would bring ’em back after a rethink. Well, EA’s chief financial officer said on Tuesday that is still very much the plan. While he isn’t sure how and when microtransactions will return, he seems fairly certain they wouldn’t include cosmetic items which seem goofy or out-of-place in Star Wars – no pink Darth Vader, for starters. (more…)
It’s almost impossible to talk about Asakusa Studio’s debut game Hyakki Castle without invoking the looming western spectre of Legend of Grimrock. While this particular formula for party-based first-person dungeon crawlery (real-time grid-based movement and all) dates all the way back to Dungeon Master in the 80s, Grimrock is the game that re-launched a genre, and a solid yardstick by which to measure imitators.
Hyakki Castle, then, is Legend of Grimrock – the original, rather than the more open-world sequel – in Medieval, mythical Japan. It’s a pure dungeon crawl with only the most threadbare of stories: a team of four heroes are sent to a cursed castle to stop an evil wizard. Boilerplate, even by dungeon crawl standards. Hyakki Castle has few ambitions of its own and while it comes tantalisingly close to Grimrock at moments, more often than not it feels like a shallow imitation that doesn’t even wear its own aesthetic as comfortably as it should.
As muscular as the GTX 1080 is, there have been some not-entirely-unwarranted grumbles about its underlying tech; specifically, that it’s basically a GTX 1070 with more of the GPU’s cores enabled. The GTX 1080Ti is much bigger break from the rest of Nvidia’s 10-series, and a much more overtly ‘high-end’ card. It uses the bigger, beefier GP-102 GPU, same as in the bonkers-expensive Titan X and Titan Xp, and wields 3584 processing cores to the GTX 1080’s 2560. Its 11GB of memory is the most you’ll find in a mainstream card, too.
Obviously, these upgrades will put a proportionally larger dent into your finances. The MSI GeForce GTX 1080Ti Gaming X Trio I’ve been testing – with its factory overclocking and custom triple-fan cooler – is £750, and generally the cheapest GTX 1080Ti I can find still asks for £698. With the GTX 1080 dropping as low as £500, this card needs to prove it’s not just a list of fancy-sounding specs.
The prophecies were true – demos are back. This time it’s Nazi-bludgeoning romp Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus that’s offering a morsel of its shoots and boots. The demo only lets you play through the first level, so it really is a teeny tiny taste. “Should you choose to upgrade to the full version of the game,” enthuses this faceless Bethesda announcement, “all of your save data will carry over.” Right so. (more…)
As anyone who watches their feeds knows, we live in a constantly evolving cyberpunk dystopia. They’re connecting toilets to the internet, for heavens sake. If this Gibsonist world is just too REAL for you, we have put together the ten best videogames about hacking, programming and computing so you can escape into meta-dystopia. Which I’m sure is a much better place.
