With Irrational 20,000 leagues under and Ken Levine off doing his own, significantly smaller thing at 2K, you might think BioShock dead in the water. You would, however, be wrong. Following on from Levine’s original comment that he was leaving the series in 2K’s hands, Take-Two Big Daddy Strauss Zelnick has confirmed at a recent analyst conference that the oft-divisive series will carry on and once-thought-dead BioShock 2 developer 2K Marin will do the honors.

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This week has been a bit of a blur for me albeit in an awesome way. It’s not every day you’re startled into remembering that a beloved book series is being adapted for the television. (The Strain is squee, guys. Squee.) I can’t abide by the kind of vampires that have slowly crept into media these days. Flashy, sparkly things built for lust rather than terror. Ugh. Needless to say, the vampires in del Toro’s show are anything but sexy. Anyway, here’s this week’s conglomeration of bargains! Enjoy. (And tell me about your favourite horror movies in the comments.) The evil skeleton bunny is courtesy of lemming! … [visit site to read more]

For Graham, Watch_Dogs was like a multi-pack bag of crisps – all choice and abundance, no soul. For many other people, however, it’s been like one of those bags that won’t open no matter how hard you try. You wrench and strain and try from different angles, but alas: nothing. You know something> semi-flavorful is inside, but you just can’t get it to work right. Fortunately, Ubisoft is aware, and it’s working on a patch to alleviate some of the performance issues PC players have been encountering.

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No tease before the jump here, let s get straight to it. Distant Worlds: Universe is my favourite space strategy game. Not my favourite space strategy game released this week and not my favourite space strategy game released this year. It s the definitive version of the best space strategy game I ve ever played and I want to share the excitement with everyone, starting with an old friend. The transcript below explains all.>

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Perhaps it’s time to look at early access releases another way. Don’t become frustrated by games which aren’t yet what we hope they’ll be, find games which right now are something we want. DayZ was once a brisk countryside hike. Star Citizen is still a gorgeous spaceship museum to visit, fleeting perfection for someone who wants nothing more than to gaze at spaceships. And The Forest, well, it’s now on Steam Early Access but has yet to fully round out the survival stuff, so perhaps it’s as close as it’ll ever be to the woodland stroll I crave on a Friday evening.

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Call of Duty: Ghosts seems to have rediscovered a bit of the Quake and Half-Life mod scene spirit. Hear me out, right. I know it’s all usually very po-faced and dull, but the next DLC map pack seems to throw together whatever weirdness its creators found kooky or funny or cool–as so many mods did. See, ‘Invasion’ will bring ghost pirates and mariachi revenants and I’m surprised to find CoD DLC making me nostalgic. It’s just a shame this attitude is confined to paid DLC.

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I remember when this here were all World War 2 games, as far as the eye can see. Before we had yer modern warfares and yer advanced warfares and yer fancy space games fer use in intros about commonplace genres, it was all about Nazis, hedges in France and Steven Spielberg movies.

With Wolfenstein out and City Interactive’s Enemy Front just around the corner, let’s pretend it is that way again. This latest manshoot is about an American war correspondent playing witness (and gun-pal) to the Warsaw resistance, and this new story trailer wants to convince you of its serious intent.

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Tropico 5 doesn’t deviate far from the series’ blueprint – real-time city-building on an initially low-tech, low-wealth Caribbean island, with you playing the role of a cartoonish dictator who’s as benign or malign as you care to be, now with a revamped campaign mode and added multiplayer.

I’ve spent a big chunk of this week with it, and have now left its sun-kissed beaches and mouldering tenements to bring you the following report. If it matters, I skipped Tropico 4 so can’t tell you anything about how it compares to that.> … [visit site to read more]

It’s possible that some of you have overdosed on Prison Architect update videos by now, but if you’re like me and still in the throes of a monthly addiction to the incarceration management sim’s new features, then this month’s hit is a good one. As explained on the official forum, the major new addition: your prison’s inhabitants can now smuggle in drugs, get hooked on them, and go into withdrawal or overdose. Inject the trailer below directly into your eyeballs to beat the blood-brain barrier.

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Every game series you never played will return to taunt you. I have no experience of Keiji Inafune’s Mega Man, but its Kickstarter-funded spiritual successor Mighty No. 9 is too big, and too full of heroically upbeat platforming music, to ignore. There’s a trailer below showing the project’s healthy development progress.

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