There are beloved boutique Japanese studios, and then there's Falcom; a true grandee about to celebrate its 40th anniversary, the company traces its beginnings back to a hobbyist shop selling PCs and Apple IIIs as well as the curious games people were coding for them, before turning to making those games themselves. The studio has stayed purposefully modest ever since, still employing just over 60 people as it continues doing what it does best: making RPGs rich in character and story, with vast arcs that can span multiple games.

Fans of Falcom are a dedicated bunch, then - like Toshihiro Kondo, for example, who took over the reins from founder Masayuki Kato in 2007. Since then, there's been a gentle push towards the west that's led to new audiences discovering the likes of Ys, the brilliantly breezy action RPG, and the ongoing Legend of Heroes series and its offshoots - a series that rivals the likes of Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy in longevity.

As Falcom's 40th anniversary beckons, we sat down with Mr. Kondo to discover how he went from being a superfan to heading up the company - and how Falcom are endeavouring to find new fans along the way.

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Tower defense title Orcs Must Die 3 will launch for PC via Steam, PlayStation and Xbox on 23rd July.

That's almost exactly a year on from its original release as a timed-exclusive for Stadia, back in July 2020. The news was confirmed this evening, as part of the PC Gaming Show.

The latest game in the Orcs Must Die series features solo and co-op play, and a campaign set 25 years after that of Orcs Must Die 2. Clearly, you were not successful enough at getting rid of all those orcs last time around.

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Indie publisher Devolver Digital will host an E3 livestream at 9.30pm UK time on Saturday, 12th June.

It's part of Geoff Keighley's Summer Game Fest.

There's no word on what to expect from the show, although I suspect it will follow the same unhinged theme of previous Devolver Digital E3 shows.

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Terraria developer Re-Logic has said it will still support its 2D sandbox hit on Android and Google Play, despite publicly canning the game's Stadia version yesterday due to grievances with Google.

Re-Logic founder Andrew Spinks made headlines when he railed against Google on his personal Twitter and said he would never work with the company again.

Spinks' own Google account had been disabled for three weeks with no explanation, he said, meaning he had lost access to his Google Play app library, Google Drive data, YouTube channel and Gmail account.

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You'd be well within your rights to think Terraria had finally finished updating earlier this year, as developer Re-Logic declared May's big content update was the game's last. But 2020 is full of twists and turns, and so Re-Logic has announced it's releasing a final update. Again.

Dubbed "Journey's Actual End", the latest update adds the "final" NPC and several new achievements, along with the usual mix of balance changes and bug fixes. There's also new vanity armour, and "the long-requested game credits (done Terraria style!)".

This bonus update will launch on PC sometime today, while mobile players can expect the whole of Journey's End (1.4) to release later this month. As of yet there doesn't appear to be an exact date for 1.4's arrival on console, with Re-Logic last week saying it's still "working on it".

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Terraria has been declared complete after its developers released the game's final major update.

The Journey's End update arrives today nine years after the hugely popular sandbox game came out on PC, and makes significant changes to most of Terraria's systems.

"This update has been a labor of love, tirelessly worked on by our team over a good while, and we truly feel that it brings Terraria to the next level, to a place where the core game can finally be called 'complete'," developer Re-Logic said in a forum post.

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Oh man, Hotline Miami. I can still feel it. What a cutting, embarrassingly necessary parable of violence. What a way to stand on the shoulders of Shadow of the Colossus, by taking that moral throughline and wrapping it, head to toe, in the trappings of its time.

What's weird, though, is I think parables are a bit rubbish. More often than not a parable will do somewhere between most and all of the work for you. You'll finish up - watching, reading, playing, whatever - and you'll know exactly what it is that you just consumed, what the point of it was, and what you need to do next, which is usually nothing.

Hotline Miami, a lot of the time, is at real threat of falling into that trap. You are summoned, via anonymous phone call, into a series of ultra-violent raids on various bad guy hideouts, and you obviously oblige. It's 2012 so naturally, Drive still fresh in the mind, this is set in the late '80s. It's a cult hit because it's indie and violent and has music, and the cult following has nicknamed your character "Jacket", because he has a cool jacket. Everything is neon, but a sort of grim neon, with a dirty, grainy flicker over the top that could be a sort of VHS effect or could be a glaring sign, as it gradually flickers with more vigor and grunge, that what you're seeing here isn't entirely real.

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To mark the end of the 2010s, we're celebrating 30 games that defined the last 10 years. You can find all the articles as they're published in the Games of the Decade archive, and read about the thinking behind it in an editor's blog.

Sometimes you make a connection with a game that's very enduring. I was introduced to Bastion by my then-flatmate, the same person who introduced me to this very website, while I was thoroughly disenchanted with video games as a whole. It made me want to look deeper into what games could be, what they could become if a team focused on its unique talent and the things that were important to them. A little less than a decade later I'm here doing just that, so it's safe to say that Bastion is my most personal game of the decade.

Initially I was confused and slightly annoyed by what I now feel is Supergiant's biggest asset - the narration. It seemed a little creepy to have an omniscient voice follow you around while your own character stayed silent, but I changed my mind as soon as I realised how ingenious it really is. Bastion could have been a simple action game with a silent protagonist, but instead it's a perfect example of how story matters. With nothing more than a few sentences here and there Supergiant breathed life into its world and told a story of conflict, community and tolerance. It whispered enough of that story to feel real but deliberately left gaps that kindled my imagination. Its refusal to tell you everything felt as unique as the mode by which Bastion told its story, and more importantly, it opened up a world beyond known tropes - no cops and robbers, no cowboys, no knights. Just a boy and his hammer.

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OK, so I know Eurogamer's actual birthday was two days ago, but as is our style, the Eurogamer video team is once again Late to the (birthday) Party.

Over the past three years, we've been introducing each other to our favourite (and/or least favourite) games from yesteryear as part of our Late to the Party series. During that time we've shared our love (and/or hatred) for over one hundred and fifty different games and thanks to this, we've been able to make a compilation episode of LTTP that features one game from every year that Eurogamer has been alive.

In this video, Aoife, Zoe and I are joined by some friendly video team faces from the past (who?!) as we play our way through the 20 years worth of games, including 1999's Dino Crisis, 2006's Gears of War and 2017's PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds. Basically, if you want a healthy dose of nostalgia (or just want to feel rather old) this is the video for you!

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It's four in the morning on 18th February 2017, and a 19-year-old modder and writer named Spencer Yan is sitting in his college dorm at his computer, with a server full of Discord users eager for him to drop the latest update for Midnight Animal, a total conversion mod and original story built upon the bloodstained, bullet-riddled blueprints of Hotline Miami.

At this point, Yan has worked on Midnight Animal for over a year. The project has grown from a Mod DB page and some well received YouTube trailers to being greenlit on Steam. He has permission from developers Dennaton Games to use the source code, and an entire community of engaged and supportive Hotline Miami fans behind him.

What the community isn't yet aware of is the drastic creative reimagining the project has undergone in the time since they last saw an update. A transformation from what its creator describes as a "comically dark, pseudo-cyberpunk revenge story" to something far more personal, philosophical and poignant.

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