Get your speedrunning shoes on and prepare your glitches: Awesome Games Done Quick has arrived for its yearly speedrunning extravaganza. As with previous years, the charity event is raising money for the Prevent Cancer Foundation. It’s been live since yesterday evening and runs until this Sunday, and there are already some fab runs in the likes of Mirror’s Edge and Dragon Age: Origins to catch up on.

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We’ve just passed the half-way point of 2018, so Ian Gatekeeper and all his fabulously wealthy chums over at Valve have revealed which hundred games have sold best on Steam over the past six months. It’s a list dominated by pre-2018 names, to be frank, a great many of which you’ll be expected, but there are a few surprises in there.

2018 releases Jurassic World Evolution, Far Cry 5 Kingdom Come: Deliverance and Warhammer: Vermintide II are wearing some spectacular money-hats, for example, while the relatively lesser-known likes of Raft, Eco and Deep Rock Galactic have made themselves heard above the din of triple-A marketing budgets. (more…)

The power fantasy of exploring new worlds or meeting strange alien races (and then shooting at both of those things) is the kind of thing that big-budget games tend to focus on. As far as humour is concerned, they re at best plus comedy experiences that deliver on their key points but also have some funny quips along the way. You re never asked to participate in the humour, and if the jokes don t land then there s little you as the player can do about it. So why not equip the player with the systems to write their own jokes and tell their own stories? And how do you foster humour creation in games that don t already have a pun-based name for every item? I spoke to the developers of four such games to find out how they utilise this approach in order to enable players to create their own fun.

One thing that became evident through the interviews was that each and every system available to the player has to be airtight if they are to get the most out of the experience. A poorly-implemented system can cause you to lose investment in the same way that a poorly delivered punchline might. Each developer wanted to encourage experimentation through their game s systems in their own way. But which comes first; the design of the systems or the desire to create humour? (more…)

As if swinging from hostile helicopters on a grappling hook, gliding around on a wingsuit, and causing so very many explosions weren’t dangerous enough for Rico Rodriguez, in Just Cause 4 he’ll also be fighting through tornadoes, sandstorms, and blizzards. Publishers Square Enix today formally announced Avalanche Studios’ next explosive sandbox, surprising no one after recent leaks, and it looks nifty. The storms in Avalanche’s Mad Max were astonishing, and I’m certainly up for launching myself into a tornado. Watch the announcement trailer below. (more…)

An apparent whoopsie on Steam has revealed the existence of Just Cause 4, in an advert, without anyone having announced any such game. So that’ll probably be something Square Enix plan to announce during their E3 press event on Monday. The ad is a simple picture which doesn’t reveal much but all I need to know is: our fella still has a wrist-mounted grappling hook; he’s still outside somewhere pretty; he still has guns; he still has a grenade launcher on a gun. Aye that’ll be Just Cause alright, more open-world sandbox shoot-o-grapple-a-destruction. (more…)

A third Short Circuit film was never made, but I think we all know what course it would have taken: feeling betrayed by the discovery that his best friend had inexplicably pretended to be Indian to him for years, self-aware military robot Johnny 5 decreed humanity to be a cruel and deceitful species, and raised an army of fellow machines designed to eradicate them. That’s my headcanon explanation for why Avalanche Studios’ new open world game Generation Zero features bandanna and mohawk-wearing humans versus hordes of cute-but-murderous robots, anyway.

Yup, fresh off the back of their sale to a Scandinavian movie company, the Just Cause, Rage 2 & Mad Max devs have announced their new thing, and it’s all about “playing war in the serene forests of 1980’s Sweden.” Sure, sure, we’re drowning in faux-80s stuff right now, but watch this and tell me it doesn’t look like a good time. (more…)

There we were, being all surprised that Just Cause/Mad Max outfit Avalanche Studios had been handed the reins to Id sequel Rage 2, and now here we are, being all surprised that Avalanche are now owned by a 111-year-old Danish movie studio. Nordisk Film, the world’s oldest still-active film production firm, have doled out some $103 million to take control of Avalanche’s three offices, but the claim is that the Swedish games studio will retain creative independence. In fact, the plan is to work on more self-published titles, though they don’t plan on giving up work for hire just yet. (more…)

We’ve already seen which games sold best on Steam last year, but a perhaps more meaningful insight into movin’ and a-shakin’ in PC-land is the games that people feel warmest and snuggliest about. To that end, Valve have announced the winners of the 2017 Steam Awards, a fully community-voted affair which names the most-loved games across categories including best post-launch support, most player agency, exceeding pre-release expectations and most head-messing-with. Vintage cartoon-themed reflex-tester Cuphead leads the charge with two gongs, but ol’ Plunkbat and The Witcher series also do rather well – as do a host of other games from 2017’s great and good.

Full winners and runners-up below, with links to our previous coverage of each game if you’re so-minded. Plus: I reveal which game I’d have gone for in each category. (more…)

Another year over, a new one just begun, which means, impossibly, even more games.> But what about last year? Which were the games that most people were buying and, more importantly, playing? As is now something of a tradition, Valve have let slip a big ol’ breakdown of the most successful titles released on Steam over the past twelve months.

Below is the full, hundred-strong roster, complete with links to our coverage if you want to find out more about any of the games, or simply to marvel at how much seemed to happen in the space of 52 short weeks.

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The sale event to end all sale events is here. That’s right, folks, Black Friday 2017 is here, and this year’s sales frenzy is set to be bigger than ever as we head into the Christmas shopping period. In all honesty, they should just rename it Black November, as there have been deals going on throughout the month in preparation for the big day.

To save you trawling through the web in search of a good bargain, we’ve created this handy guide containing everything you need to know about Black Friday 2017. If you’re on the hunt for a new graphics card, a bigger and better monitor, want to splash out on a fast SSD or upgrade your gaming headset and get a more reliable mouse and keyboard, this is the place to be. We’ll be updating this hub page on a regular basis as new deals get announced, too, so make sure to keep it in your bookmarks if you fancy grabbing yourself a bit of a bargain before Christmas. We’ve also got tips on the best places to browse, and how to find out if those hot discounts are really as good as they seem.

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