Games Done Quick, the marathon that raises millions of dollars for charity twice per year, and speedrunning more generally, owes its existence to glitches. Though runners show off their skill and dedication, almost all of them rely on the game behaving in unintended ways, doing things that people playing casually would never experience.

Despite this, runners often make off-hand comments about the games being broken, or worse, the developers being lazy. The latter is obviously generally untrue and unfair. But spare a thought for the humble glitch itself, and how they make this whole wonderful endeavour possible.

(more…)

The deadliest multiplayer game of all – hide and seek – is coming to excellent Prey expansion Mooncrash next week, free. Typhon Hunter was announced when Mooncrash launched, and sounds a lot like Prop Hunt, a mode big with the Garrys Mod and Team Fortress 2 scenes. Six players, one as an increasingly paranoid human and the other five as shapeshifting Mimics waiting for a chance to pounce. It’ll be a free update next Tuesday, December 11th for anyone with the Mooncrash expansion, along with a VR escape room mode. That’s a trailer below, not a mimic – promise.

(more…)

Arkane s space-faring update for immersive sim Prey was a more roguelike spinoff called Mooncrash, and now they ve added some homages to the indie games of the genre that inspired them. The free Rogue Moon update gives players the chance to add skins based on these games to their operator companions, as you can see in the trailer below:

(more…)

Goodness me, I’d forgotten how brilliant the opening of Prey is. Bluffs and misdirects, some delivered on immediately, others saving surprises up for later, it’s an ever-backward-pulling camera as your complex situation begins to dawn upon you.

And thank goodness it is quite so good, because if you want to play Prey’s New Game+, or it’s Story Mode, you’re going to have to go through it in its vanilla mode before you can see the differences. There’s just some question about how much either adds. As for Survival Mode – well, it’s great, but it’s not a survival mode. (more…)

Prey: Mooncrash is a game of refinement. It’s a piece of DLC that uses an economy of space by asking you to replay the same sprawling collection of areas repeatedly, with varying characters, varying skillsets, and an ever-changing threat to combat. It’s a game that will make you play Prey differently than you have before, and you’ll be grateful of it. (more…)

At last night’s Bethesda E3 conference, we got another of those ‘here’s a thing and it’s out now’ announcements. It’s a Prey expansion, called Prey Mooncrash, which is pitched as “an infinitely replayable experience” in which the “enemies, hazards and loot” are different each time you play.

If spending money isn’t your thing, Arkane had more Prey-flavoured stuff, too. A free update – also out now – brings new modes to the base game, including store mode, new game+, and a survival mode. Hop below for trailers and details of all of those – plus a scant mention of a multiplayer mode called Typhon Hunter that’s coming later this summer. (more…)

I love to start the weekend off right. And by that, I mean seeing some fun video game news that makes me shout at my screen uncontrollably. Look, there’s no bigger fan of Prey than your boy Brock here. Heck, I’m a fan of all Preys. But now, it seems Michael Stipe is giving me a run for my money. While we already know that Prey is headed for a bit of a moonshot, the time for saying Good Morning, Morgan may be upon us sooner rather than later, because 150mb update just added 10 secret achievements, and maybe more?

(more…)

There are few things as momentous in the gaming calendar as Games Done Quick charity speedrun marathons, and the full broadcast schedule for this June’s upcoming Summer Games Done Quick event has just been published. Many of the world’s weirdest, most diverse and implausibly skilled players will congregate at the end of June to raise money for a good cause (in this case, the increasingly important M decins Sans Fronti res), and systematically tear dozens of games into tiny, glitchy shreds over the course of a week of non-stop speedrun showboating.

(more…)

Occasionally while surfing the interwebs, you’ll stumble upon a Cool Thing from a few years back that you absolutely missed in the moment, but is both fascinating and painfully applicable now. I failed to notice that this post I love is from 2014, so while some of the examples are slightly dated, playing the associated game is still a frustrating experiment in awareness.

So let’s play Male Protagonist Bingo.

(more…)

Huzzah for rhyming headlines! Yesterday, we reported on a series of increasingly overt teasers coming from Arkane Studios, not-so-subtly hinting that they’re not quite done with System Shock-ish immersive sim Prey.

Today, they dropped almost all pretense. It’s March 15th, the day that Prey’s story begins on (at least according to the robo-voiced alarm clock that awakens protagonist Morgan Yu from rest). Celebrating the pseudo-anniversary, the studio got together to tweet out a mysteriously redacted team photo, only to release the uncut and probably release-date-containing one later in the day.

(more…)