We've been eagerly awaiting Ion Maiden, the retro shooter made in Duke Nukem 3D's old Build Engine, for over a year now. While the release of Amid Evil did a little to scratch that itch, its Heretic-style shooting is a little different in style to what we've seen of Ion Maiden. Its "preview campaign" available in Early Access is much closer to Duke Nukem in tone and level layout, even down to the protagonist having cheesy catchphrases.

Now Voidpoint and 3D Realms are teasing something Ion Maiden-related on Twitter, saying there's an announcement coming and "You don't want to miss this!" Yes, this is probably an announcement for an announcement but we're pretty hyped for this game, OK? Whether it's a release date (it is "almost done" according to Frederik Schreiber, VP of 3D Realms) or an agreement being reached with the band Iron Maiden in the legal dispute over its name, we'll just have to wait and see.

French publisher Focus Home Interactive has released its yearly earnings, and clearly had a good 12 months, racking up $US143 million in the last fiscal year. Their biggest hit has been Farming Simulator 19, with over two million copies sold. As we reported at the start of the year, developer Giants Software launched an esports league with a €250,000 prize pool and its grand final will take place FarmCon 20. Baling hay is big business.

Vampyr, Dontnod's original but also slightly janky Victorian-era RPG, also did well with over a million copies sold. Dontnod has renewed its contract with Focus Home Interactive, and there's apparently a Vampyr TV show in the works too.

Insurgency: Sandstorm, their multiplayer FPS, also enjoyed healthy sales. All in all, Focus Home's earnings beat their guidance target by 20%, setting a new record for them. 

(Thanks, Gamedaily.biz.)

Apex Legends' ping system is one of this year's best FPS mechanics—and now PUBG has its own version. After this week's patch, you can hold the mouse wheel to flag up an item to a teammate, call out an enemy location, request ammo or suggest a new position for your squad. Those messages will pop up on the left of your screen and some will also place a marker on your map.

The system seems pretty smart: when you ping an enemy, it will tell your teammates whether they're at near, medium or long range, along with the approximate distance in metres. When you ask for ammo, the message will include the ammo type for the weapon you're holding. The wheel menu has eight messages in total plus a central 'ping' option—you can see them all in the screenshot below. It should make communicating without a microphone far easier.

The patch also adds a new weapon, a ledge grab mechanic and an amphibious vehicle. The weapon is a Deagle—at 62 damage per shot it packs more of a punch than other handguns, but kicks harder too, making it more difficult to control. You'll find it on every map.

The new vehicle is the BRDM-2, which can take you across both land and water. It replaces the armored UAZ and you can only find it it by firing a flare gun first, calling it in as a care package. It's a beast, with heaps of armor and wheels that can't be damaged. The trade-off is that you and your squad can't fire your weapons when you're inside.

The last major addition is the ledge grab, which will let you traverse urban environments more smoothly. You can jump and grab onto roofs, fences and other obstacles, making it easier to leap between buildings or reach previously inaccessible spots. To grab a ledge, you just hold onto the space bar after jumping or vaulting—pressing the space bar mid-air will work too, if your timing is right. 

You can see the Deagle, the BRDM-2 and ledge grabs in action by watching the video at the top of this post. For the full patch notes, including performance and minor UI tweaks, click here.

Thanks, PCGamesN.

The first PC test for Halo: The Master Chief Collection is limited to fewer than 1,000 Halo Insiders, and some fans that didn't make the cut are now attempting to join illegally. The test has been "illegally distributed online", according to developer 343 Industries, which says it can ban anyone involved.

"If you download or play this illegal copy, we have the right to ban all associated accounts and remove you from all current or future 343 programs," it said in a forum post, providing a link to the Microsoft Service Agreement. 

The test launched on Friday and ends tomorrow. It contains the Halo: Reach campaign Tip of the Spear, and is designed to both test the rollout of builds onto Steam and to "get player feedback on the current state of mouse and keyboard controls". It's an updated version of the demo that impressed James at E3.

In other Halo: The Master Chief Collection news, 343 has revealed that Halo: Reach will not include the Forge level editor or the Theater replay modes at launch.

My Friend Pedro, a 2D bullet-time score-attack action-platformer, is almost entirely the work of one developer: Victor Ågren, aka DeadToast Entertainment. Publisher Devolver Digital recently announced that his game sold 250,000 units in its first week (across both PC and Switch), so Victor's probably pretty happy about that.

To celebrate, Devolver have put together a charming video about Victor and the four-and-a-half year journey of My Friend Pedro, which began as a Flash game made for a student project, was put on the backburner when Victor got a job at MediaMolecule, and finally came out this year.  Watch the whole thing embedded above.

Among the nuggets of information the interview reveals is that Pedro, the player's mentor, was almost a flying gnome, "but bananas are easier to animate" as Victor explains.

Read our review of My Friend Pedro here.

Great moments in PC gaming are bite-sized celebrations of some of our favorite gaming memories.  

You only need to shoot once in the entire opening level of Unreal, and that's to break the glass on the emergency exit control. Which is not to say it's peaceful. Unreal's first map is its most intense, in spite of the lack of pew-pew action.

It begins with a crash. You come to in a prison cell on a wrecked spaceship, the door open and the other prisoners dead. There's a roar and scream in the distance, and as you step out a robotic voice declares that "Prisoner 849 is escaping." 

You make your way through the rupturing, exploding guts of this prison ship, crawling through vents and hunting for med packs (you start at one-third health thanks to the crash). During all this you hear more screaming in the distance, Unreal's excellent 3D sound doing as much work as its groundbreaking 3D graphics. Then you get to the corridor.

There's a blast door ahead of you, and one behind. But while the one behind you locks itself, the one ahead is jammed inches off the floor. There are voices and swearing from the other side, then flashes as guns go off. All that shooting doesn't help, and when the door finally rises all you see is dismembered body parts and a glimpse of a long-haired alien leaving the scene.

Shortly after that you make it out of the ship, stepping onto an alien world. The sky is bright, with a huge moon hanging low. You're in a canyon that's been carved up by the crash landing, and there's a rabbity alien hopping around at your feet. After all those corridors and vents it's a breathtaking moment of openness, one that later games like Oblivion and Fallout 3 would recreate.

Before long you're shooting aliens, often back in corridors, but Unreal's beginning sets up a tension the rest of the game benefits from. No matter how big the flak cannon you pick up, you still remember what just one alien was capable of. You never underestimate them. At the time of its release Unreal was mostly a revelation for its graphics, but it's this well-paced beginning that's more impressive today.

The PC version of Halo: Reach will not include the Forge level editor or the Theater replay modes at launch, the development team for Halo: The Master Chief Collection has confirmed. 343 Industries doesn't know how long it will take to get them ready for PC, but it will likely be "a very lengthy amount of time".

Halo: Reach is coming to PC as part of The Master Chief Collection later this year, and it will arrive on Xbox One at the same time. While the Xbox One version will launch with both Forge and Theater, the team says that "bringing both features to PC is extremely complex and time consuming".

"We need to properly give both features enough time, so they are a true PC-first experience," lead PC producer Michael Fahrny said in a development update yesterday. "When you look specifically at Forge and what it truly is, it is a 3D editing tool that was built completely for console. In some cases, it’s built to have mouse and keyboard support, and in some it’s not—and that’s one of our biggest challenges right now with the feature.

It will take an "undetermined amount of work" to get Forge ready for PC, he added. "We haven’t done a deep enough dive to determine how much work it truly is due to the priority of getting the main game up and ready. What we suspect, is it’s a very lengthy amount of time."

The team's main focus is finishing the main game, after which it will try to get Forge and Theater finalized "as soon as possible", with help from studios Ruffian and Splash Damage.

In the same update, the developers revealed that players will be able to import custom maps from previous Halo games on the Xbox 360 to PC. Maps made in the Forge modes on Halo 3, Halo: Reach, and Halo 4 will be playable on PC: to prepare, all you have to do is boot them up on Xbox 360, or Xbox One if available, and upload files to your file share. When the time comes, you'll be able to play them in The Master Chief Collection on PC.

The first PC test for Halo: Reach is live right now.

Halo: Reach is finally playable by the public for the first time, but fewer than 1,000 fans have the chance to test it out. The closed test of Halo: The Master Chief Collection—a compilation that brings lots of Halo games to PC for the first time—started yesterday, and it contains an updated build of the Halo: Reach demo that James tried at E3.

343 Industries stressed this first test is "very small", and that only a fraction of the registered Halo Insiders that showed an interest have been invited to play. The primary goal is to test how to roll out builds on Steam at a larger scale, while the secondary goal is to "get player feedback on the current state of mouse and keyboard controls and how the game 'feels' on PC", 343 said in a forum post.

"This flight will include a broader range of PC hardware than what we’ve had access to thus far so we’re eager to see if any specific new issues arise related to things like drivers and different configurations."

The test includes the Halo: Reach campaign mission Tip of the Spear. It's "missing numerous features and is sure to have some rough edges"—known issues include intermittent audio problems and full-on crashes. The test launched yesterday and will run until Monday, July 1.

Alongside the test, the dev team released 15 minutes of 4K gameplay from the campaign mission, which you can watch at the top of this article.

The co-op horror game The Blackout Club, about a group of kids investigating a horrific mystery in their spooky neighborhood, made a big impression when we looked at it last year, just ahead of its October 2018 launch on Steam Early Access: James called it "a legitimately terrifying cooperative game where the horror emerges from clever systems and enemies designed to ratchet up the tension using the same clear, unrelenting logic of the best movie monsters."

That's pretty high praise, and there have been multiple updates since then, which have fixed bugs and made performance improvements, and also added significant new content including missions, areas, and more oddball (that is, freaky-sounding) stuff like the Enhanced Horror System, which enables the game to record your "vocalizations" while you play (without impacting other microphone settings) and then "use it to create the most immersive possible horror experience, both for you and other players."

It's all apparently coming together well, as developer Question has announced that The Blackout Club will leave Early Access and go into full release on July 30. The full and proper launch of the game will see more fixes and polish, and the addition of a large new above-ground region. It will also bring about an increase on the $20 Early Access price—although it's currently on sale for $16/£12/€13 in the Steam Summer Sale.

It's a grim, dangerous, and terrifying life aboard a submarine exploring the pitch-black seas of Jupiter's moon Europa. That's what you're doing in Barotrauma, the Early Access multiplayer side-scrolling survival game: steering a sub through the vast ocean beneath the ice and trying to complete missions while fighting off alien creatures and sometimes your own crew. A lot can go wrong: accidents, attacks, sabotage... and sometimes you open the door to your reactor room and discover it's simply exploded.

Barotrauma is incredibly moody and completely terrifying, but it's also an amazing comedy. Characters move around as if they got their training in QWOP, so even when horrible things are happening it's hard not to laugh.

And in Barotrauma, horrible things are always happening, and since you're often playing with complete strangers, every voyage is unpredictable. Here's every horrible death I've experienced (so far). Note: some of the action can be hard to see so you might want to click on the gif and then enlarge it to watch in full-screen.

I mistook welding fuel for oxygen

It's hard to think of a worse death than asphyxiating at the bottom of a freezing-cold ocean on another planet. But I managed to discover one! After putting on a diving suit and investigating some underwater ruins, I realized the oxygen tank was nearly empty. Always check your tanks before you go for a swim on Europa, is the lesson. The other lesson? Not all tanks are the same. In a panic I tried replacing my oxygen tank with an identical tank I had in my inventory, but it wasn't an oxygen tank, it was a fuel tank for my welding torch.

Imagine trying to gulp in oxygen and instead getting a lungful of welding fuel. It's an unpleasant thought and a terrible way to die. RIP me.

I was dumped out the airlock while wearing a clown mask after attempting to poison my crewmate

Yes, I attempted to inject a crewmate with poison and kill him, but I'm not a griefer! I swear. Barotrauma has a multiplayer option called Traitor, which when activated will give certain crewmembers a secret task to murder another player during the voyage.

It was only me and one other player on this particular voyage, and I'd signed on as a medic. I searched lockers and compartments looking for any weapons I could use, but couldn't find anything (except a clown mask, which I naturally put on). I decided to just take a bunch of medical injections from the sickbay and stick as much medicine into my target as I could, hoping he'd have an adverse reaction, or maybe just pass out until I could figure out a better way to murder him.

This was not his first rodeo, though (it was only my second rodeo). After quickly realizing I was injecting meds into him—my first injection only took away a sliver of his health and my second immediately healed it back up—he immediately battered me with his stun stick and wordlessly dragged me away, clubbing me as we went. He dumped me into the airlock and locked the inner door. With nothing else to do, I eventually just opened the outer door and drowned, embarrassed both for trying to kill him and doing such a terrible job at it.

I was eaten by an enormous sea monster

After encountering and being chased and eaten by an enormous sea monster, I was dismayed to discover that GeForce Experience hadn't been running and I didn't get the footage captured. So I was thrilled to witness it happen to someone else while I was spectating a match. Maybe it's poor form to be overjoyed at the death of someone else, but hey, it's a cold world.

Interestingly, the monster actually bit his head off, and even more interestingly the enormous beast itself died a few minutes later. Whatever this crewmember had in his inventory managed to poison the monster. Be careful what you eat, stupid giant monster!

I mistook a plasma cutter for a welding torch

A common theme of my deaths, as we can see, is me thinking I'm doing one thing (like breathing oxygen) but doing something else (like inhaling welding fuel). After monsters chewed their way through the hull on one voyage, the crew quarters flooded so I grabbed a welding torch, opened the door, and swam in to patch the holes. Unfortunately I'd actually picked up a plasma cutter instead, so I was just making the holes bigger—though I barely had the dexterity to even do the wrong thing the right way.

Anyway, the ocean rushed in and the sudden increase in water pressure simply and instantly crushed me to death. Ouch.

I was trapped in a room with a sea monster

There are big, terrifying sea monsters that can eat you and smash your hull full of holes, but there are also smaller ones that can chew their way right onto your ship. It's horrifying. Above you can see one of them making its way into the cabin as I ineffectively try to burn it with a welder. As it slithers around and pounces on me, I keep trying to close the door between compartments with it on one side and me on the other.

I did not manage to accomplish this.

I was beaten to death by an alien hermit crab

While investigating a distress beacon, I took another swim to what I think was a small sunken vessel. It's hard to tell what happened, but it looks to me like some sea creature had taken up residence inside it, hermit-crab style, because when I swam close the little sub began twitching. Then what I assume was an alien hermit crab proceeded to beat me to death with its improvised shell. Welcome to the neighborhood.

I was scissored to death by a malfunctioning door

There was so much going wrong I'm not entirely sure what actually killed me, but as the sub was filled with water and creatures were burrowing their way inside, I tried to swim to safety by opening a door. The door immediately slammed shut on my head. I mean, that's what it looks like. It could have been the water pressure that crushed me, too, but I'm pretty sure it was the damn door.

I wasn't crushed between the submarine and a rock (but someone else was)

This isn't one my my deaths but happened to a crewmate while I was spectating and it was too gruesome not to include. The sub had crashed and settled partially on an undersea ledge and a crew member swimming outside was trying to re-enter the sub via a hatch below. Only the hatch was pressed up tightly against the rock.

As the crew member swam under the sub he realized he wouldn't be able to get back in. And then the sub shifted, just a tiny fraction, and instantly squished him. Brutal. I mean, yes, you can hear me laugh if you turn on the sound, but still. Brutal.