Sharpen your fangs and chuck out all of the garlic bread in your house, Castlevania's back with a new game co-developed by the folks who made roguelike-Metroidvania Dead Cells. Castlevania: Belmont's Curse is the name of this fresh bout of vampire whippage set in medieval Paris, which publishers Konami have teased is just the first of many Castlevania things they have coming as the series turns 40.

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You knew it was coming, I knew it was coming, and now one Mr. Hideo Kojima himself (disclaimer: technically it was Sony during tonight's State of Play, though I'm sure he's Fweeted about it on Fwitter) has confirmed that yes, Death Stranding 2: On the Beach is making its way to PC. It's also doing so pretty soon, and with a small suite of additional features not present in its original PS5 release.

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If there is anything that is concretely true about the upcoming Disco Elysium follow-up Zero Parades, it is that it is certainly a new RPG from ZA/UM. Everything else, well, that depends on who you ask, and where they lie in the messiness that has been in and around the studio these past few years, but a ZA/UM game in name it is. And now there are two opportunities for you to form a more direct opinion about Zero Parades, and its quality therewithin.

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There is certainly something to be admired in Peter Molyneux's commitment to infinitely overpromising right through to what is meant to be his final game, Masters of Albion. I'm not saying I admire it, but someone might. And while I truly have no horse in the race regarding the quality, or potential lack thereof, in Masters of Albion, its latest gameplay trailer certainly does at least suggest it'll be a true as it can be Molyneux game.

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Back when Lil Gator Game arrived in the forgotten year of 2022, it received RPS' coveted Bestest Bests badge because, well, it was just so darn delightful! And in the years since, developer MegaWobble have been tinkering away at a seemingly Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom influenced bit of DLC. Which, as it just so happens, has just been released today!

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This is probably a sentence that could be said literally any day of the week, but a new cosy farming sim is on the block, this time taking the form of Starsand Island. The flavour on this occasion is of the anime variety, with some slightly goofier farming mechanics (i.e. turning your watermelon patch into one singular, 10 foot tall watermelon), some very Pokemon Legends: Arceus looking combat, and some appropriately cute animals to hang out with. And there's skateboarding! But never do launches go all that smoothly, as developer Seed Sparkle Lab have had to do a dash of damage control regarding some concerns over the game.

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The fine frigate which serves as the featured image for this article is called the Stately Gunwale. That's not a name I, the boat's creator, gave it. It's a name ShipShaper's demo automatically assigned my vessel when I picked the set of colours I wished it to be painted. Quite frankly, I doubt I could have dreamed up a more fitting moniker for my deliberate attempt to fling something funky onto the high seas.

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I’m planning to better balance the recent glut of high-end hardware reviews with some genuinely affordable stuff, but in the meantime, here’s something that’s a little of both. The Epomaker G84 HE is another Hall effect keyboard, meaning its magnetically operated switches can be adjusted for actuation height, and/or set up for strafey-strafey, shooty-shooty rapid trigger/Snap Tap shenanigans in compatible games. Both are features you’d normally expect to run pricing up into the triple figures, and yet at £80/$85, the G84 HE costs more like a lower-mid-range, traditionally mechanical 'board.

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WARNING: Major story spoliers for Yakuza Kiwami 3 & Dark Ties, as well as the original Yakuza 3, lie ahead.

It’s natural to spend a lot of time thinking about what games could have been, had different decisions been made. Whether the change is preferable to the reality often doesn’t come into it, the fantasy of another possible world is the draw.

Despite that, few studios choose to make major shifts - at least as far as the main stories of those games go - when they remake their previous games. This won't necessarily be a philosophical decision: the remaster or remake has to sell. Games which get revisited are ones players deeply love, and the suits will inevitably see tweaks to their fundamentals as an unnecessary risk. Old Oblivion is loved, so Bethesda adopted a rubber glove approach to the Oblivion remaster. They limited changes to modernising visuals and snipping away some annoying features. It's akin to polishing up a holy relic, rather than replacing the gemstones or changing the engravings.

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Like all white, middle-class Londoners, I subsist on a diet comprised mainly of salted caramel and katsu curry. It appears Grasshopper Manufacture, makers of maximalist action adventure Romeo is a Dead Man, appreciate that delightful marriage of rice, breadcrumbs, and carroty sauce as well. Our lad Romeo can gather up katsu ingredients before delivering them to his waiting mum, who’ll turn them into one of ten mouth-watering, buff-applying curries.

But can those recipes nourish us, fleshy humans of IRL make, with the same benefits? To find out, I prepped, cooked, and taste-tested all ten of Romeo’s mum’s katsu creations in my own kitchen.

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