You might want to duck and cover if you’re playing Fortnite: Battle Royale tomorrow, Saturday at 1:30pm EST (6:30pm BST for us UK folks). Epic have been teasing some manner of big in-game event to tie up its current superhero-themed season and it probably involves big, very dangerous looking rockets.

A countdown displayed on TV screens throughout the battle royale shooter’s world suggests that it’s going down tomorrow afternoon. According to a pop-up warning in the game itself, this will be a one-time live event, so be there or be square (and watching it on YouTube afterwards). (more…)

The Australian Senate are launching an enquiry into microtransaction loot boxes, investigating whether they constitute gambling and to what extent they “may be harmful”. While the enquiry won’t change any policy itself, it could inform future laws.

A number of politicians and bodies around the world have cocked an eyebrow at microtransaction virtuacrates of random digicrud in recent years, most notably after the loud backlash against Star Wars Battlefront II’s loot boxes. Belgium’s Gaming Commission declared that some loot boxes are gambling and Hawaii’s state government were concerned, among others. (more…)

AMD’s next-gen Navi GPUs have been a known quantity for a number of years now, but the number of concrete facts about them, such as their specs, release date and price, are still few and far between. With so much of the recent conversation around what’s next for gaming graphics cards being dominated by the will-they-won’t-they circus of Nvidia’s Turing cards, it’s easy to forget that Navi’s still in the running.

Still, despite numerous missed shows and AMD’s own silence on the subject, the shroud of mystery surrounding Navi is starting to become ever-so-slightly clearer with each passing month. There’s still a lot we don’t know about what AMD have up their sleeve, but to help you separate probably likely facts from clearly made-up fiction, I’ve put everything we know so far into one handy guide. Here’s everything we know so far about AMD’s next-gen Navi cards.

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Trials Rising may be conforming to the series usual style, as well as the law of videogame subtitles (Trials Origins and Trials Legends have yet to be announced) but it is adding one wonderful new feature: tandem motorbike muckabouts. In this local two-player mode, each player controls half the throttle, and each makes up half the weight on the bike. Like any Trials game, you can still leap from the seat at any moment, but doing so in tandem mode leaves your co-biker in the lurch, struggling to correct the vehicle s trajectory in midair. It s wonderful. I played it at E3 and it turned me into a giddy ragdoll. (more…)

Pros: Great vibe, top banter, cracking japes.Cons: Bit of a dump, no bogs.In brief: A slice of heaven for any stag or hen weekend.Rating: >

“Heaven is a place on Earth,” Belinda Carlisle sang. I had always thought that sentiment trite, but after visiting Paradise Resort I know it’s true. I’ve returned from one final prenuptial jolly with the lads on Sanhok, the tropical island where antics flow like water, and at the foot of big top banter mountain stands my idea of heaven. Paradise Resort is rotting, the hotel staff are never around when you need them, and it doesn’t even have toilets, but you’ll not find a more perfect place to meet absolute bloody legends and go hard like it’s your last free night on Earth. (more…)

I am apparently the sole person in the RPS Treehouse who hasn’t played any Crash Bandicoot games, allowing me to be intrigued by today’s release of the remastered N. Sane trilogy. This three-in-one bundle gives a modern-day lick of paint to the eponymous marsupial’s ’90s PlayStation mascot platformer series, originally developed by Naughty Dog.

While first slated for a July release, Crash has been taking notes from the speedrunning community (whom he’s quite popular with), and has managed to rush out a few days early.

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Welcome to Soundbyte, an audio mini-series that stimulates your ears and explores topics in the games industry. In our first episode, Pixel Picketers, we’re talking about unionisation in the games industry, what some folks are doing to make it happen, and the challenges they face. Let’s start by speaking to Doug Cockle, who plays Geralt in The Witcher among other roles, about his negative experiences in the recording booth. It turns out you can’t speak like a rough mercenary for hours on end without your voicebox shriveling up. Who knew?

Oh, voice actors did. (more…)

Multiplayer head-to-head hacking battles. That’s the primary carrot I can see Hackmud dangling before me with its 2.0 update, though the road there is long and packed with players who’d probably steal my stuff before I figured out how to Hello World. Hackmud is a hacking MMO, see, where duplicity is encouraged and people that know JAVA can run rings around those that don’t. Think EVE, but in cyberspace rather than the real deal.

As well as that new ‘Binary Matrix’ PvP system, update 2.0 also brings “new music, better performance, bug fixes, security tweaks, and changes to the economy to make PvP more exciting”. They… may well do? I won’t lie, these are the trickiest patch notes I’ve ever tried to parse.

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Releasing a game called Terraforming Mars so soon after (the recently much-improved) Surviving Mars probably ain’t great for the ol’Google rankings, but in fairness Terraforming got there first. It’s an adaptation of an extremely well-received 2016 cooperative-but-competitive boardgame, retaining all the rules, but removing the need to pollute your home with a thousand pieces of cardboard or the festering presence of other meatbags.

The game’s due later this year, but yesterday a free beta-cum-demo snuck onto Steam, which gives a good sense of what to expect as well as how to play.

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Below is a list of 30 Things Wot Are Yellow ( things is used here in its broadest possible sense). Entries have been stripped of vowels and had any inter-word spaces repositioned. For example, if Bart Simpson was present, he might appear as (more…)