No one believes me when I say Counter-Strike Nexon: Zombies is fascinating. Nexon’s free-to-play spin-off uses good ol’ CS 1.6 as the foundation for what feels like a self-contained mod scene, throwing in oddities including a base-building cooperative survival mode, humans vs. zombies modes, football, arena boss battles with giant monsters, races, a mode similar to Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, and so very many ‘sexy’ ladies. It’s a wide and surprising range of games which often have little in common beyond using CS guns. I have hugely enjoyed wandering from server to server, feeling out what this even is. And now CSNZ has a little bit of Minecraft or perhaps Garry’s Mod, thanks to its new Studio Mode. (more…)

You know how Gatsby was, in many ways, not all that great? Well, Gary is not legendary. He might be a heroic character in the games that he plays, and he might well discover that he is more important than he knows in his dealings with family and friends, but he is not the stuff of legend.

He is, in fact, a man with a fairly ordinary life who spends his evenings playing a game called Legend of the Spear. It looks a bit like The Banner Saga, with tactical grids and gorgeous graphics. I’d definitely rather spend my days living an ordinary life and my evenings playing Legend of the Spear than spend my days living an ordinary life and my evenings playing Skyrim, so Gary is probably having a better time than 90% of RPG fans I know.

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There’s something faintly ridiculous about the Asus ROG Swift PG258Q. Maybe it’s the fact it has a glowing red Asus ROG light coming out of its elevated, three-pronged stand. Maybe it’s the colossal 240Hz refresh rate. Or maybe it’s the price, which most retailers currently have pegged somewhere around the 500 mark (or $513 if you’re in the US). That’s a fair bit of cash for a 25in 1920×1080 screen, especially when the Acer XF270HUA gives you a 27in, 144Hz 2560×1440 display for the same money. Nah, on second thought, it’s definitely the light.

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Playing Paladins is like walking into a supermarket in another country: you recognise most of the stuff in there, but everything is slightly wrong. But where exotic hypermarches have tubes of Pr ngles, cartons of Jiffy Cakes, and peanut-flavoured toothpaste, Paladins has bizarro versions of characters from Dota 2, Team Fortress, and Overwatch. (more…)

Back in the summer, I boldly declared that ‘I will play XCOM 2: War Of The Chosen’s daily challenge mode every day.’ Er. Whoops. I’ve only played a handful since then, and I’m not alone there. Though the mode still pumps out a new challenge every day, it hasn’t blossomed into a new religion in the same way The Binding of Isaac and Spelunky’s daily random-o-map scoreboard challenges have for those communities.

So, what happened?

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When Electronic Arts turned off microtransactions in Star Wars Battlefront 2 over that whole stinking loot crate progression system mess, they said they would bring ’em back after a rethink. Well, EA’s chief financial officer said on Tuesday that is still very much the plan. While he isn’t sure how and when microtransactions will return, he seems fairly certain they wouldn’t include cosmetic items which seem goofy or out-of-place in Star Wars – no pink Darth Vader, for starters. (more…)

It s almost impossible to talk about Asakusa Studio’s debut game Hyakki Castle without invoking the looming western spectre of Legend of Grimrock. While this particular formula for party-based first-person dungeon crawlery (real-time grid-based movement and all) dates all the way back to Dungeon Master in the 80s, Grimrock is the game that re-launched a genre, and a solid yardstick by which to measure imitators.

Hyakki Castle, then, is Legend of Grimrock – the original, rather than the more open-world sequel – in Medieval, mythical Japan. It s a pure dungeon crawl with only the most threadbare of stories: a team of four heroes are sent to a cursed castle to stop an evil wizard. Boilerplate, even by dungeon crawl standards. Hyakki Castle has few ambitions of its own and while it comes tantalisingly close to Grimrock at moments, more often than not it feels like a shallow imitation that doesn t even wear its own aesthetic as comfortably as it should.

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As muscular as the GTX 1080 is, there have been some not-entirely-unwarranted grumbles about its underlying tech; specifically, that it s basically a GTX 1070 with more of the GPU s cores enabled. The GTX 1080Ti is much bigger break from the rest of Nvidia s 10-series, and a much more overtly ‘high-end’ card. It uses the bigger, beefier GP-102 GPU, same as in the bonkers-expensive Titan X and Titan Xp, and wields 3584 processing cores to the GTX 1080 s 2560. Its 11GB of memory is the most you ll find in a mainstream card, too.

Obviously, these upgrades will put a proportionally larger dent into your finances. The MSI GeForce GTX 1080Ti Gaming X Trio I ve been testing with its factory overclocking and custom triple-fan cooler is 750, and generally the cheapest GTX 1080Ti I can find still asks for 698. With the GTX 1080 dropping as low as 500, this card needs to prove it s not just a list of fancy-sounding specs.

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The prophecies were true – demos are back. This time it s Nazi-bludgeoning romp Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus that s offering a morsel of its shoots and boots (we’ve mentioned it before, but here’s a reminder). The demo only lets you play through the first level, so it really is a teeny tiny taste. Should you choose to upgrade to the full version of the game, enthuses this faceless Bethesda announcement, all of your save data will carry over. Right so. (more…)

As anyone who watches their feeds knows, we live in a constantly evolving cyberpunk dystopia. They’re connecting toilets to the internet, for heavens sake. If this Gibsonist world is just too REAL for you, we have put together the ten best videogames about hacking, programming and computing so you can escape into meta-dystopia. Which I’m sure is a much better place.

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