Drizzle-soaked Welsh county and card game of tavern scoundrels, Gwent [official site], is now in open beta. Originally an in-game pastime from The Witcher 3, developers CD Projekt RED are casting it out into the world to see if it can survive on its own with naught but a pair of free-to-play clogs. It involves pitting your fightcards against the enemy s fightcards on a wooden battlefield and borrows at least some ideas from the card game of sublime Italian cowardice Condottiere. But if you’re unfamiliar, we have a trailer below which explains it much better. … [visit site to read more]

We are living in a golden age of big-budget PC games that offer us choice and freedom. Be they descendants of the System Shock model – finding a route around a meticulously-crafted, locked-down and hostile place, most recently seen in Prey [official site] – or the roleplaying games based around choice and consequence rather than action alone, they are legion. There are so many, even, that I’m not sure we can fully appreciate how good we’ve got it.

… [visit site to read more]

We are living in a golden age of big-budget PC games that offer us choice and freedom. Be they descendants of the System Shock model – finding a route around a meticulously-crafted, locked-down and hostile place, most recently seen in Prey [official site] – or the roleplaying games based around choice and consequence rather than action alone, they are legion. There are so many, even, that I’m not sure we can fully appreciate how good we’ve got it.

… [visit site to read more]

Another week has gone by and with it came the news of Destiny 2, a Witcher TV show and a whole stack of new gaming deals to check out. Conveniently enough, I m here to take a closer look at that last thing and it s about the only thing that s keeping me from playing more Prey. Without further hesitation, let s go ahead and check out what s on offer this week, shall we?

As usual, we ve got deals that ll work in the UK, deals that ll work in the US and some deals that will work in both the UK and US, as well as presumably many other places. Let s get started.

… [visit site to read more]

Netflix are developing a series based on The Witcher. The press release says it’ll be based on “the globally popular fantasy saga from Polish writer Andrzej Sapkowski”, with only passing mention of the games. As for what it’ll be about, the producers Sean Daniel and Jason Brown (of The Expanse) have this to say:

“The Witcher stories follow an unconventional family that comes together to fight for truth in a dangerous world. The characters are original, funny and constantly surprising and we can t wait to bring them to life at Netflix, the perfect home for innovative storytelling.”

It’ll be English language and I look forward to my Netflix recommendations to suggest “IF YOU LIKE THE WITCHER YOU SHOULD WATCH THE WORST WITCH”.

… [visit site to read more]

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.>

I have a mental firewall about how recent a game can be before I’m allowed to write a Have You Played? about it. In my head, The Witcher 3 is about three months old and therefore invalid.

It’s two years old next month. I’ve had it on my hard drive for two years now>, thinking “yeah, I’ll finally finish that next weekend.” … [visit site to read more]

You woke up this morning, got yourself a gun, Mama always said you’d be the chosen one to write the weekly Steam charts. These are the games which sold best on Steam last week.

This week: order returns. OBEY OBEY OBEY OBEY OBEY OBEY OBEY … [visit site to read more]

By the power of Grayskull, it’s only the weekly Steam charts! These are the games which sold best on Steam last week.

It’s all gone a bit 2015-2016 in here again, I’m afraid, but fortunately cavalry of a sort arrives in the pendulous form of some big ol’ swingin’ dicks. … [visit site to read more]

CD Projekt RED, the makers of The Witcher, are warning that unknown naughty people gained access to an old forum database of theirs in March 2016. RED say passwords were stored in a way that should keep them obscured but do say, just to be safe, that if you used that same password on other sites you should probably change it. (You know better than to reuse passwords, don’t you?)

I myself didn’t know I’d even registered for their forums — I couldn’t tell you when or why — so perhaps you did it yonks ago yourself. Be warned! … [visit site to read more]

It’s the weekly Steam charts! These are the games which sold best on Steam last week. This week, it’s the first true> chart of 2017, as the last one covered the arse-end of 2016. All change, all change.

I’m even going to do this one upside-down. New year, new rules! And I don’t want to spoil the surprise right away.

… [visit site to read more]