The Consumer Electronics Show is happening in Las Vegas right now, which is a lot like E3 but full of televisions and Michael Bay instead of videogames. There is at least one thing there of interest to us, though: Valve have been revealing the first concrete details of their Steam Machine partners, including the 14 manufacturers currently making them and the specs and prices of some of those boxes.

Nathan is at the event and we’ll have interviews and impressions to share with you soon, but let’s round-up the news so far. (more…)

During the long hours of a League of Legends or DOTA 2 session, do you occasionally grimace and howl at the bright colours flashing across the screen? Would you like your champions to be drawn from a pool of necromancers, skellingtons and leather-clad vampires, with not a wisp or an elf in sight? Deadbreed could be the MOBA for you. From a veteran team of developers, including Stefan Ljungqvist who has experience as a member of the Just Cause team, Deadbreed promises to be HARDCORE and it contains more monsters than an abandoned Universal Studios backlot. Battles are 3v3, with AI opponents available if you don’t fancy dealing with spectral smack talk. A trailer lurks in the cold earth below and beta signups are open now.

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You think it’s hard reading about this many games? Imagine writing this thing. RPS has officially worn itself out before the year’s even gotten going properly. But it was worth it, because below is the third part of our ultromegafeature preview of 2014′s crop of PC games. At least those that have been announced already. And now you have it all, filling your calendar. Part one is here, and part two is here. Reading them all in one go will kill you. You’ve been warned.>

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So it turns out a lot of you like games about exploration and building things. Who knew? Starbound, the game that let’s you do that while travelling a universe of alien planets, has sold a million copies. That’s not bad for a game that only came out on December 4th. (more…)

Hello there. Things have sounded a little unhappy at Hitman and Kane & Lynch devs IO Interactive for a while now, in the wake of 2012′s Hitman: Subtitle achieving neither the acclaim or the spondoolies it was hoped to. Last year, the Square Enix-owned Danish studio saw half its workforce removed from their jobs, along with claims that the remainder would get to do nothing but Hitman games. Yesterday, reports circulated that the Next Jennifer Hitman game had been quietly garotted. That claim, despite being made on a Square Enix Montreal senior game designer’s LinkedIn profile, has now been denied. (more…)

In 2015, the Ghostbusters remake will dominate multiplexes, with its blockbuster cast – Seth Rogen, Will Ferrell and Ben Stiller – grinning at the world from posters on every street corner. Bill Murray will have a cameo, playing the ghost of Garfield, and Slimer will twerk in 97% of his scenes. Don’t worry too much though – nobody will force you to watch it at the cinema. Network television will replay it during every holiday, however, and your children/siblings/pets will inexplicably adore the antics of Stay Puft Girrrl and demand to see that one bit when she dances, using the Empire State Building as a pole.

If that all sounds like too much excitement, perhaps the more tranquil pace of GhostControl Inc will be to your taste. It’s a ghosthunting management sim with turn-based trapping and it’s available now.

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Scary hospitals filled with things that bump unkind in the night? We’ve all been there. Daylight looks like a sequel to Outlast, a game which initially scared the socks off me and then became so cosily familiar and repetitive that it fit me like a pair of slippers. Daylight mixes up the institutional walkthrough horror by introducing randomisation – the corridors and creeps are different on every playthrough. At first watch, I found the new trailer ridiculous. Who holds a camera phone up in their face at all times? And then I remembered that I often stumble into traffic while checking my tweets or looking for the nearest speakeasy on Google Maps.

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Clint Hocking, he of Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory and Far Cry 2, has departed from Valve after eighteen months working as a something or other designer and level designer. Meanwhile, Gabe Newell has been talking to noted videogame blog The Washington Post about the company’s structure and strategy. Observant readers will notice that this post contains two pieces of Valve news but not a shred of concrete information about any games in development. I reckon that’s why Hocking left – he designed a couple of levels every week but couldn’t find any games to put them in. After trying to drop a few into DOTA 2 when nobody was looking, he eventually left the building with a bag full of digital architecture.

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Plenty of people who were veterans of the original DayZ mod had been wondering whether the magic of the original experience had survived the making of a standalone game. I’m pleased to report that not only has it survived, but there’s new magic, too. Rocket and his team know what they are doing, and the changes they’ve made have created some tense and terrible moments in this new game. The realism it strives for is simultaneously unreal and dark, and creates some of the most awkward and sinister roleplay situations I’ve experienced in any game.

Surviving is back. And it is horribly compelling.

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Here’s a nice piece of news to brighten a dreary Monday. KAMI – the superbly received puzzler for IOS – is heading to the PC. This is from State Of Play Games, who brought us the lovely Lume, and are working on the forthcoming (and even lovelier looking) Lumino City. KAMI is also now out on Android too, for proper decent people who don’t have iThings, like ME. But the important thing is: PC version very soon. There’s a trailer below, so you can find out why you should care.

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