Ultra Street Fighter® IV

I was struggling to think of a way to write about Evo 2015 without my limited fighting game knowledge tripping me up, but luckily Capcom came to my rescue. They've made their Ultra Street Fighter IV free on Steam for the weekend, and (sorta) free games are something we can all appreciate. You can play USFIV for freesies for the next couple of days, and buy it for cheap if you fancy keeping it after that.

Also, hey, Evo 2015 is happening this weekend. The schedule for the big fighting game tournament is here in annoying PDF format, and the list of multiplayer biff-'em-ups this year includes Ultra Street Fighter IV (obviously), Super Smash Bros. Melee, Tekken 7 and Mortal Kombat X. There are a whopping eight Twitch streams covering the event over the next three days.

I wouldn't be surprised if Capcom use Evo 2015 to reveal some Street Fighter V titbits, possibly a new character or two. I'm hoping for Remy from Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike, myself.

Breach & Clear: Deadline Rebirth (2016)

Breach & Clear: Deadline developer David Brossoie stopped by our office to give us a thorough tour of what the tactical, squad-based, zombie-shooting, RPG monstrosity is set to offer up when it officially releases on July 21st. 

The game has been in early access since January 21st, but has changed considerably since the last time we saw the game. Check out the video to see exactly how (and to hear me repeatedly express a distaste for worms).

PC Gamer

Peter Molyneux's Godus is one of gaming's more famous hot messes. Most of the promised features haven't been implemented, development priority appears to have shifted from PC to mobile platforms, the winner of the "life-changing" prize in Curiositygodhood in Godus—has been left out in the cold, and topping it all off, then-newish Lead Designer Konrad Naszynski admitted that the studio probably won't be able to deliver on everything it promised in the very successful 2013 Kickstarter.

We haven't heard much from Godus or developer 22 Cans since then, as Molyneux swore off talking to the press in February and has, rather surprisingly, kept his word. But Eurogamer today posted an in-depth interview with the studio's new CEO, Simon Phillips, who took the job shortly after Molyneux's vow to clam up. In it, he's surprisingly frank about the depth of the studio's troubles, and how it all came out.

The core problem, he said, was Molyneux, specifically that he was out of his element trying to run a business. "All that stuff you've done wrong is quite easy stuff to fix and should have been done, and yes, you fucked up and should have done all this stuff, but we can sort that out," Phillips told him. "You need to get back into designing games. Don't try and do everything. Don't try and glue it all back together because it's just going to crumble down. You need to make games. That's what you enjoy. I quite like business. I'll do the business."

Offering a cut of Godus' profits to Bryan Henderson, the winner of Curiosity, was a "genius concept," Phillips said, but it never got past that point. "Peter's already out here somewhere thinking about this and thinking about this, and no-one was doing this stuff in the middle," he continued. "It's really basic stuff, but there was no-one in the studio to do that. It's a highly design-led studio that didn't have the structure it needed to deal with this kind of stuff."

22 Cans still intends to finish and release Godus, but Phillips acknowledged that there's no time frame for implementing any of the missing features, like combat and multiplayer, saying it could be "years of development" before any of it is in. He's been in contact with Henderson, but that situation is complicated by the fact that the God of Gods feature upon which his prize is based doesn't actually exist.

"There's nothing to calculate [the prize] on. You can't say, let's put a pound a day away for Bryan, or ten pounds. There's no financial concept of what this God of Gods thing is, and that's what we need to sort out," he said. "That's not to say there isn't an idea of what maybe it should be. But I categorically don't want to just buy Bryan off. I don't want to go, we're really sorry, here you go, and we really mean it. No actually, let's try do the right thing. It's so difficult to try and convey I just want to do the right thing."

Talk is cheap, but this kind of blunt (and slightly vulgar) admission of bungling is unusual, and it gives me hope that the accompanying commitment to setting things right is sincere. The full interview goes much further into what Phillips has planned for the future of 22 Cans, and by extension for Molyneux, and it's really quite good. Give it a read at Eurogamer.

PC Gamer

My state in is the grip of a historic drought, but I don't have even a single bottle of water in the house. In the event of a power outage, I'm not sure where my flashlights are stored, and I don't have any spare batteries for them anyway. I'm the kind of guy who buys a birthday card on the way to the party, and then has to go back into the store to buy a pen to fill it out on the dashboard. I'm unprepared for stuff, in other words.

That's why 60 Seconds!, an adventure game by Robot Gentlemen, feels like it's designed just for me. The atomic bombs are falling, and you have just a single minute to run around your house in a panic, grabbing whatever you can, before heading into the bomb shelter and seeing how long you can survive.

During my mad dash, I manage to collect a few cans of soup, a bottle of water, what I thought was another bottle of water but was actually bug spray, a fire axe, and a rifle. Oh, and my family. My wife, Dolores, my daughter, Mary Jane, and my son, Timmy. Unfortunately, I forget to grab a radio, and one bottle of water is not going to be nearly enough for all four of us. We're not off to a good start.

As each day passes, you have to make decisions on everything from rationing food and water, to dealing with events (such as a weird smell coming from a wall, someone banging on the door to your shelter, or family members getting sick), to deciding who, if anyone, should undertake an expedition to the surface for supplies. We definitely need some, and I choose little Timmy to go scavenge. The kid needs to grow up sometime. He departs. What a sport.

While Timmy is gone we manage to shoot a hole in a water pipe with my rifle, and fill a couple extra bottles, which is great news. When Timmy returns a few days later, he's brought more soup and water, a first-aid kit, and a gas mask. Also excellent news! What a little scavenger he turned out to be! Timmy found something else: tetanus, after cutting his hand on a rusty piece of metal. That's not good. I decide to save the first-aid kit for a real emergency, and try to seal Timmy's wound with a heated axe blade. I'm not going to win Father of the Year, but it seems to have worked.

Feeling a little guilty, I head outside myself on the next expedition. While I'm gone, everyone else gets sick. I guess I should have brought some sort of soap or disinfectant, and washing in bug spray, while an option, doesn't seem like a good idea. Worse yet, the only thing I found on the surface was a Boy Scout manual, so I send my daughter into the wastes, hoping she'll do better.

She never returns.

As we reach Day 25, it's just me and Timmy. Dolores has undertaken the next expedition, hopefully to find a radio, and she's not back yet, either. Timmy and I are down to our last can of soup, and seeing as how he's already crawling with disease, it seems pointless to, you know, feed him. He expires. I guess eating him is out of the question?

Down to my last can of soup, I use my Boy Scout manual to repair the gas mask. In hindsight, I probably should have done that before letting my adolescent daughter and loving wife go wandering an irradiated wasteland in search of supplies. It's clear at this point neither of them are coming back. Well, no sense in beating myself up over it, and besides, I can probably barely lift my arms to hit myself with.

Notes for the next apocalypse? Bring more water. Bring a radio to get news from the outside. Bring more first-aid kits and something to wash with. Bring... well, maybe bring one less family member? 

I mean, there's only so much soup to go around.

PC Gamer

THE HIGHS

Phil Savage: Design meetingI love listening to game designers talk about game design—to the point where I'm often having to reassure interview subjects that, yes, I really do want you to talk endlessly at me about game design. No, really, it's fine. For God's sake stop apologising. I'm fascinated by the choices that smart people make, and the impact those choices have on the things they create. That's why I love any situation where a developer is quizzed about their involvement in an old project. The added distance generally leads to a level of detachment that results in a more frank breakdown of the limitations and compromises. You can hear that in Steve Gaynor's brilliant Tone Control podcast, and see it in Double Fine's Devs Play series. Most recently, you can watch three of Deus Ex's creators replaying Deus Ex. I recommend you do, even if it will mean an inevitable urge to replay Deus Ex.

Andy Kelly: Sex appealFemale character models have been half-launched in survival sandbox Rust. This is a game where your avatar is generated randomly based on the numbers in your Steam ID. It determines your skin colour, body shape, and penis size—and now it will, eventually, dictate your sex too.

This is a brilliant idea, and I love how salty it s making people. Some players are visibly upset and complaining that the character that s been generated for them is black. I can only imagine how bad they ll react when they appear in the game as, GASP, a woman.

Rust is a silly, anarchic game whose tone is utterly incoherent, so this character randomisation doesn t feel out of place. I love that you can t choose, because when confronted with a character creator, people will naturally makes someone who looks like themselves. But that s boring. You can be ANYONE in a virtual world, so why be boring old you?

Mainly, though, I m just looking forward to the angry forum threads by people who have spawned as women. That alone is worth the inclusion of the feature. Make sure you grab the next issue of PC Gamer, in which the team compares the sizes of their randomly-generated Rust dongs.

Samuel Roberts: Miami horrorThis week my brain has reacted by craving morbid media. For example, I ve cycled between listening to an audiobook of Bugliosi s Helter Skelter about the Manson Family killings, The Evil Within, The Shining, and Hotline Miami 2. The one I ve been enjoying the most out of those is that which is the most cartoon-y and therefore the least like real life—Hotline Miami 2 is a flawed sequel with a fragmented story, but as someone who devoured the original many times over, I m enjoying the challenge. I m liking it a bit more than Chris did earlier this year, helped, I think, by only encountering a fraction of the bugs he did.

I m also appreciating the new conditions of the levels—being forced to use specific weapons, some of which were far from suitable for the level at hand, is like playing a challenge mode more than a main story. But that level of difficulty, while a step up from the original, is oddly appealing to me. I think it s because I always enjoyed Hotline Miami the most when I was on the border of ragequitting every single time, which happens regularly in every level here. Wrong Number is so maddening I spent 40 minutes trying to escape a prison full of armed guards, which is an appalling performance for a Hotline Miami level. It s flawed, but I am still very glad I played it, particularly for the near-3 hours of extraordinary electro music found here—perhaps the best soundtrack for a game I ve heard in years.

James Davenport: Alarming alliterationFull disclosure: I gave ten bucks to the Neverending Nightmares Kickstarter. I also gave ten bucks to the Devastated Dreams Kickstarter. Why? The former was an honest exploration of developer Matt Gilgenbach s depression and anxiety, expressed through stark, Edward Gorey-inspired art and simple mechanics. It was a relief to see such a gorgeous, personal game tackle horrifying issues through a genre I love. Some of the imagery in Neverending Nightmares still stands as some of the most genuinely shocking stuff I ve seen in a game. Devastating Dreams, on Kickstarter now, is hoping to riff on a similar design—2D, exploration-based, art-driven—but posits the player as a young, pregnant Filipino woman. Gilgenbach is tapping into his wife Joanne s experience growing up in the Philippines, embracing her culture s folk tales as a backbone for their new project. Turns out, some of these Filipino folk monsters are super into chowing down on babies. Yikes. There s a playable demo on the Kickstarter page, and it s very early on, but it still managed to coerce a few jumps and curse words out of me.

The amazing play above was posted by Reddit user Craizinho on the Rocket League subreddit

Tom Marks: SoccarI ve had an absurd amount of fun playing Rocket League this week. Possibly too much fun.

Fundamentally, Rocket League doesn t have too much going on. There isn t a lot to do in the game besides dressing your car up in silly hats and playing the standard game mode—it s an experience stripped of nearly all fat and excess. But the skillcap is so monumentally high that I could play for hours on end and still feel like I d have to get better before I start showing up on highlight reels. Intense moments abound, even at low-level play, but I can feel myself getting a little better during every match. That feeling of constant improvement while also knowing I have more room to grow makes Rocket League an incredibly engrossing game.

Also, thank you to Skoo in our comments for the brilliance that is calling Rocket League Soccar.

Chris Livingston: Turn-BiasedI am not much for turn-based combat: either I stink at it and thus don't enjoy it, or I don't enjoy it and thus don't put much effort into it and thus stink at it. That's why I was pleasantly surprised by the short time I've spent with Legends of Eisenwald. The combat, as noted in Andy's review, is oddly restrictive. You characters can only choose to attack enemies near them, often leaving them no choice at all about who to fight. While you can make a character retreat, you can't peel them off, button-hook around the crowd, and attack someone else.

It's a really odd, rigid system, and I expect it will greatly annoy a lot of turn-based combat veterans, but I actually wound up liking it quite a bit. Rather than staring at the battlefield, confronted with dozens of different options, there's really only a few. Battles are straightforward and usually pretty quick. For someone like me who doesn't have a mind for strategy, and not a lot of interest in learning the intricacies of ten different character classes, I found it refreshing and got a grip on it almost immediately. Like I said, the relative simplicity will no doubt turn some people off, but I appreciated it, and I'm having a fine time with the game in general.

THE LOWS

Andy Kelly: Death to realismI ve been thinking about the Rise of the Tomb Raider video shown at the Xbox E3 conference, and how depressing it was. Our goal is to make the most realistic characters in games, says a developer, and you think, cool, they re going to talk about writing and characterisation. The stuff that makes a character. But not: they were talking about the graphics.

They meant realistic in a very literal sense. Yeah, Lara looks realistic, sort of, but that doesn t make her a realistic character. Look at, say, any Studio Ghibli film. Do the characters look realistic? No. But are they characters? Yes! Or read any good book, which paint rich, believable characters with nothing but letters printed in ink.

Character comes from writing. Look at something like Crysis, for example. Incredibly realistic character models, but zero rounded characters. Totally forgettable. Rise of the Tomb Raider might be a good game (I liked the last one), but it s a shame to see developers working so hard in the wrong direction. Realism has long been the games industry s goal, but it leads nowhere. Stories need to get better, not the amount of visible pores on the hero s face.

James Davenport: Bad shepherdI have a really hard time getting into multiplayer games. There are a small stretches where I ll attempt to dive deep into Counterstrike, Battlefield, Starcraft, or the MOBA of the Week, but nothing ever holds my attention for long, especially right when they come out. Which is why I m bummed (and fascinated) to hear that The Flock, a super interesting asymmetrical multiplayer game, has an expiration date. The game injects horror into its first-person competition in a clever way. One player is a humanoid and everyone else is a nimble, monstrous being with the goal of killing the human. However, the human player can prolong their death using a (quickly dying) flashlight to stop monsters in their tracks. As a monster, if you move in the light, you re dead. Neat idea, yeah?

It s a wonderful idea, and exactly why I m bummed it isn t set to last. The developers have a point: these niche multiplayer games do tend to lose audiences over time and the idea of facilitating a climactic finale before turning the game off forever is novel, but prioritizing a high concept idea over convenience is somewhat baffling to me. I could understand, especially if this was posited as an experiment from the get-go, but now I m far less interested in playing the game, simply because I m not sure I ll even have the time. Boo.

Chris Livingston: Survival of the ShittiestI've finally begun playing ARK: Survival Evolved (my first diary entry is here). My first headache with the Early Access survival game, which has quickly become a hot seller, was that I simply couldn't get the damn thing to run. I'd start the game, pick a server, wait for five minutes, and then it would crash. What's more, this wasn't a quick crash to desktop, but a long, slow crash that would take minutes to complete, sometimes to the point where I'd have to manually restart my PC. I'd estimate I've probably lost about six hours just trying to get onto a server over the past several weeks.

I eventually found a workaround by accident: using the in-game server browser would cause a crash, and using the Steam server browser while in-game would cause a crash, but using the Steam server browser to select a server before launching the game—which would then auto-launch the game—would actually get me onto a server. I have no idea why, but at least I could finally play the game with other people.

This, of course, brings on its own series of headaches, because to this point, and I'm not exaggerating, every single person I've met in ARK has immediately punched me in the face. Once, this simply left me unconscious for a minute or two. Twice, after punching me, the other player simply killed me. And, several other times, I was eaten by the other players' pet dinosaurs while I lay there unconscious. This all happened with a minute or so of joining a server as a new character, wearing only underpants and not possessing a single item.

I know this is a part of multiplayer survival games—and I've done my share of unprompted killing of other players so I probably deserve it—but being eaten by another player's trained dinosaur before I've had time to even craft an axe, pick a berry, or take a shit seems a little more unbalanced than, say, DayZ, where you probably won't immediately run into a well-equipped player, and even if you do, he won't have a giant prehistoric monster following him around.

Phil Savage: Quest delayedI've been catching up with my RPG backlog, which means I recently finished The Witcher 2—and only a few years after everybody else. This should be great news, as it means I now get to start The Witcher 3. Hurrah!

Except, not quite. Having seen the 1.07 patch change list, I've convinced myself that I won't start The Witcher 3 until it's been released. The Witcher 2 would have been intolerable without those storage chests, and knowing they—and other essential looking inventory tweaks—are on the way was enough to get me wait. In other words, patience is my low this week. Specifically my lack of it. Come on, CDPR! It's been a week now.

(Seriously, though. Take your time. No pressure.)

Samuel Roberts: Death to DeadpoolI think it s good news that Deadpool returned to Steam earlier this week, even if the game itself is slightly weak (Nolan North is excellent as the titular character, but it s a forgettable third-person action game with 7/10 jokes—a few 8s.) I am oddly annoyed that it s returned to Steam at full price, though, retailing for $40/ 30 despite being two years old and not that good—and people are buying it. It s on the second page of Steam s best sellers list, last time I checked today, and I can t help feeling like people are only panic purchasing for fear of it being pulled from Steam again. I promise you, it s not worth 30. It ll be around until the movie releases next year, I m almost certain of that—wait until it ends up in a Steam sale if you re that big a fan. It s what Deadpool would do. 

Tom Marks: A hollow protestThat we reportedly won t see a rereleased PC version of Batman: Arkham Knight for at least another six weeks is downright ridiculous. It s good that they re taking the time they need to actually fix the game, but it s disrespectful that they didn t give the port the time it deserved before its initial launch.

Not having any clue when Arkham Knight will be fixed is a low, but it isn t what got me lowest this week. That honor goes to a common reaction I saw to the news, and it goes a little something like this: I m not going to buy Arkham Knight. I ll be playing it, but they won t get my money. That s the worst response you can have, because it doesn't accomplish what you think it does.

For a long time, big developers felt that the PC market wasn t worth the effort, and a huge part of that attitude was because of game piracy. This attitude is finally starting to change as we see more and more PC sales, even on DRM-free platforms like GOG. Some developers are still making mistakes—as the Arkham Knight debacle clearly shows—but the attitude is generally shifting. Responding to instances like this by publically and proudly announcing that you are going to pirate the game is short-sighted, petty, irrational, and stupid. You are not hurting them more by stealing their game, you are hurting the PC community.

If Arkham Knight s launch state and post-launch delay means you can no longer support WB and Rocksteady, then by all means don t buy the game. But don t pirate the game. It hurts the cause you claim to be fighting for. You think you are taking something from them, but you are only helping to perpetuate a cycle that leaves us with more botched ports.

And if you really, truly can t resist and have to play it, pay the company for the product they made. I know a guy who makes the best falafel I ve ever had. He s an asshole, but that doesn t mean I steal the falafel.

PC Gamer

You probably did not know that when you kill a Viper in XCOM 2, what you hear in its final seconds is a howling baby. But that's what it is, according to Lead Audio Designer Chris D'Ambrosio, who described it in a new blog post as "a pitched-down baby's scream, which is completely unnerving."

"A baby crying is very interesting because the sound is a frequency our hearing notices above most other things," D'Ambrosio explained in a brief, interview-style discussion about the creation of XCOM 2's audio. "To then pitch it down becomes so off-putting. It works perfectly! Movies have also set the precedents that snakes make a high-pitched screeching noise. The challenge with the Viper was to take a high-pitched screech and make it big."

"Big" was also a factor in the creation of the Berserker's yell. D'Ambrosio said he watched the animation of the Berserker's initial reveal four or five times after it was first given to him, "to understand the motion of the animation and to start figuring out the size of the sound she should be making." And even though it's an alien creature, he said making use of recognizable sounds, which in this case included a pig, an elephant, a tiger, a tornado, a flamethrower, and a bit of bass drop, helps players "understand the size, weight and in this case, the damage this thing is going to do."

The Berserker and Viper audio clips are embedded below. Sadly, a third clip, created by rubbing a wet lacrosse ball on a carpet, is not, so instead we'll make a game out of that one: Can you guess what it's for without looking?

XCOM 2 is slated to come out in November.

PC Gamer

The Verge reports that Shenmue 3 has become the most funded video game on Kickstarter to date, surpassing Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, which raised $5,545,991 as of June 11. As of this article, the Shenmue 3 project has just 7 hours to go and has gathered $5,779,046 from 63,856 backers. Yup, we have a new champ, folks.

Shenmue 3 is slated for a December 2017 release and is a true sequel to the original Shenmue and Shenmue 2 chapters. The game will be offered as physical and digital copies for the PlayStation 4 and Windows PC and will be based on Epic Games Unreal Engine 4.

If you were not around in 1999 when Shenmue first came out, or did not have the opportunity to play it if you were, you may have missed this game which has gone on to win the hearts of gamers everywhere, and influenced so many games to come after it, the Kickstarter page reads.

The story focuses on Ryo Hazuki who travels to China from Japan to seek out his father s killer. The Kickstarter page reveals that Hazuki studies Kung-fu and will make both friends and enemies during his training. The game is open world, meaning that players can take their time in following the story. Shenmue is even packed full of mini-games to play.

If Shenmue 3 was going to get made, I wanted to make it with the fans. Through Kickstarter, I knew that could happen. Together, with Shenmue fans everywhere, I knew we could build the game that the series deserves, says Yu Suzuki.

The first Shenmue game appeared on the Sega Dreamcast back in November 2000 here in the States, followed by Shenmue II in 2002 on the Dreamcast and Xbox consoles. Both were developed in the same timeframe and featured not only an open world, but some fighting action, role-playing and life simulation.

According to the Kickstarter page, the new entry will be similar to the first two but feature new fight mechanics that will pull gamers into the virtual world like never before. Suzuki aims to not only reward long-time fans of the series, but to draw in a new audience with updated gameplay.

The Kickstarter project originally sought out $2 million. However, the stretch goals reach $11 million, which will expand the Bailu Village and add a magic maze. Other goals include expanding the battle system, expanding the Choudu area, adding more mini games, adding a part-time job and more.

Image: Ys Net

PC Gamer
NEED TO KNOW

What is it: A puzzle-platformer where you control multiple characters by rewinding and replaying their movements.Reviewed on: Windows 7, Intel i7 x980 3.33 GHz, 9 GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce GTX 960Release date: Out nowPrice: $10 / 7Developer/Publisher: Neko EntertainmentMultiplayer: NoESRB: NRLinkOfficial Site

"Oh, you moron! Get out of my way!" I scream with red-faced fury at my co-op teammate. After a long, laborious run through a complicated level where absolutely everything worked perfectly, I've just tried to jump over him but he's chosen that exact moment to jump over me, meaning we collide face-first in midair just inches from the exit. No one goes anywhere, and we have to replay the level again. "MORON!"

What's important to understand is that this is a single-player game and my co-op teammate is actually me. In puzzle platformer Replay: VHS is Not Dead, there may be two characters on the screen, there are usually three or four, and at one point, there are five. You control all of them, just not at the same time. And, while I spent time yelling at them (me) when things went wrong, I spent far more time cheering us (me and me and me) when things went right.

Here's the deal: after renting some VHS tapes and being sucked into his television, Harvey Hachess must escape a series of movie-themed puzzle rooms by cooperating with the characters he meets. Each character starts the room in a different spot, and each must reach their own designated exit point. You pick a character and start moving him through the room, and at any point you can rewind time and either move the same character again, or choose a different character. If you switch characters, your original character will repeat the most recent movements you made with him or her while you move your new character. Essentially, it's a co-op game where your teammates are just versions of you from a short while ago.

Five of them! Five is too many! Actually, five wasn't too many. But it felt like too many.

This quickly grows complicated, as more characters are added and rooms become more complex and dangerous. It's enjoyably mind-bending, as you first try to figure out how the puzzle works, and then try to solve it by controlling different characters at different times who will then all work together at the same time. You can complete most levels at your leisure, but a few have timed devices—like a robot that will begin to push a block five seconds after you begin—which means you can't dawdle.

There are even boss fights, which are the most memorable and satisfying challenges, as they involve real-time threats that can kill you while you're trying to solve puzzles a step at a time. In one boss chamber, a swarm of vampire bats appears at the bottom of the screen and flies upwards. To avoid them, I had to move two characters up one side of the room and a third up the other side. One character had to push a block so another character could climb it to reach a ledge where she could activate a switch to reverse gravity so the third character could be sucked to the ceiling, where he then had to scoot over some spikes, at which point the second character had to re-reverse gravity to allow him to fall safely back down to step on a switch that slid open a wall to allow the other characters to advance. After much experimentation, trial-and-error, timing and retiming and re-retiming the movements of everyone involved, we finally all made it to the top, an absolutely exhilarating feeling—at which point I called myself a moron because I'd forgotten which character was supposed to jump over which.

This is sort of important: rewinding is an all-or-nothing prospect. If you've just completed a long and complicated series of moves, and you goof at the very end, you can't just rewind a few seconds to make a small adjustment. You have to go all the way back to the beginning of your current run, and do the entire thing again with that character. This can sometimes feel aggravating and overly punishing, but more often it feels amazing. When precision, reflexes, and memorization all come together in perfect start-to-finish runs for all of your characters, it's immensely satisfying.

One character becomes a ghost when you're not directly controlling her.

A few drawbacks: the resolution is fixed at 1280x720, though I could play it fullscreen in my 1920x1080 monitor or in a window. The simple controls aren't remappable, and the R key (to rewind a run) and F key (to fast-forward so you don't have to wait in real-time while watching your replays) are adjacent. It would be nice to have those keys further apart, because you don't want to accidentally press R while trying to press F, and have to re-do your current run over again (which I did a number of times).

Plenty of elements in Replay, like time rewinding, gravity-flipping, and laser-redirecting, are familiar from other puzzle games, but they're all used well and combined interestingly here. For the true sadists out there, each level also contains a key, and acquiring that key usually requires a number of additional moves: essentially, it's an extra puzzle within each puzzle. It took me about 12 hours to complete Replay, and that's without finding most of the keys or achieving 'gold medal' times, so that's a good amount of game for the $10 price tag.

PC Gamer

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PC Gamer

Did you miss Bethesda's Fallout 4 presentation during the Xbox press event at E3? Do you wish you could see it again, without anybody talking over it? Would you like to watch it again just because, hey, it's Fallout 4? Whatever your reason, now is your chance.

The trailer runs about 5 and a half minutes, and it's not the most action-packed thing I've ever seen, but it's nicely stitched together to hit all the major talking points. The wasteland appears to be a far more colorful place than we've seen recently, we meet Codsworth, Dogmeat (although I prefer to call him Doogie Bowser), and Preston Garvey, and enjoy a new perspective on things from inside power armor. The updated VATS, which slows, rather than pauses, combat also gets a few moments in the spotlight.

There's nothing new in here, but it's still really cool to see it all strung together, without interruption. Fallout 4 will be out on November 10.

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