Slain! attracted quite a bit of attention in the lead up to its launch, and rightly so: in motion it looked really cool. The hard-as-nails, 16 bit-inspired sidescroller looked like a death metal album cover come to life, and the soundtrack sounded the part too, composed as it was by a former member of cult band Celtic Frost.

Unfortunately, when it launched back in March, the response was less than favourable. People criticised its movement, its difficulty, and... well, most aspects of the game. That prompted Wolfbrew Games to completely overhaul the game, and the results of their attention have launched today as Slain: Back From Hell.

According to the announcement, not much has been left unchanged. The changenotes say that the "difficulty curve has been completely re-calibrated", checkpointing has been "re-regulated to allay difficulty spikes" and enemy AI has been overhauled to allow for "more complex and challenging behaviours for nearly all enemies".

Meanwhile, there are three new bosses, combat has been changed, and weapons can be switched on the move. For the full list of updates, head over here. As you'll see, they're quite substantial.

It's interesting that a lot of the changes reduce the difficulty, because Slain was originally delayed because it was too hard. I hate to think how hard the game was before that delay, but whatever the case now seems to be the time to jump aboard. Everyone who owns the game will be gifted a new copy as well, to pass on to a friend.

Check out a trailer for the re-launch below:

Escaping the buzz surrounding Pok mon Go is, at this point, nearly impossible. Its greatest strength isn't that it's a good game, but that Pok mon Go challenges us to view our neighborhoods differently. Through the lens of your phone, that convenience store you never visit is now a 'Pok Stop,' and that memorial you pass by on your way to work is a 'gym.' But you don't have to play Pok mon Go just to have that kind of shift in perspective PC games have been tinkering with real-world locations for a long time. From the comfort of my computer chair, I've spent weeks discovering the joys of hauling dangerous materials in my Renault semi-truck between Poland and England in Euro Truck Simulator 2.

There's the prevailing myth that video games are often just a form of escapism, but Euro Truck Simulator 2 suggests just the opposite. Instead of running away from the real world, I'm gaining a unique understanding of it. Through the windshield of that truck, I'm beginning to see the twisting highways of Europe in a whole new light. With all of the tools that developers have at their fingertips, it's no surprise that most would want to spend their time bringing imaginary landscapes to life. But the subtlety of the world we live in can be just as memorable as the impossible realities dreamed up as backdrops for video games.

Euro Truck Simulator 2 certainly takes liberties in its recreation of Europe by decreasing its scale, but it has a masterful understanding of how something as mundane as a realistically modeled exit ramp can teach a lesson. Learning how to downshift through seven gears while simultaneously reducing speed and navigating an agonizingly tight turn has given me an appreciation for hauling a 20-ton trailer that I'd never have otherwise.

Real locations that inspire real understanding 

What's fascinating about Euro Truck Simulator 2 isn't the ways it can make a mundane activity like truck driving interesting, but the fact that time and time again I walk away with a new appreciation for a real-world activity that I might not have had otherwise. My dozens of hours spent hauling haven t given me the skills to operate an actual truck. But they have given me an understanding of the nuances of driving them that extends beyond what I consider as I pass semi-trucks on the highway and I'm much more sympathetic to when they're struggling to make it up a hill now, too.

More importantly, video games that play with our own reality offer us spaces to engage in a way we could never do otherwise. Anyone can remember how terrifying it was stepping behind the wheel and learning to drive for the first time because there were tangible consequences to making a mistake. My first accident in Euro Truck Simulator might not have cost someone their life, but that didn't stop me from blushing furiously and fighting the need to apologize to the other AI drivers. Sims like Euro Truck Simulator 2 excel at poking holes in the wall between real-world experiences and those we traditionally have in video games, but there's still lessons to be gleaned from games that don't aspire to simulate reality with the same determination.

The sprawling forests of Arma 2 and DayZ's Chernarus are modelled heavily after Bohemia Interactive's homeland, the Czech Republic, but there's a pretty good chance that you've never been there. Still, by taking a real world location and using it as the framework for a fictional country, Bohemia Interactive created a layer of authenticity that few other shooters can achieve. Instead of building an environment that caters to the kind of experiences the developers wanted players to have, both DayZ and Arma 2, like our own lives, feel like products of the environment they exist in. As you begin to understand the landscape of Chernarus, you also begin to adapt how you play. Once you've been sniped in the head in an open field a few times, you learn to see pastures and glades not as shortcuts but death sentences. You learn to stalk along the treeline to maintain cover. I'm a wee bit embarrassed to admit that I sometimes find myself instinctively doing the same thing when I go out hiking.

That silly habit I've developed also illustrates the way games that model real-life create situations that inform how we act in the real world and how we behave in a video game. DayZ, for example, doesn't have a magical user interface that shows you where to go. Instead you need to lean on your own awareness of your surroundings, landmarks, and, if you're lucky enough to find them, a compass and a paper map. Being able to navigate the forests of Chernarus is, in many ways, no different than being able to navigate a forest in the real world but with the added reassurance that making a wrong turn doesn't mean wandering into a hive of agitated zombies.

Of course, this has also inspired more than a few pilgrimages by dedicated fans to the parts of the Czech Republic that were used to create Chernarus. Aside from what playing in these environments can teach us, there's an undeniable allure to comparing the two, which in turn can give us a greater appreciation not only for the effort that went into building these worlds, but the real locations that inspired them. When it comes to a game like Tom Clancy's The Division, the greatest thing that it achieved was creating a Manhattan that felt authentic despite the state of chaos it had fell into.

As video games get progressively better at realistically modeling our world and find increasingly more creative methods to interact with that world, they also create opportunities to discover new ways of understanding our own. Whether it's through the camera on your phone as you hunt for Pokemon, the windshield of a semi-trick, or a pair of binoculars as you scout through the woods of Chernarus, each one offers a unique perspective that can inform how we behave in real-life. The lens might change, but the truth stays the same: Our world and the ways it intersects with games has plenty left to teach us.

Everybody who likes pirates (and who doesn't like pirates?) has a pitch for the ideal game about them. We carry our imaginary game around with us, close to our rum-soaked hearts. It's got to be open world of course, because what's the point of the horizon if you can't have it brought to you? The romance of being a pirate is all about freedom.

It's also about stabbing people. There needs to be good stabbing, and pistol-shooting as well, and belting out a good har har! while you do it. You want swinging onto someone else's deck and swashbuckling away to be joyous. Blasting enemies from a distance with cannon fire is Pirating 101. Duelling with swords and also with sails, some kind of system for using the wind against opponents and lining up broadsides, more tactical than the wild to-and-fro of close combat.

Oh, and we'll also need a robust economic simulation, please. What's the point of killing people and stealing their stuff if that stuff can't be sold at port? That leads to profit, so there need to be ways of upgrading ships and buying whole new ones with those profits, as well as managing the crew. Maybe something abstract for the bulk of yer maties, but if the officers could be BioWare-style companions with their own dark secrets to uncover and loyalty missions to undertake that'd be swell.

Sounds perfect. Why doesn't it exist already?

Here's a game we can probably agree is a good one: Sid Meier's Pirates! It doesn't tick every box on that list but it's close. It encompasses a stretch of the Caribbean and Spanish Main so big you need turbo mode to cross it, there are ships full of Spanish gold to take (and Dutch gold, French gold, and English gold), and you can buy low and sell high profitably enough that you don't even need to turn to piracy if you're boring. On the other hand its dueling is pretty simplistic and depending which version you play there might be a divisive ballroom dancing minigame in there as well.

And, more to the point, it's a game from 1987. It's been remade since then, in 1993 and again in 2004, but it still has very little competition. If you want to get your pirate on with something newer you have to play Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag and slog through all of the assassin bits so you can unlock the half of the game you actually want: boarding ships and listening to sea shanties. But as great as it is to hit rough water and hear the crew of the Jackdaw launch into It's stormy weather boys, stormy weather/When the wind blows we're all together, boys, Black Flag isn't going to let you profit from manipulating trade conditions. It's just not that kind of game.

The MMO Pirates Of The Burning Sea is that kind of game. Its player-driven economy is detailed enough that you can have your own plots of land producing resources like iron ore which you manufacture into nails before selling them to another player who owns a shipyard. It's also got a fine ship-to-ship combat system for getting the wind in your sails and opening fire on someone who has a hold full of nails if you'd rather be a straight-up buccaneer than a manufacturer who also occasionally pirates it up.

Being an MMO means Pirates Of The Burning Sea can use other players for those interactions, whether trading or risking crew and cargo sailing through the dangerous waters of the PVP zones. But online games bring their own problems. Board a ship and you'll find yourself staring at a cooldown bar of attack options straight out of World Of Warcraft, a far less thrilling prospect than its ship-to-ship combat. And even its sailing can be seriously hampered by lag, with your ship suddenly stalling then teleporting to a different position nudged up against an outcropping of land.

There are plenty of other games about pirates and Steam is full of cutthroat simulators, many of them products of Early Access. But just like Black Flag or Pirates Of The Burning Sea there's always something missing, something holding them back from fulfilling our hopes and living up to that dream pitch of being a truly well-rounded pirate. They may start with positive feedback from the most involved community members, but once more players get involved their ratings drop Blood & Gold: Caribbean, Naval Action, Pixel Piracy, they're all trending down towards a 'mixed' rating in the harsh waters of Steam community reviews.

We're a judgmental bunch. I'd make a joke about pirate fans liking to make underwhelming games walk the plank, but then I'd get a bunch of judgmental comments about how walking the plank's unhistorical. We may like Monkey Island but we still want more than just a pirate costume draped on another genre. We see a ship and we get our hopes up, setting ourselves up for disappointment. Take a look at Sunless Sea, which isn't even about piracy though you can dabble in it. It's a game about story, as much a text adventure as a naval adventure, but there's still a cranky subset of its players upset by the fact its trade side is underdeveloped. Give us a ship and a set of ports and we want to start manipulating their economies for our benefit even in a game that's really about earning eerie stories rather than loot.

Why doesn't our ideal pirate game exist? Maybe it s simply because we're asking too much. First on our list is open world but open-world games are expensive and inevitably troubled by bugs, even when the biggest studios are behind them. The licensed Pirates Of The Caribbean game made by Akella and published by Bethesda, as well as its unofficial sequels in the Age Of Pirates series, are perfect examples, where you're as likely to crash to desktop as into a warship. The first thing on our list of demands is almost impossible on its own, let alone once we start fussing over the rest.

Rare s ambition for its upcoming online pirate game Sea of Thieves actually highlights why it s so difficult to make a truly satisfying one. Everyone s got an idea of what pirates do, design director Gregg Mayles told us at E3. Everyone knows they go after treasure. You don t need to be told how to sail a ship or climb to the crow s nest and use a telescope.

Anything you expect to be able to do in a pirate game, we expect to make that dream come true for players, added executive producer Joe Neate.

Other popular genres like sci-fi and fantasy settings certainly come with their own preconceptions, but they re less clear-cut. Pirate games aren t just about a place but about a specific kind of character and action. They re a more codified fiction than living in space or like the past but with wizards and when we can t swashbuckle across the seven seas just right and raid and trade and all the rest, it just doesn t feel like real pirating.

I wish Rare all the luck in the world with Sea of Thieves. But rather than getting our hopes up and setting ourselves up for another disappointment (we don't talk about Risen 2: Dark Waters), maybe we should lower those expectations like we're lowering our sails, losing some speed but gaining some maneuverability so that we don't smash right into a bitter reef of our own making just like this metaphor has.

In the meantime, who's for another rousing chorus of 'The Fish In The Sea?' It's stormy weather boys, stormy weather...

The Dota 2 International begins in earnest on Wednesday, when the sixteen best teams in the world go to war in the group stages in the hopes of securing an advantageous start in next week's main event. Before then, however, we have tomorrow's wildcard bracket. Four teams will fight for two remaining spots in the International in a brutal double-elimination format with everything on the line.

I mean everything. The International's massive prize pool in excess of $19.2m and climbing at the time of writing is split between all sixteen finalists. Even the bottom-place finishers will walk away with close to $100,000. Not only are tomorrow's wildcard competitors fighting for the right to join the International proper, then, but for a prize in excess of the total pool of many smaller events.

The stakes are absurdly high. These four teams Escape Gaming, compLexity, Execration and EHOME all placed third in their respective regional qualifiers. This earned them one last shot at a place among the very best in their sport. Tomorrow, we'll learn which teams made the trip to Seattle in vain.

HOW TO WATCH

The games will be placed on US west coast time tomorrow. Valve don't yet list a time on the official schedule, but expect play to start around 10:00 PST (19:00 CEST).

You'll be able to watch the games on Twitch as well as via Valve's on proprietary Dota streaming service, DotaTV. You can also watch in the game client itself, which allows you full choice of commentary team as well as the ability to control the camera yourself if you prefer. For the first time, Valve are also offering VR spectating through the Dota VR Hub.If you miss any games, check out the replay section of the official site.

THE TEAMS

 compLexity Gaming 

compLexity put themselves on the map in 2015 with a better-than-expected performance at last year's International. Since then they've undergone a roster shift, losing MoonMeander and Fly to OG and bringing in three Swedes: Chessie, Limmp and Handsken. The new coL is a team that has proved itself capable of taking games off the very best, but is yet to place above the mid-table at a top-tier event. The team is also notable for including two sets of brothers in its roster in Chessie/Limmp and swindlemelonzz/Zfreek.

Their track record suggests that they've got a good chance of making it through the wildcard. compLexity are taking the International seriously and have brought in coaches and analysts to help them prepare. This could be the beginning of another underdog run, but they'll need to show something new if they want to escape the mid-table at the most competitive event of the year.

 EHOME

This isn't necessarily a name you'd expect to see in the wildcard. EHOME is one of the grand old houses of Chinese Dota, placing high at last year's International and performing well right up until the Shanghai Major, where their star fell a little. After a reshuffle, the new EHOME boasts a lot of talent, including longstanding Dota veterans like iceiceice and LanM. These are players more used to getting invited to the International than fighting their way in the long way.

As such, it'll be an upset if they don't qualify for the main event and if they do, they ve probably got the best shot out of any team in the wildcard at causing an upset in the group stages. That s not to say that they re a safe bet, by any means: their recent form has been hit and miss, hence why they re playing in the wildcard at all. But if you re assembling your fantasy draft in time for tomorrow s games, you could do worse than to slot in a couple of EHOME players.

 Escape Gaming

Formerly No Diggity, there's a lot of veteran European Dota talent in Escape Gaming including player-turned-caster-turned-player SyndereN, who last attended the International as a player in 2013. He's joined by former Fnatic/NiP carry Era and nomadic midlaner qojqva, returning to pro Dota after a break. That wealth of experience isn't evenly distributed, however: YapzOr and KheZu are both relative newcomers.

Escape have a mixed recent track record and the wildcard is likely to be a real test. But their performance against the top tier isn't what matters, at least in the short term: what matters is how they shape up against the other wildcard teams. In that regard, they have a shot at making the cut most odds favour them over Execration. Much depends on how they match up against compLexity, however, which makes their first game of the event one to watch.

 Execration

This is a team that hasn't competed much, or won, outside of South East Asia. Recent form suggests that they can be competitive with the other top SEA teams, but their performance is very variable. That, coupled with a lack of experience at events of this scale, means that Execration are the underdogs coming into the International wildcard.

That's no reason to count them out, however. Abed is the youngest player in the tournament at 15 and supremely talented the second highest-ranking player in SEA. Execration have the ability to perform at a high level, it's just a matter of whether they can bring that talent to bear when it counts. It's also worth remembering that the wildcard is a dangerous bracket and upsets can and do happen when the stakes are this high. For these teams, it all comes down to a handful of matches. With the right players and the right strategy, Execration certainly have a shot.

We ll be running more guides to the International, its competitors and metagame as the week progresses. You can find it all on PC Gamer Pro.

Stellaris may be on the cusp of welcoming its first official Species pack later this week, however its keen modding community has hardly taken a breath since the game s launch back in May. The latest mod to impress is G-Man s Star Trek New Horizons a total conversion that follows the entire canon timeline from 2150 s Enterprise era through to 2400 and beyond.

It s in the early stages of development, but New Horizons already packs a host of tweaks and tinkerings that give Stellaris a flavour of the ST universe. There are 38 pre-scripted races, for example, with canon starting positions; as well as five playable factions and their ships, including: United Earth, the Klingon Empire, the Romulan Star Empire, the Vulcan High Command and Gorn Hegemony. While not exclusive to this mod, civilian trade is also a welcomed addition.

Relevant to the Enterprise era and that of the original series, the mod introduces replica uniforms and portraits specific to each time period; it adds new Torpedo weapons and shields; new races; and the The Borg in place of the Scourge crisis events featured in the original game. The full list of changes can be found on the mod s Steam Workshop and ModDB pages and, as it s a work-in-progress, promises to add more in the coming months.

"As this will be a total conversion we plan on creating a whole new canon static universe with proper factions, ships, portraits and storytelling," says its creators. "Prepare to relive your favourite episodes and movies, this mod will guide you through the entire canon Star Trek timeline."

The original Quake was a muddy medieval world of knights, Lovecraftian horrors, and grim castles. But the sequel, cleverly titled Quake II, goes in a different direction entirely. You re a space marine, naturally, who has crash-landed on an alien world called Stroggos. In a desperate attempt to prevent an invasion, Earth sent an army to the distant planet, but the Strogg knew you were coming and your arrival was a slaughter. The dropships were shot down by anti-air defences and pretty much everyone died, except you. And so, in true id Software FPS style, it becomes a solo mission.

There s a chance you don t remember any of that. After all, Quake II is not a game renowned for its deep, complex sci-fi storyline. But the inclusion of a plot, and mission objectives, was pretty unique for an FPS in the late 90s. As you play, a robotic voice regularly drones computer updated and gives you mission objectives. By modern standards that s completely unexciting, but back then it set Quake II apart from id s other shooters. It was more cinematic, and your actions felt somehow more meaningful. And by your actions I mean shooting , because that s the beating heart of the game. Shooting things, and avoiding being shot.

At the time, Quake II was a technical marvel. Powered by the id Tech 2 engine, it boasted features that seem unremarkable now, but were amazing in their day. Hardware-accelerated graphics, coloured lighting, skyboxes, and the ability to return to previously completed levels were among its once groundbreaking features. After the release of Quake II, the engine powered several other games, including, in the early stages of its development, Half-Life. Quake II also had massively improved networking, making it one of the best early examples of an online FPS. Mod support also dramatically extended its lifespan for anyone lucky enough to have an internet connection with which to download the things.

People are still making mods today, in fact, including a few that let you play the game at high resolutions and with some graphical improvements. It ll still look like a game from 1997, but it makes it a bit more tolerable to modern eyes. Character movement is mapped to the arrow keys by default, but after some rebinding you can have it playing like a modern FPS. Although, weirdly, strafing is faster than moving forward and backwards. A strange sensation that took me a while to get used to. But for such an old game, Quake II is surprisingly playable.

A big part of this is its arsenal. It s still one of the finest collections of FPS guns on PC, and every weapon you wield has a distinct personality. The chaingun rattles at incredible speeds, getting steadily faster the longer you fire it. The super shotgun is like a handheld anti-aircraft gun, and you can almost feel the power as you unload it into an enemy and hear that echoing boom. The exaggerated kickback on the machine gun, which rises slowly as you fire, gives it a sense of physicality. And I love it when you fire the grenade launcher and hear the metal clink of the grenades as they bounce around the level. Every weapon, except maybe the blaster, is a joy to fire.

But the best of the lot is the railgun. This metal tube of death fires depleted uranium slugs at extremely high velocities, which leave a blue corkscrew of smoke in their wake. The railgun is incredibly accurate it s like a sniper rifle without a scope and it can cut through several Strogg at a time. In fights with multiple enemies, a useful strategy is running around until a few of them are lined up, then firing a slug. Seeing it tear through a line of bad guys is one of the greatest pleasures in first-person shooting.

And the things you shoot are just as well-designed. Quake II has the standard FPS structure of starting you out against small groups of easily-killed grunts, increasing the challenge the deeper into the game you get. In the first few levels you re fighting shotgun-toting Guards, beefy Enforcers with chainguns, and Berserkers who lunge at you with big metal spikes and later fire rockets at you. The way enemies explode into chunks of bloody meat, or gibs to use the parlance of the times, is still gruesomely satisfying. And there are other grisly touches, like when you don t quite kill an enemy and they squeeze off a few extra shots before they finally collapse and die.

But this is just to ease you in, and it s not long before id starts throwing its meanest creations at you in force. The Strogg are weird cyborg hybrids, with mechanical limbs and eerily human, grimacing faces. Gladiators stomp around on metal legs, firing their own version of the railgun at you. Mutants are angry, feral beasts who pounce on you, usually from dark corners. Brains, perhaps the weirdest enemy, attack you with tentacles and blood-stained hooked hands. There s a huge variety of things to kill, all with unique behaviours and weapons, which keeps the game interesting especially when you re facing several types at once.

The hardest thing to stomach when revisiting Quake II is how brown it is. The switch from dark fantasy to sci-fi leaves the levels brutal, industrial, and metallic. There isn t much variety or detail in the environments, and the colour palette is depressingly muted. The actual design of the levels is great, with plenty of secret areas and multi-level arenas to fight in, but the lack of colour and almost nonexistent world-building make it feel like a bit of a slog at times. But I remember thinking this back in 1997, and really it s a game about combat, not drawing you into its world. And since the Strogg live only for war, I guess it makes sense that their planet would be like one giant factory.

When you ve fought your way through the Strogg and infiltrated the headquarters of their leader a space station in an asteroid belt above the planet it s time to complete your final objective: kill it. The Strogg leader is called The Makron, and it s a two-stage boss fight. Its first form is a powerful exoskeleton which comes equipped with a BFG10K, the most powerful weapon in the game. And, unlike your own BFG, it can fire it multiple times in quick succession. When you destroy the mech, it s time to kill The Makron itself, which also has a BFG as well as a blaster and a railgun. Luckily the arena is littered with power-ups, health, and ammo, including a secret underground chamber that can be accessed by pressing a hidden switch. When the boss falls, you step into an escape pod, and that s it. The End unceremoniously flashes up on the screen, and your only choice is to go back to the menu. Imagine if a game ended like that today.

Quake II is still a great game, and I m surprised by how well it holds up. There s something about the feel of the weapons, the way they re animated and how they sound, that makes them some of the best examples in the genre. Even the new Doom, which is a fantastic ode to this era of shooter design, doesn t have anything quite as enjoyably punchy as Quake s railgun.

There s fish burning in a fryer and I m too busy washing plates to stop it. Meanwhile, nobody is cutting potatoes and the paraplegic racoon in a wheelchair just slipped and fell into an icy river while holding a full plate of french fries ready to serve. The fryer goes up in flames and the tabby cat rushes for the extinguisher. We still need to cut potatoes.

This is a normal level of catastrophe in Overcooked, a wonderfully chaotic local co-op cooking game that gives real power to the words too many cooks spoil the broth. At its best, a team of four players look like a beautiful mix of a ballet and an assembly line. At its worst, they look like one of Gordon s Ramsay s nightmares. And either way it s an absolute blast to play.

Overcooked is a race against time as you and your team try to make and deliver as many dishes as possible in four minutes. Burgers, pizza, and other dishes all come together in a similar way: chop ingredients, cook ingredients, put cooked ingredients on a plate, and serve before time runs out. Simple enough, but very rarely that straightforward in practice.

Overcooked s controls are great because they are easy enough to pick up quickly, but also allow for lots of little tricks that aren t taught in the tutorial. You can bring each ingredient to a plate, or you can pick that plate up and use it to gather the ingredients directly, saving time. Ingredients can be placed on a level s limited counter space, or you can just throw them on the ground to be picked up later. Learning these things through playing was exciting because I could see myself actually getting better, not just being given new abilities or told how to do some new technique.

Occupational hazards

Where Overcooked really shines, and where the vast majority of its challenge comes from, is its level design. They start simple an outdoor kitchen with random people walking through your path, a pirate ship that tilts and moves your tables back and forth but quickly escalate until your kitchen is split across three moving trucks or on shifting islands in a lake of lava, testing your team s communication more than anything else. There are two ice river levels, mentioned above, and they re some of the hardest in the game, but they made me keep coming back for more, trying to get a three star rating.

Suddenly we were driving back across Overcooked s charming level-select map, tracking down and tryharding any levels we only had two stars on. It s easy to complete a level, as the one star requirement is generally low except for the final set of levels which ramps up dramatically. There s no way to fail entirely, which I actually disliked as it removed some of the pressure when time was about to run out on an order. But to get three stars for most levels requires a gameplan and a coordinated team. We would often pause a level right at the start just to plan our strategy and assign roles to each person. As I played with the same group of people more, we all fell into regular roles.

But the levels in Overcooked are specifically designed to throw this sort of planning into chaos, and inevitably things would fall apart. The game didn t want us to have a plan, it wanted us to think on our feet. What happens when the pirate ship tilts, the tables slide, and suddenly Evan and his raccoon don t have access to the burners anymore? It s being able to quickly communicate and swap roles that let us conquer some of the game s harder stages, and when our communication broke down it was utter chaos.

I always knew things had gone horribly wrong when everyone stopped talking. The silence was often deafening as orders went unfilled and people haphazardly bumped into each other. These trainwrecks are part of the experience, but there are some ways Overcooked could better support players during the chaos. For one, every character wears a white chef s hat, making it hard to find myself at a glance, and I wish hats matched each player s shirt color. Another issue is that thresholds can be a little ambiguous I sometimes fell through the cracks between platforms on the ice and lava levels.

Off-line cook

In addition to the cat and the racoon, there s still an elephant in the kitchen we need to talk about: Overcooked doesn t have online play. Plenty of fantastic games are local only TowerFall Ascension and Gang Beasts are prime examples of that but it s still disappointing. The experience of reorganizing on the fly (read: frantically yelling at each other) probably wouldn t be the same over VoIP, but I wish I at least had the option.

Overcooked just isn t as much fun alone. Playing solo, you control two chefs which you can swap between, and chopping ingredients takes a lot longer than while playing multiplayer. This let me start chopping an onion with one chef, swap to the other to start another task, then swap back when the chopping was done. Instead of being about adapting to the level and sharing tasks, Overcooked becomes more like StarCraft a game of micro and finding the optimal order to complete those tasks.

It s a harder game, and a significantly more frustrating one with no one but yourself to blame for mistakes, but it s actually easier to progress while playing alone. The less people you have, the fewer points you need to reach two or three stars. So while you can get more done with four people, I often found it easier to reach three stars on a level with only one or two players because the bar was set so much lower. It felt like a cheap trick in order to progress when I was stuck, but everything seems simpler when there are fewer cooks in the kitchen.

With four players gathered around, Overcooked is hands down one of the best couch party games ever made. It s the perfect balance of chaos that can be conquered with skill. With two or three players, the game gets a little easier and much more strategic, with room to see what your doing and think about what needs to be done. With one, it s all about challenging yourself, and a lot of the whimsical fun of shouting at the screen is lost.

YouTube chap Limit Breakers recently wowed/shocked/disgusted us by replacing every Dark Souls 3 texture with crabs, and it appears he s at it again this time at the behest of viewers. After putting it to a vote and thereafter rounding up the most popular suggestions, Limit Breakers latest peculiar Dark Souls proclivity lets you swap out single textures from the action role-player for the likes of Shrek, the word Poise , and Hollywood star Nicolas Cage, among other equally bizarre characters and monikers.

Just some guy who likes taking dumb ideas to the limit, aptly reads the About page of the Limit Breakers channel, which evidently translates to something that looks like this:

With that, I can't help but wonder: why would someone be inclined to do this? Who knows, but in the event you d like to try it yourself, Limit Breakers has provided a handy how to guide.

When the crab video first surfaced, Andy suggested it might be some kind of psychological payback for a bad encounter a Great Crab in the past. Nic Cage and Shrek, on the other hand? Again, who knows. A strange Monday morning discovery, indeed.

An Australian senator has announced that he intends to introduce a bill defining Counter-Strike: Counter Offensive as gambling, thanks to its weapon skin trading system. In what looks to be a world first, independent senator Nick Xenophon will introduce the bill when the Australian federal parliament resumes next month.

Speaking to the Sydney Morning Herald, the senator said that Counter-Strike and similar games "purport to be one thing" while they're actually "morphing into full-on gambling and that itself is incredibly misleading and deceptive.

"This is the Wild West of online gambling that is actually targeting kids," Xenophon said.

According to the report, the legislation could make it illegal for Valve to solicit payments in exchange for items with different, or random, value. Or else, there could be legislated age requirements to play any game featuring a similar economy, or the requirement to warn of gambling related content.

Valve has only recently made meaningful steps to curb the fledgling but already very prolific skin gambling market. In a statement issued earlier this month, Valve made clear that it has no connection with any of the skin gambling sites that have emerged since they introduced in-game item trading.

"A number of gambling sites started leveraging the Steam trading system, and there's been some false assumptions about our involvement with these sites," the statement read. "We'd like to clarify that we have no business relationships with any of these sites. We have never received any revenue from them. And Steam does not have a system for turning in-game items into real world currency."

This statement was prompted by this month's CSGO Lotto scandal, which involved two high profile streamers failing to disclose their direct connection with the gambling site they were promoting. Valve sent cease and desist letters to over 20 skin gambling sites last month.

Of course chortle Deus Ex: Mankind Divided was already gold, given the overwhelming amount of the colour featured in both this game and its predecessor. But 'gold' is a term that here means ' the game is done', and it's very unlikely to suffer another delay like the one that pushed it from February into the mechanical hinterland of August.

The Deus Ex Tumblr announced the news, with a lovely photo of the development team, and a big gold arrow pointing to the tiny master disc that houses the game. If you need more Deus Ex and you can't wait until August 23, why not read our impressions of the first seven hours of the game, from this month's issue.