Valve have reversed some of their recent changes to Steam user reviews. Most notably, they’ve made store pages once again include all reviews, no matter how players obtained the game. Some developers we’d spoken to were concerned that excluding people who had got games by activating Steam keys – by backing Kickstarters, buying in other stores, and so on – could harm them by making their games seem worse and less popular. But some devs were glad for the change, an attempt by Valve to crack down on fake reviews. Well, now all reviews are once again shown by default, though overall ‘scores’ will ignore reviews from key copies.

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The Crew is free this month from Ubisoft, just two years on from its release. Back then it received mixed reviews. But free is free, and the size of the game s open world a huge recreation of the United States is intriguing enough to entice Adam and Brendan to revisit the racer with a challenge in mind. Who can get from East coast to the West coast the fastest? Ready, set, go.

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In case you’ve not picked up on all the hints: Devil Daggers [official site] is my favourite new game of 2016, and I’d say the best-looking game in yonks too. Devil Daggers is Geometry Wars thrown against a satanic altar in a darkened room made of Quake [see me -metaphors ed.]>. I do recognise a leaderboard-climbing first-person shooter in skull-filled satanarena is a hard sell for some so here, look, it’s in the latest pay-what-you-want Humble Bundle along with Prison Architect and more games. Maybe that makes it cheap enough for you to give it a try?

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This is the second part in a six part series on the French games collective Klondike. This second article focuses on one of the ten members of the collective: Delphine Fourneau. Find out more about Delphine at dziff.com and follow her on twitter. Download her most recent game, Sacramento, right now.>

Delphine and Gib meet me at Lille Europe. I almost walk into them, largely because I m slightly dazed by the fact I d gotten to the other side of another actual country quicker and cheaper than it would have taken me to get halfway up my own. Delphine gives me a huge smile and as we make our way to Porte d Arras on the Metro, speaks to me about the area; expressive with her body language when she feels like her English won t suffice. I trace place names on the Metro map familiar to me from famous cycling races as we move towards the northwest border with Belgium.

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Oh my God, the Ladyvikings are awesome>. … [visit site to read more]

Heart shoulders knees and guts(Knees and guts)Heart shoulders knees and gutsAnd jaw and brain and liver and noseHeart shoulders knees and guts(Knees and guts)

That’s a handy song to help you remember which bodybits get shot, stabbed, punched, kneed, ruptured, shattered, and exploded in slow-motion internal views in the first ‘gameplay’ trailer for Sniper Elite 4 [official site].

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I’ve always had a soft spot for the first two Dead Rising [official site] games. Soft spots are the second cousins of nostalgia, and similarly mean that I’ll happily make concessions for a series’ flaws. The Dead Rising games have rudimentary combat, horrible time limits, and dodgy AI, but I forgive them because the brutal absurdism of the series has always tickled me (except for the grimy, obnoxious third game). I’ll happily jump in just to save a couple of survivors, and while I’d get angry whenever I lost 20 minutes of progress because I died and forgot to save, I’d be all smiles again as soon as I encountered the next eccentric boss.

It’s been a long time now since the original first came out, and I wonder whether the passage of time has atrophied a game whose systems and mechanics already felt unwieldy ten years ago. And with the super-similar but generally superior sequel already out on PC for a quid less, is there even a need to go back to the original?

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Is this a ‘meme’? Another car game has added a DeLorean DMC-12. Are you ‘memeing’ on me? It is mighty strange that two games are so interested in an obscure failed car. Am I being ‘trolled’? Even more strange is that this one comes heavily modded with sci-fi pipes and lights, just as Rocket League’s DeLorean is. Are you ‘trolls’? The newest Car Mechanic Simulator 2015 [official site] DLC lets us discover what really makes a DeLorean tick, and I don’t know what’s happening. Are you all ‘Beadling’ me?

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

Much of the praise for horror series Silent Hill is directed at its second entry Silent Hill 2. I m not sure it was entirely understood when first released in late 2001, however it s since become a marker against which psychological horror games are judged. Silent Hill 4: The Room [Wikipedia page], on the other hand, isn t discussed nearly as much but it s arguably the scariest game in the series.

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Mate, no wonder cybergoggles didn’t bring an overnight revolution: they weren’t in the shops here. Digital distribution is great for games but you can’t download goggles, can you? Think it through, yeah? No one’s going to pay a few hundred quid for an e-mail with a small picture of a black plastic box. What kind of mug do they take us for?

At long last, Oculus Rift is now officially in Europe as something you can touch with your face. The physical edition is now in shops in boxes, and a fair few places are hosting demos so you can try jacking your face in.

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