Often, I think “surely we are now at Peak Character Customisation.” The freaks and geeks of Saint’s Row or Black Desert seem to have pushed things about as far as they can go without entirely breaking – a dizzying range of choice and absurdity, only hinted at in the days when we believed City of Heroes’ dressing up tool was a revelation.

I never expected Tekken 7 [official site] – a fighting game, of all things – to be the game that made the joke funny all over again. From Sexy Skeletor to three-foot hair to Murderous Bird-Jocks to Regency Mech-Deer to Cath Kidston Badass, tailoring Tekken 7’s brawlers is an absolute delight. It is also the real game>. … [visit site to read more]

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

Perhaps the reason the rights to make a No One Lives Forever game are permanently stuck in limbo is because everyone keeps looking for them under ‘N’, forgetting that the name by which everyone refers to this fabbo FPS was only ever the post-colon tagline. … [visit site to read more]

John has been writing these charts for just a few weeks and already he’s had to book a week off in order to recover. I am made of more sterling stuff, and while he’s gone it falls to me to share the details of which games sold the best last week on Steam.

… [visit site to read more]

The early stages of Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus [official site] show the same blood, guts and heart that were key to the first game’s success. Described by Bethesda’s Pete Hines as fucking bananas , it’s a game of extremes, but it’s the care that it shows for its characters and setting that stand out as unique in the field of alt-history Nazi war-shooters. Alongside the silliness, the gore and the pulp fiction roots, there’s a core concern for humanity and its loss.

… [visit site to read more]

Real talk: the only opinions I’m capable of having right now are related to ice creams that will see me through the UK’s unfamiliar hot weather. That’s why my emotions towards Rebellion’s next game, Strange Brigade [official site] are pretty much just “WHY ARE YOU NOT AN ICE CREAM?” Instead of being a delicious Twister, Strange Brigade is determined to be a third-person adventure thingy for 1-4 players set in a 1930s explorer kind of world. It’s all ancient evil and dirigibles and Egyptology and British Empire this and that. Aesthetically it reminds me of films like The Mummy – the one with Brendan Fraser, not the reboot with Tom Cruise which is confusing me every time I pass the local cinema – or the Tintin comics from around the 1930s. Maybe even a ’50s rendition of the ’30s? … [visit site to read more]

Modern warfare is so pass . As video game trends turn again, the Call of Duty series is off back to World War 2, Battlefield is currently larking about in World War 1, and Electronic Arts have dug up an old game from the previous WW2 fad (whose dying embers lit the inferno of the modern warfare craze). 2004 first-person shooter Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault is free right now through Origin, letting all and sundry romp around battles from the Pacific Theatre. … [visit site to read more]

An unconventional form of weekly challenge run is coming to Diablo 3 [official site] with the introduction of Challenge Rifts in the next big patch, Blizzard have announced. Every week, Challenge Rift players will play through the exact same Greater Rift with the same character and item build – a character copied from an actual player’s account. Challengers will take on the same Rift with the same build originally used to beat it. It’s an interesting idea which might force players into some unconventional play styles. I dig that! And the reward for beating the original player’s time? Loot, obvs, and bragging rights. Have a look: … [visit site to read more]

For a few horrible minutes during E3, it looked like Bethesda might seriously claim that The Elder Scrolls and Fallout were part of the same universe. Thankfully, not. Despite this being an era where Sony wants a Ghostbusters universe and Universal thinks demeaning the Universal Monsters by linking them with a top-sekrit monstah hunting group led by Dr Jekyll is anything other than schoolboy fan-fiction, Bethesda’s Pete Hines has been quick to go “What? No. No! No…>” Phew! Honestly, it’s bad enough that Daggerfall has six endings, ranging from the villain becoming a god to orcs being either defeated or victorious, and canonically all of them are true.>

But at a time when we’re seriously asked to pretend that “Dark Universe” is a thing we should want to see, that unholy union really wasn’t impossible…

… [visit site to read more]

Take-Two’s lawyers have shut down three cheats for GTA Online, Kotaku report, and their makers are donating their ill-gotten gains to charity. Cheats offered by the trio of Force Hax, Lexicon, and Menyoo in the multiplayer side of Grand Theft Auto V [official site] variously include free cash, invulnerability, spawning vehicles and objects, superpowers like flight and superspeed, spamming big bags of cash, and forcing other players to do things. A real sack of dickbaggery.

These cheat shutdowns come shortly after The Suits killed popular GTA modding tool OpenIV, supposedly for enabling cheating in multiplayer. Rockstar haven’t said how this singleplayer tool enabled online cheating, so the explanation is still confusing, but it’s good that The Suits are cracking down on actual recognised cheats too. … [visit site to read more]

Colour Clash [itch.io page] is a little game about firing projectiles to make artworks. There’s a Missile Command-ness where you’re using limited reserves to stop these alien blobs from reaching the ground, but here it’s more about the visual effect you’re creating in tandem with staving off the swarm. When you’re done the level is presented to you as an artwork and your high score is presented as the number of visitors it’s had. … [visit site to read more]