Good news, Plunkchums: both the old island and the new desert maps are now live in the test version of Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds. Both Erangel and Miramar, to use their real names, are on the test servers all the way through the Battle Royale ’em up’s exit from early access on December 20th. Previous tests have only had one or the other. The game will randomly select a map when each match begins, as there’s (currently?) no official way to select one. I don’t want to quit the test servers because it feels so much more like a finished game (well, except for the lag and crashes) but I have missed Erangel a bit so grand, mix it up and let’s go. (more…)

The Game Awards and its accompanying news orgy are over and everyone is settling back into normal life with a low-burning sense of shame. That sweaty night of news saw the announcement of sword-slashing fighting game Soul Calibur VI and its upcoming PC debut. We only saw some cinematic swordicuffs between staple characters Mitsurugi and Sophitia but some PlayStation salesmen have now shown more of the stabbing n jabbing in an interview with producer Motohiro Okubo. It s mostly fluffy talk filled with mild sycophancy but it does give a better idea of what players will see and do, including a reversal mechanic. (more…)

I like the boat-centric Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag so much that I just went and added it to Uplay even though I already own it Steam. That’s right: an Asscreed I dig enough to voluntarily load up Uplay. Last week, Ubisoft were giving away the tragically de-Steamed RTS World in Conflict, and, as we promised then, here’s your nudge about this week’s Festivus freebie.

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This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the difficult journeys they underwent to make the best bits of their games. This time, Quadrilateral Cowboy [official site].

Quadrilateral Cowboy is a firstperson puzzle game about a group of hacker friends who stage heists across a set of increasingly challenging missions. Together they tell a surprising and affecting story of professionalism, friendship and rising threat through Blendo Games distinctive tight cutting between interactive scenes, flipping the action from a hoverbike chase to the gang s return to their hideout. It s clever, pacy, and rich in detail and nuance. Pretty much, in other words, what you d expect from Blendo Games.

But it s not what Blendo Games – which is to say, Brendon Chung – expected to make. Quadrilateral Cowboy s entire structure and form is completely different to what he originally envisaged. The way in which his game changed over the course of its development is a model for how a game is shaped by the realities of production, and how ideas can be far too big for their own good. (more…)

Let’s be clear: Normal Human Face Simulator is not a game about eating your friend’s face. No, that would be weird. In this new free local multiplayer game, after you’ve lunged forward, latched onto your mate’s cheek with your teeth and gnawed down through the flesh to reveal the muscle then bone underneath, you let the strip of flesh fall from your teeth to the floor. You’re simply trying to bite their face off while they try to bite your face off until one of you succumbs to bloodloss – a gesture of normal human friendship. (more…)

For a wireless gaming headset, the Steelseries Siberia 800 sure does come with a lot of cables. Open up the box and you’d be forgiven for thinking you’ve bought the wrong headphones, as there’s a whole other mini box crammed inside it with more cables than you know what to do with. This is mostly because, unlike a lot of wireless headsets, the Siberia 800 uses a dedicated transmitter box that can be connected to a variety of different devices instead of a traditional USB dongle. Don’t get me wrong, it still feels like a slap in the face when the whole point of wireless headphones is to get rid> of said wires, but there is method to this cable-hogging madness.

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This time last year Piranha Games announced MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries would release in 2018, but we haven’t heard much about the game since. Until now. At last weekend’s Mech_Con, developer Piranha Games revealed MechWarrior 5 will feature four-player co-op as well as full modding and Steam Workshop support. They also revealed MW5 is due to launch in December 2018. Only a full year to wait!

The newly announced four-player co-op allows players to add up to three friends into their campaign universe, from there you can can embark on missions as a mean-machine unit of savage mercenaries – and probably Dave from accounting. (more…)

You Must Be 18 Or Older To Enter is a fine free horror game for the digital age, a tale of looking at pornography for the first time and fearing your parents will catch you.Logging onto AOL, we click through porn sites showing murky ASCII art porn while jumping at every creaking door and passing car. It is good horror, Olivia White and our Brendan have previously told you and I’ll third that. It is also, supposedly according to Valve’s standards, pornographic. Valve have pulled the game from their store and oh, that’s so daft. One of the game’s creators has written a good response to this, using the opportunity to call for us all to break the cycle stifling unconventional games. (more…)

We should have seen this coming. Job Simulator devs Owlchemy Labs have announced Vacation Simulator, which brings the slapstick VR work ’em up to Vacation Island. Job Simulator was all about trying and failing to perform mundane tasks while being jeered at by robots, so Vacation Simulator will probably be about trying and failing to relax while being jeered at by robots. Don’t confuse that with the non-existent Vatican Simulator, which this news post was almost all about thanks to a typo.

You can soak up some virtual rays in the trailer below.

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This door really swings.

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