Last month, GTA Online introduced its three-part Doomsday Heist sequence with new objectives, rewards and toys to muck around with. Sam and Tom have since discussed the merits of flying cars, while the update also brought with it the Mammoth Thruster jetpack. 

The latter is now available in Grand Theft Auto 5's single player by way of jedijosh920's Jetpack SP mod. 

"The mission triggers at around 00:00," says jedijosh920 on the mod's GTA5-Mods page, "and if the weather is currently thunder storming and you are at Mount Chiliad." Ascertain this criteria and the Mammoth Thruster will automatically spawn in specific locations across Los Santos and beyond—such as Mount Chiliad and Fort Zancudo.

As the following footage shows, the jetpack's colour scheme, weapons and thrust capabilities can be customised as you see fit.

The mod's creator notes that the latest versions of ScriptHookV, ScriptHookVDotNet and NativeUI are required to run Jetpack SP, and also links to the following installation guide from YouTube person Swixtor:

Again, full information on jedijosh920's Jetpack SP mod can be found via its GTA5-Mods page. 

And while we're talking GTA, let me point you towards the PCG team's latest run in with Doomsday's water cannons. Follow that link to understand what's going on here:

The PC Gamer team is gradually working its way through GTA Online's newest Doomsday Heist. So far, it's a mix of pure elation when everything goes right, then disappointment when the game doesn't checkpoint and we're forced to clear out the same enemy-swarmed hangar twice because a glitch wouldn't let us finish a mission. On balance, though, we're coming out on the positive side, even if we feel like GTA's testing our resolve. And that's mainly because the vehicles and missions offer some of the best GTA we've ever played.

As ever with open world games, though, it's often more fun to ignore the objective and do your own thing. Some of The Doomsday Heist's best moments have surprisingly come in the setup parts, where you have to fetch a vehicle on a public server and deliver it to your facility, which is where the Doomsday Heist is activated. In act two, you have to head to an area near the beach in Los Santos, start a riot by throwing tear gas and punching pedestrians, then wait for the riot police to turn up and defuse the situation. This is when you steal the beefy Riot Control Vehicle and take it back to your facility, where it'll come in handy later on. 

It's a fun little mission, and it's nice that you can complete a set of GTA objectives without headshotting anyone. The best part, though, is that the riot van itself comes equipped with two water cannons, which can be controlled by members of your crew. In real life, of course, these things would be scary. But in GTA, it's very funny, because of the physics and animations. Here's myself and PCG's Phil Savage getting knocked over: 

This went on for about 10 very funny minutes, as we each took it in turns. The fun only came to an end when I accidentally drove the RCV onto the objective marker, completing the mission and putting the vehicle in storage, which was devastating. The whole thing reminded me of how fun it was to use the hose on the fire trucks in past GTAs, particularly 3, where knocking down pedestrians with it became a game in itself. Maybe I'll buy one when the heist is over.

If you've been considering gathering some friends to tackle the new heist, the elaborate new vehicles are worth it alone, in my opinion. We're about two thirds of the way in, and so far it's offered an impressive array of new stuff considering it's essentially a free update—from flying cars to the Avenger, a flying base with optional turrets, and more to come. For infrequent GTA Online players, all of these are worth trying once in their respective missions, even if you never plan to grind enough to own any, and they may even hint at what Rockstar has in mind for future GTAs.

The Red Strings Club is the next game from Deconstructeam—the studio behind 2014's unorthodox indie point-and-click adventure Gods Will Be Watching. Billed as a "cyberpunk narrative experience about fate and happiness" that features "extensive use of pottery, bartending and impersonating people on the phone to take down a corporate conspiracy", it sounds a wee bit out there. It's also now got a launch date: January 22. 

Here's the reveal trailer that arrived last October:

Similar to its forerunner, The Red Strings Club is set into the future with the player rebelling against dubious life-affecting technology. Here, Supercontinent Ltd are pedaling the Social Psyche Welfare—a system designed to eliminate depression. Before long, you uncover a "mysterious corporate program" within, and are forced to consider the meaning of happiness. 

As you might have spied, Jody wrote about The Red Strings Club's underdogs and weirdos earlier this week. Here's an excerpt from his impressions: 

When you're playing a transhumanist implant robot it's about matching upgrades to clients, figuring out whether enhancing someone's sex appeal or rendering them immune to the effect of internet comments will fix their problems. Once you've chosen an upgrade you spin up the lathe, put on a tune, and use the mouse to carve it out of biomatter. 

It's an unusual way of representing the process and honestly a bit fiddly, but trying to second guess which modification will actually solve humans' ridiculous problems is darkly funny. I could give this person everything they desire, or I could just block the part of their brain that makes them desire things. Tough choice.

The Red Strings Club is due January 22, 2018. More information can be gleaned from the game's Steam page. 

PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds has received another post-launch PC update that targets cheaters, performance issues and its new incoming crate system. 

At the end of 2017, PUBG hit three million concurrent players and simultaneously announced it has banned 1.5 million cheaters since Early Access launch last March. The latest PC update—live now on test servers, coming soon to live servers—aims to level the playing field further still by allowing players to report others directly from the game's replay function. 

"This means that you no longer need to be killed by a suspected cheater for you to be able to use the in-game reporting tool," so reads this Steam Community update, before suggesting catching unscrupulous players in the act should make it easier to remove them from the game.  

Elsewhere, the new update tests the game's new crate system with two new crates—one of which is free to open, and another which requires a key. Developer PUBG Corp says each test server will be given 100,000 BP and six Early Bird keys—"the new unified PUBG crate key that can open Desperado and Gamescom crates"—so that players can easily test the new crates and their contents. 

"Each time you spend BP to get a crate, you will get one of the 4 available crates," says the dev. "There will be a much higher chance of getting one of the two new ones. You can see the exact percentage values below. The BP value, the new items and the keys won’t be transferred to live accounts." 

PUBG Corp adds that these are granted for the purpose of testing, and that items are purely cosmetic and "provide no gameplay advantage."

Full patch notes for PUBG's latest PC update—which include its latest performance nips and tucks and bug fixes—can be found in this direction.

The first DLC for Assassin's Creed Origins (our vote for best open world game of 2017) is due out this month. Called The Hidden Ones, the expansion will add a new region to the already massive Egypt map, and today Ubisoft announced a few extras that will arrive alongside it:

• A new quest to celebrate the arrival of the first expansion, The Hidden Ones
• Update to the Heka chests item pool, which adds the items from the Nightmare and First Civilization packs, as well as the Gladiator and Wacky packs to the pool
• A new option to sell outfits at weaver shops

That's the free stuff. As for the expansion itself, which is included in the Season Pass (I don't yet see a price listed to buy it alone), it features Bayek fighting the Romans in the new map region as part of events that take place years after the story of Origins. The level cap will jump from 40 to 45, leaving you room to become an even more deadly assassin.

Players will also get another chance this month to fight Anubis (January 9-16) and Sobek (January 23-30) as the Trials of the Gods event returns.

The Hidden Ones will be followed up by the second DLC in March, called The Curse of the Pharaohs, in which Bayek will take on "famed Egyptian monsters."

2017 was a hard year for some high-profile singleplayer games, and there was more than a little hand-wringing that the genre as we know it might be dying, replaced by 'games as a service.' We argued that in fact they're not dying, just changing, but it's easy to look at Steam's highest earning games of 2017 and spot the commonalities. Free to play mechanics, skins and loot boxes and crates and keys, all play a major part in 'living' games like Rainbow Six: Siege,Warframe,PUBG and Dota 2. And then there's The Witcher 3, which doesn't have any of that shit. And it's still raking in the dough.

The Witcher 3 was released on May 19, 2015, almost four years to the day after The Witcher 2 first hit PC. By the end of summer, it had sold more than six million copies across PC and consoles. That was only a little surprising, because The Witcher 3 is an incredible game—it was good enough, and big enough, to lure in players who'd never touched the series before. A year later, CD Projekt put the final touches on the Blood & Wine expansion and a Game of the Year re-release. And that, a bit more surprisingly, was enough to make The Witcher 3 the second-best selling PC game on Steam in all of 2016.

In the year after its release, it made more money in gross revenue than the new Doom, Call of Duty: Black Ops 3, Stardew Valley, Rise of the Tomb Raider, and other huge games released in late 2015 and throughout 2016. That made The Witcher 3 a 'Platinum" seller. Valve jumbled the games in each tier, so it's hard to know exactly where The Witcher 3 ranked, but it was up there with Dark Souls 3 and Fallout 4 and The Division. Impressive legs, Geralt, but not truly shocking.

But here's what I just can't get over. Valve recently  put together another list of Steam's top 100 games, by gross revenue which covered 2017. And The Witcher 3 is still on it. And not just in the top 100. It's still in the platinum tier! Up there with Dota 2 and Rocket League and Warframe, which sell in-game items by the virtual truckload, and PUBG, which sold more than 20 million copies in 2017. 

No new expansion, no re-release. The Witcher 3 apparently doesn't need those things to keep selling. It's in that ludicrously elite tier of games now, along with the likes of Grand Theft Auto and Mario Kart, that simply keeps selling year after year. And who knows how well The Witcher 3 has sold on GOG, the platform that CD Projekt owns? 

For two and a half years, The Witcher 3 has held onto a spot as one of the PC's best selling games. And that's sure as hell not easy, but I do think the reasons for its success are simple: CD Projekt made one of the best RPGs of all time, and then immediately improved upon it with weeks of patches and free DLC, followed by two meaty, fairly priced expansions. Not every great singleplayer game will find that kind of success, of course. There's no guarantee that a new triple-A game, with no loot boxes or in-game stores or season passes will capture such a large audience.

But at a time when so many of us are sick of all those things, it's encouraging to know that 'games as a service' elements aren't the only way to keep players engaged, and to keep a game relevant, for years. For The Witcher 3, it was sheer quality.

Or maybe it was just the tub.

Tyler1, the infamously toxic League of Legends streamer who was hit with an indefinite ban in 2016 for "verbal abuse, intentional feeding, as well as account sharing/purchasing, evasion of sportsmanship systems, and player harassment," was recently reinstated by Riot. Today marked his official return to the game on Twitch, in full Draven cosplay with a Wonder Woman tiara, and it's fair to say quite a few people tuned in hoping for fireworks.

The concurrent viewer number is bouncing around, as they do, but at one point moved past 382,000. That's well off the overall record numbers—Twitch's E3 2017 coverage peaked at 1.1 million—but it absolutely crushes Faker's 245,000 concurrent viewer count set in early 2017, which was at the time a record for an individual streamer. In fact, Twitch just confirmed that Tyler1's return stream has set a new record for most concurrent viewers on an individual's channel.

It's also fair to say that these numbers are piling up more thanks to Tyler1's reputation for misbehavior than due to his LoL skills, impressive though they may be. Prior to his reinstatement, he was indirectly thrust back into the spotlight when developer Aaron "Riot Sanjuro" Rutledge was dismissed from Riot after predicting that Tyler1 will "die from a coke overdose or testicular cancer." That angry outburst was prompted by a redditor's request for Tyler1's return, prompting Rutledge to say, "I've spent many many hours of my work day dealing with his bullshit. if games had terrorists..." 

Nonetheless, the fans are in a forgiving mood.

Matt Makes Games founder Matt Thorson is best known for TowerFall: Ascension, a delightful co-op action platformer. Thorson's next game is Celeste, a self-described "hardcore mountain-climbing platformer" that's coming to Steam this month. 

Celeste stars Madeline, a young girl hellbent on reaching the summit of Celeste Mountain. To do so, she'll need to clear more than 600 screens of "hardcore platforming challenges and devious secrets," it seems. Celeste is an old-school platformer, after all, with one giant level broken into smaller stages. There are also "B-side" chapters to unlock, which offer yet more challenging stages. 

Thorson worked with developer Noel Berry on Celeste. Berry has designed numerous flash games in his time, and also helped Thorson create Celeste Classic, a free flash-based prototype which you can play here. (Pro tip: jump with X and dash with C, and don't forget you can dash upward.) 

Although unreleased, Celeste was nominated for Excellence in Audio in this year's Independent Games Festival awards. Its Steam page boasts it will have more than two hours of original music. 

Update: In a tweet, Devolver Digital confirmed that this Steam sale is being held in conjunction with charitable speedrunning organization Games Done Quick. Devolver says they'll donate 10 percent of the sale's revenue to GDQ.

GDQ recently kicked off Awesome Games Done Quick 2018, a week-long speedrun marathon dedicated to breaking videogames every way possible and raising money for the Prevent Cancer Foundation. 

Original story:

Publisher Devolver Digital is running a quick Steam sale to ring in the new year. A handful of good indies are on sale through Monday, January 15, including gratuitous violence simulator Hotline Miami and contemplative puzzler The Talos Principle. Here's the full list: 

•  Titan Souls - $4 at 75 percent off 
•  Broforce - $4 at 75 percent off 
•  Serious Sam 3: BFE - $8 at 80 percent off 
•  Serious Sam: The Random Encounter - $1 at 80 percent off 
•  High Hell - $5 at 50 percent off  
•  Omnibus - $3 at 75 percent off 
•  Hotline Miami - $3 at 75 percent off 
•  Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number - $4 at 75 percent off 
•  The Talos Principle - $8 at 80 percent off (the DLC-filled Gold Edition is $11 at 85 percent off) 

You'll also find some good discounts in GOG's New Year's Resolution sale, which started earlier today and runs through January 15. The first day's 'resolutions' (read: recommendations) are mostly meaty RPGs like Divinity: Original Sin 2 and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, and there's a good indie presence thanks to other games like Torchlight and Legend of Grimrock. 

If diligently cleaning the streets of Nazis in Wolfenstein 2 hasn’t quite sated your appetite, and you also think that cats are probably evil, then Rise of the Wool Ball and its predecessor, Shadow of the Wool Ball, might be just what you’re craving. The pair of Doom mods are filled with fascist felines and Doom, Wolfenstein and Rise of the Triad-inspired maps. 

Slap your eyes on the video below if you’ve got a completely understandable grudge against cats. 

Though it’s obviously a complete overhaul of Doom with a dramatically different, extremely effective cartoon style, all three of its inspirations bleed through pretty clearly, especially in the level design. But there’s plenty of weirdness too: telekinetic sheep, hedgehog heroes, cucumber-launching guns and lots of adorable animals that need to be rescued from their kitty captors.

To play Rise of the Wool Ball’s 6 levels, you’ll need to get GZDoom first, then just chuck the mod in the GZDoom directory and you’ll be able to play. If you fancy playing the first mod as well, you’ll also need a Doom 2 WAD file.   

Cheers, RPS.