The former Criterion folks at Three Fields Entertainment are renewing their commitment to smashes, crashes, bashes, and explosions next week in Danger Zone 2. It’s a sequel to their 2017 arcade smash ’em up, which did involve driving cars but was most certainly not about racing. Riffing heavily on Crash mode from Criterion’s Burnout 3: Takedown, it has us smash through traffic and power-ups to score megapoints – pinball where we’re the ball. While the first game caused spectacular crashes inside bland concrete boxes, the sequel is stretching its legs and getting some fresh air everywhere from LAX airport to English motorways complete with caravans. (more…)

ArenaNet have fired two Guild Wars 2 writers for tweets they made this past week. In doing so, they’ve thrown their lot in with players and harassers who make unreasonable demands of game developers. Good work, ArenaNet. Let’s start at the beginning.

On July 3rd, Jessica Price wrote an interesting Twitter thread about the challenges of writing compelling player characters in MMORPGs. In response to one of those tweets, Guild Wars 2 YouTuber and ArenaNet content partner ‘Deroir’ responded to disagree and argue in favour of branching dialogue. On July 4th, Price quote-tweeted Deroir’s response, correctly connecting it to the all-too common situation of women game developers being condescended on Twitter. (more…)

We’ve just passed the half-way point of 2018, so Ian Gatekeeper and all his fabulously wealthy chums over at Valve have revealed which hundred games have sold best on Steam over the past six months. It’s a list dominated by pre-2018 names, to be frank, a great many of which you’ll be expected, but there are a few surprises in there.

2018 releases Jurassic World Evolution, Far Cry 5 Kingdom Come: Deliverance and Warhammer: Vermintide II are wearing some spectacular money-hats, for example, while the relatively lesser-known likes of Raft, Eco and Deep Rock Galactic have made themselves heard above the din of triple-A marketing budgets. (more…)

Nearly every night, I do the ‘should I play more Slay The Spire‘ dance. The cons: I wind up feeling guilty about not spending my free time trying something new, such as any of the half-dozen games I bought in the Steam Sale. The pros: it’s always satisfying, and there’s nearly always something that makes each run uniquely interesting.

That’s largely thanks to the devs adding something new to their roguelike deckbuilder nearly every Friday. Today’s early access update is a little beefier than usual, chucking in ten new relics and a special event where a six-armed entity offers you a new face. (more…)

The ‘Playground’ sandbox mode that’s currently seeing players cover Fortnite Battle Royale in everything from Mario Kart-esque trolley-racing tracks to elaborate pranks is only temporary, but Epic are already planning to bring it back and dreaming bigger. They’re talking about having a “full creative mode” eventually, taking it weirdly full circle to the days when Fortnite was more of a Minecraftbut than a battle royale megastar. This is a long-term plan, mind, but in the more immediate future Epic plan to add support for teams in a future Playground. (more…)

There’s a frightening invisible monster at large in my corner of Wiltshire at the moment. It can kill you with a single touch and is completely indiscriminate when it comes to selecting victims. Should I pick up and bin that rubber glove that someone has discarded next to my front gate, or incinerate it with a gout of flame from my butane-fuelled weed burner? I just don’t know. Lionising pillars of the Flight Simulator community and writing about Tiger-stuffed tank games feels like a walk in the park totally safe in comparison. (more…)

To fully defox the following enlargeable geofoxer, identify all twelve locations plus the theme that links them. (more…)

Kotaro Uchikoshi, the director of the first and third Zero Escape games, has revealed his next murderous mystery during Spike Chunsoft’s panel at Anime Expo 2018. AI: The Somnium Files is a visual novel adventure doodad about a detective with a roboeye who will travel into people’s memories as he hunts a serial killer. The game is still largely under wraps, but apparently a core theme is “different types and expressions of love”. And a teenaged YouTuber is involved somehow. No word yet on when AI will launch, so for now check out the announcement trailer below. (more…)

You have no idea how nice it is to finally be able to write about Shenmue again. While my nostalgia for both games will undoubtedly be shattered entirely when the Shenmue I & II collection releases on PC next month, I’m savouring every bit of it I can in the meantime. The aforementioned collection is one of the best PC gaming deals of the week, conveniently enough, though there’s a whole lot more to look through, so let’s do that right now.

As usual, we ve got deals that ll work in the UK, deals that ll work in the US and some deals that will work in both the UK and US, as well as presumably many other places. Let s get started.

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Four queer misfits living in a small desert town, making ends meet and trying to keep ahead of the half-witted fascist gangs that roam the streets. It’s a simple enough and very contemporary story… Right up until you get to the sun disappearing, the town being somewhere in the ‘Hellzone’ and the fist-fights using giant biomechanical meat-mecha. Welcome to Extreme Meatpunks Forever, an upcoming visual novel (with some realtime, low-fi robo brawling). The trailer is below.

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