With only a month remaining until FIFA 19 is released in September, the countdown to kickoff has well and truly begun. There have been a number of leaks in recent weeks from the closed beta (this is FIFA after all), and although many greatly anticipate the newest chapter in the series, others have asked whether EA is really listening to community requests. Much of the discontent revolves around career mode, which fans feel has been neglected in recent years.

At this year's Gamescom, I sat down with associate producer Sam Rivera and creative director Matt Prior to discuss all things FIFA, and ask some of the community's burning questions. Yes, including what's happening with career mode.

I thought I'd start with a really important question. Jesse Lingard's been complaining about his haircut on social media, he wants it changed and said it's been a few years since it's been updated. Will you be changing Jesse's haircut?

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I didn't realise, until I started playing The Messenger last week, that I had started to see this kind of game as a bit of a chore. The kind of game I'm talking about is the rigorously observed reconstruction of an 8-bit style of gaming, right down to the limited colours, three-slot save system and chugging, popping, tweeting sound effects. And I only realised I had started to see all this as a chore because I found I was surprised, an hour or so in, to be enjoying myself so much.

I am still a bit confused about it all, to be honest. I don't think it's the games I've played that have put me off. I loved Retro City Rampage, which managed to reimagine a modern open-world adventure for the era of the NES, and since then I have happy memories of a handful of similarly styled platformers and Castlevania knock-offs. They do start to blend a little, though, once they're left in the memory: I'm left with a generalised sense of artful glitches and anachronistic leetspeak.

And then, I guess, my own associations come in to muddle everything further. We're venerating these games rather than trying to do new things, we're making a brief period of gaming into a golden age at the expense of the present and, with that, focusing on a handful of attributes - difficulty, ninjas - and in some way limiting what games are.

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Developer Yacht Club Games has revealed Showdown, the fourth and final DLC for its excellent 8-bit-inspired platformer Shovel Knight - and it's a 2D multiplayer brawler.

Showdown was originally mentioned back in 2013, as part of Shovel Knight's Kickstarter campaign. At the time, Yacht Club's fourth and final stretch goal was simply described as a "4 Player Battle Mode", but now we know more.

As has consistently been the case with Yacht Club's Shovel Knight post-base-game offerings, Showdown is gearing up to be considerably more involved than its early description might suggest. Showdown, it turns out, is a fully feature local multiplayer brawler, pitting four players against each other across a range of stages, and a variety of modes.

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Developer WashBear Studio has announced that Parkasaurus, its breezy dinosaur theme park management sim, will be heading to Steam Early Access next month, on Tuesday, September 25th.

Inspired by the classic likes of DinoPark Tycoon and Theme Park, Parkasaurus tasks players with managing their own prehistorically-flavoured amusement park.

Unlike, say, Frontier's recent and rather rigid Jurassic World Evolution, however, you've full control over your Parkasaurus park, and have access to a range of tools enabling you to properly plan and lay out your creation - even constructing and customising individual exhibits - to ensure that paying guests and your dinosaur inhabitants remain happy.

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Capcom has announced a remaster of Onimusha: Warlords, due out on PC via Steam, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One on 15th January 2019. In Europe, the game is download-only across all platforms.

Onimusha: Warlords, a sword-based action game set in feudal Japan, first launched in 2001 on PS2 and went on to sell over two million copies.

This new version includes a raft of new features, such as high-definition graphics, widescreen support and new display options (you can switch between 4:3 and 16:9 at any time in-game). There's a screen scroll feature for widescreen display, where the background scrolls up and down according to your movements. This shows areas that can't be fully displayed from certain positions, Capcom said.

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A strange one indeed, this. Rebellion's efforts tend to be admirably direct in their titling - Zombie Army, Sniper Elite, Rogue Warrior, all games that serve up exactly what it says on the tin - and so it is with Strange Brigade, an all-new IP that is more than a little odd. What if the Zombie Army formula was transposed from the fuzzy VHS of a straight-to-video schlocky spin on World War 2 to the high-spirited world of 30s serials? What if Indiana Jones, but with a Path voiceover and a heavy dose of colonial derring do washing over that sense of innocent adventure? Best not linger on that last point too long - it seems that not many at Rebellion have, anyway.

Still, if this studio has forged a reputation for anything over the past few years, it's for making big, dumb and - more often than not - enjoyable action games. Strange Brigade takes the straight-to-the-point gunplay of Zombie Army and throws in its own kinks, doubling down on the co-op - the campaign can be soloed, or opened up to friends or strangers to play alongside you - and sprinkling the lightest amount of strategy atop the shooting.

And so you have four characters (five if you include the pre-order bonus, of course), all loosely drawn from some dusty archetypes, and all with their own particular traits. There's Frank, the thick-skinned and hard-edged veteran! De Quincey, the magician who can absorb souls readily and is a dab hand at sourcing secrets! Gracie, a Rosie the Riveter repro who's good with her fists and will remind you at every given opportunity - and a few more besides - that she's a no-nonsense Lancashire lass. And then there's Nalangu, the spirit warrior who can draw upon the supernatural as she draws health from the recently deceased.

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Yesterday, seemingly out of nowhere, a mysterious page of code appeared on CD Projekt Red's Twitch channel. After a few hours of anxious waiting, fans were rewarded with gameplay footage from Cyberpunk 2077, giving us our first extended look at what we can expect from the open world action role-playing adventure.

The demo, which was originally shown to media at E3 and Gamescom, is now available for all to view on YouTube - and in 4K too, if you want to experience the full glory of that shiny cyberpunk rain. It's a whole 48 minutes of first-person shooter action and a truly gritty introduction to life in the Cyberpunk 2077 universe. (NSFW warning: there's nudity, swearing and of course violence in the demo.)

From what's been shown, Cyberpunk 2077 has some impressive world-building: Night City is a bustling, grim world that's the perfect backdrop for sinister storylines and brutal combat.

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Surprise! 24 years after the last Streets of Rage game came out, Streets of Rage 4 has been announced.

The beat 'em up is a co-production from Lizardcube, the developer of 2017's Wonder Boy: The Dragon's Trap remake, Guard Crush Games, maker of Streets of Fury, and publisher Dotemu (Wonder Boy, Windjammers), under an official licence from Sega. Specifically, Lizardcube is working on the new hand-drawn visuals.

We don't know much about the game yet, but we do have the announcement trailer, below, which shows off brief snippets of gameplay. Here's the official blurb:

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Thought the loot boxes drama was over? Think again, as the saga continues with the news Blizzard will remove paid loot boxes from its games in Belgium.

In an official post on Blizzard's forums, the company announced paid loot boxes will be removed from Overwatch and Heroes of the Storm in reaction to the Belgian Gaming Commission's report in April, which classed Overwatch's loot boxes as gambling and therefore illegal.

"While we at Blizzard were surprised by this conclusion and do not share the same opinion, we have decided to comply with their interpretation of Belgian law," the company stated. "As a result, we have no choice but to implement measures that will prevent Overwatch and Heroes of the Storm players located in Belgium from purchasing in-game loot boxes and loot chests with real money and gems".

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I love the football in PES 2019. Not the game of football, the actual football. There's an impressive realism to the way it moves, the way it bobbles along the grass after a pass, the way it spits out of a tackle in some random direction, the way a low driven through ball skims across the pitch like the Tokyo to Kyoto Bullet Train kisses the track, the way it spins like a planet in fast forward after a wallop from the outside of your striker's boot, the way it pulverises the back of the net - which, by the way, is much improved this year - rolls out of the goal, is scooped up by your striker and hurriedly carried to the centre circle, the comeback now on.

PES 2019's football demands respect. Unlike FIFA's football, which often feels like the asinine, laser-guided result of some complex equation scrawled onto a sphere on the end of a string or, you know, a pinball in a pinball machine, PES 2019's football has soul. If Konami's development wizards have mastered anything over the course of the 20-odd years they've spent making football video games, it is how to give a virtual football a weight and a presence not just felt on-screen, but in your hands. Kicking the thing takes more than a button press - it takes a force of will.

I love the animations in PES 2019. I love the way goalkeepers explode into a dive, flapping at a shot that looks like it's already passed them only for a hand to turn the ball around the post at the last millisecond. The chip shots - oh, PES 2019's chip shots! - are a joy, a soup on of Lionel Messi and a smidgen of Davor Šuker. Outside of the boot flicks, for shots, for crosses and for no-look passes, are as effortless in PES 2019 as Rom rio made them look at the 1994 World Cup.

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