When you re working on annual iterative titles, it is difficult, says Miles Jacobson, Studio Director at Sports Interactive. You re always going to get people turning around saying you haven t added anything. And no matter how much you add, you re still going to get people saying that.

That s the challenge that the Football Manager series faces every year. It remains, as it always will be, a game about being a football manager. It will always be about selecting a team to manage, creating tactical systems, crafting squads of players and sending them out onto virtual pitches in the pursuit of glory. And it will always, to quote SI s Director of Development Marc Duffy, aim to achieve suspension of disbelief in the player s mind.

The question then, as with all annual series, is the extent to which the game advances on its predecessors. In the case of Football Manager 2019, the studio is bullish about their ambitions for this year s release. (more…)

The dramatic clotheslines, hairlines, and plotlines of the world’s second-best soap opera (after Sunset Beach, obvs) have slammed ito PC once again, as WWE 2K19 launched this morning. 2K’s official licensed take on sports entertainment might not be the most technical wrassle ’em up (look more to Fire Pro Wrestling for that) but it is the shiniest, and not just cos 2K hose their sports games with high-tech sweat. If you want hundreds of WWE folks recreated in fancyvision, not forgetting making your monstrosities in the character creator, this is the shiniest option around. And it sounds like this year’s game is pretty deece – if you aren’t hit by the bugs some players are reporting.

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The latest Half-Life mod to resurface, repacked and polished on Steam is Halfquake Trilogy – defining ‘masocore’ well before I Wanna Be The Guy made it a genre. Halfquake is a trilogy of surreal and cruel puzzle-centric mods by Philipp “Muddasheep” Lehner and they’re some of the most interesting maps produced for the original Half-Life. Featuring striking, abstract environments, genuinely clever puzzles, some very stupid ones and enough deathtraps to wear the ink off your quicksave key. They’re worth playing, if just to test the water and your tolerance for pain.

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CD Projekt Red today announced an interesting partnership today with small studio Digital Scapes, with initial plans for them to work on upcoming mega-budget immersive sim Cyberpunk 2077. Digital Scapes recently made some waves through their work on Dying Light‘s surprisingly entertaining asymmetrical PvP mode while Techland focused on the single-player side of the game.

Tempting as that sounds, the announcement says that Digital Scapes will “closely cooperate with CD Projekt Red on creating and optimising technological solutions for use in the development of Cyberpunk 2077”. Delightfully vague – that doesn’t mean a possible multiplayer bonus mode is entirely off the cards, but don’t go getting your hopes up – it’s interesting to speculate on, though.

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What would you do in HAL 9000’s position? Beyond venting everyone into space, I mean – that’s the question that Observation looks to be posing. Announced today and due out early next year, it’s a sci-fi thriller from No Code, creators of the excellent Stories Untold. Similar to their previous game, it’s an adventure where you’re cleverly limited in your interaction with the world. In Stories Untold it was because you were using mechanical and computer interfaces – in Observation, it’s because you’re a space station AI. Check out the debut trailer below, hosted by IGN.

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Microsoft are the latest to hop on the game-streaming bandwagon, announcing Project xCloud today on the Microsoft Blog – a way to beam Xbox games direct to any device with a fast internet connection. While currently only in internal testing, Microsoft are rolling Xbox One hardware out to Azure datacenters around the world. While Microsoft recommend an Xbox controller (broadly supported via bluetooth), they’re working on alternative control setups for other devices, including touchscreens and (presumably) our more humble, less beefy PCs.

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Intel lifted the lid on their 9th Gen desktop processors this afternoon, giving us a glimpse of what’s coming next after their current crop of 8th Gen Coffee Lake chips. Leading the pack is their flagship Intel Core i9-9900K, an 8-core, 16-thread CPU that can Turbo Boost all the way up to 5.0GHz.

However, the news comes little over a week after Intel’s CFO and interim CEO Bob Swan issued an open letter to customers and partners warning of an imminent CPU shortage due to increasing “pressure on [Intel’s] factory network.” If you’re thinking about building a PC any time soon, you might want to grab one of Intel’s current Coffee Lake processors now instead (or, indeed, one of AMD’s rather good Ryzen+ CPUs) before they disappear for the foreseeable future.

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On paper, the Acer Predator X27 should be the bestest best gaming monitor to end all gaming monitors. It’s got the same lovely 4K 144Hz IPS Nvidia G-Sync HDR panel with 384 dynamic backlight zones and 1000cd/m2 peak brightness as the Asus ROG Swift PG27UQ, but in the UK it costs 200 less than its Asus rival. That might not be of much consolation to anyone in the US, where both G-Sync HDR monitors cost a hoofing identical $2000 apiece, but when you’re asked to choose between spending 2300 and 2100 for exactly the same panel (and I mean exactly> the same), I know which one I’d rather choose – especially when the latter doesn’t bombard you with an LED light show packed into its stand.

There is, however, a small problem (all right, a few small problems). For starters, it still costs $2000 / 2100. As I said in my Asus PG27UQ review, I could probably justify spending a grand on a fancy monitor like this (just) – I would definitely spend as much on a fancy Ultra HD Premium TV with HDR and 1000cd/m2 brightness – but more than double that? On yer bike, mate. Even if I did> have that amount of money, though, I just couldn’t get the Predator X27 to do HDR levels of brightness and> HDR levels of colour, which absolutely isn’t> what you want from a two grand+ monitor. Here’s how I got on.

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It only feels right to call the bikes in Steel Rats ‘choppers’, considering that their front wheels are also saw-blades, ideal for grinding through robots, letting players climb vertical walls and even adhere to ceilings. Tate Multimedia’s offbeat vehicular platformer is nearly ready to roll out, and launches on November 7th.

I played a bit of Steel Rats earlier this year at Rezzed. While I was only just getting a handle on its controls by the end of my demo run, it felt good. It borrows some bits from the likes of Excite Bike and Trials, but assembles them into something fresh. Below, a developer diary with a bit of game footage – make sure you turn on subtitles if you don’t speak Polish.

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“Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven,” Satan once wrote on a toilet door, back before he was ejected from his skull throne by Devil Daggers players. Those Hellbound hearts have been scrapping for top spot on the leaderboards since the wave-survival FPS launched in February 2016, and today I’m delighted to see records are still being set. New hellchamp “Bintr” yesterday survived over eighteen minutes, beating a months-old records by a precious three seconds. I am still in awe of not only how well they play, but how amazing the game looks and sounds once things really kick off (officially the best-looking and best-sounding FPS, says me). Come watch Bintr’s performance.

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