With Armistice Day approaching, marking the end of World War I in 1918, folks including the co-director of Valiant Hearts, English animation studio Aardman, and Elijah Wood out those there films have come together to revisit it in 11-11: Memories Retold. Released last night, the “narrative-driven, WWI experience” follows two fellas with very different reasons to be at war, all wrapped up in a third-person notshooter with a painterly style. Have a look in the launch trailer below.

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

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Thanks to money raised by the last Flare Path Funicular Fun Run, our somewhat neglected six-year-old Reading Room has recently gained a third wing. While the addition hasn’t brought the climb and turn rate improvements that some wags predicted, Joyce, the Chief Librarian, couldn’t be happier with the extra capacity. As she said to me this morning while surveying her new vacant tome tenements We’re finally ready for Phase 2 – that second round of book suggestions we’ve always talked about. (more…)

Aliens Versus Predator 2 pitted colonial marines against predators against aliens. It was an asymmetrical first-person shooter that stood out when it was released in 2001. For seven years, the multiplayer servers pulsed with life. No dark corner offered sanctuary, cloaked predators disemboweled marines, and marines surrounded themselves with thickets of spider mines, and, all the while, alien players crawled through the vents.

Then in early 2008, Vivendi Games, parent company to the shooter s publisher Sierra Entertainment, merged with Activision. Within a few months Sierra announced it would be shutting down the servers for 21 of its games. Aliens Versus Predator 2 was one of them. By the end of the year, Sierra itself was shuttered. The master server browser going down was almost an apocalyptic event for the players. Almost.

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I hope you’re feeling lucky, punks, because there are more games with a cyber-aesthetic in development than I can count on the fingers of my digitally-enhanced robo-hand. Rain Of Reflections was announced way back in 2015, but Lionbite Games only gave us our first proper look at their turn-based stealth and conversation ’em up earlier this week. The gameplay trailer for the first chapter, “Set Free”, awaits below: you’re a scientist who’s decided to stop experimenting on the last child ever born, and free him instead.

I’m not sure that’s a great idea. He could get hit by a bus or something.

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Just when you thought you’d explored every nook and cranny of Don’t Starve‘s nightmare otherworlds (plural), a new set of porcine problems present themselves. Hamlet, begining a quick spin through early access today, is another expansion for Klei’s survival action RPG sandbox. This one takes Wilson and his sketchy pals to a new, far more civilised> land. There’s a town run by aristocratic pigfolk, trap-laden ruins, the usual bundle of massive new boss monsters to tussle with and the looming threat of a coming Aporkalypse. The launch trailer is hamming it up below.

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Warframe‘s second open-world expansion, Fortuna, is out, free and available to download, taking Digital Extremes’s third-person free-to-play ninja shooter to the icy terraformed surface of Venus. Fortuna adds a slew of new features including stunt-capable hoverboards, a wildlife preservation mini-game, customisable kit-guns, buildable robot buddies and more. It’s easily the biggest expansion for the game yet, its new map dwarfing the previous open-world offering Plains Of Eidolon. The update clocks in at a hefty ~4gb in size. Ogle the trailer below while you wait.

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Jason Rohrer’s wildly ambitious humanity simulator One Hour One Life has resurfaced on Steam today. Previously available only direct from the developer, it’s a real-time survival and crafting sandbox – familiar stuff, but with a twist. Every time you play, you begin as a random, helpless baby, unceremoniously spawned from another player. For your first few minutes, you’re dependent, and must be carried and fed by others. From there, you’ve got under an hour until you croak and begin the cycle anew, so players are constantly rushing to achieve something> before they die.

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Like a well-trained operator, End State has somehow escaped my attention until just before it’s ready to strike. Inspired heavily by squad strategy classic Jagged Alliance 2, it’s a tactical squad combat game with realistic ballistics, a complex stealth system an a morally blurry modern-day black ops setting for its campaign. Oh, and groin-targeting. It’s somehow been lurking around for years, but today developers Iron Sight put out a fancy new features trailer in preparation for an early access release in the near future. Sneak a stealthy peek at the game in the video below.

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HyperX clearly have a thing about clouds – no, not that mopey JRPG chap, the real, white fluffy things you find in the sky. I had a good time with their wireless Cloud Flight headset earlier in the year, for instance, but since then the number of Clouds in their audio line-up seems to have grown exponentially. Today, I’ve got the Cloud Alpha, which is not to be confused with the Cloud Revolver, Cloud Stinger, Cloud Earbuds or, indeed, just the regular Cloud.

What makes this gaming headset different from all the other Clouds out there? According to HyperX, the Alpha has the special distinction of having two chambers inside each audio driver to help separate the bass from the mids and highs, which supposedly produces a cleaner, smoother sound than single-chamber headsets where everything is all jumbled together. Is it enough to break into our [cms-block] list, though? Let’s find out.

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