EA have added a first-person camera view to The Sims 4, giving the opportunity to watch lives unfold from inside characters’ heads. See through the eyes of an idiot guided by wonky logic and incomprehensible whims and desires, watching their hands touch and do things you know are foolish. And in the game. Oh, and a new expansion is out today.
Sure you’ve touchtyped through zombie hordes in Typing Of The Dead, but are your fingers nimble enough to tap out exorcisms while dodging demonic bullet hell blasts? You’ll get to find out in The Textorcist, an upcoming game which will have us both typing and dodging, dispelling demons with our fast fingers and hot feet. Mavis Beacon, eat your heart out.
I ve built an army of inflatable flesh bags that puff themselves up to three times their normal size and then launch into the air like oversized, leaky balloons. They re called Gasbags, and they re my favourite dinosaur in Extinction, the latest expansion to Ark: Survival Evolved. Whenever I don t fancy aimlessly floating around on the back of one, I can load any metal I ve collected into their giant inventories and puff my way back to base. They re brilliant.
Extinction s new creatures are some of the best in Ark so far: alongside the Gasbags you ll find new friends including the lumbering, sloth-like Gacha, which drop semi-randomised loot from giant crystals on their back, a teleporting robotic raptor/spider hybrid called an Enforcer, and a Velonasaur, which can fan out its facial fins to transform into a walking machine gun that shoots quills, shredding armour in seconds.
Well, this is a surprise, isn’t it? After all the hoo-hah of Nvidia’s new and shiny Turing RTX graphics cards, AMD have gone and snuck in another mid-ranger right under our noses in the form of the Radeon RX 590. Alas, it’s still not one of the long-awaited AMD Navi GPUs everyone’s been whispering about – it’s fundamentally a Polaris card just like the rest of AMD’s RX 500 family – but it is the first one to use a 12 nanometer (nm) manufacturing process, which AMD say gives it a 12% performance boost over the still very much alive Radeon RX 580. Let’s take a look, shall we?
I m really excited about Void Bastards. I mean, it s a new deeply systems-driven FPS made by some of the people behind System Shock 2, Neptune s Pride and Captain Forever. Of course I m excited.> You play as a desperate crim boarding extremely hostile derelict spaceships to loot stuff. It s got cool guns and a striking comic book art style, and it s the result of some extremely qualified unfinished business. I reckon that s the best reason to get into making something special.
Telltale’s The Walking Dead, Monkey Island, Jurassic Park, and Back To The Future games have have been pulled from sale on Steam, though folks who already own any can keep playing them and other stores do still sell ’em – for now. This comes as the company goes through the final motions of legally shutting down, settling assets, and all that after laying off most employees in September and those remaining in October.
There s little else quite so frighteningly intimidating, yet wonderfully liberating, as stepping into a new Hitman game for the first time. While the first level is a fraction of the size of the others, these vast assassination playgrounds allow you to explore, poke around, and get up to all sorts of murderous mischief. It’s the kind of game where discovery is half the fun.
For the times when it can be overwhelming, or where you just need that extra bit of information to master the level, I suggest you direct your eyes to this steadily assembled and soon-to-be robust Hitman 2 guide somewhere that ll give you a surreptitious nod in the right direction if you re looking to find all Hitman 2 disguises, how to assassinate every target in Hitman 2 or how to beat Hitman 2 s challenges. Think of me as your Agent Diana Burnwood on the web, delivering all the intel you need for a successful mission. Good luck, Agent 47. (more…)
Hawke s Bay, the short tutorial mission that opens Hitman 2, is one of the game s least complicated stages. As such it shouldn t cause too much stress if you re looking to get a Silent Assassin rating. Nevertheless, I ve put together this quick Silent Assassin walkthrough for Hawke s Bay if you re looking for an optimal path to infiltrate the home of Alma Reynard and eliminate her.
Waking Mars is possibly the most chilled out 2D jetpack game in existence. I came across it during that lazy, turkey-stuffed interim between Christmas and New Year’s Eve back in 2013, and I’ve never felt such inner peace while playing a video game. It’s a story of quiet wonder, where the aim isn’t to destroy, evade or do battle with hostile, alien creatures, but to watch them grow and flourish as you venture further and further into the depths of our neighbouring red planet.
Cute space survival sandbox Astroneer isn’t far from the finish line, say developers System Era Softworks, it’ll be bounding out of early access in just a few months – February 6th, specifically. The studio have some big plans for the release – the launch version will include a “new exploration-focused adventure”, taking you to new planets full of interesting new things to poke around, or be poked by. The launch version will also support cross-play with Xbox One folks, hopefully ensuring a healthy and well oxygenated player-base for a while. A stardate trailer lies below.