Grace Bruxner almost delayed the release of her latest game, The Haunted Island, a Frog Detective Game, which is a cute adventure about a frog trying to find a ghost. But then she changed her mind because she wanted to make sure it released near Hitman 2. Close enough that news stories mentioning both would be on gaming sites at the same time.

“Like, it’ll be an article about Hitman and then an article about Frog Detective and that’s really satisfying to me, to be mentioned with Hitman,” she says, laughing. “Because they’re such similar games!”

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Fortnite has been a masterclass in exceeding expectations in many ways, not least because of its deceptively high skill ceiling. This beast of a Battle Royale not only has a great deal of weapons and locations with which to familiarise yourself, but also a whole host of systems such as building and editing, the Storm, healing and shield items, piloting land and air vehicles, and much more besides.

So we’ve put together the below Fortnite guides series, packed with all the most up-to-date information on how to get set up, how to build properly, weapon stats, best locations to drop, in-depth explanations of items and weekly challenges… All with the ultimate goal of equipping you with the knowledge to improve your game ten times over.

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Katana Zero is much more than it first appears. And it first appears to be plenty. A side-scrolling reflexy beat ’em up, painted in very pretty pixels, with a character who cannot take a hit. It’s a surprisingly interesting weakness to give your ninja-esque mass murderer, who is fast-paced, all dashes and slides, rolls and manic combat. And yet on top of that there’s the temporal meddling, some peculiarly introspective downtime, a novel and fascinating conversation system, and the fact that your incredibly vulnerable character is in fact, um, immortal.

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To completely defox today s word chain you ll need to provide Roman, my Chief Foxer Setter, with the sequence of 24 words suggested by the clues below. (more…)

For reasons I cannot fathom and that are probably lost to the bowels of their marketing department, Western Digital have decided their high-performance Black line of NVMe SSDs were in need of a face lift for 2019, because apparently gum stick-sized storage drives don’t look ‘gamer-y’ enough already. The result of their somewhat baffling nip and tuck is the Black SN750, which I think you’ll agree looks exactly the same as last year’s Black NVMe SSD albeit with a slightly different sticker on the front.

Or at least that’s true of the regular version of the Black SN750, as there’s also going to be a special heatsink edition available sometime next month. That one does> look a bit more upmarket and ‘gamer-y’, if such a thing is possible, but that’s not the one I’ve been sent for review. Instead, you’ll have to make do with wot I think of the normal Black SN750 for now. Can it beat our best gaming SSD champion, the Samsung 970 Evo? Let’s take a look.

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Need to paralyse an international airport, drop hand grenades on infidels, or shoot a spectacular intro sequence for a puffin documentary? You, Sir/Madam, require a drone and drone operator. In preparation for the day when the majority of jobs in the UK involve quadcopters, I’ve spent the past week learning how to manoeuvre faithful digital facsimiles of these agile aerial peeping Thomases. Thanks to a selection of relatively cheap and free PC sims, I am now – in my own mind at least – Dr. Drone… The Dronemaster… Stone the Drone>. (more…)

Some scurrilous hornswaggler yesterday gained access to an Atlas admin account with dominion over the piratical survival sandbox’s North American PvP servers and used it to, in the words of developers Grapeshot Games, “cause some devastation.” This appears to have included summoning a great many sea beasties as well as, ah, driving around in World War 2 tanks and raining warplanes from the skies. To undo the devastation, Atlas rolled those servers back to a backup from some five-and-a-half-hours earlier. Skulduggery may be supported in Atlas, even encouraged, but only approved skulduggery: no ducking, no bombing, no heavy petting, no tanks.

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On the first day God created light, and saw that it was good. On the 18th trillionth day he created mods, and saw that they were better. ModDB, a site that serves as a nexus for mods of every flavour imaginable, has branched into publishing. “Modularity is a new games publishing division”, they say, “with a focus on investing in and supporting games that are created by modders, inspired by mods, or have strong modding support themselves.”

They’ve already teamed up with devs Vox Games to launch Meeple Station on Steam Early Access, a cute-looking space station sim styling itself after RimWorld.

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“Daddy, why are you cross?”

“Because, my little one, someone’s just added some lovely-looking raytraced lighting to seminal 90s first-person shooter Quake II, but I am unable to experience it myself because I don’t own an RTX-series graphics card. Now repeat what I just said back to me flawlessly, or you’re sleeping in the shed again tonight.”

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Yeah, it’s a screensaver. Yeah, I played it for hours. By which I mean, watched it for hours.

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