The Xbox 360 pad may be the reigning champion for the most popular controller on Steam, but Steelseries have just announced a new challenger to that title in the form of their dual wireless Stratus Duo. Priced at 60 / $60, the Stratus Duo comes with support for Bluetooth 4.1 and> the usual 2.4GHz wireless so you can use it with your PC and Android phone alike, as well as mobile-based VR headsets including the Samsung Gear VR and Oculus Go.

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Electronic Arts have thrown in the towel in their battle with Belgium over whether or not paid loot boxes in FIFA‘s Ultimate Team mode constitute illegal gambling. Without admitting to anything, EA today announced that they will soon stop selling Belgian players the ‘FIFA Points’ microtransaction currency used to buy Ultimate Team ‘packs’, effectively stopping selling them. Technically if someone is sitting on 657965468476 of virtuacash they’ll still be able to buy loot boxes until the cows come home, but no new Points will be sold.

“After further discussions with the Belgian authorities, we have decided to stop offering FIFA Points for sale in Belgium,” EA said today. I can relate. After further discussions with the Scottish authorities, I myself recently decided to stop stabbing tourists in Scotland.

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Tacoma is a game about a world that never stops watching. Corporations have achieved vertical integration on a near-total level, functioning as distinct economies running on contract workers and loyalty points. You go to the Amazon school, you work at your Amazon job, you get paid in Amazon points.

The characters of the game are so consumed by the anxiety of keeping up with this treadmill that they don t have the time to think about what actions they could collectively take to improve their material conditions, let alone act on them. And of course their every waking (and sleeping) moment is logged on company servers by an inescapable Augmented Reality surveillance system.

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Fallout 76 is going to go down for maintenance later today, so since information is generally not easily accessible, we figured we’d keep a log of when it is going down and the changes that were made. I’ve put together this page which will have any information regarding any planned maintenance days, along with all the times and dates in your area. (more…)

Last night, MSI published a news post on their website detailing which of their gaming monitors had been “effectively” deemed G-Sync Compatible screens after running some of their own internal tests on them. This morning, that post has mysteriously vanished, suggesting something might be amiss with either the wording of the post or the list of monitors themselves. I’ve reached out to MSI for clarification on this, but in the mean time, let’s take a look at the post itself, which was luckily still open on my phone browser when I came to look at it this morning – although how much stock we should put into this list now it’s been pulled is up for debate.

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So many games of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds end with me getting shot out of nowhere by someone I never saw. It’s the authentic Plunkbat experience – though a bug that turns players invisible might be taking things a step too far.

That bug definitely exists, and is definitely being investigated by developers PUBG Corp. The only question is whether it’s a recent phenomenon.

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“Get this tweet to 10k RTs and we will make Pekken” says Jon McKellan of No Code, the studio behind the lovely Stories Untold and upcoming Observation. Pekken is a two-player fighting game starring violent pigeons, in the Tekken paradigm. A short video of a prototype build delighted the hearts and minds of the internet yesterday, because PS1-styled pigeon brawlers is an inherently wonderful concept.

I… I don’t really want it to happen. Am I a bad man?

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>Please Knock On My Door [official site] has a warning on it because of its themes. It s a little story game that came out a couple of years ago, initially made as a way for the dev Michael Levall to explore his own experiences with depression.

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Anarchic FTL-esque board game Galaxy Trucker – a board game I’ve always wanted to try – is headed to PC on March 7th. Czech Games Edition brought the game to Android and iThings a while back, but for those of us who do their social gaming at their desktop, this upcoming version is a pleasant surprise. It’s a quickfire game of improvised ship-building, profiteering and disaster, and includes a bundle of single-player challenges and bots to play with if you’ve not got anyone to team up with. See the trailer for the desktop version below.

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Steam, unquestionably, needs a sizeable competitor. With a significant monopoly on the PC games market, such that present rivals like GOG and Humble barely take a dent out of its audience, Valve is able to take an infuriatingly lackadaisical approach to many aspects of Steam. Something to scare them into action would be marvellous. And while not optimistic, I’d hoped that maybe Epic, with their lorries full of money, might be able to try. Except, with yet another exclusivity announcement today regarding Metro: Exodus, they’re going about it entirely the wrong way.

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