The big melee revamp for space-ninja loot n’ shooter Warframe might be late, but Digital Extremes just rolled out an overhaul of one of its older, clunkier core parts. Alerts – time-limited side missions, rewarding players with money, crafting blueprints and the occasional bit of rare crafting gear – are out. In their place comes Nightwave, seasons of new story-driven missions delivered by pirate radio host Nora Night, with a progression track and less capricious reward store. This season, Tenno are hunting an escaped convict; The Wolf Of Saturn Six. The update is live – see the trailer below.

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Entering early access on Steam today after some Itch exclusivity, Monothetic’s roguelike shooter Beacon has a delightfully grim concept – Freja Akiyama has been smashed into soup by a hard landing on an very hostile planet. Fortunately her ship’s escape pod comes equipped with a cloning bay and gene-splicing lab. Each time she dies, you get to jam a few rogue strains of collected alien (or even robot) DNA into her next iteration, visibly mutating her. It’s like a stylish future-tech version of The Binding Of Isaac’s blobby sprite abominations. See the new trailer below.

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Frank Herbert’s sci-fi world of vast sand worms and magical spacedrugs and political intrigue and swordfights and Kyle MacLachlan with a pet spacepug and Sting posing in his pants is being digitised again. Funcom, the Norwegian crew behind Conan Exiles and The Secret World, today announced that they’re planning to make several video games based on Dune. We best know Dune round these parts for Dune II, Westwood’s seminal 1992 real-time strategy game which set the blueprint for Command & Conquer and Warcraft and so on. Funcom’s first Dune game is due to be some sort of “open world multiplayer” game, so perhaps another sandbox survival sorta thing?

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Alec: Foundation is like a ba no, I already did that. Foundation is – and I m projecting onto it a bit here – a reaction against city-builders and management sims increasingly inclining towards survival and punishment, in this, the age of streaming and gitting gud.

It s a cod-Medieval town management game, in which the pressure is largely off, and really the focus is more about designing your hamlet than it is making sure the poo comes out of the right pipe or everyone s got enough raspberries to eat.

It s currently my go-to relaxation game. Is this because I m an old man with entrenched tastes and terrible reflexes, or is it achieving similar for y all too, two of the three Alices?

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Nvidia’s first crop of RTX gaming laptops are finally here and the first one to slide across my desk is Asus’ ROG Strix Scar II GL504GW. Packed with an Intel Core i7-8750H processor, 16GB of RAM and one of Nvidia’s new RTX 2070 chips, this 15.6in laptop is primed and ready to take full advantage of its 1920×1080 resolution display and 144Hz refresh rate, but is it worth spending a massive two grand on? Let’s take a look.

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Hacking games fall into two main categories – fanciful Hollywood-style UI showcases like Uplink, or grittier, more code-based ones like Exapunks. NITE Team 4 left early access today and looks like it straddles that divide. Developed by Alice & Smith (nothing to do with our crew, but a studio that John is rather fond of) it’s a game of military hacking and espionage with serious command-line stuff wrapped in some lovely-looking interfaces. Just going on looks alone, it’s come a long way since its minimalist 2016 demo – see a trailer below.

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Hacking games fall into two main categories – fanciful Hollywood-style UI showcases like Uplink, or grittier, more code-based ones like Exapunks. NITE Team 4 left early access today and looks like it straddles that divide. Developed by Alice & Smith (nothing to do with our crew, but a studio that John is rather fond of) it’s a game of military hacking and espionage with serious command-line stuff wrapped in some lovely-looking interfaces. Just going on looks alone, it’s come a long way since its minimalist 2016 demo – see a trailer below.

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Excuse me while I come to terms with the fact that I ve been playing de_dust2 for 18 years. If my playing Dust2 was a person, I realise, it could legally drink, vote, and join the army in the UK. My playing Dust2 could have its university picked out, could be settling into a career path. It could have moved out. I could have driven it, teary eyed, to its new home, where it would find its own way in life, maybe even find its own first-person shooter map that it could play for 18 years.

I m trying to say that I have been playing Dust2 for a very long time. And somehow, I m still not any fucking good at it>. Sheer bloody mindedness alone should ve seen me get incrementally better, but dipping back into the newly free-to-play Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, I m still making the same mistakes I was in 2001. I m still rushing B too fast and getting mown down by a CT in the cracked wall. I m still hawking around the AWP corridor from the T spawn, getting my head taken off by a sniper shot for my troubles. I m still getting flashbanged by everyone, be they friend or foe. It s frustrating to still be this bad, to still not understand Counter-Strike s emphasis on precision and movement.

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Digital games store GOG will soon stop offering customers store credit equivalent to how much less their purchase would cost in North America, a scheme they call Fair Price Package. It’s GOG’s solution to the prickly problem of regional pricing, which often means people outside North America end up paying a higher price in their native currency. GOG have themselves been paying for these rebates, which they claim average 12% of the game’s price and go up to 37%, but say they can no longer afford to do that. This is a mite concerning given rumours surrounding GOG’s recent layoffs, though GOG say it’s to help them secure more releases by giving developers a better cut of sales.

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It’s been a while since I last looked at Blade’s Shadow cloud PC service. Over a year, in fact. Since then, Blade have grown quite a bit, expanding their remit to the US and five other European countries after initially starting out in France, and today marks the release of their brand-new cloud box for sticking under your TV or monitor, the Shadow Ghost (which is pictured up the top there). Could this tiddly monochrome miniature of the London Aquatics Centre really replace your current gaming tower, though? Let’s find out.

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