The curious do ’em up House Flipper will go outside in the sunshine in May with its first paid expansion, Garden Flipper. As you might guess from the name, you clever little detective you, it’ll send us out to renovate gardens as well as homes. I didn’t stick with House Flipper for long because I found myself wishing the renovation was more like the physics-driven chaos of Viscera Cleanup Detail rather than just clicking to make things go, but I might be tempted back by these gardens. The possibilities really do look quite nice.

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With both the White House and Theater acting as settlements in The Division 2, there are only a few other places that you can warp to, in order to save on the walking. The first are Safehouses that can just be accessed once, but the more interesting checkpoints are the Control Points. You’ll need to take over them, but once you do, they unlock goodies for you and you’ll be asked to help with supplies.

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Stray Bombay are going to make co-op games. Dr. Kimberly Voll, (PhD in computer science and AI, first class honours degree in Cognitive Science, experienced game designer, VR researcher, expert in player dynamics, and former professor of computer science) and Chet Faliszek (man who worked at Valve and has made some games you ve probably heard of) have co-founded this new game studio. It s called Stray Bombay after Chet s cat Boris, a rescue Bombay cat he adopted. They already have a framework for the first game they re going to make, but while they re talking to developers about it, they re not ready to tell the public what it is yet. Faliszek, therefore, has a message to players: I get it. You don’t have to care about this. It’s fine.”

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Our boy Brendy is still roaming the wasteland of Washington, Detective Comics before presenting to us all Wot He Thinks of The Division 2, but one thing I can tell you is: one nasty skills bug is fixed. Massive Entertainment have stamped on a number of bugs which were causing deployed skills to just plain misfire and go on cooldown. Sure, everything is busted in the post-apocalyptic wastelands of the United States AND IN THE GAME [Alice… -ed.]> but that’s no reason for even our skills to break on us too. That’s now mmmostly fixed as of last night’s update, though Ubisoft do advise avoiding certain skills until a few more fixes follow.

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I like bad weather and I m not sure why. Maybe it s the raw, sublime beauty of it. More likely, it s a form of meteorological Stockholm Syndrome. I ve lived in Britain long enough to appreciate being constantly rained on (at least until Summer when my face melts off onto the pavement). But the bad weather I m talking about lies in the Goldilocks zone. I want neither the tacky Clintons Christmas card nor the photoshopped Thomas Cook travel brochure. No, I want that grey zone, that drizzle into downpour. In Metro Exodus, I found the sogginess I long for.

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High-tech stubble, virtual eyebrows, and a rad-as-heck crowbot feature in Unity’s latest tech demo showing off their game engine’s shiny new features. The Heretic is another wee film, a mysterious mix of sci-fi and fantasy that’s looking all sorts of fancy running in real time on what Unity call “a consumer-class desktop PC.” Not a cheap desktop PC, I bet. If you enjoying cooing over pixels, coo on, my friends.

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Devil’s advocate: I’d have been even more excited about Otherside’s System Shock 3 if it didn’t have revered murder-computer SHODAN in it. ‘Shock, traditionally, has been about pushing things forwards, not looking to the past, and what stronger statement could there be than to ditch its godhood-seeking figurehead? Make the big bad a disgruntled janitor named Susan instead, maybe.

But I won’t pretend that I didn’t experience a multitude of teenage kicks when I heard the returned voice of original SHODAN actor Terri Brosius, in this first teaser trailer for the belated third System Shock.

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“2002’s Morrowind is the best Elder Scrolls!” or so the popular refrain goes. Popular if you’re as old as I am, at least. I agree, obviously I agree.

But I’m also wrong.

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Yes, you read that correctly. Nvidia have announced they’re going to enable DirectX ray tracing (or DXR for short) on GeForce GTX 10-series graphics cards, starting with the 6GB GTX 1060 next month. The update will come via a new Game Ready Driver expected sometime in April, and the hope is that it will finally give developers the shot in the arm they so desperately need in order to get more ray tracing-enabled games into our hungry, reflection-obsessed mitts – regardless of whether you have an RTX graphics card or not.

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Some days, I lament that FromSoftware — once known for Otogi and Armored Core — are now (near) exclusively the Soulsborne studio. Then I watch today’s near-launch ‘overview’ trailer for Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice and suddenly don’t feel so sad, because it looks fab. It’s a more agile and aggressive game than even Bloodborne or the similarly Sengoku-era styled Nioh, blending the familiar high tension combat of Dark Souls with everything we associate with ninjas. Check out the hacking and slashing below, with a dash of stealth and a very snazzy grappling hook.

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