Games, as the saying goes, happened. The Electronic Entertainment Expo has closed for another year, the convention hall left in ruins with mounds of charred promotional t-shirts still smoking. Come home, Brendan. Come home, Matt. You done good. We turn our gaze from the smouldering future back to the present.
What are you playing this weekend? Here’s what we’re clicking on!
The Touhou series is intimidating in so many ways (most of them bullet-based), so you might have skipped on brillo time-bending metroidvania Touhou Luna Nights. If you have, today is a great day to give it a stab as developers Team Ladybug just patched in one final round of goodies, as well as cutting the game’s price for a week. While previously complete, this new update bulks up the game with another level (featuring a boss fight against series mascot Reimu), a dash move for speedrunners, a new weapon, achievements and a boss rush mode. Below, a spoileriffic video showing off the new bits.
Gritty, dusty team (and co-op) shooter Insurgency: Sandstorm is coming full circle later this year, as developers New World Interactive unveil mapping and mod support among their 2019 plans. Fitting, considering that the original Insurgency started life as a Half-Life 2 mod. There’s two new maps coming, including one snowy environment to address complaints that there’s far too many rural desert towns in the game right now. Also planned are night-time versions of existing maps, new play-modes, and (for folks who aren’t me) “hardcore” rules for all modes. You can see the full road-map here, or the abridged take below.
We’ve been drowned by E3 2019 this past week, but maybe you only waded into the river of game reveals and new trailers up to your ankles. If you didn’t get your hair wet, there might be some gems among the flotsam and jetsam that you missed. That’s what this post is for: we’ve rounded up our picks for the best games of E3, based on our own impressions of either seeing the games behind closed doors at the show, or of watching the videos from the comfort of our homes.
My first try at Hunt: Showdown was going so well. The demon, The Butcher, was dead (along with one rival in the fracas) and banished to hell, and I was off to claim my due. In the dark, I didn’t see the cultist near the swamp’s edge, and got a swarm of poison death-hornets in the face as punishment. Half blind, I panic and flee into the water. The bugs leave just in time for me to see something moving under the surface. Crunch. I’m bleeding. Another hit, and I’m out. A loss, but a good first impression for the early access weird western monster-hunting FPS, which is free to try this weekend.
Blaster Master Zero, Inti Creates’s excellent re-imagining of Sunsoft’s NES classic, has made the leap from Switch to PC today. Having played through both it and its even more excellent sequel on Switch, I’m excited for more people to try it. It’s part side-scrolling Metroid-like where you mostly control a bounding future space-tank called Sophia III, except for the parts where it’s a top-down maze shooter, as you wander around on foot. It even launches alongside a little bit of DLC, letting you play as Shovel Knight and Shantae, with all their abilities intact. See the trailer below.
Borderlands 3 is on the way, and developers Gearbox really want everyone to know, so they’ve launched one final piece of epilogue story DLC for enduringly popular looter-shooter Borderlands 2. Commander Lilith And The Fight For Sanctuary is free until July 8th brings the cast back together (including folks from Tales From The Borderlands) for one last fight. They’ve also slashed the price on Borderlands: The Handsome Collection (Containing Borderlands 2, Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel and all their DLC) to under a fiver. Below, a trailer for the new stuff, featuring a gun that shoots exploding unicorns.
Facepunch Studios – them behind Garry’s Mod, Clatter, and Rust – have just released Chippy, a minimalist, colourful twin-stick bullet hell shoot ’em up. Can a bullet hell really be called minimalist? I guess that leaves more room for the actual bullets. I’m also guessing it makes some space for all these gigantic bosses Facepunch have left lying around everywhere. I probably could have tacked the words ‘boss rush’ on to the other two genres, to be fair, but that would have created a hyphenated genre cluster the likes of which I’m not sure the world is ready for. It’s Friday. Friday. Got to run out of imaginative ways to describe games by Friday. Does look good though, doesn’t it? Look at that giant eye! He looks like he’s just stepped on someone’s very small dog. Let’s shoot him for it, mates!
Star-stuffed nineties adventure game Toonstruck is as free as a bird, now, and this bird you can grab in the GOG sale. Go on. Grab that bird. Hold it in your powerful fists. That thing’s ancestors were dinosaurs, don’t you know? You have basically captured and now have total power over a dinosaur. You have not only outlived every T-Rex to ever exist, but now have almost total say in the fate of its ancestor. Take that, all dinosaurs. Turn your all-conquering eyes towards this bit of Toonstruck footage we found on the internet below:
It’s been just over a week since Google announced their big launch line-up of Stadia games, but with E3 2019 now drawing to a close that list has now become ever so slightly longer, with new tiles such as Ubisoft’s Watch Dogs Legion, Square Enix’s Marvel’s Avengers and more joining the ranks. To help keep track of them all, here’s a list of every Google Stadia game confirmed so far, as well as which games are coming at launch, which ones will be arriving a little bit later, and which games you’ll only be able to play by subscribing to one of the special Stadia publisher subscriptions.