We no longer have bees in the real-world, the last one having left to fly to its home planet of HV-1 last Tuesday, so Minecraft has memorialised our buzzy buds by adding them as a new mob. The fuzzy little dancers are a neutral mob who ll happily fill your game with honey for you to enjoy, and have just set up a hive in the 19W34A snapshot. Let s smoke out some details, shall we?
Honking great mechs stomping around and blasting rocket barrages is not so much fun in a game where most players are squishy humans scampering about on foot, Epic have conceded. They’ve rolled out a comprehensive series of balance tweaks reducing mechs’ power, though they still haven’t removed them. Epic added the B.R.U.T.E. mechs to Fortnite with the start of Season 10 on August 1st, and many players have been complaining ever since. Epic defended the mechs at first, arguing that they weren’t too disruptive and were fun for new players who didn’t often get to feel powerful, but finally relented last night.
Previously on Hounded Out: My dogs and I narrowly survive a heroic rescue of the townies in their sinister underground excavation. Our generosity rebuffed, we head North, seeking peace in the wilderness.>
Travelling with three easily distracted dogs makes it difficult to get lost, as you retread your path every few minutes to retrieve them. This has probably saved me from getting lost for months, although it has happened before and since.
One of the most maddening things in mainstream science reporting (and my goodness, there s a panoply to choose from), is how every year, without fail, there s a rash of articles making wild claims about how scientists are on the brink of cloning a woolly mammoth. I m not saying it s impossible, but they seem to have been on the brink for at least 25 years now, and the press release promises are starting to wear a bit thin.
So it is with games that promise to simulate biological life, and its evolution. An electric playground in which to grow monsters is the dream for speculative evolution fanatics like me, but while the idea gets discussed all the time, it never seems to materialise.
Marthe Jonkers is a senior concept artist at CD Projeckt Red working on Cyberpunk 2077. Jonkers actually designed the location in the first very first teaser trailer for the game back in 2013, featuring the cyberbabe with mantis arms, and was resigned to the fact that nobody was really looking at the building behind her.
Jonkers’ team work on locations and interiors, and even the broader piecing together of Night City. “We even have urban planners on our team,” she explains, since after all, someone has to work out how a city centre actually works in practise, and how you drive around it all. And the way this cyberdystopia RPG backdrop is all designed is really bloody interesting.
It’s good to feel excited about Halo again, isn’t it? After all those years of Microsoft teasing us, saying stuff like: “The PC is an important platform for us and we are committed to a long and loving relationship with it,” and then leaving us at the altar time and time again… well, it started to get a little bit old. But now we know that Halo: The Master Chief Collection is coming for sure, we can all get excited again.
Anyway, developer 343 Industries hosted the first look at Halo: Reach PC’s Firefight mode on Mixer. Want to watch an hour of the game’s co-op PvE mode for the first time on PC?
Square Enix’s Tokyo RPG Factory today launched their third retro-styled RPG, Oninaki. Following I Am Setsuna and Lost Sphear they are shaking things up a little, this time taking more an action-RPG angle. You can see some of that bif-boff-pow in the launch trailer below, and Oninaki does have a demo so you can try it yourself for free.
It’s amazing how quickly you get back into a routine, even when you’ve been out of it a while. I got to play a bit of the Proving Grounds, one of Borderlands 3‘s endgame challenges where you run a timed gauntlet and try to survive waves of high-level enemies and/or kill them efficiently. It was like putting on a big explodey coat. Which is not necessarily what you want in a coat, but it tracks because some of the bigger, louder weapons do a lot of splash damage.
Avowed fans of Gearbox’s first-person looter shooter may feel like they’ve been waiting a while for Borderlands 3, especially in a word full of annual releases. But Paul Sage, the creative director, explained to me that early work began on Borderlands 3 four years ago, before he even arrived at the studio. It has been in what he called “hardcore development” for about three years now.
It’s amazing how quickly you get back into a routine, even when you’ve been out of it a while. I got to play a bit of the Proving Grounds, one of Borderlands 3‘s endgame challenges where you run a timed gauntlet and try to survive waves of high-level enemies and/or kill them efficiently. It was like putting on a big explodey coat. Which is not necessarily what you want in a coat, but it tracks because some of the bigger, louder weapons do a lot of splash damage.
Avowed fans of Gearbox’s first-person looter shooter may feel like they’ve been waiting a while for Borderlands 3, especially in a word full of annual releases. But Paul Sage, the creative director, explained to me that early work began on Borderlands 3 four years ago, before he even arrived at the studio. It has been in what he called “hardcore development” for about three years now.
I was up for Desperados III just knowing the real-time tactical stealth series is being resumed by the studio behind the swish Shadow Tactics. But the most important detail of the game has, for reasons I cannot fathom, been kept quiet until this month: one of our squad members has a cat. This cat is named Stella. When Stella’s food-provider talks to Stella, she meows like she definitely does understand. A good cat. Stella is also so adorable that baddies admiring her don’t even notice someone sneaking up to slit their throat. Come meet Stella and her feeder, Isabelle Moreau, in a new video from our Matthew out at Gamescom.