Developer Maschinen-Mensch enormously enjoyable rogue-like exploration adventure, Curious Expedition, might be getting on a bit (it released back in 2016), but it's just received a free multiplayer mode, previously available in browser-based beta, in its latest update.

The gist of Curious Expedition, if you're unfamiliar, is that it's the 19th century and players, cast as daring adventurers, must embark on a race across inhospitable climes to find (ie. steal) exotic treasures in order to secure fame, fortune, and a footnote in the history books.

What that equates to in practice is a compelling blend of board-game-like exploration across a procedurally generated hex-based map, and a text-based choose-your-own-adventure-style yarn. The ultimate goal each game is to score highest against the AI across a set number of expeditions, and to do that you'll need to purchase supplies and prepare a party - whose useful individual perks are usually offset by negative traits such as paranoia, misogyny, or racism, eventually making them something of a liability as things start to go wrong.

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Veteran racing developer Codemasters has announced the acquistion of fellow British racing house Slightly Mad Studios, adding the Project Cars series to its collection of racing brands alongside Dirt, Grid and the official F1 licence.

Codemasters paid $30m in cash and stock, according to GamesIndustry.biz. Slightly Mad CEO Ian Bell will remain head of the studio within Codemasters. Codemasters CEO Frank Sagnier reckoned that "more streaming services coming to market and the next generation of games consoles due in 2020" made this the perfect time for expansion.

Slightly Mad Studios was founded 10 years ago and has specialised in racing games ever since, developing the two Need for Speed Shift games for EA and then its own Project Cars franchise, which has so far yielded two games published by Namco. It is currently working on an "unannounced Hollywood blockbuster title" which is very probably a Fast and Furious game.

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Can you bin a plastic game box and not feel like you've hurt David Attenborough in the process?

Maybe you're having a clear out. Maybe you're downsizing your physical game collection now you've subscribed to Xbox Game Pass. Or maybe you have bought Stadia...

Video games might be moving away from living on plastic discs in plastic boxes, but it's still a worthwhile question to ask. Helpfully, the latest video from People Make Games, presented by some guy named Chris Bratt, asks exactly that.

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We've been asked a lot for prebuilt gaming desktop recommendations for Black Friday, and there are quite a few going. Unfortunately, a lot of the prebuilt options available use older processors or graphics cards, meaning you're leaving a bit of performance on the table compared to someone that was building their PC from scratch using more recent releases. Thankfully, we have found a few great options that are offering completely up-to-date hardware at a good Black Friday discount.

The absolute best Black Friday gaming desktop we've found so far comes from CCL Computers. Their NebulaX gaming desktop boasts a surprisingly strong spec for 893, including the recently released AMD Ryzen 3600X six-core twelve-thread processor and a Nvidia RTX 2060 graphics card. This is backed with 16GB of 3200MHz RAM, a super-fast 256GB NVMe SSD and a slower but very capacious 2TB HDD.

Here's the full breakdown, including manufacturers of each component and their approximate prices online, if you're interested:

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Oh man, Hotline Miami. I can still feel it. What a cutting, embarrassingly necessary parable of violence. What a way to stand on the shoulders of Shadow of the Colossus, by taking that moral throughline and wrapping it, head to toe, in the trappings of its time.

What's weird, though, is I think parables are a bit rubbish. More often than not a parable will do somewhere between most and all of the work for you. You'll finish up - watching, reading, playing, whatever - and you'll know exactly what it is that you just consumed, what the point of it was, and what you need to do next, which is usually nothing.

Hotline Miami, a lot of the time, is at real threat of falling into that trap. You are summoned, via anonymous phone call, into a series of ultra-violent raids on various bad guy hideouts, and you obviously oblige. It's 2012 so naturally, Drive still fresh in the mind, this is set in the late '80s. It's a cult hit because it's indie and violent and has music, and the cult following has nicknamed your character "Jacket", because he has a cool jacket. Everything is neon, but a sort of grim neon, with a dirty, grainy flicker over the top that could be a sort of VHS effect or could be a glaring sign, as it gradually flickers with more vigor and grunge, that what you're seeing here isn't entirely real.

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Kerbal Space Program 2 was a surprise announcement at Gamescom 2019 - but it came as an even bigger surprise to the game's original creator. After leaving the first Kerbal Space Program team three years ago, Felipe "HarvesteR" Falanghe had no idea a sequel was even in development.

Before Kerbal Space Program, the developer Squad was a marketing company. But then Falanghe pitched an idea for a game about space flight simulation - and the rest is history. A few years later, Falanghe's brainchild was released to the world, and Kerbal Space Program became one of the most popular indies out there, even managing to catch the attention of NASA.

Falanghe left Squad in 2016, leaving upkeep of KSP to the rest of his team as he made a fresh start with a new game. In 2017, the Kerbal Space Program IP was acquired by Take-Two Interactive, and until this year, that was all the clues we had that something bigger was in the works.

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To mark the end of the 2010s, we're celebrating 30 games that defined the last 10 years. You can find all the articles as they're published in the Games of the Decade archive, and read about our thinking about it in an editor's blog.

In the world of racing games, this decade started with a death knell. In the first months of 2010, two excellent arcade racers were released: Bizarre Creations' Blur and Split/Second by Black Rock Studio (formerly Climax). They both flopped, miserably, and as a direct consequence both studios were soon shuttered. The arcade racer was dead.

This death knell was heard particularly loud in the UK, where both those studios were based and where racing games, just like real motorsport, run in the blood. This is the land of Project Gotham Racing, of Wipeout, of Burnout. It was a bleak time for that particular development community. Evolution Studios struggled on, but wouldn't last the decade. Criterion relinquished Burnout and accepted the life-raft of the Need for Speed franchise, but soon even that was gone and it was making vehicles for Star Wars and Battlefield games. Codemasters survived thanks to the Formula One licence and a hard pivot to the safer ground of sim racing, with its dedicated community. But where was the racing game for everyone? The racing game for people who don't play racing games?

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The recent announcement of Half-Life Alyx has brought a flurry of interest in VR headsets ahead of the March 2020 release date. If you're planning to buy a headset so you can check out the long-awaited third installment of this legendary PC franchise, this article is for you. We've scoured the web for the best VR headset deals, including the best prices on all of the four headset types officially supported by Half-Life Alyx.

That foursome includes Valve's own Index, plus the HTC Vive Pro and Vive Cosmos, the Oculus Rift S and Quest and a range of Windows Mixed Reality headsets. The biggest deals we've found are on HTC Vive and Oculus equipment, which are currently discounted on the official Vive Store (in the US) and Amazon, respectively. All sales are only while supplies last, so if you've got your eyes on something hot - like the recently released Vive Cosmos - you may want to act quickly.

Update - HTC Vive VR headsets have seen price drops of up to 300, making them a much better deal than they were yesterday!

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The best Black Friday OLED deal is for the Philips 55OLED754, the company's entry-level OLED model. The 754 OLED was released earlier this year for 1499, and since then it has gradually dropped to 1099. For Black Friday, it's breached the 1000 barrier, and now costs 989 at both Amazon and AO. It's rare to see a current-gen OLED for just three figures, especially one so fully-featured as the Philips 754.

So why is this 4K HDR TV worth buying? Most importantly, it's because it uses the same OLED panel as the LG B9 which costs 100 more. That means gorgeous colour reproduction, especially in HDR, plus nearly infinite contrast thanks to the perfect blacks possible with OLED tech. The 55OLED754 is also a good choice for gaming, with reasonable input lag (30ms), nearly instantaneous pixel response times and superb motion handling.

The Philips TV supports for the full range of HDR standards - HDR10+, HLG and Dolby Vision - so you'll be able to watch HDR content from almost any provider. Reasonably powerful 40W speakers with Dolby Atmos support are also included, so you're covered on the audio front too. The remote control even includes Amazon Alexa support, so you can ask your TV to play your favourite show without lifting a finger.

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I did a bit of gardening this morning. I didn't want to. I had been putting it off. So many memories! But then I thought: enough. I got right to it and pulled up all the weeds. It took about two seconds. And on the other side of those two seconds the landscape was transformed.

There are so many reasons to love a game like Grow Home, but one of the greatest is this: here is a game world that I helped to build. Grow Home's vertical playground - sandy beach reaching upwards via floating boulders to wonderful mini-islands, waterfalls, forests and mountains - is beautifully designed. It's full of secrets. It's full of potential for open-ended play, for clear, wholesome distraction, which is just about the best currency video games can trade in. But on top of all that are the vines. Grow Home is a game about coaxing a plant up from the earth and high into the sky, so that the little robot you control can get back to his spaceship. You do this by riding vines off the center of the plant, sending them bucking and twisting through the sky towards the rocks you plug them into. This means that you're adding as much to the landscape as was already there. You're putting your touch to it. These vines, which you are sort of in control of, mean you can sort of embellish the world and create new parts of it.

Grow Home is full of this stuff. People think it's going to be like QWOP, a game about awkwardness, because your little robot is powered by physics and has to climb each surface by gripping and releasing his two hands. But it's not about awkwardness. It's about the balance of happy accident and growing mastery. You learn how to be this robot. You learn how much he weighs, how high he can jump, how long he can fall and still be safe when he lands.

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