Microsoft has unveiled Project Artemis, a technique used to detect online predators who try to groom children for sexual purposes using chat in video games.

Project Artemis is applied to historical text-based chat conversations, and evaluates and "rates" conversation characteristics and assigns an overall probability rating, Microsoft said.

This rating is then used as a determiner, which can be set by individual companies that use the technique as to when a flagged conversation should be sent to a human moderator for review. The idea is a moderator, if necessary, would refer imminent threats to police and other relevant authorities.

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Cyberpunk 2077 is probably the most-anticipated video game in the world right now - and so it seems only right it should have a PSone demake already.

Cyberpunk 1997 is a fun reimagining of CD Projekt's upcoming behemoth by prolific demaker Bearly Regal - and it was made in Media Molecule's PlayStation 4 creation game Dreams.

Bearly Regal's Dreams creation apes Cyberpunk 2077's official gameplay video from August 2018 by starting off in the player character's apartment. This first-person section lets you move about the room, checking out some appliances and picking up a gun.

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First-party Xbox Series X games won't be exclusive to the console for a while, Microsoft has said.

Speaking to MCV, Xbox Game Studios boss Matt Booty confirmed Microsoft's own titles will work across the Xbox family of devices as well as PC for the next two years.

"As our content comes out over the next year, two years, all of our games, sort of like PC, will play up and down that family of devices," Booty said.

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Call of Duty: Modern Warfare will get 3v3 Gunfight, additional loadouts and a raft of bug and exploit fixes, developer Infinity Ward has said.

In the first major community update of 2020, Infinity Ward said it'll also bring back the Gunfight Tournament, last seen in November 2019.

Elsewhere, Infinity Ward promised to tackle a number of bugs and exploits currently hot topics within the community. Among them is a fix for an exploit that sees players get out of the map in Ground War (Emma reported on glitchers in Ground War yesterday), and mission collision on containers on multiplayer map Cargo.

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We tend to think of real and virtual spaces as being worlds apart, so why is it that I can't stop seeing an octopus arm in 2007's spectacular Dead Space 'Drag Tentacle,' the alien appendage of developmental hell? Beyond surface xeno-weirdness, it's what clever animation and the neural marvel have in common that has me interested. Since an octopus arm is infinitely flexible, it faces a unique challenge. How do you move an arm to set x,y,z coordinates and a certain orientation if it has infinite degrees of freedom in which to do it? How might the octopus arm tackle its virtual cousin's task of going to grab the player when they could be anywhere in the room - free even to move as the animation is first playing?

You simplify. The former Dead Space developer and current senior core engineer at Sledgehammer Games, Michael Davies, took me through the likely digital solution. The drag tentacle is rigged with an animation skeleton - bones to twist and contort it so animation/code can bend it into different shapes. A trigger box is placed across the full width of the level Isaac needs to be grabbed from, with a pre-canned animation designed specifically to animate to the centre of it. Finally, to line up the animation to the player, inverse kinematic calculations are done on the last handful of tentacle bones to attach the tentacle pincer bone to the ankle bone of Isaac, while also blending the animation to look natural.

The octopus, conversely, constricts any of its flexible arms' infinite degrees of freedom to three. Two degrees (x and y) in the direction of the arm and one degree (the speed) in the predictable unravelling of the arm. Unbelievably, to simplify fetching, the octopus turns an infinite limb into a human-like virtual joint by propagating neural activity concurrently from its 'wrist' (at the object) and central brain and forming an 'elbow' where they meet - i.e. exactly where it needs to be for the action.

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Monster Hunter World's Iceborne expansion finally - finally - launched on PC yesterday, four months after its console debut. And while its highly anticipated arrival is certainly reason to celebrate, not all PC players are in a jubilant mood, with many reporting a range of issues with the newly released PC version - the most worrying being that existing game saves are, in some cases, no longer recognised after Iceborne's installation.

Monster Hunter is, it's fair to say, a game that can swallow up an enormous chunk of play time, thanks to its grind-focussed design - and after almost two years of free content updates for World, individual saves can easily reach into the hundreds of hours. Understandably then, players are oscillating between horror and devastation upon discovering that - as repeatedly reported across Steam, Reddit, and other corners of the internet - their saves are gone following an Iceborne install, with the game prompting them to create a fresh file on start-up.

As noted by VG247, in the absence of official word from Capcom, players have speculated that missing saves could be the result of mod compatibility issues, or perhaps a failure to update Monster Hunter World following a previous patch that made alterations to save data.

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If you've yet to experience the wonderfully strange delights of the superb Rusty Lake series, now is the perfect time to get acquainted; the whole gleefully odd endeavour continues in The White Door, which is available now on mobile and PC.

Rusty Lake, if you're in need of introduction, currently consists of 14 games. Nine of these are free-to-play (these fall under the Cube Escape banner, and are available on mobile and through a browser on PC) and another five, including The White Door, are meatier paid offerings. There's even a short film, tying into last year's Cube Escape: Paradox!

Positioned somewhere between room escape games and point-and-click adventures, each title forms a discrete episode in an interconnected, increasingly strange tale of murder, temporal meddling, and mysterious animal-headed gents.

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Sundered, developer Thunder Lotus' wonderful (and gorgeously animated) Lovecraft-inspired Metroidvania, is currently free to download on the Epic Store.

Sundered - the follow-up to Thunder Lotus' Viking-themed boss-rush adventure Jotun - first emerged from the depths back in 2017, and sees players, cast in the role of Eshe, exploring the labyrinthine underground passageways of a long-forgotten desert ruin, at the behest of a mysterious entity known as the Shining Trapezohedron.

Although Sundered follows a familiar Metroidvania template, gradually opening out as players uncover handy new items and upgrades on their antediluvian adventures, its sprawling subterranean corridors are far from immutable, and the world is subtly rearranged upon death.

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GAME staff face an anxious start to 2020 as they wait to learn their fate following the struggling company's announcement of impending store closures.

Yesterday, GAME announced it intends to close 40 stores in the UK, and called for "realistic, fair" rents amid "a challenging retail market". According to Gfk, the UK retail market suffered a 20 per cent drop in physical game sales last year.

13 stores have been served notice so far, including sites in Mansfield, Canterbury, Watford, Glasgow Fort and Leicester. This week, GAME served notice on a further 14 sites, including Derby, Norwich Chapelfield, Lakeside, Bexleyheath and Carmarthen, as part of what it called a "store rationalisation programme".

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Now that 2020 is here we're having a little look ahead at some of the year's new games that have us intrigued.

"Play as your favourite cake in a variety of tasty levels." That was the moment I suspected 2020 might be interesting. Cake Bash is a party game in which you get together with a bunch of people, decide which cake to be - choose your favourite - and then have at it.

It looks like absolute chaos - everyone running around trying to get as delicious as possible while fighting off each other and ducking environmental hazards. The physics! The attacking birds! The cherries!

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