There’s a lot of Half-Life: Alyx to coo over in those three gameplay videos Valve released yesterday. Googheads might be smitten with catching grenades in mid-air, opening a car door to take cover behind, or lifting the lid on a portaloo then reaching in deep with your digiarm. Me, I have simple pleasures: I am well into the needlessly extravagant reload animation on what I believe to be a sci-fi shotgun. Who wants the fiddly task of manually loading shells when you can have a little mechanical arm do it at terrifying speed? Not me.

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Are you finding the Champion of Stormfall mode in Wolcen a bit slow going? If so, you may want to look into giving Expeditions a go. These are small gauntlets where you explore dungeons and grab lots of loot. It’s worth playing this mode a few times to try and get the most production out of it. (more…)

There’s simply no stopping the SSD deals train this week, as today there are more great savings to be had on a bunch of really rather good WD Black and Blue SSDs and HDDs over on Amazon US at the moment, including almost 50% off the heatsink version of their excellent WD Black SN750 drive. Normally $150 for the 500GB model, you can now bag one for $80, which is the cheapest it’s ever been. So come inside and do the SSD deals dance with me, because there are some right tasty deals to be had here.

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The Sims 4 liker has logged on again. This week she (I) was poking around for some nice potted plants to download for some ongoing build projects, and found a list of recommended custom content makers by Ravasheen, the creator from my first ‘custom content of the week’ post. Ravasheen recommended NynaeveDesign for great plant work, and lo – Nynaeve does great plants. I was cooing over them in pigeon-y delight when, a few pages deeper in Nynaeve’s creations on archive site The Sims Resource, I stumbled across a bunch of great pok mon crap.

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There’s a handful of films at home that the family and I very rarely end up watching. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The Revenant. The Imitation Game. Her. The Judge. Absolutely outstanding films, but they’re also what we call “heavy” – and we seldom have the emotional energy to sit through two hours of “heaviness” at the end of a long day. So we pretty much never bite the bullet and say “You know what? Let’s finally do this.”

Today, I’m biting the bullet. I’m gonna talk about something that makes me very sad to think about. It’s a game called Steel Circus, and last month the developers bit their own bullet, shut down the servers, and pulled the plug on their dying game. Which is such a gruelling shame, because Steel Circus was probably the most fun I’ve had in any competitive game since Rocket League.

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Seems that Nvidia have gone and put their foot in it again with their cloud streaming service GeForce Now. This time, they’ve failed to ask Hinterland Studio to include their game The Long Dark in the library. In return, Hinterland have asked for it to be removed from the service. This follows several other games being removed from GeForce Now, with some publishers pulling their entire catalog.

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Last Friday, after multiple large publishers cancelled their appearances at the event, the yearly Game Developers Conference was postponed. Originally scheduled for March 16-20 in San Francisco, the conference has been postponed to “later in the summer” due to concerns about potential spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus. GDC say they will refund the cost of passes to the conference to attendees but tickets to the event itself are hardly the only lost investment for smaller developers. Many may be unable to refund the cost of plane tickets, lodging, and other personal or business costs associated with preparing for a large industry event. Wings, in collaboration with several other indie game publishers, have opened applications to their relief fund for developers, which they say will be assessed based on “estimated impact.”

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Half-Life: Alyx will be here before the month is out and Valve are kicking off March with three new gameplay videos. There’s the usual headcrabs, of course, but we also get a look at exploding, healing, shooting, and plenty of other important VR action verbs. Valve have separated these into three videos to show off three types of VR locomotion: teleporting, shift, and continuous. Step lightly around the headcrabs though, right?

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With recent Runeterra patch notes making some much needed changes, the newest patch (0.9.1) is more here to fix bugs and introduce some new guardians and boards. Detain also now works as it should against champions. In order to keep up with all the changes that will be made to the game, I will be looking over the changes that are being made when every Runeterra patch note post is released and seeing where the biggest changes are going to be.

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Following the postponement of this year’s Game Developers Conference due to concerns about the Covid-19 virus, the organisers of other upcoming games events must surely be asking themselves that same difficult question. For E3 2020, at least, the Entertainment Software Association say they’re keeping an eye on things but “moving ahead full speed” with planning. Which I guess means they’re are hoping this will have blown over by June?

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