Surprise! With little warning, Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary launched on PC today. This is the remake of Bungie’s very first game in the first-person shooter series, the one which started Master Ian Chief’s adventures on Xbox way back in 2001. I never played it but my god, the things I’ve heard about its powerful pistol… maybe I’ll finally see for myself. It is only 7, after all. You can snook a look in the launch trailer below.

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The “roguelike” mode touted as a stretch goal on the 2015 Kickstarter campaign behind Bloodstained: Ritual Of The Night will not be made, the developers have announced, to be replaced with a smaller feature. Roguelike Dungeon was the stretch goal for $5m ( 3.9m), and the campaign hit that. The mode would rebuild the Castlevania ’em up as a a roguelikelike, sending players to plunder procedurally-generated dungeons. But now, eight months after the finished game launched, the devs say they can’t make that and have binned it. Instead, they plan to make a Randomizer Mode shuffling item locations. The mode doesn’t sound bad in itself but ditching a funded stretch goal isn’t great.

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The next season of Destiny 2 starts next week, and Bungie today revealed more of what we’ll be doing in the Season Of The Worthy and why. Turns out, the dregs of the Cabal who survived our latest drubbing have a spiteful last-ditch plan to straight-up crash a miles-long superweapon spaceship into Earth. That’ll be a problem. So off we’ll go, powering up the defences of the cranky ancient AI, Rasputin and looting all sorts of new shinies along the way. This season will not benefit from Bungie’s recently-announced intent to cut down on FOMO but hey, I’ll take any newness for now.

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A side-scrolling roguelike with a pixel art style and an adorable little skull person protagonist, Skul: The Hero Slayer could easily be mistaken for about seven thousand other early access games. After all, we ve long since hit peak pixel, reaching the stage in society where lovely chunky squares are the mainstream rather than the exception, and aliased edges and bezier curves have to cower and beg in the street for hovering roast chicken sprites.

Does that make any sense? I ve got a touch of fever this evening and I m writing this introductory paragraph in a state of delirious hypochondria, so my usually astute and cutting edge observations have reverted back to PC gaming circa 2007.

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There are sadly no cheat codes in real life, but we’ve got the next best thing! Our ultimate guide to The Sims 4 cheats contains everything you need to know about how to enable cheats, and then how to use said cheats to fulfil your sims’ every need… or brutally murder them. To each their own.

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The Valorant characters roster is what developers Riot Games hope will set the game apart from its venerable competition in the tactical shooter genre. With each character sporting four unique abilities to help turn the tide of battle, there’ll be an awful lot to learn when this free-to-play FPS releases in the summer. So why not get a headstart now by reading this here Valorant characters guide, so you’ll know exactly what to expect from each Agent and their abilities!

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After leaving New York to visit Washington, D.C. in The Division 2, Ubisoft have now returned to the location of the first game in a new expansion. Warlords Of New York is its name, and hunting down the first game’s baddie through is its game. The expansion launched on PC yesterday (consoles today) annnd now it might be worth a go, after a hasty hotfix targeting problems like not being able to talk to key NPCs. Bit of a problem, that. But the hotfix launched a few hours ago so go on, escape to New York.

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Everyone from Taylor Swift to Tyler, The Creator has written a song about flowers. Fancy restaurants scatter them over melting chocolate bombes. Van Gogh even had a crack at painting some once, I believe. And after all, why not? Flowers bloom all around the world, and symbolise so much to so many different cultures. Final Fantasy is far from the only video game series to lean into flower metaphors – but few have done it better.

As with so many of Final Fantasy s strengths, the best examples can be found in Final Fantasy VII. Already considered by many to be the pinnacle of the series, the upcoming remake (eagerly awaited but a PlayStation exclusive until April 2021) has seen Cloud s battles against Sephiroth back in the headlines. It s been talked about so much since its original 1997 release that it s hard to imagine anything about it remains underrated, yet the flowers are a seldom appreciated piece of Final Fantasy VII s world building which the high definition makeover really must get right if it’s to get anything right at all.

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I don’t know what’s happened further down the timeline, but it would appear that the terrifying Acer Thronos mega chair has been overthrown by a new gaming overlord: the gaming bed>. Conceived in Japan by gaming desk maker Bauhutte, this cursed concoction is actually a Power Rangers-style amalgamation of all their gaming furniture combined. Only instead of transforming into a mighty-morphin’ humanity-saving mech suit, it’s a mighty-morphin’ gaming prison designed to bombard us with more #content than we could ever possibly consume. The only thing it’s missing is a built-in bog hole.

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Pulsating with irrepressible energy, Sayonara Wild Hearts is a music-based arcade game which lets you ride motorcycles and riposte teddy girls, all while balancing on a massive aerial sword that sails through the air at 200mph. It s a euphoric and unexpectedly emotive experience, brimming with explicitly queer and feminine energy fortified by its bisexual lighting filter of pink, purple and blue, and an electropop soundtrack influenced by the likes of Charli XCX and Chvrches. Given that the game is made up of an eclectic mix of genres from side-scrolling shooter to bullet hell, it s a marvel how much the music is in sync to the movement on screen.

When I spoke to Daniel Ols n, one of the soundtrack s composers, he shared that Swedish developer Simogo didn t intentionally give Sayonara Wild Hearts such a distinct queer vibe. Instead, they were motivated to make a game that s just more inclusive.

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