BEEEUUUUUHHHH. That’s my impression of a battlecruiser jumping in to ruin, or make everyone’s day, depending on its mood. For the next eight days, Elite Dangerous‘s fleet carriers are here in temporary form for its ongoing beta. I have not, frankly, been doing anything exciting, because I am like that. I’ve been enjoying the jumps, though.
Take one look at Gris and you’d probably think it was a dainty, delicate flower of a game. Yes, it’s a story that’s ultimately about grief and loss and all those other fragile, angsty emotions> that are apparently exclusive to young women, but I put it to you that Gris is actually an absolute bruiser of a platformer, one that slaps you round the face with its good looks and doesn’t even bother to apologise for it. And I absolutely dig it.
It is time, once again, to take a wee trip into outer space. From Friday, May 22nd ’til June 1st, interstellar sandbox and crowdfunding purgatory Star Citizen is doing another free fly week – letting you get behind the controls of Star Citizen’s roster of big expensive computer spaceships as part of the in-universe Invictus Launch Week festival.
For as much as Blizzard players love loot, it took them a hot minute to find this hidden Overwatch easter egg. But after idly punching breakable barrels during a round on Blizzard World, one Overwatch player discovered a legendary drop of their own – a years-old Diablo reference that may have lay undiscovered by the community since the map debuted in 2018.
Screenshot Saturday Sundays! It’s time once more to hack into the big game database and pull top-secret, work-in-progress screenshots and videos out from under the noses of unsuspecting developers and hobbyists. Or, well, fire up Twitter and choose some pretty clips I liked the look of. This week: line-art lighthouses, lovely skeletons, stop-motion seamen and drive-by rocket launchers.
Outside of the occasional free weekend, you can’t play Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege for free – never mind trying to get it running on your phone. Unfortunately for Ubisoft, it seems that particular space has been filled by an unnervingly similar tactical FPS. This week, the French publishers filed a lawsuit against Google and Apple, demanding Area F2 – an alleged clone of Rainbow Six Siege – be removed from their respective mobile shelves.
The version of cult war movie Colonel Croesus that went on general release in 1970-something, ends, as Comment Commander khamul pithily pointed out last Sunday, with the gold-stuffed getaway sub “holed and taking on water, but Steiner opening the gates and taking her out to sea anyway, purely to spite Croesus – not knowing he was already dead.”. The final scene in our Combat Mission-powered homage feels more like the end of the Director’s Cut – Captain Crosbie (Clint Eastwood) standing on the periphery of a throng of celebrating Millionaires, blood-spattered gold bar in hand, contemplating the almost Bosch-like tableaux of death and destruction that surround him. (more…)
As is Dwarven tradition, the intersteller halflings at Deep Rock Galactic just won’t stop digging. Alien bugs or no, there’s gold down there – so grab a shovel and get in the hole. This week, developers Ghost Ship Games revealed their plans for the next few months of mining n’ shooting, bringing new biomes, classes, jobs and objectives to the beardiest blokes in deep space.
Sundays are for continuing to exist. Here’s the best writing about videogames from the past week.
For The Ringer, Ben Lindberg dove into the history of female videogame protagonists, touching on myriad forces that shaped (and still shape) developer decisions about representation. It’s a valuable, well-researched, and impressively thorough piece.
Let it not be said that Terraria failed to go out with a bang. Dropping today, Journey’s End is an exhaustive final update for Re-Logic’s venerable block-building sandbox. But beyond new items, biomes, bosses and golf, Journey’s End formalises mod support by releasing a fan-made kit as free DLC, putting Terraria’s future in the hands of the folks still playing it ten years on.