Hey, parents! Looking to distract the kids with something shiny for a few hours in these trying times? You can currently get The Lego Ninjago Movie Video Game free for keepsies on Steam. It’s another of those there Lego games from Traveller’s Tales, doing their usual Lego game things. Except unlike the Lego games based on serious films for serious adults, like Star Wars and The Avengers, this is based on the 2017 movie adaptation of Lego’s Ninjago line. You don’t have to know Ninjago to have a go, I suppose.

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Rockstar have finally managed to get GTA Online back up, after a weekend where the game was basically unplayable due to overwhelming numbers of new players. The Epic Games Store is giving GTA V away free at the moment, see. So many people came to claim it that Epic’s own servers collapsed during at the start the giveaway, so I guess it’s only fair that Epic players crash Rockstar’s servers in return. Having spent some time sat staring at error messages hitting retry myself, I admire the ingenuity of the person who built a wee robot to keep hitting the spacebar for them.

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The Wonderful 101

is a breezy, demented action game in which you battle alien invaders as an army of vinyl superheroes who can merge and transform themselves into weapons. Think Pikmin, but Captain Olimar is played by the Green Lantern, and you’re tossing around Avengers instead of seedlings. Or to put it more succinctly, a literal “combined arms warfare” game.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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…)