With Street Fighter games, if you’re not a professional esports person, it’s generally best to wait a few versions before jumping in. Ultra Street Fighter IV was hands down the best version of that wave of games, as it included all 44 characters, and a range of modes and features.
A real pretty remake of Mafia is coming on August 28, 2K announced today. After accidentally blowing the surprise last week, they’ve now made Mafia: Definitive Edition official. As well as remaking the 2002 wiseguy ’em up, they’ve given the less-good 2010 sequel Mafia II a less-dramatic remastering, which is due to launch today as a free update. And Mafia III is getting its DLC thrown in for free. Together, they call this Mafia: Trilogy.
Videogames. Wow, what a concept. Crackling portals to distant lands. Doorways inviting us to impossible places and barbarous shores. Psychedelic imaginationariums fuelled by the limitless potential of raw human creativity. Time machines folding history in on itself, over and over, until the beginning cannot be told apart from the end, like the infinite buttery layers of a viennoiserie pastry formed of unleavened millennia and, christ, I don’t know, chronoflour>? Anyway, I think you get the point, this week I have been playing the delightfully mundane metro sanitation sim Train Station Renovation.
The deals train continues today, this time in the form of huge savings on a bunch of Dell and Alienware desktop PCs and gaming laptops on both sides of the Atlantic. Indeed, Dell UK are having a 72-hour sale right now, where you can get a 14% discount on a number of great G-series and Alienware laptops and desktops with the code SAVE14 (or AW14, if you’re after an Alienware model), while Dell US have shaved hundreds of dollars off their fancy Alienware R1 laptops. Here’s my pick of the bunch.
One of the first things you do in The Witcher 3‘s Blood And Wine DLC is fight a giant. He comes at you moments after you arrive in Toussaint (read: France), when a very silly looking knight rides past you while frantically tilting at a windmill. The giant erupts from that windmill, flailing his club around and sending errant sheep flying. They roll and baa, while you do cool sword moves around succulent countryside. It is both glorious and gorgeous, and a downright terrific way to kick off some of the best adventuring in videogames.
I sure hope you like being heralded in verse.
They really go for that sort of thing in Toussaint. They go hard. It is a silly place, where people swear oaths on herons and dress up as rabbits for courtly nonsense. Geralt, as you might expect, makes a fantastic foil. Especially when he joins in. (more…)
War never changes, but sometimes the optional mid-war missions do get swapped around. That’s actually quite common. Developers Infinity Ward briefly added Most Wanted contracts to Warzone last month, wiping over a different type of mission that I really liked. Fortunately, they quickly swapped them back around – and more fortunately still, yesterday’s update lets us have both. Great! Thanks for that.
The update also smuggled in assault rifles and SMGs to the Gulag, and you’ll now find SKS carbines dotted around the main map. There are a couple new maps for plain old Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare, too. Oh, and you can now open those mysterious bunkers – and some players have found a nuke buried beneath one of them. Just thought you might want to know.
It was only a matter of time before Amazon properly jumped into the gaming space, and here we are with their very own multiplayer hero shooter coming out tomorrow. Developed by Amazon’s Relentless Studios, Crucible is a new free-to-play third-person shooter. I’ll be the first to admit that those words put me off at first, it’s not easy for these sorts of games to stand out amongst the rest. But having seen some gameplay firsthand and had a chat with the developers, I’m actually really excited about Crucible and what it’s bringing to the table.
It has taken me a long, long time to figure out how I, personally, can enjoy The Witcher 3. It got recommended to me loads because it’s a big flouncy fantasy RPG, which is my type of thing. But playing it was like running into a brick wall. Or a wattle and daub wall. Or maybe the planks of a grim, windowless wooden hut? Basically, I find it really difficult to inhabit Geralt. Rather than being a John Q. Everyman type, he is a strongly characterised man whose history I do not know – and which I’m not prepared to read an entire library worth of books or play two previous very long games to uncover, thank you very much.
Neither do I feel like I am a protector helping Geralt along, because he is clearly much better at his job without me, given all his expertise in monsters and the seven different types of weeds that’ll kill them and such. I ran into trouble playing it last night, for example, because I could not figure out how to brew more of the Swallow potion. The Witcher 3 would go more smoothly without me, the equivalent of an unqualified middle-manager, forcing my involvement on Geralt. But I have come up with a solution, and that is to ignore almost all of The Witcher 3.
This past week has revealed a little more information about Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. Even though we’ve yet to have had a proper “gameplay” trailer, we know a fair amount about the Viking Assassin’s Creed thanks what has been uncovered in interviews.
If you’ve been planning on giving your desktop a CPU-shaped shot in the arm, then get thee to Best Buy, where three of Intel’s excellent 9th Gen Coffee Lake processors have been reduced to some all-time lows, including the Core i7-9700K and the Core i9-9900K.