Rejoice, for the Monster Train has been updated. Cry, for your favourite cards are probably worse now. Yesterday’s patch to Shiny Shoe’s splendid roguelike deckbuilder introduced optional mututators that tweak the rules for each run, but I’m more struck by the balance changes. Shiny Shoe say they’ve gone after “the outliers”, aiming for a state where choosing a certain card is “never a ‘no-brainer'”. That’s reasonable, but it does make me long for Dota’s balancing philosophy where buffs were always prioritised over nerfs.

It’s not all bad. Morsels look pretty strong now.

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My [cms-block] recommendation, the excellent AOC 24G2U has been pretty difficult to get hold of here in the UK for a number of months now, with prices steadily creeping upwards as stock levels continue to dwindle. Happily, a very good alternative has recently sprung into view in the form of LG’s 24GL650, which is one of Nvidia’s officially certified[cms-block] with a 144Hz refresh rate and is now down to £192 over at Ebuyer.

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I was expecting Surgeon Simulator 2 to have more wacky procedures to fumble my way through, and it does. I was not expecting its level editor to let four players run around together, building everything from basketball courts and bowling alleys to escape rooms and Dance Dance Revolution machines. A new trailer for the Bossa Labs Creation Mode shows off those and more, as well as announcing a release date of August 28th. Come see:

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Death Stranding

, the walking simulator about the sad Deliveroo man, is finally out on PC, allowing thousands of keyboard clackers to decode the complex metaphors embedded within such characters as “Mama”, a woman with a baby, and “Heartman”, a man with a pacemaker, played here by an aging and tired Danny Wallace. Look beyond the sub-textual nuance of such masterful creations, however, and you will find a half-decent delivery ‘em up. But is reliable postboy Sam Porter Bridges (a transporter who builds bridges) one of the 7 best couriers in PC games? You can find out by reading closely between the lines of this list.

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I am not ashamed to admit that it was Final Fantasy X-2, not Final Fantasy X, that made me want to get a PlayStation 2. So fervent was my desire for this game that I even entered a text competition on the telly to try and win one. Needless to say, I was not successful. Still, it was just what I needed to push me over the edge. I was vaguely aware of FFX and Yuna and Tidus and all of that back in the early noughties, but man alive, Yuna just looked so damn cool in X-2 with her guns and new short hair/mad pony-tail combo, and I was also precisely the right age for Paine to seem like a total badass. It was the perfect storm of all my teenage passions, and I still look back on it fondly even though we all know it’s a total trash fire and innately inferior to X proper.

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The Darkness might be an intimidating mass of deadly triangles, but Destiny 2 has more grounded concerns to worry about right now. As Bungie continue to wrestle with life under the Covid-19 pandemic, they’ve postponed the release of the game’s next big expansion to give themselves more breathing room. Destiny 2: Beyond Light will now release just under two months after its planned September release, launching instead on November 10th.

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I’m afraid Rogue Legacy 2 will be waiting a few more weeks before taking its place in the roguelike pantheon. Developers Cellar Door today announced that the procedural, generational dungeon-crawler needs a little more time to polish its armour, and won’t be launching this month as planned. Instead, Rogue Legacy 2 will enter early access at the later date of August 18th – and promises to be a heftier package than initially planned.

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Have you packed your broomstick, reader? Are you ready to learn spells, master potions, reckon with some unsavoury facets of a beloved children’s book series, and gorge yourself irresponsibly on flavoured beans? Release this week, Pottergame is a wonderfully broken mess of an homage to Hogwarts – a broken, nostalgic collectathon that’s at once a shovelware joke and a cutting criticism of the Potterverse.

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We’re back! This week, we’ve reverted to a more traditional gaming podcast format by spending the first five to ten minutes talking about 90s kids’ TV shows we watched. Did you miss us?? Remarkably, we do also talk about some video games, to whit: Halo 3 and Death Stranding, which are two big beasty release from this week that VidBud Matthew and Nate have been playing. Unfortunately I, Alice, haven’t been playing anything new, but am able to provide input – as well as sound effects! Yes, this week also sees the return of the much loved soundboard. Ooh la la!> (more…)

In 1994, Revolution Software released their second game, a dystopian adventure game named Beneath A Steel Sky. Then they mostly made Broken Sword games for the next 20 years. Today, Revolution finally return to that ferrous firmament with the launch of a sequel, Beyond A Steel Sky. It’ll send us into an AI-controlled megacity to rescue an abducted child and definitely not get tangled in any sort of sci-fi conspiracy. Come see some of that in the launch trailer below.

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