Though Robin Hood was famously surrounded by his Merry Men, the newly-announced Hood: Outlaws & Legends is “a dark and gritty re-imagining of the Robin Hood legend”. Unveiled last night during Sony’s State Of Play stream, Hood is a heist game where two teams of four aim to nab the same prize, fighting both AI guards and each other – a bit like Hunt: Showdown but with more tights. It looks like it has mixture of stealth and head bashing with friends, something I’m always up for.

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So it is, the rumours are true. After months of speculation on whether or not Alan Wake might make an appearance in Control, Remedy Entertainment have revealed that he will indeed be in the game’s next DLC, AWE. You won’t have to wait long to see him either, because it releases on August 27th.

For a hot second, I thought that AWE might stand for Alan Wake Expansion, because that would’ve been a bit of a laugh. But no, it actually stands for Altered World Event, which is a thing that happens when paranormal forces make their way into the game’s world.

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We’ve updated our list of the best Minecraft shaders for 1.16.1 as a result of the newly released Optifine version for 1.16.1, so you can once again find exactly the right Minecraft shaders for you. We run the gamut between highly performant, lightweight shaders and glorious trundling behemoths that require beastly rigs to even contemplate using. But all the below shaders are guaranteed to make your Minecraft world look more fantastic than any resource pack could ever make it.

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Can you honestly say with a straight face that Pac-Man has seen the same success he once saw 40 years ago? He’s been rebooted an embarrassing number of times; I still have nightmares about his “Ghostly Adventures”. However, I’d argue that Pac-Man Championship Edition DX+ (or Pac-Man DX+ for short) was one of the two times that Bandai Namco were onto something great.

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The good news? Spelunky 2 comes out next month! Hooray! The bad news is that, in all likelihood, the spelunkin’ sequel’s release will be exclusive to Sony’s PlayStation tellybox. Boo, hiss, and all that rubbish. But while a PC release date remains as elusive as an eggplant, we can still enjoy a deeper dive into Spelunky’s caves with developer Derek Yu.

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Call yourself Serious Sam 4, do ya? Well, you don’t seem so “serious” about this launching in August lark to me. Unfortunately, the next entry in Croteam’s run-and-gun-and-scream-and-explode ’em up won’t launch this month as planned, with the devs today announcing that Sam’s fourth shooting gallery has been delayed into late September. It takes time to pack 100,000 baddies onto one screen, after all.

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It might’ve taken eight years for Phantasy Star Online 2 to make it to the West, but fortunately, the jump from the Windows Store to Steam only took the Japanese MMO a mere couple of months. Sonic Team’s free-to-play anime romp has finally found a place on Valve’s shelves, making it easier than ever to hop in and bash a load of goblins in a Gundam.

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Playing defensively rarely pans out in Apex Legends – at least, it’s never panned out for me. But then, I’ve never had a whopping great turreted machine gun to help lock down Skulltown. That’s all set to change later this month with the addition of scrappy mechanic Rampart and her life partner Sheila, arriving as part of Apex Legends’ sixth season on August 18th.

Sheila is the gun, by the way. I very much look forward to getting to know her.

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I like neat AI stuff. The prospect of making machines autonomously clever (whatever that means) is a fundamentally exciting concept to me, even though there are plenty of ways in which AI is being and will be used to make people’s lives worse. I’m therefore a prime target for Two Minute Papers, a YouTube channel that takes interesting research papers and presents them with hyper-infectious enthusiasm.

One of their latest vids is about an AI someone’s managed to trick into being really good at generating realistic basketball movements from a tiny amount of data. I don’t understand how, but I don’t particularly want or need to. This man just wrapped up his vid by whooping “what a time to be alive”, and you know what? It is.

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We’ve got sitcoms based on game development, so hows about repaying the favour with a playable comedy series? That’s the idea behind 3 Out Of 10, an interactive animated series from Mothergunship developers Terrible Posture Games. Debuting on the Epic Games Store today, each week should see the release of a new episode following the hijinks of a hapless gamedev studio trying to create their first half-decent hit.

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