Despite being very, very bad at its turn-based tactical survival, I quite enjoy Overland. I always welcome a reason to jump back in and utterly fail at surviving an apocalyptic road trip across the country. Finji have given me another fantastic reason to get back behind the wheel. In its newest update, Overland adds an “all dogs” setting that guarantees your squad will only be made up of furry friends. Also there are pugs now.

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Spelunky 2

launches on PC next week, but you’ll be tackling its randomised platformer dungeons solo for a few weeks after that. “Our online multiplayer had a bit of a rocky start on PS4,” Mossmouth say, and they’ve decided to hold that element out of the PC release temporarily instead of delaying the launch of the game entirely. Mossmouth and BlitWorks anticipate that online multiplayer will be ready for PC within a few weeks.

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Maxis have given some new details on their commitment to fixing dark skin tones in The Sims 4. An October update will address existing graphical issues with darker skin tones while a later update in December will add one hundred new skin swatches and additional customization controls for Create-A-Sim.

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You may not be able to buy it anywhere right now, but Nvidia’s new [cms-block] GPU has very much set the bar for next-gen graphics cards. It represents a significant leap over the existing RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Super, both at 4K and lower resolutions, and it’s hands down one of the best graphics cards Nvidia’s ever made. But just how much faster is the RTX 3080 over the RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Super? Let’s find out via the medium of some lovely graphs.

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Of course Amazon is launching a cloud gaming service. How did I not see this coming? Amazon Luna is the company’s upcoming service for playing games on most of your favorite screens via subscription packages to different libraries. They’ve opened applications to the early access version of the service currently available in mainland United States.

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“This is all just an excuse for me to build a universe, right?” says Daniel Fedor, as I settle in for an evening watching him play Ostranauts. And he’s serious. The sandboxy space sim, which hit early access on September 10th, and which is a sort-of sequel to acclaimed oddball RPG NEO Scavenger, has some properly deep worldbuilding. And I don’t mean deep as in “my D&D setting has a map I did myself, and religions to boot”. I mean deep as in “a spreadsheet just to track the product ranges and distribution networks of fifty-odd manufacturing brands”, which is just one of Fedor’s many design documents.

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Call Of Duty: Warzone

is kicking off season six next week and you’ll want to check the schedule before you hop back into Verdansk. The train schedule, that is. COD’s looty shooty battle royale is getting a working metro system to carry you around the map. The trick is that you’ll have to play nice on board. No fighting back there or this train isn’t leaving the station, squad!

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Featured as part of the Game Devs of Color Expo and its Gradient Convergence showcase on Steam, Onsen Master’s Ghibli aesthetics caught my eye immediately. It’s a “hot spring customer management” game where you ditch the whole ‘service with a smile’ schtick and drag your customers with speed and aggression into hot spring baths you’ve prepared especially for them.

Other duties include making sure they’re cleaned between uses, that you’ve mixed the right ingredients, and you’re keeping spillages to a minimum. It’s a tough gig! And the more I ran my onsen in the demo build, the more I felt a seldom used part of my brain expanding. Is this – am I multitasking?

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Solid Snake, Revolver Ocelot, and all their wacky mates return to PC today with re-releases of the first two Metal Gear Solid games popping up on GOG, after years hiding in boxes. The stealth series was clunky but ahead of its time in a lot of ways (and I’m as alarmed as anyone by how prescient their politics now seem) so I’m quite curious to see how the vintage tactical espionage action actually holds up. It’s not going to be super-great, is it, but I’m game. GOG have dug up the original Metal Gear too.

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This was to be the week Bungie launched Destiny 2: Beyond Light but, like everything else this year, the expansion ended up delayed. This week has at least brought news about installing Beyond Light come November, both good and bad. Good news: thanks to some revamped technoguts, the game should take up less drive space and Bungie should be able to patch any urgent problems faster. Bad news: you’ll need to download the whole game again when Beyond Light arrives. We’ll get a few hours’ head-start to preload, at least.

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