Screenshot Saturday Sundays! Yes, the sound of jingling bells may be getting irrepressibly lounder on the horizon, but we can still take reprieve against the oncoming yuletide with a festive-free edition of lovely videogame screenshots. This week: interstellar suburbia, power-up sequences, turning out the lights and vibing to the beat.
Along with a half-dozen planets and countless weapons and armour, Destiny 2: Beyond Light made us say goodbye to the game’s existing raids – so it’s about time it added a new one of its own. Thee Deep Stone Crypt opens its doors today, letting you put all that hard-earned Europan gear to the test in the expansion’s first real endgame challenge. Or, alternatively, get ready to watch Destiny’s smartest Guardians duke it out in the race to be the first to clear Bungie’s latest sci-fi puzzle-box.
Think, for a moment, about how Call Of Duty: Black Ops Cold War‘s guns must feel in your digital soldier’s hands. Cold, hard and metallic, even through the stiff tactical nylon of your combat gloves. Now imagine it all oozing in greasy nacho flavouring powder. That, perhaps unsurprisingly, is the inescapably tactile sensation that’s stricken me since finding out you can slide into Mountain Dew’s DMs to stick a Dorito chip on your Call Of Duty rifle.
When you’re dropping heavy machinery from orbit, a few dings and bangs are to be expected. Unfortunately, Titanfall‘s long-overdue arrival on Steam left it more than a little smashed up. Early reports from the mech battlefields suggest the 2014 game is pretty much unplayable, locking its fascinating experimental multiplayer campaign behind server issues and broken software.
There’s an ephemeral, anxious mood I often find myself looking for in games. A sense of long, sleepless anxiety, the kind of anxious melancholy that hits after a few too many drinks in a town I don’t quite know too well. That, I think, is what I walked away from Taylor Swietanski’s That Night, Steeped By Blood River feeling, a short series of dreamless vignettes where nothing but the signature you scrawl on the hotel room door is certain.
Helps that it’s bloody gorgeous, mind.
One of the smaller frustrations that come with writing for a living is that you really can’t listen to music with lyrics while working. So, for the past few years, I’ve listened to every “24/7 lo-fi jazz-hop beats to study and relax to” mix the that exists, a thousand variations of some Sisyphean student cursed to forever turn pages to the sound of chill, non-distinct tunes. Ahead of World Of Warcraft: Shadowlands‘ release next week, Blizzard have released their own spin on the form – commissioning four composers to create vibe-soaked remixes of the MMO’s underworld soundscapes.
The race towards the end of the year continues, and we’ve started talking amongst ourselves about our favourite games from 2020. This is challenging both because there have been a lot of great games this year, and because none of us can remember anything that happened before August. We’ll do our research and name our favourites across December, just as Horace demands, but what about you. Do you already know what your favourite game of 2020 is?
More urgently, what are you playing this weekend? Here’s what we’re clicking on!
That’s week one done in Call Of Duty: Black Ops Cold War and Treyarch have rounded up all the balance changes and bug fixes they’ve made so far. Guns have been adjusted and scorestreaks tweaked, all detailed in the list of first week patch notes. They’ve also published a new Trello board so players can keep an eye on known issues that Treyarch are working on.
Earlier this year, 343 Industries announced that they were delaying Halo Infinite, originally planned as an Xbox Series X launch game, to 2021. They’ve been pretty quiet on Infinite since then, presumably adjusting to what the delay means for the game and the team. Now they say they’re planning an end of year update and hope to be more communicative in upcoming months.
Rockstar have finally tipped their hand on the big, new heist they have planned for GTA Online, which they’ve previously said would take you crime lot to a whole new location. No, it’s not Vice City, but you will be leaving Los Santos. The Cayo Perico Heist will send you off to a drug lord’s private island and you can even fly solo if you like.