Microsoft has announced the Xbox Games with Gold lineup for January 2021.
Tarsier Studios' Little Nightmares is available all of January. "Little Nightmares is everything you may have loved about LittleBigPlanet thrown into a sausage grinder with everything you may have dreaded in Silent Hill," Edwin wrote in our review.
Watch our Aoife and Ian play Little Nightmares in the vide below:
Despite enjoying it during my initial review, I never connected to Afterparty in the same way as its predecessor Oxenfree, one of my favourite games. Both are narrative-focused - you walk two characters from A to B and pick dialogue options, some of these options will change the course the story takes. Your protagonists are young people with a very natural way of speaking - they mumble and interrupt each other should you so choose, sigh loud and use "like", like... you know.
I think I never liked Afterparty as much as Oxenfree because it's a less hopeful continuation of the same problems - Oxenfree ends at a point where Alex can choose to go to college in a different state and start over, whereas Milo and Lola spend college just as miserable as before. They aren't nice to each other. They may in fact be very tired of each other and ready to explore something new, but they're also scared of letting go.
Both games try to make a point about autonomy, about their protagonists never really being their own people, not only because they're literally being controlled by you. Alex is trying to move on from a traumatic experience in her life and needs physical distance for that, and Lola wants to move town after college, which frightens Milo enough to sabotage even a tentative attempt to do so. Alex in Oxenfree by contrast is much more of a video game hero protagonist, as she has the power to alter reality and undo the source of her trauma. What actually happened on Edward's Island, what happened to her brother before that, will be a thing only she remembers. I liked that option better, because what I want when thinking about traumatic experiences is a do-over. As Cher puts it: "If I could turn back time".
Humble have gone live with their annual 'Female Protagonist' sale, and this year the line-up is particularly good, and particularly cheap.
As well as the usual suspects (all those gritty Tomb Raider reboots), they've got the 2019 mind-bending action thriller Control, the brand new Resident Evil 3 remake, plus a whole host of Indie darlings like Gris and River City Girls. They've even included digital sleeper hit Prey for only £4. That's an entire 80% off. Not too shabby at all.
As usual, the games are available only on PC, and a portion of all the proceeds will go to charity. The deal is live until the 28th - so, six days and counting. It's well worth checking out for yourself, but in case you just hate scrolling, here's a few of our recommendations:
Call of Duty: Warzone and Black Ops Cold War dataminers have revealed the first set of Mastercraft weapons.
Mastercrafts, which return from Treyarch's Black Ops 4, are over-the-top weapon skins that transform a gun into something more. They're entirely cosmetic, so don't offer a gameplay advantage, but they sure do stand out.
Activision had teased their arrival earlier in December, but only now do we see what these guns actually look like.
It was probably the stand-out reveal of this month's Game Awards show; a first look at the kind of survival sci-fi horror so many of us have been pining for, from the same people that brought us video game's defining sci-fi horror Dead Space. The Callisto Protocol, due in 2022 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series S/X and PC, is the debut of Striking Distance Studios, formed by Glen Schofield and other veterans of EA Redwood Shores/Visceral Games - a project, fascinatingly, tied into the PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds universe, seeing as it also comes courtesy of the PUBG Corporation.
"Well, I'm not sure how much I can even say about it," Schofield tells us in the aftermath of the reveal. "But you know, there is a lore, and there is a big storyline that's being written now. I've been wanting to do another sci-fi horror game. I mean, you know, I love doing sci fi and I love doing horror. I wanted to go back to exactly what I wanted to do. So I presented an idea to them - then we try and retrofit this storyline that they've been working on."
The story's set in a distant future on Callisto, Jupiter's second largest moon, and equal in size to a planet like Mercury - "It's a good size moon!" says Glen - and is confirmed to be third person and single player. Beyond that? There's not much more information on offer, partly through a desire from Striking Distance to keep its cards close to its chest, and partly because as a project it's still early days. What we can glean, though, is the direction Glen and his team - some 25 of which hail back to the Dead Space days - will be taking The Callisto Protocol, and indeed the survival horror genre.
Gearbox and Bobby Prince have come to an agreement over the use of Duke Nukem music.
In 2019, Robert "Bobby" Prince filed a lawsuit against Gearbox, alleging he owned the copyright on some of the music in 2016's Duke Nukem 3D: 20th Anniversary World Tour, itself a remaster of the 1996 original.
Prince believed the use of his music in the earlier Duke games was subject to a licence agreement between Prince and 3D Realms. Thus, Gearbox did not own the rights to certain music it thought it owned the rights to.
I wasn't so keen on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare's multiplayer at launch. Most of the maps available to play at the back end of October 2019 were too big for their own good, resulting in boring play. Some of the maps were downright dirty. Piccadilly remains a blot on the Call of Duty multiplayer landscape, and I still have nightmares over sniper rifle glints peeking out from the safety of Euphrates Bridge. Add to this cluttered map design, a largely useless mini-map and upper-level windows all over the shop, and you got a camper's paradise right there.
A year later, I am craving more Modern Warfare, and I feel bitterly disappointed that the game feels like it's being left behind as Activision shifts focus to Warzone and Black Ops Cold War.
It's interesting to look back at Modern Warfare's first year of life. As new maps were added to the game, I found myself playing it more and more. I had a blast with the chaotic Shipment. I love the flow of Rust. And Shoot House is one of the best FPS maps around. Modern Warfare's close quarters maps are brilliant, and it remains my favourite 6v6 game installed on my console hard-drive. Yep, I think Modern Warfare is a better 6v6 game right now than Black Ops Cold War.
It wouldn't be right to suggest that World of Warcraft had ever, at any point during the last 16 years, been a less than popular and successful game. The days when it was thought the biggest game in the world are long behind it, but it has been reliably raking in subscription revenue and expansion pack sales on a considerable scale the whole time. It's also a fool's errand to mark any one expansion out as a return to form; many WOW players will argue that each expansion is either a disgraceful betrayal or a triumphant comeback, but different sections of the community seldom agree on which is which. (Meanwhile, long-term but less invested casual players like myself tend to think they're all pretty good.)
Yet something feels different this time. Shadowlands, WOW's eighth expansion - or perhaps we should more properly call it the ninth edition of the game - was briefly the fastest-selling PC game of all time this month, before Cyberpunk 2077 came out. Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick has been talking up this venerable franchise too, boasting of record player engagement before the expansion released and noting that it brings in over a billion dollars a year, making it the financial equal of stablemate Call of Duty.
What's going on? The pandemic, certainly. Few are the popular games that haven't seen more interest and more playtime this year, with everyone spending more time at home, searching for comfort and entertainment. Kotick also seemed to suggest last year's launch of the retro WOW Classic was a turning point. The developers say that there isn't much crossover in the communities of the classic and modern games, but it's easy to imagine that Classic boosted mindshare and tempted many lapsed players back to the wider fold. (And since the games share a single subscription fee, they're commercially indistinguishable.)
As expected, Alien: Isolation is the next free game on the Epic Games Store.
Epic's free Holiday Sale 2020 games list leaked last week, and it's all played out as accurate so far. The leak said Alien: Isolation would be today's free game and that's an affirmative, soldier.
Alien: Isolation is free to claim until from now until 4pm tomorrow, 23rd December, when if the leak continues to prove accurate, Metro 2033 goes free.
GTA Online is like a Xenomorph, in a lot of ways. It's an iconic behemoth, one that creates a parasitic relationship with its hosts and refuses to die. It also thrives unexpectedly during quarantine.
Grand Theft Auto 5 celebrated its seventh birthday during this noxious year, but Los Santos has never been busier. The game sold 400,000 copies in under four months in the UK, in the midst of our first national lockdown. That success might have had something to do with the *ahem* player-driven alien gang war that consumed the game (and most of social media) in April.
But if you need a stone-cold example of GTA Online's enduring relevance, Sony led with the damn thing during its PlayStation 5 reveal conference. In 2021, Rockstar's service sandbox will land on the monolithic mini-fridge and its router rival, the first of its kind to span three generations of consoles.