Hack-hunting group Secret Club have revealed multiple exploits affecting Source Engine games like CS:GO, which could allow hackers to steal player data via Steam invites and community servers. They claim they reported one of these exploits to Valve two years ago, but not only are the company yet to patch it, but they allegedly prevented Secret Club from publicly disclosing the information too.
After taking a year off following the disastrously buggy WWE 2K20, 2K are returning to their wrestling series with WWE 2K22. They announced the new game at WrestleMania over the weekend with a wee trailer starring Rey Mysterio, though didn't have much to say about it. Still, I suppose a bullet point list of new additions wouldn't mean much when the main feature people want from a new 2K WWE game is for it to just not be mega-busted.
Sundays are for plopping eye drops into your eye pouches to prevent that horrible, allergy-driven burning sensation. Before you raise the dropper, let's read this week's best writing about games.
Most cooking games have you following a specific recipe and being judged on your accuracy. Soup Pot aims for something else. Announced during the recent ID@Xbox stream, it's a cooking game in which you can follow the recipe, sure, or you can mess around and experiment.
Yahoo! Answers announced this past week that it was closing down. This is bad news to those who used the question-and-answer website to learn about the world, but doubly bad news for the much larger population of people who liked to laugh at the dumb questions and dumber answers posted there.
To mourn the site's approaching closure, the operator of the YahooAnswersTXT Twitter account has created a custom dictionary for Typing Of The Dead: Overkill. So now you can kill zombies by typing, "What does Bigfoot want??".
Cozy Grove is a chill life sim set on a haunted island, which you restore to its colourful best by crafting, fishing and performing jobs for a growing menagerie of harmless ghosts. It looks wonderfully pleasant - and it's out now.
Despite being the fifth main game in its series, the only way of looking at Age Of Empires 4 is as a sequel to Age Of Empires 2. The first and third Age titles were both fine games, of course, as was their stoner cousin Age Of Mythology. But it was AoE2 that would be enshrined as one of the all-time RTS greats, and it’s the inevitable benchmark against which AoE4 will be measured, when it launches later this year. Just the twenty-year fug of strategy dad nostalgia surrounding the series would have been a significant enough headwind for AoE4 developers Relic Entertainment to release into. But thanks to a belting remaster of AoE2 in 2019, the old bruiser is somehow once again the RTS of the day, complete with brand new expansions, lashings of fresh esports, and the largest player base it has ever had.
Launching a new Age game now has the air of a prince giving a nervous funeral speech, where he promises to exceed the glories of his father’s reign, even as the king’s body casually bench-presses a horse from the coffin next to him. How do you supplant a game whose star still seems to be rising? Change too much, and you’ll be beasted for fixing what wasn’t broken. Change too little, on the other hand, and you’ll be castigated for not fixing the broken bits. It’s a hell of a balancing act, for sure. And yet, after watching the footage from today’s Fan Preview event, and speaking with the folks at Relic, they look well in reach of pulling it off.
Temtem is another game that found popularity at the beginning of 2020 - which, as you know, was roughly six years ago. The monster taming MMO has been relatively quiet in the year since, but its next major island-adding expansion will launch on April 13th.
Age Of Empires 4 was announced a few years ago, but we've only seen a little of the Relic-developed sequel to the classic RTS series. That's about to change with the Age Of Empires Fan Preview event, which is taking place about an hour from now at 5pm BST/9am PST/12pm EST. You can stream it before.
Maybe this is because I try hard to ignore it, but did this April Fool's Day seem a quiet one? Not many japes? I mean, most April Fool's jokes are not at all funny, so that's not necessarily a bad thing. But maybe I missed something good? Gang, what good japes were afoot this year? And more importantly, what are you playing this weekend?