The COVID-19 relief Humble Bundle has raised $1,170,824 (£825,000).

Humble launched the Heal COVID-19 Bundle a couple of weeks back to support a number of charities aiding the hardest-hit countries such as Brazil and India, as well as the global medical effort to save lives. It's gone on to sell 54,374 bundles and raise aid for the humanitarian efforts of Direct Relief, Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), International Medical Corps, and GiveIndia.

"Direct Relief is tremendously grateful to Humble Bundle and its community of passionate and generous people," Direct Relief said in a statement on the official website (thanks, The Gamer). "Their collective efforts will translate to critically-needed medicines, supplies, and other resources to the hardest-hit communities in India and Brazil as they continue to battle rising cases of COVID-19.

Read more

A cancelled Fallout 2 sequel by Black Isle studios is now available to play in Fallout New Vegas courtesy of a new PC mod.

The game - which at the time had been codenamed Van Buren - takes place in 2253 and had been set in the great Midwest Commonwealth over four states. Sadly, it was cancelled in 2003, and while New Vegas inherited some aspects from the game, the Revelation Blue mod doesn't "treat [Fallout: New Vegas] as cannon [sic] in any way".

"The project's goal is to remake Van Buren for Fallout New Vegas," explains the mod creator (thanks, PC Gamer).

Read more

The developer behind Biomutant has said an upcoming update will make significant improvements to the game.

Experiment 101 said this update, which it hopes to release soon, will include bug fixes and "changes based on community feedback".

What changes, exactly? Experiment 101 didn't go into great detail, but namechecked many of Biomutant's systems:

Read more

Scavengers will today test up to 5000 players in a shared environment.

The recently-released sci-fi survival battle royale hybrid has an experimental sandbox testing platform built into the game called ScavLab, and it's in this that the test will take place tonight, from 7pm UK time.

This first public ScavLab event will allow thousands of players to gather together in a single, shared in-game communal hub. Developer Midwinter plans competitive sports mini-games, large-scale combat, as well as a live, digital AMA with CEO and co-founder Josh Holmes.

Read more

Benoît Sokal, creator of the Syberia series, has died aged 66.

French video game company Microids said in a blog post that Sokal passed away on 28th May after battling a long-term illness.

Belgian comic book artist Sokal is perhaps best known in the world of video games for creating the Syberia adventure games. But his first game for Microids was 1999 adventure Amerzone, which was based on Sokal's popular 1986 Inspector Canardo comic strip L'Amerzone .

Read more

Creative Assembly is facing a vociferous backlash over its decision to end support for Total War: Three Kingdoms.

This week the British developer announced it had wrapped up work on Total War: Three Kingdoms with the 1.7.1 patch. No more DLC or patches will be released for the game, which broke series records upon launch in May 2019.

Total War: Three Kingdoms saw seven DLC releases over the course of two years, but many fans feel Creative Assembly quit the game too early - and before the release of a promised expansion that would build out the north of the map.

Read more

Grounded will get "larger and slightly less frequent" updates from now on, developer Obsidian has said.

After a period of radio silence, the developer issued an update on its survival game, which launched in early access form in July last year.

"We are approaching the one-year mark from the game preview / early access launch and we still have so much that we want to do for the game," Obsidian said.

Read more

Koch Media has announced a livestream as part of Summer Game Fest.

Koch Primetime is set to take place at 8pm UK time on 11th June.

Koch Media releases video games under the Deep Silver publishing label, and owns the likes of Saints Row, Dead Island and Metro. It also recently set up a new studio to revive TimeSplitters.

Read more

A new Microsoft Flight Simulator patch has reduced the game's initial full download from over 170GB to 83GB.

In the patch notes for Sim Update 4, aka patch 1.16.20.0, the development team said it had performed optimisations for the initial full download of Microsoft Flight Simulator so the base game is 83GB instead of over 170GB.

It's good news to see the game's download halved, although 83GB is still a chunky old effort.

Read more

Hello! Welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we've found ourselves playing over the last few days. This time: Grindstone, sacred geometry, and suspiciously sexy rhythm.

If you fancy catching up on some of the older editions of What we've been playing,
here's our archive.

Capybara's toothsome and inexorable Grindstone - easily the best puzzle game of the last few years - popped up in a lovely PC version on the Epic Games Store this week, which was all the excuse I needed to give it another whirl. (It debuted on Apple Arcade and can also be found on Switch.) I'm not going to elaborate on the game's exquisite balance of risk and reward or its savagely crunchy and satisfying chain-making gameplay - you can read my Essential review of the Apple Arcade release for more on that. What I want to highlight here is the Fortune Grind, a new daily challenge mode which for my money knocks the existing Daily Grinds into a cocked hat.

Read more