Sega's long-running Yakuza series already said goodbye to in-game hero when they retired old protagonist Kiryu Kazuma with their latest Yakuza: Like A Dragon. The series, and Sega, may be about to lose another familiar face with a lengthy career. Long-time Sega director behind the Yakuza series and Super Monkey Ball games Toshihiro Nagoshi is reportedly in talks to leave the company after 32 years. If he does make the leap, Nagoshi is expeted to start a new team beneath NetEase—the company currently behind mobile games including Diablo Immortal.

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Oh dear, it appears that someone's ripped a whole chunk of days out of my calendar. Today may be August 30th, but tomorrow appears to be October 31st in my book. How spooky. If Halloween haunts your heart earlier every year as it does mine, how about more PS1-style spooks? Security Booth is a bit like Papers Please in that you're in charge of sorting out who's allowed through your gate. Here though, you're guarding a questionable corporation campus and things get a bit cursed quite quickly.

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You can always beat the wolves, right? They're usually the next rung up from rats; even at their very hardest, they're maybe the fourth distinct creature thing a trainee adventurer has to slash into giblets on their way to bigger and better things. These grey, hairy training wheels might do a bit of snarling, a few mild biteroonies, but they won't ever kill you. That's not what wolves do.

Wartales, the next game from Northgard devs Shiro Games (which lands in early access soonish), didn't get the memo. Just twenty minutes into this sombre, map-wandering mercenary adventure, I ran into a crew of the old growly-howlies, and got killed to pieces. My second run, at least, left me with one survivor. But they were soon ruined financially by the burden of treating their wounds and repairing their mangled armour, and eventually met their end in a muddy ditch, at the end of a bandit's longsword. This game, folks, is not messing about.

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Just when we thought video games were properly back, we got another wave of delays last month. It’s totally understandable: unprecedented times and so on and etc.. However, for you dear reader, that did mean our top games of August post was gutted almost as soon as it was published.

There are a lot of great-looking games out this September… at time of writing. So, can everyone stay as still as possible, please? It’d be an awful shame if Kena got pushed again. I’d really like to play that one. I’d really like to play a lot of these, to be fair.

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Sundays are for cramming a 4x4 with your belongings for a house move and hoping that at least some of it survives. Before you set off, let's read this week's best writing about games.

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9 Years Of Shadows is an in-development metroidvania which features music from Michiru Yamane, Manami Matsumae, and Norihiko Hibino, who worked on Castlevania, Mega Man and Metal Gear Solid respectively. This doesn't excite me, but I mention it in case it's appealing to you.

What does excite me is that 9 Years Of Shadows otherwise looks fab, due to richly detailed pixel art, glittering world design, and a sidekick that appears to be a teddy bear ghost.

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The Overwatch development team announced on Thursday that they would rename cowboy McCree later this year. The change is due to the name's association with former Blizzard developer Jesse McCree, who left the company after a lawsuit against Activision Blizzard alleging workplace sexual harassment and discrimination. McCree is not specifically named in the lawsuit.

Now the World Of Warcraft team have announced similar changes, with rerences to former Blizzard employees due to be removed in a future update.

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Starfield committed to a November 2022 release date during E3, and we're now beginning to learn more about Bethesda's next big RPG. This week they released three "Location Insight" videos, describing in basic detail some of the cities you'll visit on your interplanetary adventure.

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Shadow Tactics was one of the most pleasant surprises of the past five years, establishing Mimimi as ones to watch before Desperados 3 established them as masters of tactical sneak 'em ups. Now the German developer is returning to their samurai roots with the standalone expansion Aiko's Choice. Announced back in March, it now has a release window: December.

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Valve have released their monthly list of Steam best sellers for July, and it's good news if you're a fan of Japanese re-releases. The pixel remasters of Final Fantasy I-III all made the list, but so did The Great Ace Attorney Chronciles and Ys IX: Monstrum Nox. New games from Japanese developers did well, too, with both Monster Hunter Stories 2: Wings Of Ruin and Samurai Warriors 5 making the list.

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