eFootball™

I'm worried about eFootball.

It's not just the 30th September launch - what Konami has already admitted amounts to an extremely limited demo with just a handful of teams available to play.

It's not just that key gameplay features, including new mechanics, animations and even kicks won't make it in time for that initial launch.

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Castlevania Anniversary Collection

UPDATE: Castlevania Advance Collection was announced (finally!) during tonight's Nintendo Direct - and it's out now on the eShop priced £15.99.

The compilation includes classic Castlevania games from the Game Boy Advance and Super NES:

New are Rewind, Quick Save and Button Mapping features. All regional versions of each game, as well as a gallery mode with never-before-seen artwork, are included.

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Apex Legends™


Apex Legends developer Respawn has backtracked on a definitive-sounding statement regarding the future of fan-favourite series Titanfall.

Earlier this week, Respawn's Jason Garza gave a refreshingly frank answer when asked by a fan about what was going on with Titanfall these days. In short: nothing much at the moment, as the studio was so busy.

But as coverage of his comments gathered steam, Respawn this morning issued a new statement via Twitter aimed at press coverage of the matter, deliberately muddying the waters.

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Sable

It's funny how much the mind fills in. The art for Sable: you could say, hey, it's Moebius, the French artist who once made the Silver Surfer such an elegant, lonesome presence, a needle of swift, glittering will darting above the blasted canyons of Manhattan. Or you could talk of the thinness of the line, the slow-strobing pastel colours, the sparing use of shadow.

But these are just separate pieces, and the mind fills everything in anyway. It works with the emptiness, giving this desert landscape with its speckled earth and Vegas carpet of exposed strata an overwhelming sense of spent time. Time passing! Centuries have soaked into the ground, bleaching animal bone and dulling machinery, revealing a hard, dry world scoured of obvious context. Wide expanses of sand make you wonder about what forgotten lake once pooled here. Meanwhile, the thin black line that gives the game its illustrative flair works on the scattered dwellings, rendering plasterwork with a powdery, ossuary feel, the ragged scraps of sheeting flapping like old shrouds.

The trees, what trees there are outside of the forest region, can seem seared, the outer bark stripped away by the sun. Elsewhere, the huge things lying about are ancient scrap, half-pipe fragments of something that was once vast and science-fictiony. Smoke rises against thin clouds - a clue? A prompt? And then night falls and the sky is suddenly so dark, so blue, the land loses its banding to the wonderful gloom, and the stars come out and make everything a delight.

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The Sims™ 4

EA has been in a bit of a revitalising mood for The Sims 4 of late, revisiting and improving a range of existing features, and that spirit of rejuvenation continues with the game's latest update, which adds a massive 1,200 colour variants to a whole heap of items.

In total, 149 Build Mode items from the base game have received new colour options as part of the update, including cups, curtains, windows, lamp shades, floorboards, action figures, bins, ovens (and other assorted kitchen appliances), plus a huge range of furniture - from bookshelves and coffee tables to chairs and beds.

The goal of all this, explains EA over on the official Sims 4 forum, is to "complement and enhance [the game's existing] assets so Simmers have more choices and have more use out of them". Certainly, if you've ever found yourself frustrated that you couldn't match your window box to your wastebasket in the past, your prayers may finally have been answered.

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The Long Dark

Developer Hinterland Games' superb sub-zero survival experience The Long Dark will finally receive its extremely long-awaited fourth story episode on 6th October.

Fury, Then Silence, as the Episode 4 is known, follows pilot Will Mackenzie's desperate attempts to escape a murderous gang of convicts from one of the darkest corners of Great Bear Island in order to continue his search for second protagonist Astrid.

Hinterland says Fury, Then Silence will feature between 7 and 10 hours of gameplay, 60 minutes of narrative cinematics, and over 40 minutes of new music, with its action unfolding in a brand-new region dominated by an old prison complex built in the shadow of Blackrock Mountain.

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Blood Bowl 3

Developer Cyanide Studio has announced it's indefinitely delaying the early access PC launch of Blood Bowl 3 - the latest entry in the murderous, fantasy themed sports series - which was originally due to take place this September.

This, of course, isn't the first delay for the game; Blood Bowl 3 was initially due to launch for PlayStation, Xbox, Switch, and PC this August, but a June rethink saw Cyanide and publisher Nacon postpone its full release into February next year. However, that extended delay was to be sweetened somewhat by an early access PC launch this September.

Now though, the game's release has slipped once more, with Cyanide admitting its initial goal of a September early access launch "was a bit too optimistic" in a post to Twitter.

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Eurogamer

One of the most charming things about Timemelters, and about the new Timemelters demo that has just hit Steam, is how eager it is to apologise for itself. It apologizes for all the normal stuff you get in a pre-release demo - no key-binding yet, but it's coming, not everything is fully optimised. But then it keeps on apologising. Or explaining itself, in a distinctly apologetic manner, anyway. Listen: it's meant to be tough, you're meant to die a lot and iterate on a plan. You're meant to be a bit overwhelmed, and the final game will lead you in much more carefully. Promise.


None of these things should be apologised for - or even, as is probably the case, gently explained away. Timemelters, formerly called Wicca, is so exciting precisely because it's overwhelming - it gives you so much to think about! And it's so exciting because it's hard, not for the sake of being hard, but to push you to embrace all of its systems, to plan and plan and see a plan fail and come up with a new plan. Iteration!

This is perfect stuff for a real-time tactics and strategy game, which is, I guess, kind of what Timemelters is. It's the spiritual sequel to another tactics game that was wonderfully characterful, and wonderfully hard to pin down, Sang-Froid: Tales of Werewolves. That game is an all-timer for me. I have never found a game's atmosphere and mechanical mind more fascinating. And I think Timemelters is up there too. But I'm probably confusing you at this point. Apologies!

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Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy

The Guardians of the Galaxy are a band of messy, dysfunctional, often self-centred, always bickering individuals who spend about as much time travelling the cosmos cleaning up their own mistakes as they do other people's. They're irritable and they're pig-headed, but when push comes to shove, they get the job done, and it's exactly this dynamic that makes them completely unique and sometimes more relatable than the comparatively virtuous Avengers. But how do you translate that key element of who the Guardians are into a video game? We recently had the chance to get a hands-on with Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy - the latest single player cosmic comic book-inspired adventure from Eidos Montreal - and we have to say, it doesn't look easy.

Our hands on was about an hour long and took place in Chapter 5 of the game. The Guardians are locked in something of a legal dispute with the Nova Corps, to whom they owe a pretty big fine, so they're headed to the spirit of Xandar AKA The Rock - a Nova outpost - to smooth things over. Prior to this point in the story, they've been in contact with Ko-Rel, a Nova centurion, and her daughter Nikki, who asks for the team's help at the Rock as something strange seems to be going on there. (Side note for comic fans: while there are two distinct comic book characters with Guardians of the Galaxy and Nova Corp affiliations with these names, they seem to be reimagined for this lore.)

Anyway, before the team head out for the Rock, you're able to spend some time with them in their ship, the Milano. Here you can wander around, play songs on the jukebox, have Rocket craft perks from components you've picked up on adventures or explore your teammate's rooms and interact with their belongings to find out a little more about them. It's clear that this is a very different take on some of characters than in the Marvel Cinematic Universe; several backstories are more akin to their classic comic book arcs. For example, this version of Thanos, who Gamora mentions briefly, is in love with Lady Death - literally the physical embodiment of death - which is historically what drives him to do the things that he does. Peter Quill, meanwhile, is the heir to the Spartax empire, which he also mentions casually in conversation on the Milano, as you do. Some things the game does give its own original spin on, however. It reimagines Quill's moniker Star-Lord as an 80s band he idolises, and the team at Eidos Montreal actually created an entire extremely 80s-metal Star-Lord album from scratch, which is played throughout the game. Tracks include Space Riders (With No Names), No Guts No Glory, and The Darkness Inside. Think Metallica, Iron Maiden and Megadeth - all big hair and searing guitar solos.

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Eurogamer

In the beginning, there was one Cube. One single, solitary purple Cube to rule them all. Fortnite fans nicknamed it Kevin, and then watched with interest as it rumbled round the game's old map before finally blowing up.

Three years later, Kevin is back, and this time it has brought some friends. Fortnite's latest live event introduced us to a whole Cube civilisation, some of which have since made Fortite's island their home.

Now, fans are working together to watch these new Cubes, as they move and reproduce in real-time.

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