The Old West has always been weird, hasn't it? A bloody daydream of plunder and desolation, heroism and nihilism, reincarnated in a thousand motley forms across generations of books, films, folk songs and campfire stories. Videogames have certainly taken it in some peculiar directions. Think of Media.Vision's Wild Arms series for PS1, where six-shooters are ancient relics wielded by chosen adventurers, or the pre-patch version of Red Dead Redemption, with its cursed physics and flying centaurs, or the dreamy vestiges of frontier life you encounter while trudging the plains of Where The Water Tastes Like Wine.

WolfEye's Weird West mixes this vast, rancid legacy with outright fantasy elements sourced partly from the likes of Lovecraft and partly from the studio founders' previous Dishonored games. This very much isn't your classic rootin' tootin' cowboy yarn. Head out into the wilds and you'll find raucous villages of pigmen and ghost towns that absent-mindedly manifest from the foundations up. Dip into the caves and you'll encounter ravenous mutants and blue-stone temples where cultists debate visions of the apocalypse.

Magic is an everyday concern: town deputies sling lightning and fireballs alongside bullets. Stores are happy to trade in ectoplasm and cursed goblets alongside deerskin and copper. Quests alternate gritty pulp novel conceits with otherworldly enigmas: one moment you're squeezing a barkeep for information on a posse of kidnappers, against a backdrop of tinkling piano; the next, you're trying to make sense of a captive meteor. The realm is divided not just between settler communities and indigenous Americans, but factions of cannibals, werewolves and witches, all of them being manipulated by an off-screen illuminati of cowled figures who might as well call themselves game designers.

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Scott Bennie, a writer and contributor to the original Fallout, has died aged 61.

Bennie served as a designer, writer and producer of numerous games during his time at Interplay in the 1990s, including The Lord of the Rings, Starfleet Academy, plus Starfleet Command and its sequel.

On Fallout, Bennie memorably said his career had peaked with the popular naming of its canine companion, Dogmeat.

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A new Elden Ring-themed mod for Tekken 7 lets you duel as all the greats: namely potboy and lobster.

Modder Ultraboy has created the mod (available on Tekken Mods) that replaces various Tekken characters for new Elden Ring models.

For instance, Melina replaces Iidia, Malenia replaces Kunimitsu, and Ranni the Witch replaces Kazumi, as well as other bosses and player characters.

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This is cyberpunk right here. The analogue future of analogue yesterday, but with a bit of grit in it. A handicam with a busted viewing screen. A space-taxi dropping off stale pizza.

City Wars: Tokyo Reign gets cyberpunk. Gets it right in its chunky, villainous, brutal heart. This is a collectible card game and a roguelike, but deep down, in its heart? It's cyberpunk - eternal night, eternal scrabbling to get by. Never enough to go around. Never enough to get a real break.

It's complicated to learn - that said I am quite dim - but when it clicks it's already a dream. You select a faction, a load-out of cards, a weapon and a charm, and then you pick your way through the city, moving from district to district, one node at a time. Opening presents, hopefully. But more often facing a dilemma. And much more often getting into a battle.

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Dead Cells' already ridiculously generous bounty of stuff has expanded once more, this time courtesy of its free new Break the Bank update, which brings the likes of new money themed enemies, weapons, and a brand-new biome to PC and consoles today.

Break the Bank is all about the gold, and its centrepiece is an opulent depository for unimaginable riches known as The Bank. Mechanically, this is quite a bit different from other biomes so far added to developer Motion Twin's acclaimed rogue-like action-platformer, given that its entrance - a mysterious giant chest - will appear at random during a run.

Provided you've first completed its sole unlock criteria - reach the Hand of the King once - the chest can appear in any of Dead Cells' post-biome transition stages, and players will need to decide right then and there if they want to open it and delve into The Bank. If they decide yes, The Bank will replace the next biome along the path (it won't appear before a boss), but should they choose to forego its temptations, it won't reappear on the same run.

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Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe - the remake of the remake of everybody's favourite comedic rumination on video game agency - finally has a release date and will, after a number of not-insignificant delays, be heading to PlayStation, Xbox, Switch, and PC on 27th April.

Stanley Parable's Ultra Deluxe edition was first announced back in 2018, with developers Galactic Cafe and Crows Crows Crows (the respective studios of original Stanley Parable creator Davey Wreden and William Pugh, who co-designed the 2013 remake of the 2011 original) aiming to launch the following year. 2020 bought a second delay, and a hat-trick was achieved in 2021 - leaving many to ponder if the whole thing mightn't actually be some sort of mega-meta ruse and that the game didn't, and would never, exist.

Happy days are now here, however, with Galactic Cafe and Crows Crows Crows having finally given the Ultra Deluxe edition a 27th April release date - 4/27, of course, being the number on Stanley's near-iconic office door. And if that's not appropriately self-referential enough for you, the announcement is accompanied by a recreation of the Stanley Parable's 2013 trailer - only this time the player goes left.

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Today marks the launch of Intel's Arc A-series graphics family, the company's first discrete graphics cards to go head to head against industry titans AMD and Nvidia. To start, Team Blue is building its Arc GPUs for laptops, with entry-level Arc 3 models debuting now in laptops from $899. Higher-powered models called Arc 5 and Arc 7 are set to arrive early this summer, in higher-end machines. The company also teased its first desktop Arc graphics card at the very end of its presentation, showing off a much beefier design than the DG1 card shipped to developers last year. Here's what you need to know from Intel's Arc announcements.

First of all, the Arc series of graphics cards ought to be fully-featured models, with support for the full DirectX 12 Ultimate feature set (ray tracing, VRS, mesh shading, sampler feedback) plus DirectStorage and XeSS AI upscaling. That puts them on an even keel with Nvidia in terms of most features, and ahead of AMD who don't yet have a temporal upscaling solution.

Intel detailed some specs for each of the five models announced thus far, including the number of Xe cores, ray tracing units and GDDR6 memory allocation. Given the relatively rapid scaling between families - we see a doubling of core count and VRAM from the top Arc 3 model to Arc 5, then another doubling to the top Arc 7 model - we could start to see very impressive performance from those top-end models.

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Acclaimed Industrial-Revolution-era city builder Anno 1800 has enjoyed significant success since its release in 2019 - having surpassed more than 2m players at last count - and Ubisoft is capitalising on its continuing popularity with a fourth season of DLC. That much we already knew, but now the publisher has provided early details of Season 4 - which will include the likes of airplanes and agricultural revolution - revealing its first DLC will arrive on 12th April.

As outlined in Ubisoft's new introductory video, Anno 1800's fourth season will introduce a total of three new paid DLCs before 2022 is through, with its first offering being titled Seeds of Change. Arriving on 12th April, this will enable players to "revolutionise" the agricultural sector of the New World, introducing a powerful new building - the Hacienda - that will become the agricultural hub of players' empires.

Expanding the Hacienda with its various modules will enable players to gain access to a range of new agriculture-centric features, including the ability to produce import goods in the New World (such as beer) in order to help the population become more independent. Additionally, players will be able to adopt island-wide policies and produce high-quality fertiliser to boost farms in both the New and Old Worlds.

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I was a little worried Norco wouldn't be very much fun. The first from independent studio Geography of Robots, it's a dark game, a story about a region's bleak, collapsing future. And on the surface a serious one, too, with all its staid point-and-click vistas and dense blocks of prose. Serious is fine, of course. The seriousness of Norco's first act is exactly the type of thing that wins you features in the New Yorker and inaugural awards at Tribeca. It's just this type of seriousness can occasionally slip into something a bit self-regarding, a bit dour. But beyond Norco's initial, slightly po-faced outer layer is something odd and adventurous. Peevish. Occasionally quite funny. A playful spirit bouncing off its sharply political straight-edge.

Still, it takes some time to draw that out. Norco begins with you telling your own backstory, or if not telling then unearthing it, sorting through dialogue options to fill in blanks, as you will for much of Norco's six-ish hours of narrative. A brief, clever little late-game reference to one of my off-hand choices in this opening had me wondering how much this impacts - I suspect not much, and hope not much either, if only because I'm unnaturally keen to have Hoovered up every little drop of Norco's story.

The premise here is a world of industrial, environmental, and societal decay. Norco, Louisiana is a real place, settled on a part of the Mississippi delta surrounding a major Shell petroleum refinery. A kind of non-town named after the New Orleans Refining Company established there in 1911, video game Norco is closely inspired by the real thing (replace "Shell petroleum" with "Shield chemical"), with time skipped forward an unknown number of years to a point where the climate crisis has begun to pull the world apart. You, a rebellious, faceless teenage girl, have returned home to the news that your mother, a mercurial and dangerously curious former professor, has died of cancer, and your troubled brother disappeared. Naturally what follows is a mystery, but it's a deeply captivating one, a draining plughole dragging you down into the toxic muck of Norco's poisoned community.

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343 Industries describes Master Chief removing his helmet in the new Halo TV series as "a mission statement".

In a lengthy blog post from 343 Industries community writer Alex Wakeford dissecting the opening episode (it's full of spoilers!), the matter of the lead character removing his helmet is addressed, seemingly in response to fan criticism.

The post notes that the games "have predominantly been a space for player projection", but fans of the expanded universe shouldn't be quite so surprised.

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