‘s next expansion is called Going Green, and it marks the incarceration simulator’s arrival in the pantheon of games that really want to be Stardew Valley. It introduces farming as a new type of labor your inmates can undertake, the food they grow can be turned into meals or exported for profit, and it also creates the possibility sneaky prisoners might grow illicit “herbs”. Oregano, I assume?
It’s been ten years since it originally came out, and six years since it mysteriously disappeared from digital stores, but today Scott Pilgrim Vs The World: The Game made its comeback. It’s an excellent little beat ’em up based on the Scott Pilgrim comic series (or if you’ve not read those, the film starring Michael Cera and Mary Elizabeth Winstead), and this new version of the game comes with all the DLCs to boot.
EA’s exclusive reign over Star Wars game draws to a close with the news that Ubisoft are making an open-world Star Wars game, making this a curious week for the Epic Games Store to give away Star Wars Battlefront 2. For the next seven days, you can grab a free copy of Dice’s for all sorts of authentically Star Wars-y zapping and swording in singleplayer and multiplayer modes. It has come a fair way since it launched crammed full of loot box crud. Once again, waiting for a freebie pays off.
Excuse me do you have the directions to a good podcast episode? Actually, I don’t know why I’m asking: here at the Electronic Wireless Show we practically wrote the map>. Ahahaha. Yes, episode 124 is all about the best maps in games, which means it is mostly an excuse to talk about Hitman. Nate enthuses mightily about Red Dead Redemption 2, and I get a word in for Ubisoft, specifically how the Assassin’s Creed Games prove that Ubi are good at maps, actually.
Apart from that we don’t actually go on too many tangents, although we talk about swearing for a bit. Matthew also does a lovely Cavern Of Lies on hidden Easter eggs on game maps.
The greatest disappointment of adulthood is no longer receiving an activity sheet in restaurants, forcing one to converse about existential accounting and corporate philosophy rather than spotting the differences in two near-identical pictures of an eerie mascot. A tragedy every time. How Heston Blumenthal got six Michelin stars with an attitude like that, I’ll never know. Anyway, this means I’m quite keen for the upcoming release of Tiny Lands, a spot-the-difference game with wee 3D dioramas to rotate and explore. Check out the trailer.
Start packing your bag (checklist: hiking boots, boiled sweets, dinosaur saddle, etc) for adventure, because Curious Expedition 2 has announced a launch date of January 28th. The roguelikelike sends us on procedurally-generated 19th century adventures with a party from around the word, getting into all sorts of fantastical scrapes. We’ll explore a hexy map, meet and befriend people, fight everything from spiders to sandworms in turn-based battles, trade, quest, and nab treasures. The first game was a good’un, so fingers crossed.
There are dozens of RTX 30 gaming laptops arriving over the next couple of weeks, but Gigabyte’s new crop of Aorus models might be the coolest ones yet. And I mean that literally, as the new design of their Aorus 15P laptop has apparently cut temperatures on the CPU and GPU by 10 degrees, resulting in better performance under heavy load.
If you’ve been hankering for some meaty new additions to Call Of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, Treyarch come bearing gifts, many gifts. Season One’s big update drops today and it features new maps for Zombies and multiplayer, new modes for both, and an unlockable samurai sword for good measure. A free trial for Zombies also kicks off today and will run through January to 21st, which is a decent opportunity to give the undead a beatdown for precisely zero pounds.
Valve have published their 2020 Year In Review for Steam, and I’m a little shocked at how dramatic some of their statistics are. Seeing as we experienced a global pandemic during which everyone locked themselves away in their homes, it may not come as a huge surprise that more people took up gaming to pass the time. Valve say 2.6 million people> bought games for the first time on Steam each month, and Steam had 120.4 million monthly active users to boot (though they don’t mention if these numbers are averages, or the actual numbers from each month). I expected a lot, but wow.
You probably know MSI from their graphics cards, motherboards, gaming laptops or even their extensive line-up of mice, keyboards and headsets, but now the component maker has announced they’re going to start making SSDs as well. Unveiled last night during their CES press conference, MSI have already got two NVMe drives lined up for launch later this year, and both of them will support the new PCIe 4.0 interface to take on next-gen drives such as Samsung’s 980 Pro and WD’s Black SN850.
