I was rubbing along pretty well in House Of Necrosis before I hurled a vial of unidentified black serum at a squashy purple Devourer. I was hoping the serum would be some kind of poison - I mean, come on, an unidentified black serum? You wouldn't pour that on your chips. It turned out to be an XP potion, which transformed the Devourer into a Foul Devourer - still squashy, still purple, but with much sturdier defence.

I managed to recover some of the accidentally donated XP by lobbing a cheeky hex, but not enough to boost the stopping power of my homely pawnshop knife and pistol. So down I went in a pool of that special red serum the billionaires like to drink when they're feeling mortal.

Read more

****, we didn't mean for that to happen. This has been the response from Call of Duty Black Ops 7 developers Activision to folks spotting that you couldn't type the name of fellow shooter Arc Raiders into the chat of the game's beta without it being censored. Yep, you could reportedly get away with Arc or Raiders, but stick the two together, and it was off to the starred-out naughty corner.

Naturally, folks wondered why this was a thing, especially since you could chat about more obvious Black Ops 7 competitor Battlefield 6 to your heart's content without facing any star-based repercussions.

Read more

The factional asymmetry of Mars Tactics ain’t about Fish Himbos vs The Telepathic Hairdryer Folk of the Highlands. It gives you the bracingly topical choice of suits vs revolutionaries. In the blue corner, you’ve got the iron fist of Capital, who begin each campaign in a position of supremacy, but are beholden to the fatter cats on Earth for supplies. And in the red corner, you’ve got Labo(u)r, who kick off with little more than their chains, but are able to manufacture their own gear due to being honest working folk, and have higher morale due to being a bunch of zealous bolshies.

Read more

At the risk of being viciously cyberbullied for admitting I have a favourite power bank: I have a favourite power bank. It’s the Ugreen Nexode Retractable, and it’s perfect for topping up your Steam Deck, Windows handheld, laptop, headphones, wireless controller, portable fan, or overpriced electric toothbrush. It’s also going cheaper than usual in Amazon’s Prime Big Deal Days sale, shedding 25% off in the UK and 30% off in the US.

Read more

Baldur's Gate 3 modders continue to dig deep into the bag of tools Larian gave them and unleash their creativity on mods which don't just remix existing bits of the game, but add entirely custom elements. While custom campaigns and new areas rightly grab a lot of the headlines, custom companions have also been starting to arrive. The latest is a "cowboy wizard extraordinaire", a vocation that'll fit right in among the established party.

After all, people will likely be too busy staring at Withers' modded big naturals to question whether cowboys are a thing in the Forgotten Realms.

Read more

Alright, fine.

Amazon are currently running another Prime Day sale, of sorts – technically it’s Prime Big Deal Days, which is like Prime Day, but worse. Yes, you still need an Amazon Prime account to get the full discounts, and no, there isn’t nearly as much worthwhile PC gaming hardware with discount stickers as there were in the 'main' sale.

Still, this one isn’t entirely deprived of good finds. For one, there’s the Logitech G305 Lightspeed, probably my favourite cheap wireless mouse among all cheap wireless mice. It’s even less of a money sink with a Prime account, which currently snips it down to £28 in the UK and $28 in the US, with the latter getting a few different colour options as well.

Read more

Right, it's time to get ahead of the game. Approach your router and force it to repeat the things Lightning McQueen says about speed at the start of Cars, because Battlefield 6 has a launch patch coming and it sounds like it'll be weighty. EA say "over 200 changes" will be dropping as part of it and have also teased some potential future additions in their latest beta learnings post.

Read more

Mina the Hollower is quite clearly a Halloween game. The thing about Halloween is that there should always be a little bit silliness amongst the horrific and the scary, and Yacht Club Games' next retro throwback seemed quite well fitted for the season. It was so appropriate that it was even planned to be released on October 31st! All of this to say, yes, Mina the Hollower is delayed, and it doesn't have a new release date either.

Read more

Marathon lives! Well, of course it does, it would be quite shocking if PlayStation were to cancel it before it even got a chance to become Concord 2, but that's neither here nor there. What is here, and soon to be there, is another playtest, of which sign-ups are now available. It is being dubbed a "closed technical test," and plans to run for just a few days, between October 22nd and October 28th, but there are a few differences to be found compared to when we last saw it.

Read more

In the late '90s, early 2000s, there were two distinct flavours of aesthetics: boomer shooters, and Y2K girlypop vibes (for the sake of this argument we will ignore every other aesthetic that existed at the time). Boomer shooters like Doom and Wolfenstein were bloody, gory, and had a real "video games are gritty and cool now kind of vibe." Conversely, products aimed at young girls were often glittery, pink, featured leopard print, and were often about love and harmony. Don't Stop, Girlypop! is a game that combines these two vibes, and it is very good (and stressful).

Read more