Month: September 2024

Part of the lasting appeal of a game like Cities: Skylines is the thousands and thousands of mods created by its community. Maps, buildings, landmarks, vehicles, roads, themes, and sometimes entire new game systems are constantly being created by modders, meaning every time you sit down to design a city you’ll find something brand new to add to it.

So it’s always great news when a publisher embraces the modding community instead of just tolerating it, even if it takes them a while to come around. In this case it’s been about 25 years coming: the Anno series of strategy city builders has been around since 1998, first developed by Max Design and later by Ubisoft Blue Byte. This month marks the first time in Anno series history that it will have official mod support.

Mods are b…

Not content with poking fun at repressive autocrats, Tropico 6 developer Limbic Entertainment has turned its sights to a more timeless opponent of humankind: gravity. The studio’s upcoming management sim Park Beyond hands you the keys to a theme park for you to build, manage, and grow to great commercial heights—all without those pesky physics laws getting in the way.

A new trailer released during the PC Gaming Show 2023 gives us a fresh look at the physics-defying attractions we’ll be able to construct: multistory carousels, roller coasters that wrap precariously around mountains, platforms that are practically levitating hundreds of feet above the air, what looks like a fully articulated animatronic statue, and a bunch more zany ideas.

As the trailer’s di…

In 2006, Arkane Studios let loose a quiet FPS miracle with Dark Messiah of Might and Magic: a fantasy melee FPS with a fast kick move that didn’t do much damage, but would instantly ragdollize almost any enemy in this early Source engine game. Ample physics hazards and precarious drops combined to make Dark Messiah an absolute slapstick hoedown. 

Dark Messiah’s kick was so breathtakingly, life-changingly satisfying it was never seen again until 2021’s Deathloop. Now developer Alexy “cptnsigh” is building a hybrid character action game/FPS built around that same perfect attack, with a recently-released demo for Shady Knight proving an absolute blast.

I don’t know what makes the titular Shady Knight so shady, but this guy is certainly stylish. Shady Knight presen…

While other developers stick loyally to promotional schedules crafted at great expense by dedicated professionals, publisher Paradox Interactive knows that with some things there’s no need to bother. All you do, see, is show off a bit of a world map, start talking a little bit about population complexity and, like hungry sharks drawn to the blood of the chum, the Europa Universalis massive will materialise.

A new blogpost by Johan Andersson, studio manager at Paradox Tinto, basically just straight-up starts talking about and showing off elements of Project Caesar, a game that is very clearly Europa Universalis 5. Andersson is the creator of the series and, after over 25 years at Paradox, established Paradox Tinto in 2020 which initially worked on supporting Europa Universal…

A good monitor will last you many years but that doesn’t mean you have to spend a small fortune on getting the largest OLED display you can get. Pick the right budget gaming monitor and you’ll have a screen that will be more than good enough for nearly every PC gamer.

One of the best cheap gaming monitors I’d buy myself is the ASRock Phantom Gaming PG27FF1A for just $120 at Newegg. It has a 27-inch IPS panel, with a resolution of 1080p and a maximum refresh rate of 165 Hz. There’s even support for FreeSync Premium variable refresh rate, to ensure smooth, tear-free gaming.

Tucked underneath the panel’s edge are two HDMI 2.0 ports, one DisplayPort 1.2, and a 3.5 mm headset socket. While those aren’t the latest versions, they’re more than good enough for 1080p 165 Hz.

To …

Two Point Studios has announced the release date of Two Point Museum, the next game in its Two Point series, as March 4, 2025. It’s now available for prepurchase as well, with a price of $30 for the standard edition and $40 for a deluxe explorer edition.

Following on the vein mined by Two Point Hospital and Two Point Campus, Two Point Museum will be a management game that puts you in charge of building specialized museums at locations around the fictional and very silly world of Two Point County. You’ll send out expeditions to find new two-point treasures that you’ll display in a museum you design, lay out, and run with guest tours, pricing, and staff assignments. You’ll also have to look out for thieves, and some of the museum exhibits are pretty dangerous to the guests—l…

Marvel’s Midnight Suns is an odd bug—pretty much everyone I’ve talked to that’s played it has liked it, including PC Gamer’s Jeremy Peel in his glowing review. Despite everything, though, it didn’t sell nearly as well as it needed to, leading to layoffs at developer Firaxis and the departure of its creative lead.

There’s a few reasons this might be the case. First off, the venn diagram circles of tactical strategy combat/deck builder enjoyers and RPG likers don’t overlap much. There’s some—I mean, I enjoyed it—but I don’t think the people who really got into XCOM or Slay the Spire were, by and large, up for doing bookclubs with Steve Rogers. 

Then the messy post-launch support seemed to miss what was good about the game—an ill-advised seasonal pa…

Update #3: As of 7 am PT—slightly later than predicted—a hotfix has been released to fix the issues that caused players to lose Seals, Triumphs, Medals and other achievements. Hotfix 6.3.0.6 is available now.

In addition to the deployment, Bungie has rolled back player accounts to their state as of yesterday, January 24, at 8:20 am PT—just after the weekly reset. Likely this was necessary to actually restore the missing Triumphs. Bungie notes that any progress made between that time and the game being taken offline will now be lost.

It’s a small price to pay to restore the collective weight of player achievements over the years. Nevertheless, let us pour one out to this one player who earned Hierarchy of Needs in that timeframe—a rare…

Just in time for Steamboat Willie’s upcoming induction into public domain is a new indie FPS inspired by ’30s-era Disney animation: Mouse. Developed by Polish studio Fumi Games, you might have caught a first glimpse at Mouse on TikTok, where short clips of early gameplay have earned millions of views since late April.

It’s easy to see why—Mouse’s art and animations are immediately striking in the same ways that Cuphead dazzled us with its meticulous hand-drawn look years ago. Except where Cuphead largely stayed within the bounds of its family-friendly source material, Mouse dives headfirst into hard-boiled noir darkness and ’90s FPS gore. Seeing the Disney vintage look applied to machineguns and exploding headshots feels a little wrong, but also very right.

With its bl…

GamesIndustry.biz, whose parent company ReedPop was organizing E3 2023 before its cancellation this week, has published an editorial which details some of what happened. The short if it, according to the site’s head of games B2B, Christopher Dring, is that “the industry just didn’t want this E3.”

According to Dring, all but one major game company had been enthusiastic about participating in E3 2023 at the start.

“Companies were talking about taking up huge spaces,” Dring wrote. “The E3 team was looking at how we could expand into the car park and use the extra areas that hadn’t been used for years.” 

ReedPop said as recently as February that the event was “full steam ahead.” But even with E3 2023 just a few months away, contracts hadn’t been signed, and the “mood …

Preserve your hard-won Wordle win streak with our vast range of Wordle help. Brush up on the basics with our tips, guides, and archive of past answers, find guidance with the March 11 (630) clue, or give yourself an easy victory by skipping straight to today’s answer.

I’m really not sure how I reached today’s Wordle answer with guesses to spare—I’d been doing OK up to that point, but I hadn’t found anything revelatory. I suppose sometimes you just have to make that brave leap into the dark and see where Wordle takes you. 

Wordle hint

A Wordle hint for Saturday, March 11

Today’s answer involves dishing out high praise for someone or something with great enthusiasm and sincerity, to _____ their virtues. There are two vowels toda…

Dwarf Fortress has existed as a free game for near-enough two decades, but its 2022 premium version—now with graphics—has gone from strength to strength. It turned Tarn and Zach Adams (Dwarf Fortress’ original creators) into millionaires, and had sold over half a million copies as of March last year.

But that’s old news, because the brothers told PCG at this year’s GDC that it’s now sold 800,000 copies and taken root on over a million wishlists. At this point, it seems like a million sales for one of the most profoundly free games in existence is all but assured. Do the brothers have a plan to reward themselves when they hit the milestone? Ah, well, not really.

“I mean, I didn’t actually think of [hitting a million sales],” Tarn Adams told PCG, “Because …

Here are two things I learnt today. One, T-Pain—of Buy U a Drank fame—is working on Grand Theft Auto 6 in some capacity. Two, he’s a major GTA Online roleplay fan, and can often be spotted hanging out on the popular NoPixel RP server.

Or at least, that used to be the case. In a recent Twitch stream, T-Pain mentioned that his work on GTA 6 had actually gotten in the way of his GTAO double life. “I used to be [on NoPixel],” T-Pain told the audience, “and then, how about this shit? I used to be on NoPixel, then I started working on… GTA 6, and [Rockstar] told me I couldn’t do RP anymore.”

“They had this whole speech, like, ‘What if somebody took your album and re-recorded it, and more people were listening to that?'” elaborated T-Pain, suggesting Rockstar fel…

The Augmentation Evoker came to World of Warcraft with patch 10.1.5 last week, bringing a whole new type of DPS to the game. For the uninitiated, this new spec works by buffing party members to bump their damage numbers rather than melting faces itself. It’s comparable to the Dancer from Final Fantasy 14 or the Bard from Dungeons & Dragons—basically, when an Augmentation Evoker’s in the group, everyone does better.

So obviously they’ve been getting kicked out of groups for no reason. A reddit thread on the World of Warcraft subreddit emerged with a compilation of screenshots from the Wyrmrest Temple discord, community server for Evokers. Typing “!augdps” in the augmentation channel will have Carlygos, the server’s friendly bot, drop an ever-evolving montage of people mis…