Wii U อาจจะไม่ใช่เครื่องเล่นเกมคอนโซลที่ได้รับความนิยมสูงมากนักแต่ก็ต้องบอกเลยว่าระบบการเล่นและไอเดียที่ใส่เข้ามานั้นเต็มเปี่ยมไม่แพ้ทายาทอย่าง Nintendo Switch ด้วยการบุกเบิกระบบ Remote Play ที่ต่อยอดเป็นระบบ Hybrid ที่เราเห็น โดยหลายเกมแม้จะมีการพอร์ตใหม่สู่ Switch ทว่าปฏิเสธได้ยากครับว่าหลายเกมที่เอ็กคลูซีฟบนแพลตฟอร์มนี้นั้นขายความติสต์และความแปลกใหม่อย่างชัดเจนจริงๆ
Devil’s Thirdเป็นอีกหนึ่งเกมที่เปิดตัวมาอย่างหวือหวาด้วยการเป็…
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We got our first real look at the upcoming Alan Wake 2 expansion Night Springs at tonight’s Summer Game Fest showcase, and even better, we also got a release date—and even better than that, it’s tomorrow.
Night Springs debuted as a Twilight Zone-like television show in the original Alan Wake (and also appeared in Quantum Break), and Remedy is really running with it for Alan Wake 2. As you’d expect from a Remedy game, it gets a little weird (okay, very weird), but basically the expansion works out like this: Beleaguered author Alan Wake seeks to escape the Dark Place by writing scripts for the television show Night Springs, but by doing so (and you’d think he would’ve figured this out by now) he accidentally unravels the fabric of reality.
The result is three “highly stylized episodes, each offering a unique slice of the Alan Wake universe,” featuring familiar—but also very different—characters to play: The Actor, The Sibling, and The Waitress.
The Actor, who looks an awful lot like Bright Falls sheriff Tim Breaker—who looks an awful lot like Quantum Break hero Jack Joyce—headlines Time Breaker, the tale of…
Way back in the day, one rich dude in a Rolls-Royce pulled up to another rich dude in a Rolls-Royce and asked, “Pardon me, would you have any Grey Poupon?” It was an ironic expression of performative wealth that quickly evolved into a sort of pop culture touchstone, referenced and parodied many times since. There’s even a spot on Wikipedia dedicated to it.
Things are a little different these days. Wealthy white guys with dijon mustard and Phantoms are out, and wealthy hip-hop artists with Steam Decks and big SUVs—specifically Drake and Lil Yachty—are in.
“Want it? Yeah, you want it?” Drake asks, holding the “portable gaming console” out the window as the two vehicles slowly converge. When Lil Yachty replies in the affirmative, Drake says, “So then get it,” before handing it off as smoothly as if they’d been parked side by side on a quiet summer day. Lil Yachty expresses his appreciation with a friendly flip of the bird as he rolls up his window.
A few people in the Twitter replies refer to the handheld as a Switch, but others properly point out that it is in fact a Steam Deck, Valve’s hit portable PC. Or at least, it’s a Steam Deck case—the lo…
Valve may have finally confirmed Deadlock’s existence, but that doesn’t mean that it’s in a finished state. The MOBA shooter is currently in a closed beta (which is invite-only), so there are still plenty of changes to be made and features to be added, one of which is a new hero, Astro.
Astro is more of a DPS, but this cowboy has a couple of interesting abilities. The first one lets you place an exploding barrel, which can either be shot or launched toward enemies, but it’ll do more damage the closer enemies are. The second and third abilities involve dropping a bounce pad that’ll deal damage to enemies when they land, and throwing your cowboy hat to damage, slow, or reveal enemies. But the final ability is probably the coolest and one that I can see becoming an absolute pain in the ass—a lasso that can capture and drag an enemy behind you.
A couple of players have actually connected the dots between the new hero Astro and one of Dota 2’s characters, Batrider, which is apparently pretty exciting. “Yessss Batrider is back!!!” one player says.
There are already a couple of Deadlock heroes that have crowd-control abilities, and they’re inc…
One of the best co-op games you probably didn’t play eight years ago is getting a sequel that’s seriously upping the ante: Helldivers 2 is a third-person co-op shooter about tactically annihilating giant bugs with your best buds. It was announced in May during the last PlayStation showcase, but we got our first proper look at gameplay today in the trailer above.
Folks, it’s looking real good.
I promise my blanket excitement isn’t unearned. The CGI-heavy announcement trailer looked cool, but I wondered if the transition from a top-down perspective to third-person would also mean smoothing over the original’s unforgiving edges, like its brutally realistic friendly fire and resource management. Judging by the way Arrowhead Games is talking about the sequel, I don’t think I have anything to worry about.
Still core to combat in Helldivers 2 is Stratagems: an airdrop system similar to MGSV’s Fulton delivery service that lets you call in ammo drops, air strikes, and power weapons anytime during a mission. Stratagems are often a double-edged sword—calling down each one requires punching in a unique directional code and you can bet standing between …
As part of Microsoft’s ongoing efforts to convince regulatory agencies that its planned acquisition of Activision Blizzard is a good idea, it has now announced 10-year partnerships with a couple of streaming platforms you might not have encountered before: Boosteroid and Ubitus.
A quick recap: Sony is not thrilled with the idea of Microsoft owning Activision Blizzard, largely because of worries that it will make the Call of Duty series exclusive to Xbox consoles. To counter those concerns, Microsoft offered Sony a 10-year deal to keep the series on PlayStation, a proposal that Sony rejected. To demonstrate its seriousness, Microsoft then went about setting up 10-year Call of Duty agreements with various other big-time players in the business, including Steam, Nintendo, and Nvidia.
That is reportedly having a positive effect with EU regulators, but Microsoft isn’t easing off the gas just yet. But with the major platforms (minus Sony) now accounted for, it’s now taking aim at smaller-scale operators, like streaming platform Boosteroid, which on March 14 announced an agreement to bring Xbox PC games to its platform—including Activision-Blizzard games once the acqu…
This past weekend a Reddit user going by LATIN0 posted an image of what they estimated to be six pallets of Magic: The Gathering cards that had been dumped at their local landfill. What would be a treasure trove to a dedicated player was taken as a curiosity by LATIN0, who only knew the game existed from a decade of Reddit use. So they snapped a picture, dumped their trash, and moved on with their life. Later, they posted the quirky picture to Reddit alongside a few more pictures of opened sealed packs.
All without knowing that the retail value of those pallets and boxes was, at a conservative bent, something to the order of $100,000. Depending on contents, however, that could easily have been more than $250,000 worth of MTG cards, containing as it did a mix of Secret Lair, Modern Horizons 2, and Unfinity cards spanning 2019 through the end of 2022. That higher figure is if more of the valuable cards like Modern Horizons, which retail for near twice the price of a regular MTG pack, or the nicer Secret Lair cards were present. Either way, it doesn’t matter now—you can’t take stuff from a landfill, so almost all of the cards got left there by LATIN0 and their co…
The first major patch for Baldur’s Gate 3 has dropped—and it’s a doozy, so much so that it can’t even fit on the Steam page: “Patch 1 is too big for our usual patch notes due to Steam’s character limit”.
It’s an all-around tune-up to Larian’s hit RPG—which was already pretty damn good on release, with our Baldur’s Gate 3 review knighting it with one of PC Gamer’s highest scores. That said, any new release has problems—especially a game of this scope and size. I myself noticed an uptick in performance problems and story weirdness in Act 3, even if it wasn’t enough to spoil the experience, so I’m pleased to see Larian rolling out fixes in relatively short order.
First off, the patch addresses a whole goblin horde of animation bugs, glitches, and dialogue issues—such as Shadowheart talking about a fight with Lae’zel she’s never had. Here are some of my favourites pulled from my initial scroll-through:
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