The Crew has started disappearing from game libraries after its closure last month

The Crew, Ubisoft’s 2014 racing game, closed its doors on March 31st. After that date, launching the game took you to a splash screen and then presented an error message when trying to advance, because the servers are no longer offline.

Ubisoft have now taken the extra step of revoking The Crew licenses from purchasers and removing it from their library.

Read more

Possibility Space closes down, founder blames staff leaks

Possibility Space has become the second studio owned by Prytania Media to close in recent weeks following Crop Circle Games’ closure in March. Both studios were founded by Jeff Strain, the co-founder of Guild Wars creators ArenaNet and the founder of State Of Decay developers Undead Labs.

In a message to staff about the studio’s immediate closure, Strain implies the outcome was prompted by employees who leaked information about the company to a journalist.

Read more

64-player Pac-Man battle royale game Chomp Champs escapes the grave of Google Stadia onto Steam next month

Remember when Pac-Man got its own battle royale game where 64 Pac-People competed to eat each other and be the ‘Chomp Champ’? Me neither! But Pac-Man Mega Tunnel Battle apparently came out on Google Stadia – ah, that’d be why – back in 2020, and served up a massively (or at least medium-ly) multiplayer spin on the arcade classic. With Stadia dead and buried, Mega Tunnel Battle is chewing its way out of the streaming console’s grave with a new subtitle and a fresh Steam release next month.

Read more

Carpathian Night Starring Bela Lugosi takes Castlevania back to basics

“Very little Bela Lugosi” is not a criticism I ever expected to level at a game. It’s not entirely unexpected considering he’s dead, but I’m still grumbling at you, Carpathian Night Starring Bela Lugosi.

It is, as it appears, an unabashed homage to Castlevania, but with none of the -vania, making it much more like the original (or the game boy ones, and possibly a few others in the series I don’t know about): a straightforward, linear platform game about whipping monsters and not stepping on spikes. Ten a penny, right? But CNSBL captures it so well that it had me looking up old game boy tunes it vaguely reminded me of.

Read more

No, the Fallout TV show hasn’t written Fallout: New Vegas out of history, says Bethesda design director

Friends, there is trouble a-brewing down the radioactive watering hole. While Amazon’s Fallout TV adaptation has launched to pretty positive verdicts, a contingent of Fallout players are up in arms over its portrayal of the Fallout timeline. In particular, it’s being claimed that the show has written the events of Obsidian’s Fallout: New Vegas out of the canon, despite reassurances from Bethesda Game Studios design director Emil Pagliarulo. Dare you read on? Let me just load up my Junk Jet with piping, hot Fallout Season 1 spoilers

Read more

Visit a mystical Montreal corner shop in this lovely little indie game

Need anything from the shop? Mushroom milk? Fresh tarts? Mystical bejewelled skull? I’m just popping out to Dépanneur Nocturne, a lovely little game which came out in 2020 and I kept forgetting to post about. It’s a small first-person explore-o-chatter set within a corner shop in a magical, mystical Montreal, full of things to admire, find, poke at, and chat about with the owner. And it’ll only cost you about as much as a pint of semi-skimmed and loaf of Kingsmill from your own local shop.

Read more

Bore Blasters review: achieve catharsis as a dwarf yelling and shooting mud

I tried to look up the plot of Bore Blasters, because my focus when playing the game is entirely on exploding dirt, but it turns out the Steam store page doesn’t bother to explain any kind of plot either. Thus, the purity of Bore Blasters. Some facts can be divined from the earth, though: you play a dwarf, piloting a small ship akin to Robotnik’s flying hedghog killer, and are dropped off on a small, discrete, gem-bearing chunk of dirt. This you pulverise, in a downward direction, with the aim of finding a huge chest of gems at the bottom somewhere. Your drill is the machine gun on your ship, your efforts governed by about two minutes worth of depleting fuel and a hull that can take three hits total. It’s cyberpunk by Gimli.

Read more

Bethesda would “probably say no” to an Elder Scrolls show or movie

With the Fallout live-action show now out and honestly far better than I was expecting, are Bethesda also brewing an adaptation of their other big RPG series, The Elder Scrolls? Not at present, according to Bethesda executive producer Todd Howard, and he says he’d “probably say no” if approached. Mind you, that was the stance he had until Fallout finally fell into place.

Read more