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It’s been eight years since Street Fighter V hit PC. As you might recall, the fighting game landed with the poise of someone shattering both kneecaps on impact, as complaints about a small roster of characters and barebones story mode – to be filled in later with DLC – were made more egregious by a number of technical issues, including bugs and online issues caused by its wobbly servers.
Despite plenty of rumours, we still don’t know when Elden Ring DLC Shadow of the Erdtree will arrive – it could be later this month, this year or maybe beyond even that. While we’re waiting on the official expansion, though, modders have beaten FromSoftware to offering a substantial new experience to those who’ve cleared every corner of the Lands Between.
New arcade shoot ’em up Nidus first caught my eye with its psychedelic bug blast on Screenshot Saturday Monday. Three months later, it has now launched, and for a mere £6 we can all fill our eyes with so many colourful insects. You’d have to pay at least £57 for that sort of fun down the pet shop.
There’s a particular boss encounter in Balatro that always feels like it’s cheating a bit. In this mesmerising poker roguelike, each stage is made up of three blinds – small, big and boss – with the blind essentially being a high score you have to hit by playing different kinds of poker hands – your traditional flushes, straights, pairs and so on. Each hand has its own number of chips and multiplier bonuses associated with it, and Balatro’s whole deal is about shuffling closer to victory by making the most of the cards you’re dealt. While some blinds are tiny, stretching to just 300 or 450 early on in a run, they quickly start ramping up into the tens of thousands as each successfully defeated boss blind ups the ante and the accompanying stakes. Reach an ante of eight, and bingo, you’ve won a run of Balatro.
The boss blind I keep coming a cropper with, though, is The Flint. This sucker not only halves a hand’s chip score, but it also cuts its multiplier in two as well, and I’ve yet to figure out exactly how to defeat it. Sometimes it appears with a blind of just 600, but other times it’s been an enormous 22,000. In fairness, all bosses have little tricks like this. Some will debuff certain card suites, making them useless in your overall score count. Others may only let you play one hand type the entire match, while the cheeky Tooth will deduct you $1 for every card used. But Balatro isn’t simply about beating the odds with smart and intelligent card plays. It’s about bending, twisting and abusing those odds to your will – also through smart and intelligent card plays. Cheating isn’t just encouraged in Balatro. It’s damn near mandatory, and it’s all thanks to the brilliantly conceived joker cards that give the game its Latin-based name.
Every weekend, indie devs show off current work on Twitter’s #screenshotsaturday tag. And every Monday, I bring you a selection of these snaps and clips. This week, my eye has been caught by handcrafted art, intense fighting game violence, cosy management, and heaps more attractive and interesting indie games. Check these out!
Helldivers 2 is turning out to be an absolute laugh riot of a co-op shooter; it may even have the potential to rival Deep Rock Galactic on good vibes and teammate deaths as accidental comedy masterstrokes. Even ongoing server connectivity issues haven’t done much to spoil the sense of fun, which incidentally, can also be shared on the Steam Deck.
Indeed, following a quick Proton update on Valve’s part, its previously SteamOS-incompatible anti-cheat will no longer put the kibosh on you dropping into Helldivers 2 via your Deck. I’ve been testing on both an original 512GB model and the newer Steam Deck OLED, and as long as you don’t mind dropping the quality settings, it can usually run tidily above 30fps.
As time goes by, it really does seem like there’s a Soulslike for every occasion: Lies Of P for those who prefer their fairy tales more on the messed up side, Steelrising for those who like France and robots, Lords Of The Fallen for those who like spectral moths and lanterns. Well, another joins the fray in Enotria: The Last Song, an Italian-inspired Soulslike with the loveliest setting I’ve seen in a while.
Cheery RPS fanzine PC Gamer have highlighed a heartwarming story of lost media becoming found again. A mod for Matthew Perry career high and/or nuclear apocalypse RPG sidequest Fallout: New Vegas, which was thought lost since some time around 2016, has been found by chance on someone’s hard drive. The content of this mod, you ask? It adds a companion who looks like redoubtable nu-metal pioneer Fred Durst. I was trying to come up with a pun to do with “nookie” or that modders will “keep rollin'”, but I respect you too much for that (also it’s Monday and I’m very tired – give me something to break, am I right?).
Another week of PC game releases is upon us and oh heck, slow down. There are an alarming number of games out this week that I want to play, from large-scale 3D productions to itty-bitty time-killers, each sinisterly appropriate to my Steam stats and wider research interests. Are videogame publishers and The Maw in cahoots to overwhelm me with impulse-buys and sabotage my attempts to Report the News? It’s possible. It’s possible. The Maw can be pretty cunning for an indiscriminate force of cosmic famine. The creature has been known to forge alliances with misguided mortals, seeking to flank and overwhelm harried news writers. How else to explain Phil Spencer’s T-shirts?
Riot Forge’s last stab at publishing smaller spin-offs from indie teams has resulted in Bandle Tale: A League Of Legends Story, which at first glance has all the things I love in self-proclaimed cosy games: gorgeous pixel art, laidback objectives and characters cute enough to trigger primal cheek-squishing instincts. But despite looking like an SNES classic and playing like a mix between Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley, Bandle Tale unfortunately ties itself in knots with overly grindy crafting that had me rubbing my temples in an effort not to combust.
