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The second season of animated show Arcane is due to arrive on Netflix this November. After an initial teaser trailer back in June, Netflix have now released a more substantial two-minute trailer that you can watch below.
Did you forget about Baldur’s Gate 3? Because Baldur’s Gate 3 did not forget about you. Specifically, it did not forget about the incorrigible evil-doers amongst you who’ve been gunning for some additional plot catharsis. Larian’s very bestest RPG has been biding its time in the shadows while you’ve been busy with other games. It has lingered silently while you occupy yourself heisting on Tatooine or messing up Golden-Eyed Beasts, waiting and waiting for the perfect moment – and now, it has finally struck with an unholy new patch, which adds 13 new Evil Endings, revamped splitscreen and an official modding toolkit. Foolish summer child! It is too late to flee.
“Do not forget to turn the system off before touching anything,” says my astronaut colleague over the radio. I grab the faulty power transformer without listening, and am immediately electrocuted. Worse still, I have to hammer a quick-time button to recover. This is what it is like to be Jerry, the janitor of a cheap and poorly maintained space station. Jerry is being tasked with repair work beyond his job description, learning the ins and outs of an escape pod’s machinery from his co-worker via radio. This may come in handy, as the station is about to explode. Tin Can is not a new game (it came out in 2022) but it is on sale as part of Steam’s space exploration fest. And I enjoy a space game that makes me panic while alarms go off everywhere.
Full disclosure: I hadn’t heard of Bakeru until Graham mentioned it to me. Graham always has his hands on the video game pulse, gliding them over Xwitter or Steam or wherever and waiting for that “ker kun, ker kun” of a new Cool Thing. And that cool thing is Bakeru, described by its Steam page as “Japan-esque”, but is in actual fact, very Japanese. I mean, you travel around 47 Japanese prefectures as a metamorphing tanuki who bashes evilness with his taiko drum sticks. Come on.
What I hadn’t suspected was Bakeru’s chops not only as a platformer, but as a means to increase your chances at success in pub quizzes. The game is a certified trivia Tardis, where you’ll learn all sorts about Japanese culture as well as just like, the colour sepia being a genus of cuttlefish.
Helldivers 2‘s third enemy faction is maybe definitely possibly probably almost certainly about to be released, as players report sightings of the mysterious menace on the game’s Galactic War map. Development studio Arrowhead, aka the glorious government of Super Earth, are downplaying the rumours as usual. They’re claiming (via in-game broadcast) that the fleeting appearance of a weird purple blob on the map screen is actually the result of fluids leaking from the corpse of a long-dead comms technician, stranded on a server farm somewhere. Who to believe? Ah, if only we had some means of shedding light on the reports. Some way of Illuminating the situation.
Bear with me on this, but I adore how swordfighting works in Dune. Ubiquitous wearable sci-fi shields repel any attack that comes in too fast, so everyone has to learn this unique, overtly dance-like form of close-quarters combat where every thrust and parry is necessarily slow and considered. Picture it: careful judgments of your movements, weighing up the right time to strike, every measured jab part of a wider strategy that culminates in the kill.
MOBAs are like that. Both in the fights themselves, sort of, where probing lunges lead up to bursts of lethality, but more broadly in each match as a whole. They’re map-wide knife fights, where a thrust is a well-judged lane push and a parry a savvy item buy. At first, playing Smite 2 felt akin to watching on helplessly as my opponents repeatedly shoved their crysknives through my ribs. After 30 hours, it often still feels like that – but I am enjoying myself. Mostly. Despite Valve’s third-person elephant in the lane.
Blue Protocol is a Bandai Namco-developed anime MMO which released in Japan last year, and was meant to arrive in the west at some point this year courtesy of Amazon Games. Alas, that’s no longer the case – and the game is also shutting down in Japan early next year.
Back in July, No Man’s Sky reached version 5.0 with the Worlds update, which refreshed its planetary generation to introduce more variety alongside more detailed water, clouds, and weather. We didn’t write about it at the time, because I suppose re-writing the very fabric of the galaxy seemed small-time.
Today’s new update, however, adds fishing, and I can’t not write about that.
Nikhil Murthy’s Syphilisation is a “postcolonial 4X game”, which might sound like a contradiction in terms. While approaches to 4X and grand strategy vary hugely between games, factions and players, the genre as a whole is firmly wedded to imperial conquest, both structurally and at the level of narrative aspects and set-dressing. Many 4X games are triumphal re-enactments of specific periods of colonial settlement and expansion. All of which is to say that Syphilisation is fascinating. It’s a reworking of the genre which dismantles and reconstructs concepts such as diplomacy, research and production. It’s also just left early access – find more details and a playthrough video below.
It’s been 13 years since the first Space Marine came out. While it wasn’t outstanding in the grander landscape of gaming, enough Warhammer 40K fans seem to have cherished the escapades of bulky blue boltgunner Demetrian Titus for the action game to merit a sequel a decade later. It left its story on something of a cliffhanger, with said hero being dragged away to face untold tortures by the Inquisition, the most zealous sect of this preternaturally paranoid sci-fi universe. Today, Titus is free again. Free to stomp towards hordes of alien foes, blast them with a plasma incinerator, and shred the stragglers with a chainsaw sword. Space Marine 2 is an often-satisfying scrapper that has me convinced of 40K’s merit as a crafting ground for excellent-looking environments and creatures, even if I’m not particularly moved by the bland character of Titus and his fellow Ultramarines.
