”Where should I start my Yakuza journey?” is something I see so often from folks who want to know what it feels like to rip off your suit in one swift motion atop a skyscraper as rain lashes down on your dragon tattoo and your fist clatters into the chin of a 60-year-old chairman whose abs are harder than an overturned ice cube tray. My answer is Yakuza 0; always has been, always will be....

Wildermyth is an inspired example of narrative design, with some nifty tactical combat to boot. But when Nate Austin, his wife Annie, and his brother Doug began developing the game around eight years ago, the weight of emphasis between storytelling and combat was very much the other way around. “All three of us had been playing X-COM a lot,” says Nate, who co-owns Worldwalker Games with Annie, and is the primary programmer on the project....

In case you missed it the first time round, the RPS Rig aims to offer a complete package for playing PC games in 2020. That includes all the crucial things that go inside your PC, as well as a monitor, headset, and mouse and keyboard so you can get straight to the action as quickly as possible. Why £1000? Well, I reckon you don’t need to spend any more than this to get a great gaming PC, and the components I’ve picked will ensure you’ve got plenty of oomph for playing games at 60fps on max settings at 1080p, plus a bit of 1440p potential if you decide to upgrade your monitor further down the line or you want to take advantage of our chosen monitor’s high refresh rate (and yes, it is possible to build a PC and pair it with a great 144Hz gaming monitor for less than £1000)....

Unfortunately, as is often the case, some bugs reared their ugly heads not long after the patch was released; and on this occasion, the problems they cause are hard to ignore. For one thing, it seems The Sims 4’s infamous “incest glitch” is back once again, almost as quickly as it was last patched out, with the new wants mechanic causing teenagers to develop a desire to date their favourite siblings....

The Pastel Pop Kit was designed in collaboration with popular Sims YouTuber Jesse “Plumbella” McNamara. On The Sims 4 site, EA say the kit “introduces a soft pastel color palette to the game, along with fun, unique patterns of groovy shapes. This kit will offer lots of new furniture, mirrors, decorative “tchotchkes”, shelves, and desk items, designed in an aesthetic Plumbella wishes they could decorate their home with, IRL!” As odd as it might seem, the clutter is the more exciting of these two DLCs....

Headlines and Hot Takes is dominated by Resi, as Capcom dropped a ton of Resident Evil Village info on us last week. Also, slightly less exciting than that — and a bit perplexing — we got the announcement of RE: Verse, which is a multiplayer game that appears to strip out all the best parts of the series. And, rounding out the Resident Evil newsblast, development on the unannounced Resident Evil 4 remake has been a tad turbulent....

How could Indiana motherflipping Jones not lead this week’s Headlines and Hot Takes? It’s been a long time since we’ve had a video game featuring a wisecracking treasure hunter not called Nathan, so this is very exciting. We go back and forth on what MachineGames’ Indy game might actually turn out to be. And Lucasfilm Games didn’t stop there, as it was also revealed during the last week that The Division devs are working on an open-world Star Wars game....

Them’s Fightin’ Herds started life in 2011 as a My Little Pony fan game called Fighting Is Magic, but developers Mane6 switched it up when Hasbro told them no, you can’t blatantly reproduce the cartoon characters from our beloved children’s tv show in your violent brawler. One name change and a $586,000 IndieGoGo fundraiser later, they launched on Steam in 2015. It’s nice when cease and desists don’t entirely desist the thing they’re ceasing....

PitchYaGame started out last year as a Twitter event for folks to share a look at their games. It’s now adopted a biannual schedule and is handing out some money prizes to winning submissions from this month. You can spot more on the event itself over on the PitchYaGame site. Let’s take a look at some of the goods, shall we? First up is Schim, a rather neat looking 3D platformer about hopping through shadows as a tiny little shadow creature....

Chasing after bounties is one of the best parts of the game. You move in a freeform way that conserves your speed as you jump or fall down between platforms, and there’s a button to help vault over smaller objects in your way. It becomes an execution test, all about trying to hit the buttons in the most efficient way possible. It really helps you get into roleplaying Aiden, too....

So, here’s a familiar premise: 50 people drop onto an island to fight it out until only remains and claims the prize of $10 million (or to put it in genre terms, that’s 4,166,618 Tesco chicken dinners). We’re in the shoes of a washed-up actor named Nick, making the decisions that’ll affect his relationships and push him down different paths towards different endings. Eight hours of video in total, the devs say....

While some spot-the-differences remove items (a cop-out, if you ask me), in Tiny Lands both scenes have the lot. The differences come in size, colour, and position, a combination which I found pleasingly did derail my lazy checks of e.g. “Are there three fish by the lily pad? Yes there are three fish” when I realise “HANG ON THAT ONE IS BIGGER”. And I like that 3D does matter, with some objects obscured from many angles....

Below you’ll find an up-to-date list of all currently active SHiFT codes for Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands. We’ll also explain how these SHiFT codes work and how to redeem them. On this page: Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands SHiFT codes How to redeem Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands SHiFT codes Expired codes list SHiFT codes in Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands are useful because they provide you with Skeleton Keys. While exploring the world, you’ll occasionally come across a locked loot chest that calls for a Skeleton Key....

On the face of it, Tonight We Riot is yer usual side-scrolling punch up. Only, in lieu of a single muscle-bound fighter, you’re controlling a throng of protestors, activists and disgruntled workers clad in red, wielding bricks and flaming torches against an increasingly-militarized police force. As a work, it is decisively not-subtle. Beyond the more blatant red-flags-and-molotovs aesthetic, though, Tonight We Riot pushes collective action through its core loops. There’s no one player character, with you instead taking control of one of your many gathered protestors....

There’s something strange about a rabble of Goblins screaming “pointy-ears”, right? Like, c’mon lads, your ears are twice as pointy and thrice the size of your noggin, calm down. Let’s start with those goblins, actually, because they’re ridiculous and I love ’em. The first of Warden and Paunch’s two new factions is Grom the Paunch’s Broken Axe. His army’s got a right hunger, with a campaign centred on collecting ingredients to cobble together new dishes....

In a blog post today, Creative Assembly laid out their plans for Update 1.1. Expected to launch in “early” April, it’ll make some changes to the shape of the game as well as fixing a few bits and fiddling with balance. The blog post also gabs about faction balance in multiplayer (the delightful Ogre Kingdoms are “overperforming heavily” while Grand Cathay are faring the worst), improving AI responsiveness during battle, fixing bugs, releasing the mod manager and enabling Workshop support, and more....

At the same time, though, their approach to story-telling couldn’t be more different, and comparing and contrasting them like this one after the other has been both fun and enlightening. Triangle Strategy, for example, is about 80% cutscene, 20% fighting for its first six hours, while Tactics Ogre is pretty much the opposite. And yet… I think I sort of prefer Triangle Strategy? Let me explain.

It doesn’t look like the full-blown wizard school RPG you might be hoping for, but it’s a lark all the same. The most appealing thing to me is the magical battle club involving glowing hexagrams and much flailing of wands, although wandering around with a pumpkin for a head seems perfectly normal at Two Point Campus’ Spiffinmore University, which would make for a unique freshers week. The wizardry course also seems to involve several rubber duck jokes, which you can only approve of....

“We know that many people on Twitch–particularly women, members of the LGBTQIA+ community, Black, Indigenous, and people of color–unfortunately continue to experience a disproportionate amount of harassment and abuse online, including on our service,” Twitch say. “Not only is this blatantly unacceptable, it also undermines the community we’re building on Twitch and threatens the long term viability of streaming as a career for everyone who wishes to pursue it. " The detailed policy is broken down into harassment, sexual harassment, and hateful conduct....

“I heard your feedback and I’m sorry this was perceived that way,” Guillemot told staff at the start of the hour-long meeting. “When saying ‘the ball is in your court’ to deliver our lineup on time and at the expected level of quality, I wanted to convey the idea that more than ever I need your talent and energy to make it happen. This is a collective journey that starts of course with myself and with the leadership team to create the conditions for all of us to succeed together....