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Ultimate Chicken Horse is easily one of the funniest and stupidest party-platformers I've ever played, and it just had a free content update with a big discount. Read the full article here: [Hidden Content] View the full article

Absurd Ventures, the company started by Rockstar Games co-founder and head writer Dan Houser after he left said juggernaut, are working on a new "open world action-adventure" game. That's according to recent job listings on Absurd's website (cheers Gamesradar for the spot), which mention such a thing. And to be honest, are any of us surprised? Not really. Will the finished product resemble GTA to some degree? I imagine yes. Am I happy about this? Yeah, go on then. Read more View the full article

Skull and Bones Season 2 is on the way after what Ubisoft called a “tremendous response” from the game’s community. Skull and Bones launched in February on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and S, anbd PC (but not on Steam) after years of delays and was thought to have suffered from low player numbers. IGN’s Skull and Bones review returned a 7/10. We said: “Skull and Bones is a maritime RPG with a strong foundation, even if it feels like a live-service first draft.” Season 1 soon followed, and now Ubisoft has confirmed what to expect from Season 2. “Let us begin by saying how amazing it has been for all of us working on Skull and Bones to witness the tremendous response from our entire community since the launch of our game,” Ubisoft said in a blog post.. "From the ways our players engage with our game and content, to the ton of screenshots, videos and livestreams shared across social media, Discord and Reddit." “It is thanks to your incredible engagement, that we were able, throughout Season 1, to observe, listen, understand, and more importantly react to your feedback on a weekly basis," Ubisoft continued. "Our commitment continues to remain the same - to create and update our game together, with our community. This wouldn't have been possible without the passion and dedication you've shown to Skull and Bones.” During its most recent financial report, Ubisoft ******* to say how many copies Skull and Bones sold since going on ***** at full price on February 16. But it did say the game saw “strong engagement”, with the second-best daily playtime for a Ubisoft game. That included an average of four hours in the first weeks following launch. Ubisoft put this down to end-game content that launched with Season 1. “We target to further improve this retention and enlarge the player base with the upcoming launch of Season 2, Chorus of Havoc, that will continue to enrich the end-game with the addition of new bosses, world events and ship upgrades,” Ubisoft added. “Season 2 will also bring new PvE & Solo game modes.” Ubisoft has committed to at least one full year of content for Skull and Bones, divided up into four seasons. It will be interesting to see if the game gets a second year of support. Ubisoft further detailed Season 2 in the blog post. Here are the notes: Skull and Bones Season 2 key features and improvements preview With Season 2, we're bringing many improvements to our end game loop, adjustments to our seasonal formula and a ton of new content which we believe will address some key concerns from the community. Ship Upgrades, which will allow you to upgrade your ships to improve ship stats and gain new perks.Fleet Management, which will allow you to assign ships to manufactories to automatically collect pieces of eight.Helm Leases, which will allow you to acquire a manufactory of your choice.New PvE & Solo Game ModesBalancing the costs of our Manufactories These changes come in addition to the new content (new boss ******, new sea monster, new ship, weapons, armors and furniture) that will be introduced and communicated to you through additional dev updates and devblogs, in the upcoming days/weeks on Discord, Reddit, Social Media and our website. Seasonal reset With Season 2 right around the corner, many of you have been eager to find out what exactly is going to change when Season 1 ends. Rewarding your achievements and preparing for season 2 Our seasonal model on Skull and Bones is designed around the idea that players ****** against seasonal antagonists, Sea Monsters and other Ghost Ships to protect The Helm's smuggling activities and grow both their profit and influence in the Indian Ocean. Each new season in Skull and Bones sees the arrival of a new threat, coming to disrupt and force the Helm and its associates to adapt the way they operate and manage their trading network. With Season 1, we deliberately took the time we needed to carefully monitor and understand your feedback and the way you engage with our game content. The learnings we gathered throughout the season helped us make the necessary adjustments and balancing to our end game economy, features, and systems. Now that Season 2 is coming, we can share more details on the full list of rewards that will be handed out to the most successful Kingpins from Season 1. The first thing we announced during a previous livestream of The Deck was that everyone who reached the Diamond Rank on the leaderboards by the end of Season 1, would receive the cosmetic set at the beginning of Season 2. In addition, we will also be rewarding those of you who successfully and significantly grew their empire, with some of the new items coming with our Season 2 update: World Helm Leases and Ship Upgrade Parts. These two items will become key in growing your fleet of ships, acquiring the manufactories of your choice, and get a head start in shaping your empire to your strategy. As stated above, with the end of each season, and the arrival of a new antagonist, comes significant disruption to The Helm and their smuggling operations. As a result, all players will see their ranks on the leaderboards, their manufactories, and upgrades be reset. Not all is lost however, as your efforts have been recognised by The Helm's representative, who will trust you with new tools to re-build your empire and prove your worth as a Pirate Kingpin once again. Last but not least, we will not be fully resetting the number of Pieces of Eight collected throughout Season 1 but applying a soft reset instead to all players who accumulated more than 300,000 Pieces of Eight. Effectively, most of you will get to keep all your Pieces of Eight in your wallet, while a few will see their balance reduced to that number. Wesley is the *** News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at *****@*****.tld. View the full article

I think this tease is it, but I can’t quite tell. | Image: Asus On June 2nd, Asus will formally announce the ROG Ally X, a semi-sequel to its handheld gaming PC with a way ******* battery. We exclusively revealed the broad strokes last Thursday, but I’ve now touched an early engineering sample, too — and I’m pleased to say it’s far more comfortable to hold. [/url] Asus has made a whole bunch of ergonomic changes that make it practically melt into my hands, in the exact way the original did not. While I still prefer the Steam Deck’s beefier grips and symmetrical thumbsticks, the Ally X could easily be my runner-up. First, a disclaimer: this is not what I’d consider a proper hands-on. Asus wouldn’t let me power it on, play any games, or show you any photos. I couldn’t bring the old ROG Ally into the room or... Continue reading… View the full article

OK, so for the past few years, the Los Angeles Chargers - one of LA's NFL teams - have announced the schedule for the upcoming season in pretty entertaining fashion. This year, The Sims 2 has been chosen to host this reveal of who Justin Herbert and co will be playing against and when - creating something that both Sims fans and those of us who like ********* football can enjoy together. As a recap of sorts, the schedule release videos we got from the Chargers in 2022 and 2023 were both anime-themed, taking on the guises of intros resembling those of shows at least one person you know is probably really into. It's a nice way to spice up something mundane, and this year's might be the team's best one yet. There are far too many very funny gags in the video - which you can watch below - for me to point them all out, but here are some of my favorites, starting off with a few that folks who are just here for the classic Sims nostalgia will enjoy. Read more View the full article

The sequel to 2064: Read Only Memories has finally arrived with Read Only Memories: NEURODIVER now available with Linux support. Read the full article here: [Hidden Content] View the full article

Netflix has been reminding everyone that Squid Game season 2 is still coming along after a lengthier than expected wait. In February, we also received one of the shortest teasers in recent memory, and with 2024 nearing the halfway point now, many are wondering when the marketing campaign is actually starting. Main star Lee Jung-jae, who's now promoting the Star Wars: The Acolyte series, has thankfully shed some light on the matter, but ******** tight-lipped about the whole thing. While talking to Business Insider, he revealed that, as far as he knows, the second season of the South Korean drama is dropping in December. This might not be the news that diehard Squid Game fans - children who shouldn't be watching the show included - were hoping for, but it's a logical choice if true. For the past few years, Netflix's big Christmas releases, like Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery and Rebel Moon: Part 1, were huge. If Squid Game's second season couldn't be finished in time for the summer *******, it only makes sense to save it for December and finish 2024 with a bang. Read more View the full article

On May 15, developer Airship Syndicate announced that Wayfinder is turning into an offline single-player game with optional co-op. Immediately, the game’s Steam page was bombed with almost 100 negative reviews. After two seasons as an MMO-lite, Wayfinder lost most of its players, was abandoned by its publisher, Digital Extremes, and was removed the Steam and PlayStation stores. Now that Airship Syndicate is also in charge of publishing, it announced it will be rebranding the game as a single-player experience—and Steam users didn’t take the news well. View the full article

Microsoft is reportedly considering a "no red line" approach to porting games to PlayStation consoles, in a new strategy to increase margins for its released video games. According to a report by Windows Central, this would include even the company's most excusive and beloved IPs. The minds behind this move belong to CEO of Microsoft Satya Nadella and CFO Amy Hood, notably folks not inherently tied to the gaming department of the company. While the pair believe this is the right move going forward, apparently many working inside the company are uneasy with this decision and its consequences. This appears to be somewhat of a follow-up of a previous decision made by Microsoft, in which it ported four games including Hi-Fi Rush created by the wonderful and now-***** Tango Gameworks and Sea of Thieves. When these games did land on other consoles including the PlayStation, they proved quite popular, so there is proof this sort of thing does boost sales. Read more View the full article

You only have to take one look at PC Gamer's Disco Elysium review to realize just what a special PC gaming experience it is. Rated 92%, this detective RPG simply blew our reviewer Andy Kelly away, leaving him to "say with certainty that it's one of the finest RPGs on PC if you value depth, freedom, customization, and storytelling.".. Read more.View the full article

Helldivers 2’s ongoing meta-narrative took another twist this week after players ******* the last Major Order and thus ******* to unlock a promised new Stratagem. The explosive PC and PlayStation 5 co-op shooter had set the community a stiff challenge: ***** 2 billion Automatons in five days and the Anti-Tank Mines Stratagem would unlock. But despite players’ best efforts, Helldivers came 78% towards the stated goal, and in an in-universe Galactic War update from Super Earth High Command posted to the Helldivers Discord, Arrowhead signaled it would hold the the Anti-Tank Mines Stratagem back — for now. “After five days of intense decommissioning of Automatons into scrap metal for use in advanced anti-tank mines, the Helldivers came 78% towards the stated goal of 2 billion ***** bots,” the message reads. “This means that the new stratagem will continue to elude the Helldiver arsenal for now…” It’s perhaps no surprise to see this Major Order *******, given Arrowhead had warned it had fixed a bug that caused a previous Major Order to ***** 2 billion bugs to be completed too quickly. The Anti-Tank Mines Stratagem will obviously be released in time, but what’s interesting is what comes next in the Galactic War. Dungeon Master Joel, who pulls the meta-narrative strings from within the bowels of Arrowhead headquarters, appears to have a surprise up his sleeve. The rest of Super Earth’s statement says the war has now escalated into what’s called The Second Galactic War, and that all conflict leading up to this point “was merely an elaborate special operation.” And here’s a very interesting line, already being picked apart by the Helldivers community: “New recruits are being trained to bolster the ranks of SEAF, and the Helldivers are tasked with guarding these training facilities so that each recruit can be given their rigorous 72 hour basic training.” "All conflict leading up to this was merely an elaborate special operation. It could be nothing, but some players are speculating that this is a tease for the arrival of NPC squads. Perhaps an upcoming Stratagem will call in a four-person team who drop down onto the battlefield to help out until they, inevitably, ***** the dust. Here’s the rest of the statement in full: “The war now escalates into what is officially called ‘The Second Galactic War.’ All conflict leading up to this was merely an elaborate special operation. New recruits are being trained to bolster the ranks of SEAF, and the Helldivers are tasked with guarding these training facilities so that each recruit can be given their rigorous 72 hour basic training.” Helldivers 2 is the fastest-selling PlayStation game of all time, selling an astonishing 12 million copies in just 12 weeks. But it’s had a bumpy ride since coming out earlier this year, with Arrowhead butting heads with Sony over PSN account linking. This week, Arrowhead said it plans to roll back changes to patrols and spawn rates, admitting the PSN controversy had diverted its attention away from gameplay tweaks. Wesley is the *** News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at *****@*****.tld. View the full article

The latest weapons balancing blog post from Bungie revealed substantial PvE damage buffs across the Destiny 2 sandbox coming in The Final Shape. However, despite buffs, players believe one ******* category is still lagging. The majority of the buffs listed in the Destiny 2 blog post on May 15 increase the weapons’ damage against PvE combatants in light of Spec mod removal. Damage is good, but players agree swords, in particular, need something more than damage—survivability. In a Reddit thread, Destiny 2 fans pointed out that in the endgame content swords are only viable for Titans who use the Stronghold Exotic armor. View the full article

An update many have been waiting for, Caves of Qud, one of the best roguelikes ever has a Beta available that includes a huge overhaul to the UI. Much better for gamepad and Steam Deck players. Read the full article here: [Hidden Content] View the full article

Well, *********'s Creed Shadows got its reveal trailer yesterday, and it looks pretty fun. There are two protagonists with different playstyles, plenty of history at play, and - shock horror - the game's made a change to the series' iconic rooftop sync points that sounds like it'll force you to actually take in the nice views they offer. If you're out of the loop, Shadows is the game formerly known as Codename Red, and will be the first AC game set in Japan. It's set to come out on November 15 and tells the story of two fighters negotiating the trials and tribulations of the Sengoku ******* - Naoe and Yasuke. As revealed by the game's developers in an interview with IGN, one of the changes Shadows is brining to the traditional AC formula of 'go somewhere with historical signficance, stab someone, profit' concerns the iconic sychronisation points you usually find atop towers or in other places people suffering from vertigo ***** to tread. Read more View the full article

Our Edders, the RPSer I’d most trust to help me gank a rival covenant member with hammers, reckoned Pinocchio soulslike ***** Of P was an “instant must-play” in his review, and I was pretty fond of it myself. We already know that we’re due a sequel at some point the future, thanks to impressive sales. Director Jiwon Choi previously teased some DLC concept art, and now it looks like we’ll be seeing that DLC by the time the year’s out, according to a fiscal report. Read more View the full article

The 10th Generation of Pokémon games could be revealed during Pokémon’s 30th anniversary, according to a well-known leaker Khu. On May 15, Khu dropped a teaser on Twitter (formerly known as X) that reads: “Have you prepared for gen10? 30thA.” This seems to be a cryptic tease about the 30th anniversary, which takes place in 2026, having something to do with the Generation 10 games. View the full article

The award-winning mining sandbox adventure game Core Keeper is now getting ready to leave Early Access with the big 1.0 arriving on August 27th. Read the full article here: [Hidden Content] View the full article

A new Genshin Impact ***** shows that the popular Dendro user Tighnari could have had a **** as part of his in-game design. Tighnari was the first five-star Dendro character to join the server back in Version 3.0. Since then, he has become part of the permanent Standard Character Banner. View the full article

We’re just days away from the release of XDefiant, Ubisoft’s free-to-play shooter that’s been in development for what felt like ten years. The game recently, finally, for real this time, locked in a release date of May 21. In the lead-up to launch, the developer has been sharing new information about what players can expect on Tuesday, including a look at the game’s approach to matchmaking. Read more View the full article

With Dune: Part Two in the rear view mirror and everyone looking towards the Dune: Messiah adaptation next, you'd think the franchise would be taking some time away from our screens...and you'd be wrong. Dune: Prophecy is coming to Max this fall. The series takes place approximately 10,000 years before Paul Atreides was born, which is roughly 10,000 years after our time. The Dune universe's timeline is wild, and mankind has gone through a lot of common sci-fi scenarios, such as the violent crusade against sentient machines (the Butlerian ******) and whatnot. Anyway, the main takeaway from this trailer, which you can watch here, is that things looks a bit too similar to what we've been presented with in Denis Villeneuve's Dune movies. Don't get me wrong, the show looks fine so far, especially for what's essentially an early teaser trailer that still needs a lot of post-production work, but it seems that the creative shakeup that took place last year, with the original showrunner (Diane Ademu-John) being replaced and Chernobyl's Johan Renck departing as the director behind the first few episodes due to creative differences, really brought the long-in-the-works series much closer to the highly successful movies from Warner Bros. and Legendary. We'll get to see many more worlds and different cultures though. Read more View the full article

****** Bandicoot and Spyro developer Toys For Bob has seemingly teased a new game announcement with a cryptic update. A simple update to the developer’s website has changed the logo to a purple tiki mask, leading fans to speculate whether a new entry in either long-running series will be unveiled. View the full article

SAMURAI WARRIORS 4 from Koei Tecmo is a hack and slash game originally released in 2014, it later had an upgraded releases SAMURAI WARRIORS 4-II that came to Steam in 2015 and now the even more improved version SAMURAI WARRIORS 4 DX is here. Read the full article here: [Hidden Content] View the full article

We’re having a bit of a space game renaissance. But as Homeworld, one of my all-time favorites, was resurrected for a sequel, it only made me want to return to another game that will never get one. I hope the feeling of wonder is still as strong as it was all those years ago. There was something special about being a **** jumping into the low-resolution darkness of mid-90s space games, and I hope players checking out Homeworld 3 get to experience at least a fraction of that joy. The technical limitations at the time dovetailed neatly into the setting’s fundamental appeal; space is dark, empty, and unknowable. As a developer, you had to imply rather than show and make things seem much greater than they really were. So, players discovered the world rather than exploring it. View the full article

For those of you who wait until Denuvo Anti-tamper gets removed from games, you'll be pleased to know Back 4 Blood is now free of it. Plus the developers fixed the anti-cheat recently. Read the full article here: [Hidden Content] View the full article

We’re almost halfway through the year and have seen multiple spectacular Counter-Strike 2 performances from many players like donk, ZywOo, or m0NESY. All boast incredible stats in 2024, and one North ********* veteran is in their prestige company. If you have been following CS2 tournaments this year, you shouldn’t be surprised to hear it’s no other than Complexity’s EliGE. The 26-year-old has been an outstanding player for the team so far, and his stats prove it. He’s currently the third best-rated rifler of the year, according to Thunderpick. View the full article