I’ll admit, before I went to PAX I didn’t really appreciate how big Pinny Arcade was. I’d definitely seen photos of colourful metal pins depicting characters from various video games fly across my screen as I browsed Twitter, but I had never thought much about them beyond that. I was shocked, then, to arrive at PAX and realise just how integral this collectable is to the show. Merch booths sell starter packs, individual demo stations flog game specific rarities and avid fans adorn their lanyards with their favourite pieces....

Now, I haven’t personally played Ghost On The Shore yet, but it’s a game about exploring a tragic island with a tragic ghost, which does unironically sound like my jam. In fact, Jay even pegged it years ago in a Screenshot Saturday Sundays post. I can absolutely personally endorse The Longing, however, which is a really cool game about literally going goblin mode and waiting for a mountain king to wake up from his nap....

Riot already blasted some of the biggest bugs last week, but yep, there were plenty left. It (hopefully) won’t crash on startup anymore, buffs on copied units are being displayed properly, and various cards are generally doing what they’re supposed to now. I’ve been playing a fair bit and hadn’t noticed any problems, but it sounds like I ran into some without realising. Riot have also twiddled with Expeditions. This is the drafting mode where you build a deck through a series of multiple choices, and so the balancing works a bit differently to constructed play....

Legends of Runeterra vault guide In this Legends of Runeterra vault guide I will be explaining how to gain XP quickly, as well as go into detail about the weekly vault and the region rewards. I’ve also added some more details on the odds of getting certain items as weekly rewards, experience needed to get said rewards, and the chances for your rewards to be upgraded. Contents Region rewards Runeterra weekly vault Quick ways to gain XP Reward upgrades...

The game’s community managers run through the major changes in this video: There are also a bunch of feature teaser trailers on the game’s YouTube channel, but none of them can compare to the update 3 trailer, which is the only videogame patch trailer to give me chills. Update 4 adds too many features for to neatly summarise, even if I just focus on the flashiest. Let’s try, anyway. Hoverpacks are designed to make it easier to move around your base and survey your sprawling creations; drones help quickly move small amounts of resources around; lighting brightens up indoor and outdoor areas and can be customised if you’d like to bathe everything in purple; and particle accelerators form part of an re-work of tier 7 and 8 tech upgrades and the nuclear tools you can play with it....

Get the SteelSeries Arctis Pro + GameDAC for £150 (£100 off) The reason Katharine was such a big fan of the Arctis Pro + GameDAC when she reviewed it back in 2018 came to two main reasons: supreme comfort and unparalleled sound quality. The comfort is something we’ve come to expect from SteelSeries headsets, thanks to their airy fabric earcups and ski goggle style headband, but the sound here goes beyond anything else the company has produced so far....

Part of this Community Day is a “generous fixed boost” to Renown, Sea Of Thieves version of seasonal progression. Not too shabby. If you tweet using the hashtag #SeaofThievesCommunityDay starting from 11am BST on the 17th, then it’ll help raise something called the Community Emissary Grade, which is broken down into five grades. If players rank it up to the top grade then that’ll unlock a multiplier that gives all players 2....

Of course, Stealth’s main benefit is your opponent not being able to target the minion with either their own minions or spells until Stealth ends. Take advantage of this, and ensure you’re maximising your damage output. Sometimes it’s best to save an attack for later and remain in stealth. Stealth Rogue deck list and strategy Here’s the Stealth Rogue deck we’ll be using for the Ashes of Outland expansion. We’ll keep you updated with any changes!...

The game’s Twitter explains, “Shadow Warrior 3 is, like, 99% awesome, but it’s gonna be at least 120% awesome with a little more polish, so we decided to give it the extra bit of love that it deserves. However, Devolver’s Twitter says the game “needs a bit more time to sharpen its blades”. Well, WHICH IS IT? Sharpen or polish, you LIARS? I suppose one could argue that sharpening can be a crude first step in a polishing process, or that polishing is the ultra-refining endpoint of sharpening....

Details are thin on the ground right now, but a Crunchyroll announcement this week confirmed that a 13-episode run has been ordered from Telecom Animation Film. One Punch Man director Chikara Sakurai has been brought on to direct, while series creator Yu Suzuki has been brought on board as executive producer. I wouldn’t expect Shenmue to be quite as action-packed as the above examples, though. In his Shenmue 3 review, Matthew cherished the slow, often boring placidness of the series’ endearingly plodding story....

Though I coined the officially sanctioned genre name ‘Zachlike’, I have never finished one of their puzzle games and likely never will. I do not have the brain/patience for these but I respect the hell out of them. I know big-brain boy Brendy was a fan of Shenzhen I/O, calling it “a polished and compelling puzzler”. This is the second Zachtronics game to hit Game Pass, after the studio’s final game (which might be a hazy term) debuted on the service at launch in July....

Unlike the real sea, which is the very best place to be, the sea in Ship Of Fools is bad. Giant critters will attack your boat from the waves, and smaller ones will board you to nibble on your nose. So you and your pal (in local multiplayer or online) will team up to fend them off, manning cannons, fighting on the decks, repairing damage, and all that. It’s a bit roguelikelike, plotting your route across runs, finding upgrades for your weapons, unlocking upgrades and such, and sure, that looks like it could be fun....

Highlights include the AMD Radeon RX 5700 and Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 – a former flagship! – listed among the minimum specs, alongside a 12GB RAM requirement, and Windows 11 as the recommended OS. Those with a GeForce RTX graphics card could get some performance help, though, as the requirements’ notes say that meeting the recommended spec will allow for 4K resolution “using DLSS or similar technology”. That’s not quite a formal confirmation of Nvidia DLSS support, but strongly indicates it, maybe along with similar upscaling systems like AMD FSR or Intel XeSS....

GOG announced the arrival earlier this week, saying it was part of GOG’s celebrations for the store’s 14th anniversary. At the time of writing, you can get the Anniversary edition for 50% off and the Special Edition for 67% off. If you haven’t kept up with Skyrim’s re-releases, the Anniversary Edition was released last year to mark Skyrim’s 10th birthday. It bundled the game together with all the Creation Club content released up to that point....

And so he runs, pinging his way between springboard, winches, boost pads and little floating balloons, tapping the X button to bounce between them when a little target appears, beckoning him to do its bidding. Sonic looks east, he looks west. And he sees grind rails. He’s free, you see. And so am I. Free from giving the slightest toss about this stupid, rubbish series for undemanding children. No, I’m not bitter....

DLSS, in case you’ve forgotten because there are so few playable DLSS games right now, stands for Deep Learning Super Sampling, and it’s one of Nvidia’s exclusive RTX features. It’s a nifty bit of upscaling tech that uses AI to fill in the gaps when you’re playing at high resolutions such as 4K, helping to keep those frame rates nice and high without tanking your GPU’s performance. The game should look the same as it does with DLSS turned off, but it run better as a result....

CW: The report includes mention of anti-semitimism, rape, use of the r-slur. “It’s an oppressive workplace, for sure. But it’s hard to pinpoint one thing because, in isolation, all of these incidents, if they happen once, you would think they are small things,” one game developer told VentureBeat. “When you’re dealing with that for [multiple] years, you’re going to see the decline of people’s mental health.” Moon Studios is a fully remote studio with 80 employees....

Valve have previously made the peculiar move of showing exactly how to open a Steam Deck and remove individual parts, complete with video, while simultaneously declaring it something owners should refrain from. On pain of borking components, personal injury, and even death, apparently. I asked Griffais if, a few months on from that video’s release, it remains Valve’s stance that internal tinkering should be avoided. “Yeah, I think it’s best left to professionals,” he replied....

Earlier this week, Steam outlined a few new features that you can try out if you swap over to the Steam Client Beta branch. Xbox controllers get the most gains this time around with the ability to rebind the share button on the Xbox Series X controller and binding those fancy paddles up there on the back of the Elite controller in your controller configurations. They’re also testing out support for more than four Xbox controllers....

On October 14th, as per Games Radar, a mod was released for the beta that allowed players to keep entering its offline versus mode. All you needed was that initial beta invite key and you could keep playing even though the beta had technically finished. Earlier this morning, Capcom released an update to the beta which deletes the executable from player’s hard drives. It’s an extremely basic method of preventing the beta from running....