Author: Garry Smith

Alice Ruppert has been speaking out about how horses are represented in games ever since Assassin’s Creed 3. She’d had such high hopes for it after Red Dead Redemption 1, a game and series she really rates. But when AC3 came along and horses were nothing more than disposable taxis you could pick up at every outpost, she was sorely disappointed. The game didn’t even save your horse choice through loading screens. She’s been speaking out about horses in games ever since.She does it on the wonderfully named website The Mane Quest, where her in-depth reviews – she records horse…

We often say that especially clever video games consist of “shades of grey”, but there are just as many shades of blackness. The colour black has a strange, underground career in computer graphics and aesthetics, spread across different types of display and graphics hardware, different genres and art styles. The darkness of a Game Boy game is green-tinged and fertile, like a puddle of algae (and similarly reliant on sunlight). The darkness of a cathode-ray tube display is a dense fog sealed behind a bulging reflection – small wonder that Silent Hill’s most atmospheric moments came before the advent of…

There is no birth without sex, no life without birth, no birth without life, and no life without death. This cyclical motif is sewn throughout Scorn, running through it like a rotting umbilical cord. It’s a world where animal and automation are fused together in an uneasy alliance, blended so seamlessly you’re never entirely sure where organic matter ends and machine begins. For such a taciturn game – Scorn has no text prompts, no dialogue, and no map; you move through its world by organic exploration, hope, luck, and nothing more – this circle-of-life stuff is surprisingly in your face.…

Overwatch is a superhero story, and if there’s one thing superheroes adore doing in their marketing materials, it’s staring dramatically outward at something you can’t see. Overwatch 2’s launch menu art is a classic example of this – and also, a convenient cross-section for the game’s wonderfully varied, albeit mostly returning characters. There’s Tracer, original mascot and the game’s worst troll, using her teleport dash to mess up the enemy rearguard, then rewinding herself to safety. There’s Mercy, a single-target healer who handles like a ninja given a well-spaced team, with the ability to swoop towards allies. And Genji, an…

This week on the Eurogamer Newscast, we’re back discussing Microsoft’s big Activision Blizzard deal and the latest developments in the ongoing saga of the $68bn buyout being finalised. Yesterday, Microsoft leapt upon the latest concerned update from the UK’s deal regulator and repeatedly tried to minimise its own importance in the video games market. Microsoft stated it was far from the leader in terms of console share and PC games sold, and lacked any real presence on mobile devices. In a particularly eye-opening claim, Microsoft even said PlayStation’s userbase would be “significantly larger” than Xbox even if every COD player…

New Call of Duty players on PC will still need to verify their identity via an SMS message – even though Activision’s other half Blizzard rolled back the unpopular requirement for Overwatch 2 following its beleaguered launch. In a new blog post, Activision confirmed it would require a text-enabled mobile phone number to play the upcoming Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 on PC, and also Warzone 2.0. This will not apply on console, however, or to anyone on PC who verified their account to play the existing Warzone previously. Read more Source – eurogamer.net All content and images belong…

Rat-infested adventure sequel A Plague Tale: Requiem won’t officially be released until next week, but footage showing large chunks of its campaign is now popping up online. The game’s developer Asobo has now warned those with early copies not to ruin Requiem’s story – posting a picture of a knight being consumed by thousands of plague rats as a warning of what will happen should you spoil things for others. Digital copies of the game will unlock at midnight local time next Tuesday, 18th October, but it appears some early physical copies have been sent out early. Eurogamer has spotted…

Earlier this year, I shared my thoughts on five incredible mechanical keyboards that had passed over my desk as of early 2022. There was a surprisingly warm response to that piece, and I planned soon to revisit the topic when I’d tested enough great keyboards to really justify it – next year, perhaps. Scarcely a few months later, and I’ve been lucky enough to test out nearly a dozen more mechanical keyboards – five of which are well worth writing about. So, without further ado, here are five more lovely mechanical keyboards to have been released in 2022, from technological…

Developer Media Molecule’s impressively flexible PlayStation creation tool Dreams is celebrating Halloween this year with the return of its annual All Hallows’ event, this time beckoning players to take a spooky trip to the Land of Lost Dreams. This latest journey to the realms of spookidom is the third Halloween event for Dreams, following previous outings that saw Media Molecule collaborating with its community to create explorable haunted houses and then, last year, a creepy old fairground. Things are getting a little more fantastical this time around, however, with a quest to the far-flung Land of Lost Dreams, where players…

Nintendo has taken its Switch Sports servers offline – and suspended save data backups – while it investigates an issue causing crashes in the game’s latest update. Switch Sports’ version 1.2.1 update launched earlier this week, aiming to further strengthen measures against what Nintendo called “disruptive behaviours” online, as well as pledging to suspend any online players violating its Community Guidelines. Punishable actions included “fraudulent behaviour such as save data manipulation.” Unfortunately, patch 1.2.1 also introduced a significant bug causing crashes – whether playing online or offline – during the pre-match loading screen. Read more Source – eurogamer.net All content…