Once Humanprovides an intimidating experience at the outset thanks to a slew of mechanics, narrative, and systems at play. It certainly doesn’t help when things like your backpack flashing numbers, changing colors, and beepingaren’t explained. Fortunately, the explanation is easy enough and the Cradle will become far more useful. What do the numbers and beeping on the Cradle mean in Once Human? The long and short of the numbers, colors, and beeping your backpack does is to act as a warning when approaching areas of high Stardust concentration....

Behold the king; the king of kings All I want from a modernDungeons & Dragonsvideo game is a virtual approximation of the tabletop role-playing game. We already have hack-and-slash games, we already have dungeon crawlers, that road has been well-tread. I want a god damnD&Dgame; a sprawling, epic campaign with plenty of dialogue and a veritable spreadsheet of numbers hovering over me like a mathemagical Sword of Damocles. So, hey, good news....

The fairly complex brawler up hits XBLA, PSN, PC and the Wii U eShop As part of Capcom’s wave of surprise announcements, we learned that the arcade classicsDungeons & Dragons: Tower of DoomandShadow over Mystarawould be hitting the XBLA, PSN, Wii U eShop, and PC platforms as a double-pack calledChronicles of Mystara. Only the 360 version was playable on the showfloor, but it showcased the four player drop-in, drop-out mechanic flawlessly....

Having finally surpassed 2 million players onCastle Crashers(Xbox LIVE Arcade), you would think that maybe The Behemoth would take a break from the game — just for a little while. Poppycock! No, the company isthrowing a contestwith ridiculous swag instead. The top 100 Weekly Ranked Arena players on January 28 will have the opportunity to battle it out, one-on-one-elimination style. Those matches are to take place on February 5, and everyone gets a prize....

CD Projekt CEO Michal Kicinskihas statedthat videogame publishers are “scared” of letting their games go on sale without being given a hearty DRM vaccination. CD Projekt is setting up its own games-on-demand distribution service,GOG.com, but the CEO says that its DRM-free policy is frightening potential collaborators. “We’re trying to convince them there is nothing to be afraid of. DRM-free, that is something they are really scared of, but on the other hand we can say ‘all of those games are available pirated widely so it’s better to sell them for small money than make the customer’s life difficult and get some more revenues’....

PS Vita visuals won’t be exactly on par I convinced myself long ago thatThe Binding of Isaac: Rebirthwas something I needed in my life, so every additional detail or feature we’re told about in the lead up to release is justicing on top. This week, customizable controls, “seeds,” and the graphical differences between the PS4, PS Vita, and PC versions are the topics of discussion. The DualShock 4 and PlayStation Vita control layouts were detailed in a blog post, though none of that particularly matters because we’ll have the freedom to remap the controls to our liking....

Rocket Leaguex Grimes is a celebration of music Rocket Leaguehas been known to collaborate with all kinds of cool brands, likeBatman,Stranger Things, and yes, evenus back in 2015. Now the game’s newest collaboration has been revealed, and it’s with none other than musician Grimes. The event, calledNeon Nights, will begin on all platforms on January 26. This is the first timeRocket Leagueis theming an in-game event around a musical artist, so get ready for some new surprises....

Dismantle the catriarchy Asymmetry in board games is a tricky thing.Do it wrong, and asymmetry can lead to imbalance, which can lead to flipped tables and scattered pieces, or at the very least a muttering of “I’ll never playthatagain.” So most games that employ asymmetry go light on it. Maybe everybody is doing the same thing, but has different minor powers. Or everybody is cooperating toward the same goal and major differences between players is there to allow for synergy rather than to promote imbalance....

A QTE by any other name would smell as sour Crytek wants you to name one of the QTE finishers for Xbox One exclusiveRyse. My theory is that the team ran out of manpower to name them all itself because the game isbasically a giant quick time event. FollowGameStoponTwitterand tweet suggestions with the the hash tag “#RyseMove2.” The top voted submission makes it in the game. I leave it in your hands, internet....

What was your favorite title at this summer’s event? Another (relatively low-key) Gamescom event has drawn to a close. Quite honestly, it felt like it consisted of the l o n g Opening Night Live stream and little else, but at least we got to see some of the new titles getting ready to spring forth on those expensive new consoles soon… And by soon, I mean in 2022. Gamescom 2021 dropped the curtain this weekend with an awards ceremony, which saw developers, publishers, and games celebrated with sparkly gongs....

‘We will continue to enhance the appeal of the service’ In the most recent corporate management policy briefing for the fiscal year ending in March 2020, we get a tiny little update from Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa on the state of the Switch Online service. Surprisingly, it’s a little melancholy. Furukawa confirms that Nintendo has coaxed 15 million people into paid memberships for Switch Online, but as usual, there’s more work to do....

After both public pushback and developer response, the publisher is stepping back from NFTs The MetaWorms have been shelved. Following public response online and from its developer partners, Team17 has announced it is ending itsWorms-based NFT project MetaWorms. Yesterday, theWormspublisher announced it would mint a new NFT collection based on the well-known multiplayer seriesWorms. Much like other NFT announcements that have been made over the last few months, you canimagine how this went....

A first-person shooter set in a persistent, open-world sandbox Finally, after years of speculation Bungie and Activision have revealed the first bits and pieces of what exactlyDestiny(yes, that’s the official name) is all about. It’s a first-person shooter. It’s an open-world sandbox. And it’s a persistent world. It’s all that and more — something Bungie is calling a “shared-world shooter.” Bungie is betting big, offering so much promise that only a studio like them could potentially pull it off....