My Friendly Neighborhood is the tale of a derelict children’s TV studio menaced by chipper puppets, who’ve decided to take matters into their own felt-covered hands to get their show back on the air - and, unlike a lot of recent indie horror offerings, it allows your character to fight back with gusto. It doesn’t necessarily break any new ground as such, but it’s the combination of influences I find so intriguing....

“Yes, you can turn the effects off,” Need For Speed’s Twitter account said. “In fact, you can choose to never put them on in the first place. Just like any other part of a car.” The effects don’t seem to just turn your car into Roadrunner, as there are little emoji-style graffiti designs for each one that look a bit like bizarre halos for the vehicle. They seem to hover around the entire vehicle as you drive, bursting into different forms as you speed up and steer about....

Launched this week, it’s a social space supposedly inspired by Nike’s company headquarters. As well as running around, swimming, hurdling, racing, and buying virtual Nike products, players can play minigames: The Floor Is Lava, Dodgeball, Tag, and such. You can create your own minigames too. What I played seemed fairly typical Roblox minigame fare, albeit with a polished look and plastered with Nike’s iconic ‘dangerous waterslide’ logo. You can play Nikeland for free through Roblox....

“We designed GeForce GPUs for gamers, and gamers are clamoring for more,” Nvidia said in a blog post. “Yet Nvidia GPUs are programmable. And users are constantly discovering new applications for them, from weather simulation and gene sequencing to deep learning and robotics. Mining cryptocurrency is one of them.” To help deter potential miners from snapping up large swathes of (probably very limited) RTX 3060 stock next week, Nvidia will be releasing a software driver that will be able to automatically detect when the card is being used for mining, and limit its hash rate by around 50%....

While it’s on offer for free, IO Interactive say you’ll have access to Sapienza’s original mission World Of Tomorrow from Hitman 1. You’ll also be able to participate in the Elusive Target mission “The Twin” going on as part of Hitman 3’s Season Of Sloth. “Two identical twin brothers,” they say. “One is the client, the other is your target. If you kill or harm the client, you fail. Track down the twins, identify the target and take your shot....

In early July, I started writing about cycling in PC games to mark the 2022 Tour De France and inaugural Tour De France Femmes. I ride a lot in real life and enjoy watching the Tour, and wanted to share these pleasure while doing a lot of cycling in games too. I never wanted to cover every single game with bikes but the series did run long as I kept thinking of more topics to talk about (and kept making video montages of my little digital biking body being smeared across hillsides and tarmac)....

Granted, any game would have a tough act to follow after the last month. It started with Grand Theft Auto V making a somewhat-unexpected appearance as Epic’s free game, kicking off the store’s summer Mega Sale. Predictably, this absolutely hammered Epic’s servers and left the client reeling, and thousands of tried to snag a rare free copy of Rockstar’s crime ’em up. GTA was followed by Civilisation VI the week after....

How to use the Sentinel Controller If you’re just diving into Sentinel league, you will first encounter Sentinels in The Coast zone in Act 1, where most league mechanics make their first appearance. Here you will find a Sentinel Cache containing a Stalker Sentinel and the Sentinel Controller. The button for this will reside on the left side of your inventory for the rest of the league. Open the Sentinel Controller and you’ll find a grid of runic symbols, which you can hover over to read the various bonuses they grant....

“Of course, we expected excitement for the Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous campaign—after all, it is our second project, and Kingmaker has gathered a loyal and dedicated community,” Owlcat Games said. “But we could never have imagined so much support and passion for our new game! We reached the main goal in 15 hours, but more and more people kept flocking to our banner. And they weren’t just veterans: more than 20% of our backers had never supported a Kickstarter project before....

If you like your electric jigsaws, then good news: there’s now an open beta available for PC Building Simulator 2. The beta, available only via Epic’s game store the Epic Game Store, includes the career mode’s first five levels, as well as access to Free Build mode with a limited number of computer parts. PCBS’ career mode gives you specific challenges, like troubleshooting a PC with an unknown problem or building a PC to a certain set of specifications....

A press release tells me those wacky kids, the Phantom Thieves, are going on a road trip in Strikers. But, as seems to be the case pretty often, trouble finds them and they gotta fight some corruption. Rather than the series’ usual turn-based fighting, the combat in Strikers is a “hybrid” of hack ’n’ slash mixed with “pause-and-plan sequences”, so there’s still a little strategy to your tussles. All this may not come as the most surprising news to some, seeing as a leaked trailer revealed it last week....

Get Crucial 16GB DDR5-4800 for $70 (was $89) I tested DDR5 fairly extensively for Digital Foundry, and I’m happy to report that there’s minimal speed differences between the base DDR5 spec - like this 4800MT/s CL40 kit - and more expensive 5200MT/s CL38 kits. Most games perform identically, and it isn’t until you overclock an already high-end DDR5 kit (I managed around 6600MT/s) that you start to see a noticeable performance difference between different DDR5 RAM configurations....

And B, this week’s Mystery Steam Reviews focuses on video games that look older than they are. It’s faux-retro video games! In other words, fairly modern games that use a pixelated art style. No one picked that Mega Drive collection, or a re-release of an old Square RPG, so everything’s above board. But, that doesn’t mean there aren’t some little spats. What is Mystery Steam Reviews, but an excuse for both Matthew and I to nip at each other’s heels… all in the spirit of competition, obviously....

The Division 2’s new trial kicked off on April 21st, letting you play through eight hours of Ubisoft’s underground cop ’em up. Just in case you thought about speedrunning your way up to The Division 2’s endgame, it’ll also cap your agent at level 8 - likewise, you can’t join clans during a demo period, nor can you purchase premium credits for the in-game store. To see this content please enable targeting cookies....

You work as a remote manager for Flat Eye Corporation, a Google-like megacorp, and control things from a top-down view. You tell a drone shopworker when to restock shelves, what to build where, and when to go to the toilet. There are some hints of the larger story (which plays out through interactions with regular customers, and deals with the impact of this kind of technology on our lives) but, until the end point that I won’t spoil, the demo was mostly the management stuff....

QuakeCon 2020 was due to run August 6-9th in Dallas, with thousands of gibheads coming together to play, hang out, listen to talks, get wee peeks at what Id, Bethesda, and the rest of the family are working on (Doom 2016 was first seen at QuakeCon, remember), and such. Not any more. “In recent weeks we have spent a lot of time discussing how we might still move forward with QuakeCon this year, particularly given that it’s the 25th year of the event....

Year 7’s first season, Demon Veil, will bounce around the globe. The first new map will be set at a country club in Ireland, while new Defender character Azami is from Japan. She has the ability to throw out Kiba Barriers, a bulletproof blob which looks like instant-drying cement you can throw over holes or to fortify a wall. A permanent Team Deathmatch mode is due in Demon Veil too....

The EA’s NHL account has been allegedly running matches inside NHL 20 and posting the final scores for a series of matches each day. I call shenanigans though. How can we trust these numbers if we don’t see the match, EA? The Carolina Hurricanes hockey team is taking things a step further. They livestreamed a simulated matchup between the Canes and the New York Islanders yesterday. Wouldn’t ya know it, Carolina won....

As I mentioned on Tuesday, we only have a very limited number of codes available for this particular key drop (kindly provided to us by the developers, Red Hook Studios). Update: all codes have now been claimed To claim your code as an RPS premium supporter, sign in to your ReedPop ID and visit the Codes page on your account. You can then boot up Steam, click “Activate a Product on Steam…” and copy in your key to start downloading....