I say “minute” - I’ve watched this multiple times now. It has everything: cringey flirting, horrific driving, incredible dancing, and even a perfectly in-character renegade scene. As well as just generally being very funny, it’s shockingly consistent. I reckon you could swap out Shepard for Powers and the entire Mass Effect trilogy would still work. “I also like to live dangerously”, would fit into every renegade dialogue option and probably still make sense....

Owning a massive spacecraft might sound like a huge power trip, but that’s until you remember the crew that relies on you for food, water, and basic survival. Of course, a happy crew is a productive crew, so managing their needs will ensure successful missions. If you don’t want to be encumbered by dreadful things like responsibility, a creative mode is available alongside the campaign. Creative mode lets players build any type of vessel, without consideration for money, resources, and logistics....

Star Wars: Squadrons guide: top tips and tricks Star Wars: Squadrons is a challenging game with an extremely high skill ceiling. Strangely, it reminds me of Rocket League: you’re trying to learn the capabilities and limitations of a fiddly and confusing vehicle, so you can learn to pull off incredible moves instead of just constantly exploding. But with the below practical top-tier tips, you’ll sidestep the early pitfalls currently plaguing most beginners in Squadrons, and skip right ahead to the “incredible moves” part....

The videos are narrated by design director Emil Pagliarulo and were sent to subscribers of Bethesda’s free mailing list, Constellation. You can sign up for future updates via the game’s official site. The videos aren’t locked away however, and are simply unlisted on Bethesda’s YouTube channel. You can watch them below, with each one featuring Pagliarulo talking over some animated concept art. New Atlantis is a space port and the capital city of the United Colonies, the big military and political power in Starfield....

Gotta make a good first impression, eh? Juggernaut Edition introduces a big new map called Providence Ridge. This huge space should help show off some of the lighting improvements and general graphical touch-ups Undead Labs have given the game. They’ve reworked the post-tutorial experience in an attempt to better explain State of Decay’s workings. The update also includes a new class of heavy melee weapons, and includes a slew of mission and gameplay bug-fixes....

In an interview with Edge Magazine this month (via WCCF Tech) Daedalic have shared a couple extra details about what to expect from the game. On the subject of how Gollum appears, senior producer Kai Fiebig says “we started with the person he was and then evolved him. You can see that this was once something like a human being, before the Ring corrupted him.” Ignore that picture of Gollum above because the Andy Serkis version of Lord of the Rings’ horrible little goblin is out....

Steam isn’t entirely down. I have managed to get through to the main store page intermittently. I’ve even gotten through to the reservations page. Lucky me! Other folks are having a bit of a struggle though, according to Down Detector which is suddenly getting thousands of reports of Steam being down. Once you get through, be warned that you may still have some hurdles. Graham has noticed that his eons old Steam account is apparently “too new” to make an early reservation....

As explained by SteamDB’s creator Pavel “xPaw” Djundik, this is what the newly added “GetManifestRequestCode” method does: In slightly less technical terms, “it is no longer possible to download older game versions, because client asks for a code (GetManifestRequestCode) that rotates every five minutes,” Djundik says. As Djundik explains, this change only exists on the beta version of the Steam client right now. The change doesn’t actually delete old builds from Steam’s servers, or so they think, just limits customer access to them....

Valve say that the playtest function is meant to standardise the approach for developers who want to give a group of players temporary access to an early version of the game. They’ve created tools to help developers admit a certain number of applicants along with setting start and end times for a test. They can also manually invite players if needed. For players, it’s as easy as pressing the “request access” button on a game’s store page (if a playtest is available) and waiting for access....

That was nice. I like spaceships. Nemesis adds new espionage options, and new ways for players to be a galactic menace. Specifically it adds “menace objectives”, which when completed allow you to advance through “Crisis levels” and unlock new ships. Among the new unlockables are ships which eat stars. This is a new victory condition, of a sort. I’ve been hearing mixed reports about Stellaris for a long time from those players who have spent the most time with it....

The follow-up to Streets Of Rogue is set in a “huge and seamless randomly generated world filled with cities, forests, islands, caves, and the occasional cannibal outpost”. You can do whatever you fancy within it, choosing to help people out, take over the government through an uprising, or just making a load of moolah by raising herds of animals and farming crops. There’ll be online and local co-op if you want to team up with do-gooder, anarchic, or hay-baling pals, and now you’re able to drive vehicles too....

If you haven’t watched the VR run, please do. Most speedruns done in Source games are pretty entertaining, but watching runner “Buffet Time” occasionally sprint around in circles and crawl along the floor to get underneath the world in Half-Life: Alyx is something else. Another that’s well worth your time is the ’true ending’ Baba Is You run. Speedrunner “Punchy” completes the (usually) 30-hour game in about 23 minutes. It’s absolutely brain-melting and he has a godlike commentary speed to match the baffling speed at which he completes puzzles....

Apologies for this episode of The Nate Files being a few days late. I admit it: Elden Ring week got ahead of me a bit. But now it’s behind me, so things should even out. Hopefully, anyway.

As of the announcement, Counterplay have suspended all sales of Diamonds - Duelyst’s virtual currency - and are offering refunds to players who picked ’em up between December 21st and January 24th. If you’ve still got a few kicking Diamonds around though, they’ll go much further in the game’s dying month, with Diamond Orb bundles now going for 1% of the asking price. Seeking to stand out in a post-Hearthstone world, Duelyst smashed a traditional CCG into more methodical tactical battling....

Mostly, though, it’s your Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster treatment. A welcome update that maintains the look of the originals (albeit with some questionable font choices), but that’s more or less your lot. Tactics Ogre: Reborn, a remaster of the 2010 PSP remake of the 1995 SNES original, falls squarely into the latter camp, but you know what? That’s fine. It’s still a rollicking turn-based tactics game all these years later, and one that definitely deserves to be freed from the shackles of Sony’s long-dead handheld, where it’s lain dormant for the better part of a decade....

This week’s update comes as something of a renewed push to make TF2’s lobbies a bit less miserable, even if Valve haven’t exactly communicated as much. Last month, the scant handful of Valve employees keeping the violent hat collector ticking pushed an update to crack down on TF2’s racist bot problem by preventing “certain new accounts” from using the game’s text box. In the patch notes for yesterday’s update, Valve are now doubling down on that action (cheers, PCGamesN)....

These specific tweaks won’t stop the bots in their tracks, but they do enable servers to give real players some space, and to let them deal with the disruptions more easily. But it’s not enough. The bots are horrendous, at their worst spamming white supremacist memes and links to images of child abuse. Last week’s patch was the first for 112 days, the longest amount of time the game has gone without an update (previously it was 80 days)....

Riot reckon that, lately, there’s just been too much gosh dang money floating around in TFT matches. Folks were able to clean out the store within the first few rounds, selling their early heroes and accruing ludicrous incomes incredibly quickly. To counter this, Riot have severely cut passive income and stopped high-value boxes from dropping in the first two PVE rounds. To compensate, the opening carousel now only features champions that cost one gold....

Who says you don’t get more than one chance at a happy ending? Not the Terraria developers Re-Logic, that’s for sure. Today, they’re releasing their, uh, second final update for the 2D mining and crafting game. Named Journey’s Actual End, after Journey’s [fake] End that released back in May, the update adds a final NPC, new achievements, balance changes and “the long requested game credits (done Terraria style)!”. Re-Logic don’t specify who this final NPC will be, but if you know Terraria better than I do it’s entirely possible they’re in that mini teaser above....

Helps that it’s bloody gorgeous, mind. Released last week, Steeped By Blood River is another videogame-slash-poem from the creator of caged bird don’t fly caught in a wire sing like a good canary come when called - a piece that, if nothing else, is a wordcount-anxious writer’s best friend. Like caged bird don’t fly […], Steeped By Blood River is another series of seriously low-fidelity vignettes - this time, framed around a kind of grubby motel full of surrealist secrets....