But it’s not just this hulking beast that Big John Halo might be facing in Infinite. Having attended a developer presentation about the game last night, I can report that Halo Infinite might also feature the Flood as an adversary. It’s a big “might”, admittedly, as when I asked narrative lead Paul Crocker whether our old parasitic mates would be making a reappearance, he kept his cards so close to his chest I’m surprised he didn’t cough up the ace of diamonds....

When these bunker doors appeared right at the beginning of the season, they were very much the sort of environmental change you look at and think, “oh yeah, something funny is going on here”. I thought they were all just going to be quest related (only one of them is, for now), but according to data miner “Shrugtal”, they’re set to open in battle royale matches. From this map, it looks Terminal Station F-85, the bunker in-between Water Treatment and Salvage (or, Skull Town’s remains), will start opening on June 16th, and be ready for players to explore by June 23rd....

The listings on the Entertainment Software Rating Board website were spotted by Nibel on Twitter, and remain searchable on the ESRB site. Game ratings are a reliable indicator of future platform releases, although they don’t necessarily indicate when a game will come to a new platform. That said, Yakuza and Judgement developers Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio is hosting a “RGG Summit” livestream later this week, which would be a perfect time to announce PC ports....

Once there, the newcomers find confirmation of their wyldest dreams, but the planet soon turns against them. Equipment is damaged or taken by local fauna, and the weather pins the would-be explorers in place. Tor seems to at once welcome its guests and push them away, as if at odds with itself. Though the Hymnwave has hummed through the ether for many years, it’s clear the planet is not yet of one mind....

“With everything going on in the world today due to the Covid-19 outbreak, we’re facing many unique challenges that require more time to safely iterate, create, test, and make KSP2 as great as it can be,” yesterday’s statement said. “We understand this isn’t the news you were hoping to see, but ultimately we need to make the best decision for the development of Kerbal Space Program 2. That said, we will continue to keep you updated with more feature videos, developer blogs, and other content to share our progress from now up to launch....

These champions are naturally quite vulnerable, but build and buy items which’ll increase your damage output - not their health bars. This means they require knowledge of positioning and matchups, but once you’ve got hold of a few swords, you’ll be shredding enemies in no time. You’ll find a large number of the champions below fulfil the ADC role, and this is because they’re simply those that deal the most damage....

*That something was Warhammer: Vermintide 2, but y’know. Fantasy hacking ’n’ slashing isn’t to everyone’s tastes, I can get that. Following its gameplay reveal at The Game Awards last week, Back 4 Blood has since opened registrations for its closed alpha - an alpha that kicked off proper earlier tonight. Running through ’til next Monday, the limited alpha will let you play one full level featuring the new special infected (sorry, “Ridden”) and the game’s pseudo-roguelike cards, which see you countering a deck of “corruption” modifiers with your own hand of boons....

He is also lonely. His cheery quips about being ‘a fun guy’ mask a life of agaric isolation. “Oh, if mushrooms could talk,” he opines. We can dream, Puffcap man. We can dream. Legends Of Runeterra is OK. It’s growing on me. It’s like if Hearthstone and Magic The Gathering had a baby in the world of League Of Legends. Each round, one person has a chance to attack while the other defends....

These character designs caught the eyes of a few Twitter users over the weekend, who pointed out that the tribal characters look like racist caricatures of indigenous tribes. Neostream have taken note, however, and said if they can’t fix the designs, they may just change them entirely. Here’s their statement detailing the adjustments they’ll be doing to make things right: While I never thought I’d read a sentence that said “tweak the dart blower so it looks less like a joint”, it’s good to see the developers take in and understand important feedback, and just get on with changing it....

In previous years, I’ve said: look, Skeal is free to download from Itch, and also comes in a VR version and a depreciated browser version, so hop to and play it, I won’t spoil the surprise. But we’ve been doing this for years now. You have surely already experienced the surprises for yourself, and shared them with your nearest and dearest. I imagine many of you play Skeal with your families round an open fire every Christmas....

Zuckerberg said he was “especially sorry to those impacted” by the cuts, and that he wants “to take accountability for these decisions and for how we got here”. Exactly what kind of accountability he’ll be taking remains to be seen, however. He hasn’t yet announced he’ll be taking a cut in his own pay, for example, in the same vein as Nintendo’s late great Satoru Iwata did back in 2014 when the company was struggling to get the Wii U off the ground, or any other measure at all, for that matter....

“We’ve been all-in on VR since the early days of PC and mobile, all the way through to today’s premium standalone 6DOF headsets—and we’ve invested billions of dollars to help nurture a thriving VR ecosystem,” starts the post on the Oculus blog. “Now, we’re making a change that will help us continue to invest for the long term and keep driving the VR industry forward with best-in-class hardware, action-packed games, and cutting-edge research on the path to truly next-gen devices....

There’s a brief teaser trailer for the UK update below, which is filled with castles and hills and piers, just like the real Britain and Ireland. That’s piers the plural of pier, because the video contains a clip of Brighton pier, from the city where I currently live. I didn’t spot any giant Piers Morgans, thank god. The below video should play from the start of the trailer, but if not skip to around the 18m 15s mark to see it....

Just like my ultrawide odysseys with Death Stranding and Horizon Zero Dawn, I’ve been using Asus’ ROG Swift PG35VQ to try out Microsoft Flight Simulator’s 21:9 support, which has a curved, 35in display with a 3440x1440 resolution. As we’ve already discovered, Microsoft Flight Simulator is a bit of a performance hog at the best of times, let alone when you’re trying to run it an ultrawide resolution, so you’ll most likely need a pretty beefy mega rig to run this game properly at 60fps....

Air-racing was a big deal during the Golden Age of Flight in the years between global conflicts. The Granville Brothers Super Sportsters, or Gee Bees, were built to place first in the National Air Races of the time. Both models of the Gee Bee ended up crashing and were destroyed. You might’ve spotted a replica constructed of the Model Z in The Rocketeer, which has been scanned to reproduce the plane for Microsoft Flight Simulator....

On their decision to investigate, the CMA said they’ll be looking at whether the deal may harm competition under the UK’s Enterprise Act 2002, and whether the merger “may be expected to result in a substantial lessening of competition within any market or markets in the United Kingdom for goods or services.” You can read the inquiry schedule here. Microsoft’s corporate vice president and general counsel Lisa Tanzi told CNBC: “We’re committed to answering questions from regulators and ultimately believe a thorough review will help the deal close with broad confidence, and that it will be positive for competition....

Even if you cast Xbox’s Phil Spencer as a shining Herculean figure, coming to clean out the mountain of shit from Bobby Kotick’s Augean stable, you have to concede that he’s blasting it with a hose of money. Kotick, Activision Blizzard’s CEO, will have pocketed several billions from the $68.7 of them involved in this deal. But even if I wasn’t angry about that amount of money existing to be given to one person (I filed and paid my 2020/21 tax return literally yesterday), and even if I wasn’t grimly unsurprised about how little the market cares about allegations of sustained and systemic abuse, and even if ActiBlizz had an unblemished record, this sale would be bad....

I don’t think I’m very good at Minesweeper or Tetris, and I’m certainly not good at a combination of the two. It is a lot to get your head around. In the usual Minesweeper way, you’re trying to uncover mines hidden on a grid by deducing their locations from the numbers which indicate how many mines are in adjacent squares. And kinda-ish like in Tetris, the play space is slowly filling up, so you have to clear lines before it does....

Where Mini Metro had you drawing subway lines to keep trains and passengers moving between stops, Mini Motorways is about drawing roads to connect a city together. It’s still topdown and abstract, with a simple, almost zero-interface design, but it’s traded in the inspiration from London’s Underground map for more vibrant colour schemes inspired by cities from around the world. Those ciites include Munic, Rio de Janeiro and Tokyo, and the PC release will coincide with an update to add Dubai and Mexico City....

For decades, mirrorshades were the eyewear of choice for edgy loners on the fringes of society in our grim near-future, who were often found striking a pose with the city reflected in their lenses. William Gibson’s iconic ‘razorgirl’ mercenary Molly Millions has surgically implanted mirrorshades. Mirrorshades is the name of an influential cyberpunk anthology, and in many printings the pair pictured on the cover are made of fancy reflective or holographic foil....