Spelunky 2 has been designed for crossplay with the PS4, but according to Blitworks: “… our strategy for online has been focused on providing a great experience long-term, with cross-platform play and rollback [the netcode]. Unfortunately, while we were expecting some issues, the disconnects we were seeing on PS4 after we launched there were much more severe than we anticipated. Some players could play fine and a lot of players couldn’t really play at all....

Squeenix announced Forspoken’s latest delay on Twitter, saying that “all game elements are now complete”, and that “development is in its final polishing phase”. We can expect to hear a bit more about the game “this summer”. Yeah, fair enough. Forspoken was previously called Project Athia and it’s basically an isekai, a Japanese genre of portal fantasy where a regular person gets sucked into a bizare new realm. In this case, the regular person is Frey and the fantasy world is Athia, a land that looks so similar to Eos from Final Fantasy XV, I’d be surprised if the boys and their Regalia don’t feature as a method of fast travel....

In their update 2.0 notes, Motive Studios explain some of the changes to how forfeiting or sticking out matches will now affect your rewards. As for the why of it, “the new forfeit system puts control back into the players’ hands and allows players to decide which matches are worth fighting until the end and which are worth forfeiting,” says senior systems designer Dan Kim. “We felt that the previous system was often difficult for players to understand and unduly punished well-behaved players after an abandonment occurred, with some players reporting that they felt robbed of wins, locked into pointless matches, or unrewarded for time already spent when leaving ‘safe to leave’ games....

Blizzard executive producer said in Thursday’s post that they plan to “continue supporting StarCraft II in the same manner as we have with our previous longstanding games, such as Brood War, focusing primarily on what our core and competitive communities care about most.” Which means new seasons and “necessary balance fixes” but no new paid content, like the co-op Commanders or the ‘War Chest’ battle passes which help fill tournament prize pools....

These drivers come with caveats, mind. Audio drivers are still a work in progress, so only USB-C, 3.5mm, or Bluetooth headphones can output sound on Windows, and Valve’s post explains that dual-booting support still isn’t ready yet. Installing Windows, then, is an all-or-nothing switch that involves wiping SteamOS entirely. You’ll also need to use a USB-C hub with an Ethernet port to activate Windows during setup, as the Wi-Fi driver can only be installed after Windows is installed....

But which ones should you carry forward into the rest of the game? It’s a question well worth asking early on, because it costs valuable resources to upgrade your weaponry, so you should only upgrade the weapons you plan to use for most of the game. Below we hope to answer your questions with our list of the very best weapons in Steelrising, both early-game and late-game. We’ll also go over where you can get your hands on each of these uber-powerful weapons, so you can start using them as early as possible....

No it isn’t. It’s the Nate Files bonus podcast, funded by our supporters supporters, and we have an egg for you. Quoth the egg “Yolk!”

Bohemia don’t say how big a stake they sold, nor how much they got for it. Tencent have their fingers in a great many gaming pies. They fully own a number of companies including Riot Games, Funcom, Digital Extremes, and Splash Damage, and hold a majority stake in Grinding Gear Games. They also have minority stakes in Epic Games, Frontier Developments, Blizzard, Paradox Interactive, Ubisoft, Dontnod, and more. And they’ve worked with Bohemia before, bringing their sandbox game Ylands to China....

Morning Glory Orphanage - Yakuza 3 In this soon-to-finally-be-on-PC sequel Kiryu Kazuma, the former mobster with fists of rock and a heart of soft pillow fibre, finds himself in charge of an orphanage on a beach near Okinawa. Not content with bringing up one abandoned child, as he has been doing in the previous games, Kiryu must now teach kindness, manners, and caring to an entire little family. Okay, much of the game is still spent kicking people’s teeth in....

Polytopia happens to have a fair bit in common with Legion War, which perhaps suggests that the predictable, momentum-based nature of the 4X will make them an LISGFWBLMTH fixture. 12 civilisations are vying for control of a colourful little 3D pixel world, starting out with a humble village and solitary warrior for capturing rival villagers with which to produce more and better soldiers. Each village produces stars every turn, which are swapped for technology and the buildings you place on the map....

Ooh, it’s all so awfully Tory, isn’t it? Pass the biscuits, Michael. Great British Railway Journeys is a licensed spin-off from Dovetail’s Train Simulator series. But rather than painstakingly recreating every last cab, carriage and commuter line in Britain, GBRJ has hand-picked five routes from the George Bradshaw’s Handbook, a “comprehensive tourist guide” of the country’s railways released in 1840 and the impetus behind the show’s escapades. Unfortunately, it doesn’t sound like presenter Michael Portillo will provide dulcet commentary of your digital journeys himself....

Get the WD Black SN850 500GB for £85.74 (34% off) Get the WD Black SN850 1TB for £159.98 (5% off) This is a PC gaming site, but it’s also worth noting that this particular model has also been attracting attention lately as one of the few SSDs fast enough to be used inside the PS5, making it doubly useful for owners of that next-gen console. Whichever platform you install it in, you’ll likely be impressed by its speed - it tops out at 7000MB/s for sequential reads, with sequential writes not that much slower at up to 4100MB/s (for the 500GB model; the 1TB size can reach 5300MB/s)....

It’s also still doing the deals dance in the US, where you can get it for a very reasonable $90. But sheesh, fifty quid for a cable-free, ambidextrous mouse of the G Pro Wireless’ stature? That’s the best deal on a Logitech gaming peripheral since about four hours ago. And I don’t say that lightly. UK deal: US deal: On the subject of the G502 Hero, the G Pro Wireless shares the same high-performance optical sensor, and although it doesn’t have a similarly grippy, contoured design, it’s still comfy enough under the hand....

Get the Crucial MX500 1TB for $85 with code 93XRQ46 (was $100) In terms of performance, the MX500 is in the upper range of SATA SSDs. It maxes out at a read speed of around 560MB/s, with write speeds closer to 510MB/s on this 1TB size. That makes it significantly slower than NVMe SSDs, even budget models which typically reach 2500MB/s at their peak, but the difference in random read and write speeds is actually quite minimal - and that’s reflected in very similar game load times between SATA and NVMe SSDs....

In fact, I’m not sure if I’d wipe Monkey Island from my head or not, because I can’t be sure how much of my love for it is fuelled by nostalgia. Matthew has other concerns, though, because as is our usual fashion we spend some time discussing the question “what games would you play for the first time again?” more literally than is intended. What grave consequences would come from erasing certain things from your brain?...

Before we get to that, though, we must first discuss (at length) whether 200 t-shirts is a lot of t-shirts, what Nate is having for his Christmas dinner, what kind of cop duo would be named Halloumi & Date, and also what our favourite Christmas songs are. Nate also does a really good Mankind pun. Plus: which wrestler would be the best hugger? You can listen above, or on on Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, or Pocket Casts....

A) Having landed on a small tropical island to gather fresh fruit and fill water barrels, the crew of HMS Vortigaunt run into a party of Spanish sailors engaged in the same activity. A fairly dull skirmish ensues. B) Having landed on a small tropical island to gather fresh fruit and fill water barrels, the crew of HMS Vortigaunt run into a Tyrannosaurus Rex busy tearing the throat out of a wounded Ankylosaurus....

Clockwork mansion - Dishonored 2 The home of arrogant inventor Kirin Jindosh, this shifting mazehaus is a terrible place that comes with its own “assessment chamber” (a prison in the basement). Pencil-moustached thumbsucker Jindosh is the perfect man to inhabit this place. Let me pull the wank-o-analysis lever here, because I am about to call this whole building an indictment of the psychosis of aristocracy. Only a man wealthy enough to build a manor house that contorts its own innards would fill its cushioned drawing rooms with taxidermied caiman....

“While we have enough budget to bring the concept of Wrath of the Righteous to life, we want this game to provide a truly epic experience,” Owlcat say. “This idea can be stretched a lot further than our current budget allows.” To that end, their Kickstarter campaign set a goal of $300,000, which backers have handily blown through in short order. It has already tripled that goal, with 29 days still left to raise funds....