As well as all those lovely creatures, the Africa Pack adds loads of new African-themed scenery pieces with which to deck out your zoo. In the trailer below you can spot fab meerkat and fennec fox statues (as well as the fab animals themselves), cool water features, and pretty mosaics. While the Africa Pack is paid DLC, it arrives alongside the 1.6, which is free for everyone who owns Planet Zoo....

If you’ve enjoyed building toy Townscaper, or perhaps landscape puzzler Dorfromantik, Cloud Gardens seems to fall somewhere evenly between the two. Developers Noio of Kingdom: New Lands fame, call it “partly a gardening simulator, partly a dystopian landscape builder, and partly a puzzle game.” You can catch a bit of all that in the new launch trailer up above. You can build industrial creations like stacks of shipping crates overrun with ivy or work your way across a series of campaign-like puzzles that have you use rain and tools to cultivate the environment until it’s been sufficiently green-ified....

Here’s a quick little instalment of the latest free games on the ’net that I think are worth your while. Ephemeral blink-and-you’ll miss it games, games with gardens, and games about the woods. Be good out there. This, Too, Shall Pass from Marc Loths This, Too, Shall Pass is a sombre contemplation of the climate crisis and the nature of ephemerality. Your level of interaction is low-pressure; wandering a particular climate zone and watching it change through day and night, rain and shine....

“As you might have already read, Prince Of Persia: The Sands Of Time Remake will not be in Ubisoft Forward,” the company said on Twitter. “We are making great progress for our game to release next year, but we are not ready to share any additional information just yet. We will share an update as soon as we are ready.” When Ubisoft announced the game in September 2020, they said it would launch only three months later, on the 21st of January, 2021....

These days, Remedy are best known for their third-person supernatural Twin Peaks ’em ups. But to celebrate being slightly younger than yours truly, they’re making their very first videogame free forever - and you probably couldn’t get any further from their later work than Death Rally’s Carmageddon-esque vehicular manslaughter. To see this content please enable targeting cookies. Manage cookie settings Death Rally Classic is free on Steam. Forever. ??️ https://t....

There are, of course, plenty more game deals happening as part of Gamesplanet’s Summer Sale right now, which runs until Monday August 3rd. I’ve listed some of my own personal highlights below, but be warned, a lot of what I’ve picked out are from today’s 24 hour flash deals, so they won’t be around this time tomorrow. Indeed, Resident Evil 3’s half price offer is one such 24-hour-only deal, although Sekiro thankfully has a little longer on the old offer clock....

You can read more about what we thought of the game over in our Resident Evil Village review, and I’ll be putting together a best settings guide to help you get the best performance from Resident Evil Village in time for launch tomorrow. In this article, though, I want to focus on the game’s ray tracing support, showing what it looks like in-game, and what kind of performance you can expect to see across a range of ray tracing-capable graphics cards....

It’s not like I’ve been chasing that feeling in the intervening years (I am, after all, an officially certified wimp), but playing Resident Evil Village’s House Beneviento section this week put me right back in that tiny London flat where we both screamed ourselves silly. It’s proper nightmare fuel that place, and of course I had the good foresight to play it just before I was about to go to bed....

What’s nice is that vidbud Liam joined me! Both because he’s a fan of the FPS genre and to be present with a jar in hand, lest I crumbled into dust. Thankfully this didn’t happen and we had a pretty swell time, I’d say. It’s early days for the game but there’s potential there. Liam and I were joined by Pet Project Games’ creative director Goran Rajšić, who kindly steered us through one of Ripout’s early sectors....

The Fifth Anniversary event will rune June 30th to July 13th, then players with have another few days to finish redeeming prizes. Playing online matches will get you Balloons, see, which you can swap in the event store for new cosmetics including wheels, carhats, and a lovely big party blower for your boost. See the announcement for more. It’ll also bring back the Spike Rush (from the fourth birthday) and 2v2 Heatseeker (from April) LTMs....

Psyonix broke the news in a blog post earlier today, writing that “due to worldwide health concerns surrounding the developing situation around the coronavirus (Covid-19), we are cancelling the Rocket League Season 9 World Championship live event”. But while the devs are looking into alternatives to replace the World Championship format for the time being, Season 9’s Regional Championships and Promotion Tournament will go ahead as planned. The Rocket League Championship Series (RLCS) will still get weekly broadcasts - as will the Rivals series - but casting will no longer take place in the usual studio....

Twitter user Emi Fisher downloaded a bootleg Russian copy of Simpsons Hit & Run, a cult classic from 2003, perhaps best described as a Simpsons parody of Grand Theft Auto 3. Bootlegs are always a bit jank, but she discovered this Russian copy had its own quirks. For starters, the left mouse key does everything, there is no brake button, and the bootlegger has taken it upon themselves to voice every single line (almost)....

Available in 250GB, 500GB and 1TB capacities, the Samsung 980 has a rated sequential speed of up to 3500MB/s read and 3000MB/s write. On paper, this is actually a fraction slower than Samsung’s 970 Evo Plus, which was rated for 3500MB/s read and 3300MB/s write, but Samsung say they’ve made great strides in making the 980 SSD a lot more power efficient this time round. By their figures, the 980 SSD provides 54% better performance per watt than the original 970 Evo, and its improved thermal design allows it to carry on operating at high speeds for longer compared to its predecessor....

Here’s the trailer, which was shown during this evening’s Future Games Show. One thought that occurred while watching in-development GIFs is that it didn’t seem likely I’d ever be able to perform the moves shown: hopping over swung staffs, backflipping over fired arrows, that sort of thing. The trailer actually gives me some hope. Early enemies won’t block well, letting you button mash to progress, and giving you enough time to start to recognise their attack patterns so you can start performing those blocks and dodges....

With Dennis banging down the office walls all weekend, what better way to begin our breeze through Screenshot Saturday than with these storm-wracked windmills from Dutch artist Joost Eggermont. To see this content please enable targeting cookies. Manage cookie settings — Joost Eggermont (@aJoostEggermont) February 15, 2020 Perhaps it’s the wind outside, but I can practically feel my monitor shaking from the threatening gales of Eggermont’s bold clip. You may recognise the artist’s name from Mooncharmer abstract lunar dance’s....

It’s a crying shame that there isn’t a new mech game to fill this column with every week. Let’s fix that with this slick-as-hell gif from Westgunne developer Jason Koohi. To see this content please enable targeting cookies. Manage cookie settings — Jason Koohi (@zanrai_int) November 21, 2020 From Hawken to Heaven Will Be Mine, I’m obsessed with a good Mech start-up UI (and it’s to my ever-lasting frustration that I never got one into Can Androids Pray)....

We’re once again visited by Au Fil De L’eau developer Samson Auroux this week, this time with a brief dabble in map-drawing. To see this content please enable targeting cookies. Manage cookie settings — samso__n (@samson_auroux) July 4, 2020 Since releasing lovely picturebook excursion Au Fil De L’eau, Aurox’s work has chilled somewhat. Literally, I mean, putting his efforts towards crunchy snowsports trip A Skier’s Journey. Returning to warm pastels, his latest draft taps into the part of my head that’s obsessed with maps, atlases and general cartography....

Let’s start today’s session with a little art history, shall we? To see this content please enable targeting cookies. Manage cookie settings — Pat Naoum Games (@patnaoumgames) October 16, 2020 In a bizarre act of Grand Theft Monet, Pat Naoum’s painted platformer The Master’s Pupil begins the exhibit by nicking a boat straight out of the French artist’s 1874 painting Le Pont d’Argenteuil. While the transition is looking a little shaky right now, there’s a delight in scrolling the feed and seeing how Naoum has chosen to deconstruct various works, separating them into layers and deciding which parts can be chopped off for puzzle platforming progression....

Not often in my seafaring adventures do I find myself teamed up with like-minded pirates but for a good cause I’d say flying matching colors is well worth it. Purchases made in the US will to go the Stand Up To Cancer campaign, a program of the Entertainment Industry Foundation. Purchases from outside the US will go to Cancer Research UK in support of the UK Stand Up To Cancer campaign....