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Plane or planet? You may have noticed a mounting squabble betweenStarfieldfans and detractors concerning the game’s planetary maps, triggered by someleaks or fake leaksoverthe past week. Said skirmish has now escalated to “-gate” status, with “Tilegate” doing the rounds on forums and even creeping into search results, presumably much to the alarm of innocent, unaligned ceramics company Tilegate Trading Llc in Florida. The nub of the dispute seems to be thus: some people claim the procedurally generated tiles that comprise manyStarfieldenvironments actually glue together into complete globes, so that you can see and walk from one to the other and, indeed, all around the equator, while others claim they’re discrete maps with invisible walls, similar to those of the astonishing “dreamable” space simNoctis....

Bethesda “solicited stories from people outside the design team” What’s the first derelict and/or abandoned (but is it really abandoned???) spaceship you ever visited in a videogame? I’m struggling to pin it down through the growing white noise of early middle age - as with much else in my life, everything blends into a gritty soup of Metroid and DOOM beyond the turn of the millennium - but I suspect it might have been a level fromRebellion’s amazing 1999 Giger ‘em up Aliens versus Predator, which I now recall only as screenfuls of fangs illuminated by Smartgun fire....

eXploit your wallet If a strategy game gets its hooks into you, it can easily consume hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of your life. That either makes Steam’s latest sale of strategy games absurdly good value for money, or an assault upon productivity everywhere. Or both? In any case, Steam Strategy Fest islive now.Stellarisfor a tenner?Anno 1800for a little more than a tenner?Sid Meier’s Civilization VI90% reduced to just £5?...

And all the more brilliant for it The Opening Night Live trailer for ‘comedy slapformer’Thank Goodness You’re Here!was ajoyous balmin a sea of shoulder shrugs last week. Its bright, cartoon visuals instantly stood out against the grey, ultra-realistic grizzle beards of everything else Geoff had to offer in hisGamescom mega showlast Tuesday, and even now I still find myself whistling its jaunty little song around the house. But what exactlyisThank Goodness You’re Here!...

Stuck on the Wordle word for August 29? Read our hint or find the answer below! Need a hint for today’s Wordle answer?Every day,Wordlepresents its legions of players with a deviously simple quandary: can you guess the right five-letter word within just six guesses? All you have to help you in finding the Wordle answer are the contextual clues you gain from each guess - but often, that’s not enough. Wordle can be tricky, you see, and it’s not unusual to look for a little bit of help if you want to preserve your year-long winstreak....

In Summer no one can hear you scream But you know. In a good way. My waking hours are, currently, beset by stress and anxiety from a number of different directions, and I’ve only had time to play about about an hour ofMediterranea Infernoso far. It’s quite a short game, though, and I’m sort of transfixed. It’s about three men in their early 20s who, pre-pandemic, were the toast of their party scene in Milan, and after a couple of years apart enforced by a lockdown they’re reuniting for a summer mini-break....

You’ll probably be over the moon about it Many attempts have been made to recapture the JRPG’s glory days. In Tokyo RPG Factory, Square Enix founded a whole studio dedicated to the craft, and more recently Squeenix’s “HD-2D” style has come to define both their ownretroworkandthatofothers. But it’s arguably the RPGs from outside Japan that have been doing a better job of propping up the SNES nostalgia tent. Last year’sJack MoveandChained Echoeswere both infinitely more refreshing to me than the slightly tiredBravely DefaultandOctopath Travelersequels, for example, and now we haveThe Messengerstudio’s latest,Sea Of Stars, which is probably one of the few Japanese-inspired RPGs I’ve played in the last decade that’s even come close to bottling the mightyChrono Triggerand lived to tell the tale....

Stuck on today’s Wordle word for August 28? Read our hint or find the answer below! Need a hint for today’s Wordle answer?Every day,Wordlepresents its legions of players with a deviously simple quandary: can you guess the right five-letter word within just six guesses? All you have to help you in finding the Wordle answer are the contextual clues you gain from each guess - but often, that’s not enough. Wordle can be tricky, you see, and it’s not unusual to look for a little bit of help if you want to preserve your year-long winstreak....

Stuck on today’s Wordle word for August 27? Read our hint or find the answer below! Need a hint for today’s Wordle answer?Every day,Wordlepresents its legions of players with a deviously simple quandary: can you guess the right five-letter word within just six guesses? All you have to help you in finding the Wordle answer are the contextual clues you gain from each guess - but often, that’s not enough. Wordle can be tricky, you see, and it’s not unusual to look for a little bit of help if you want to preserve your year-long winstreak....

The way of watercooling Avatar: Frontiers Of Pandorais due to launch December 7th, and Ubisoft have now detailed the graphics features that will set the PC version apart. The list includes raytraced reflections and shadows, “extended graphics settings” and an in-built benchmarking tool. The PC version will also support AMD FSR2 - I don’t know what that is and I refuse to learn - and ultrawide monitors. The trailer above also explicitly brags that the game has been optimised to run on low-spec machines, as well as to take advantage of fancy modern graphics cards....

Factoriodevelopers Wube have been teasing an expansion for a couple of years, but they’ve now announced what it is. It’s called Factorio: Space Age, and it’s about constructing space platforms in orbit and then visiting four new planets, each with their own resources for you to exploit and challenges for you to overcome with conveyor belts and robot arms. “The space platforms are used on their own to generate space science, but mainly, they are eventually used to travel to different planets, and for automated interplanetary logistics,” says theannouncement on the Factorio blog....

Newgrounds to console then back to PC That HD re-release is now being re-released, and this time it’s heading back to PC. It’ll have upgraded graphics and weekly and monthly leaderboards when it arrives sometime this year, alongside a sequel. Alien Hominid HDcan be played solo or in two-player local co-op, with three difficulty options, and half a dozen mini-games. All of which makes it seem unchanged from the mid-’00s console release, but now it’son Steam....

Ode to joy I likeWarframe, Digital Extremes’ shockingly enduring free-to-play actionRPG, but I do find its sci-fantasy direction a bit much. The mashing together of tinted alloys and astral flame, the blend of over-the-shoulder shooting and swordplay, the environments that occasionally look likeGPU boxart on steroids– it’s impressive, but a lot to digest. The Canadian developer’s new projectSoulframehas the same sense of swagger, with menus consisting of beautiful, quasi-medieval illustrations decorated with scrolls and dancing figures....