Median XL is one of the oldest and most popular mods for Diablo 2 - and it's still being updated. A trailer was released last night for Sigma 2.0, the mod's "largest engine and content patch." It'll bring new skills, progression changes, endgame content, and quality-of-life features including a revamped UI, colour blind mode, and 4K rescaling.
You can find the trailer below ahead of its August 27th release.
The only good Sonic game is Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed, a fun kart racer which also featured tracks and characters from other Sega games. On PC, that included the unlikely mashup of a Total War shogunate and Football Manager's Manager Man.
I am therefore here for the similarly unlikely mashup of Sonic and Two Point Hospital, a free pack for the hospital management sim that lets you dress your staff as Sonic, Amy, Tails and Knuckles and pepper your hallway with Sonic statues. Watch the trailer below.
An otome dating visual novel? I've nothing against the genre, but it's not for me.
And yet, and yet, I keep re-watching the launch trailer and reading the Steam page for Bustafellows. Murder mystery? I love those. Puzzles and interactive narrative based in part around a time travel mechanic? Sounds neat. Lush art and a jazzy soundtrack? I'm all over it.
I definitely want the game these words make me imagine, but I've been duped before. Check out the trailer below and tell me I'm wrong.
Horizon Forbidden West hasn't been announced for PC, but it's surely only a matter of time. Perhaps more time than before: Bloomberg report that the robo-dino murder 'em up has been delayed into 2022.
Halo Infinite's technical preview is running this weekend, letting some players get their hands on with the game's multiplayer for the first time. It turns out, however, that 343 "unintentionally" left a few campaign files in the preview, and data miners have already spat details of Infinite's story on to the internet.
There are no spoilers in this story, however.
The weather has broken in spectacular style, with a lot of huge thunderstorms. Portentious indeed! Fortunately this weekend the only things I can see in our future are a buncha fun video games. Wahey!
Forza Motorsport 7 is driving off into the sunset in September. Turn 10 Studios have announced that Motorsport 7 is reaching its "end of life" status, which mostly means they're removing any way for you to buy it. It's a routine part of the Forza game lifecyle, they explain, so they've got plans in place for current owners to keep playing online and Xbox Game Pass folks to snag a permanent copy.
I would be a terrible potion barterer because I simply cannot be coy about cool things. On that note, crafting and haggling sim Potion Craft is excellent. If you happened to miss giving it a shot when it showed up in the Steam Festival from February, not to worry. Potion Craft has just brewed up a new playtest that you can tackle for the next two weeks with all sorts of new characters and its mysterious alchemy machine.
More than likely, I'm not the only person whose first reaction to the Steam Deck was something along the lines of "didn't Valve already try this?" Valve's hardware products have really run the spectrum from the VR gold standard Valve Index to the less impressive console-like Steam Machine. Sure enough, Valve say that "Steam Deck feels like the culmination of a lot of that earlier work." They say that Proton has been the route to help them solve the "chicken and egg" problem that the Steam Machine fell victim to.
The extraterrestrial survival game Icarus may have just made RPS's list of top games in August but, oh dear. It's now delayed until November, actually. It will still be playable for some folks next month though, it turns out. RocketWerkz have announced that they'll be running a handful of beta weekends for pre-order players focused on different areas of the game beginning at the end of August.
The next major update for viking craft 'em up Valheim is still being cooked up in the kitchen, but it's starting to smell just about done. Iron Gate have previously revealed several new foods and tasty cooking stations, but now they're taking us down into the cellar. That's right, iron cells, treasure chests, and giant piles of gold are also getting thrown in the Hearth & Home pot when the update lands this autumn.
It has been a hot minute since I hit you with some fun new indie games (I was on holiday! Gimme a break!) but I'm very excited to be back with some crackers this week. I was too tired to come up with a theme, though, so instead here are just some fun games that I think you'll like, woooooo!
In fact, I've managed to pick three games that are so disparate in style and tone that I don't think I could link them by a theme even if I really, really tried. I can start with a more topical one, though. Yes, it's about vaccines. But like, in a fun way. I promise.
The Artful Escape has been a long time coming for Beethoven & Dinosaur founder and designer Johnny Galvatron. While his side-scrolling platformer - about a teenage musician going on a fantastical journey to find and create his own stage persona - made its initial debut back in 2017, Galvatron tells me this game has really been 38 years in the making. He's a professional musician himself, having been the lead singer of electronic rock band The Galvatrons in the mid noughties, but he's also been raised on a diet of video games since the days of the Sega Master System. He started designing his own games during the Nintendo 64 era, but it wasn't until 2012 that he finally decided to make a proper go of it.
"Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP really made me want to make an indie game for iPad," he tells me, "[while] Kentucky Route Zero pushed me into the mindset of making something for PC. And, look, things spiralled out of control and here we are."
