If that all seems a bit confusing, don’t worry! In this guide we cover how to start a new Scenario in The Sims 4, the rewards for completing one, and tips on getting the best possible start in every Scenario that’s currently available. On this page: How to start playing a Scenario in The Sims 4 How Scenarios work in your game What are the rewards for completing a Scenario?...

See, without a dedicated benchmarking tool, running these kinds of tests requires a certain controllable environment, where variables are known and parameters can be reset in a click. This is not the case for The Cycle: Frontier, whose environment is usually trying to fucking kill you, particularly though the unavoidable presence of other players. I’ve never sat down to record some average FPS values only to spend half my time cowering behind a tree, fearful of being shot, robbed and – worst of all – forced to start work over again....

Witchers may be sterile, but they have needs just like anyone else. And who are we players to deprive Geralt of the most fulfilling romantic encounters available? Our Witcher 3 romance guide will walk you through the whos, whens, wheres, hows, and whys of wooing. From Yennefer to Triss, from Keira Metz to the Iron Maiden of Skellige, we’ll show you all the steps to ensure a happy ending for all those involved....

Thirsty Suitors follows a woman named Jala who seems to have a lot of drama going on. Annoying exes, friendship woes, immigrant parents with high expectations, and a grandma that keeps throwing suitors her way. “Our mission at Outerloop Games is to create accessible games about underrepresented cultures,” says studio co-founder and game director Chandana Ekanayake. “Thirsty Suitors will give players a glimpse into our teams’ personal experiences growing up, which might be vastly different from what players have experienced themselves....

It’s made possible by the text to speech algorithm 15.ai that studies clips of characters and uses deep-learning to make those characters say whatever the heck you want. The possibilities are endless and the amount of control that you can use to tweak how words and phrases are pronounced is pretty deep if you’re willing to get into the nitty gritty of it. For now though, I’m just enjoying scrolling through the silly skits that folks have made....

This pitch-to-be was created by Jacob Janerka, creator of another weird adventure game Paradigm, and pixel animation expert Ivan Dixon. Apparently the two are longtime Seinfeld fans. “Seinfeld has a surprisingly rich world,” they say. “There are so many memorable recurring characters, plot lines and locations as the four protagonists navigate new relationships, jobs and rivals.” Instead of rehashing familiar episodes, Janerka and Dixon say they want to create some new Seinfeld-y plots....

Enter, as always, the modders. The True Directional Movement mod available from Nexus Mods offers “modernized third person gameplay”, and it looks like a huge improvement. Here’s a video of it in action: As spotted by Eurogamer, the mod’s creator Ershin set out to offer true directional movement but greatly expanded the scope of the mod overtime to offer a full third-person gameplay and UI overhaul similar “to modern action RPGs....

11bit Studios, GOG and Slipways developer Jakub Wasilewski are all based in Poland. In their statement shared on Twitter, 11 Bit Studios wrote that they “stand against the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Just words would be empty without a meaningful act though, and the timing is crucial, so the act is as followers: for the next seven days, all profits from This War Of Mine, all its DLCss, on all stores and all platforms wil go to a special fund....

Dabloontok is TikTok’s newest trend, and is probably best described as a chaotic player-generated RPG where users collect an imaginary currency called “dabloons” cashed out by awkwardly photoshopped black cats (usually) in fantasy settings. These cats will either gift you dabloons, steal your dabloons, or tell you what you can do with your dabloons. It’s as simple as that, and so far there more than 520 million views on the dabloons hashtag....

Wonderlands, a word just two letters away from being “Borderlands”, had its genesis in Assault On Dragon Keep, a Borderlands 2 DLC in which you play out a gun-heavy D&D adventure GMed by Tiny Tina, the pyromaniac teenager who Burch voices. Since Tina appears at the end of the Wonderlands trailer, dressed as some sort of bin witch and shrieking “roll for initiative, suckers” in a voice like a masonry drill, a reprise of this bit seems a safe bet....

The little black-and-white puzzle adventure game Toem, in which all problems are solved with a camera, reminds me of that. Not because you are able to make disasterous or whimisical fashion choices - you very much are, mostly in the hat department - but because you just take photos of everything, for the fun of it, to remember this thing you saw. Wonky-focused snaps of a flower, or a ladybird, or a nice building (poorly framed because you can’t get all of it in shot)....

Ubisoft call XDefiant “fast-paced fire fights meets punk rock mosh pit.” Sure enough, there’s a lot of FPSing in the midst of giant graffiti walls down here in the reveal trailer. XDefiant is borrowing more than the Clancy name for its new game, Ubisoft explain. The four classes they’ve revealed are also pulled from other Clancy games. The tank-style Wolves hail from Ghost Recon, the assault-type Cleaners and support class Outcasts from The Division, and the healer class Echelon from Splinter Cell....

While it is very much a game you can buy and enjoy on its lonesome, TWW3 is perhaps better considered as the last, grand instalment of a game whose release began nearly eight years ago with Total War: Warhammer. It’s a genuinely epic construction; a proper Pillars-Of-The Earth-level feat of game development. And here’s where the future sticks the boot in. Because while the last stones of this electric cathedral have been lowered into place, the phone line to God hasn’t been wired in yet....

First debuted on mobile back in 2016, Traption Bakery is a sprawling, incomprehensible web of machinery for breadmaking framed in… well, a frame. That’s cute, actually. Rather than having you build a bread-making machine from scratch in a Factorio sorta way, the construction in Traption Bakery is complete. Instead, it’s your job to determine how this Rube Goldberg contraption actually operates - prodding and poking and pulling at its various wheels, levels, pulleys and buttons to work out what they do, exactly....

And speaking of agents, our theme this week was, well, agents/heroes/operators/characters, or whatever else you’d call them in an online shooter. We both went down the Overwatch route because my word does that game have some good heroes. I think they’re called heroes? It was Imogen’s turn to surprise me with some strange names she’s played with this week. Amazingly, two of them weren’t Sage players in Valorant. Unbelievable.

It’s been a while since I’ve played BioShock, but was there a level where you explored a district run by a guy who was really good at laying pipes? Because Aquatico suggests that building an underwater city demands that someone be really good at laying pipes. Aquatico is the kind of citybuilder that’s concerned with logistics: how much fuel, oil, electricity, and oxygen you’ve got, and whether it’s efficiently routed throughout your sprawling, multi-tiered city....

As someone who’s been in a state of perpetual unpacking since leaving uni three years ago (oh no), I’m really feeling the power fantasy Witch Beam’s selling of getting it all done at once. As spotted by the couriers over at PC Gamer, Unpacking is a “zen puzzle game” about fitting your old life into a new home. Think of it as a spiritual sequel to Packing Up the Rest of Your Stuff on the Last Day at Your Old Apartment, but with a far more… concise, title....

Also chickens! You can raise chickens now! They’ll give you eggs, which give you more chickens. There’s the real magic. Ed and Liam have already been given a tour of the Mistlands, as you can see above. Ed had the Mistlands described to him as a mix of the “two most hated biomes, the Swamps and Mountains”, packing more danger than either of them. It’s full of a) mist and b) “eldritch masses of limbs and nastiness”, as well as blood-sucking ticks and blimp-like tick spawners....

You’ve likely encountered “Error 43” (a classic) and “Vanguard not initialized” (another favourite), but to catch them all, “Valorant couldn’t start” should be in your collection. To help you out, we’ve broken down how to fix it quickly. How to fix ‘Vanguard couldn’t start’ ‘Valorant couldn’t start’ doesn’t offer much in the way of help, and judging by community reactions to this error, there really isn’t a solution which’ll work for everyone no matter what....

Split was included in Valorant’s original beta, and honestly it’s the map I’ve played most in the shooter. I liked it because it felt like the map most reminiscent of the Counter-Strike levels I was used to. It’s not a favourite of the game’s community however, and is generally considered imbalanced despite Riot making revisions over the years. Riot have therefore decided that they want to have no more than seven maps available in-game at a time, and that Split is the map that should be removed to make way for Pearl....