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Here’s Valve’s trailer introducing the sale: “Join us as we grab our hammers, saws, and measuring tapes and prepare to get dusty during Steam Base Builder Fest,” says the announcement. “Featuring discounts and demos on current and upcoming games, this event is for games focused on the spirit of building habitable spaces, whether a single building or collection of buildings.” The sale starts January 23rd at 10am PST/6pm GMT and runs until January 30th at the same time....

Get your festive selves over to Steam to see all the offerings. As ever, there is: a lot. Just like the sales of Chirstmas past, this year’s Steam Winter Sale will give you Steam Points when you buy games, which you can then use to buy cute cosmetics to customise your account. In a press release, Valve says the Steam Points Program has been updated this year, and there are new seasonal items like animated stickers and avatars to grab....

Paradox say the aims of the combat rebalance are to “shake up the meta” and improve space combat. They’re aiming to produce more benefits for having a mixed-hull fleet too, and improve ship design options. No changes are coming to ground combat for now, and Paradox stress that the changes in the 3.6 open beta are “tightly focused” on fleet composition and balance instead of reworking fleet combat as a whole....

The game stars Annika Stonefly, a brilliant miniature inventor who loses her father’s bug mech and sets off on an adventure to get it back. She’s joined by a team of pilots called the Acorn Corps, whose character designs and personalities are laid out above. I like the description of the story as “Rogue One shrunk down to Fern Gully size.” In between the lovely character animation and chats between characters, the trailer also gives more glimpses of the game’s rigs, the bug mechs you’ll be piloting over the course of the game....

The first developer walkthrough of Stray revealed that someone has given the cat a gun. Watch the trailer below. Did you know that, if you die in your apartment, your pet dog will lie dutifully by your side while your pet cat will eat your lips and eyes? Thankfully the weapon provided to Stray’s cat seems to only work on the swarms of greeble-creatures that pursue you, and not the robo-people....

Earth’s mightiest heroes have fallen under the control of Braniac, see, so it falls to Earth’s kinda-lightweight villains to save us all by murdering them. We’ll get to play as Harley Quinn, Deadshot, Captain Boomerang, and King Shark, with the AI taking over the rest of the squad. Or it’ll support four-player cooperative multiplayer. I’m surprised that they’re still holding back on revealing Suicide Squad’s main character, that iconic superhero created by Jared Leto himself, The Joker....

It goes on, too, and - stop me if I’m wrong - but doesn’t this sound like an alternate plot to his latest game The Good Life? Minus the whole transforming into cats at night thing? Vid bud Liam also pointed out that some of the names seem to be taken from Swery’s puzzle platformer horror ’em up The Missing from 2018. I told you it was wild, right? Witch hunts… Magic wands… Milk lorries… Nuts and coffee....

Here’s the trailer: So that’s a trailer that’s less than 60 seconds long, where the bit that might be deemed in-engine (is it?) happens 37 seconds in, is gone by the 46 second mark, and has a logo drawn over it for the 9 seconds it is on screen. This, it seems, was a failure of expectation setting, as the chat during the Nacon Connect livestream exploded in frustation over being teased again....

The 10 Best MMO and MMORPGs To help make things nice and easy for you, you’ll find links to all of the MMOs on this list below. Think of these links like a “raid-finder”, but less fighting a massive dragon and its peons, and more reading a paragraph of - hopefully riveting - text, that’ll ensure you at least level up your video gaming experiences. And don’t be afraid to write your own entry in the comments below if you feel strongly about a favourite of yours, as we may just consider it for a future update....

Imagine a world without electricity. Horrible. What would we use to blend our smoothies? How would we know when uncle Derek hits the metal bit again in the Sunday game of Operation? Electricity has roughly one dozen uses, and yet it is in the realm of videogames when we see its most fantastical and offensive capabilities brought screaming to life. To celebrate the important role of sassy electrons in your otherwise mundane life of neutrons and - ugh - protons, here are the 8 most shocking uses of electricity in games....

How to build Xinyan for shield support in Genshin Impact For this build, we’re going to focus primarily on Xinyan’s potential as a shield support character, though we’ll give details on how to build into her damage-dealing abilities as well. Simply put, Pyro DPS characters aren’t a rarity in Genshin Impact, and frankly Xinyan isn’t the best choice to fill that role if you have almost any other candidates; but Pyro shields are more or less Xinyan’s unique selling point, and Pyro support is a fairly rare specialisation as well....

Something has to be done. So I made a smaller list of the best mods that I know are worth playing. Then I cut it down some more, because RPS ran out of RAM. Seriously, there’s far too much good stuff to play. But you have to make a start somewhere. So let’s do that here. The best Portal 2 mods As mentioned above, there are no doubt hundreds more great Portal 2 mods out there, but the ones listed below are our personally curated cream of the crop....

My strained metaphor breaks when you watch this, because it doesn’t look like mangled wreckage, it looks like a pretty racing game. There’s not a lot of concrete information about Motorfest yet, even if you go a step further and watch the ‘behind the scenes’ developer video. It’s the new game in The Crew series, it’s set in Hawaii, and it’s aiming to release in 2023. That’s almost it. The added detail is that there’s a closed beta beginning tomorrow....

Fortunately, my remorse was washed away in an instant by what is the best PlayStation exclusive I’ve ever played. Yes: I’m talking about Astro’s Playroom, the pre-installed platformer that serves mostly as a tech demo for the console’s new DualSense controllers.

This does necessitate us defining wistful first, although honestly I think I nail it out of the gate. Nate also provides this week’s Cavern Of Lies mini-game, and a) he nearly beats me but b) he’d never heard of Thomas Was Alone, which is pretty funny. You can listen above, or on on Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, or Pocket Casts. You can find the RSS feed here, and you can discuss the episode on our Discord channel, which has a dedicated room for podcast chat....

The publisher can trot out its provocative “king of wargames” claim as often as it likes, but that won’t alter the fact that Panzer Corps 2 is essentially 23-year-old Panzer General 2 in new togs. Your £31 buys you an approachable, unit-rich wargame that barely acknowledges morale, command and control, and logistics; an approachable, unit-rich wargame that encourages tactics no general of the period would recognise. There are tactical truths here, of course....

In a statement on their website, Enad Global 7 said that the cancellation was due to the board deciding they wanted to “change the development priorities and reallocate resources within the group to focus on alternative long-term projects”. So that means shuffling around the 500 million Swedish krona (£40 million) they’d earmarked for the Marvel MMO over the next three years to several smaller investments instead. EG7 say these would include “previously announced major upgrades” for The Lord Of The Rings Online and DC Universe Online, along with original intellectual properties....

That’s pretty, that. I know Moomins mostly from the 90s cartoon, only a little from the books, but oh it’s very nice. What a strange and beautiful tone. It always scared or unsettled me a little, and I like that. A few years back, our Graham wrote very nicely about how it’s fun to think about a Moomin video game, and what any such game shouldn’t be. In this particular game, Snufkin will be exploring an open world, solving musical and environmental puzzles, doing side quests, and, the blurb says, ultimately chasing out the Park Keeper and his parks “with the help of your trusty harmonica, a bit of stealth, and the friends you’ll meet along the way....

In last week’s inaugural episode of Bastard Run - a title we have to keep secret lest YouTube banish us from search traffic - we broke the back of the main Edgewater quests. We’ve diverted power to the corporate scum (natch), encouraged several people to fight to the death and killed a few randoms on the instruction of the Wheel of Misfortune. That last bit is a mechanic of our own devising where any NPC who doesn’t offer us a suitably nasty decision has their fate decided by the spin of a wheel....

The RPS 100 When we set out to create the RPS 100, we wanted to go further than simply listing the best PC games you can play right now. Instead, we wanted to celebrate the greatest games from across the ages. It’s not a ranking of the most important or influential games of all time, but rather our collective Bestest Bests, as voted for by the RPS staff and some of our finest contributors....