There's a real hint of necromancy about THQ Nordic. The mega-publisher has resurrected a few games over the past few years, with Kingdoms of Amalur probably being the one that made me go "Huh?" the most. Well, there’s more "huh" to go around, because they just opened up a new merchandise store and are selling Kingdoms of Amalur cushions with the game map on them.
]]>Moaning about bad titles is easy money in this job, but now and then you get to complain because a game's title pretty much explains itself, critically undermining your introduction.
Destroy All Humans! is a remake of the mid-2000s action game about wacky 1950s aliens who've come to Earth to harvest brains and blow everything up for kicks. Its release today is the first time it'll appear on PC.
]]>You, there, stop that. You've got new videogames to play. Good Old Games has just launched free demos for Desperados 3 and the System Shock remake, along with a handful of other upcoming games. I've already had a sneaky play of both tactical cowboys and cybernetic spaceship loners, so I can already tell you they're worth your time. Aren't I good.
This is also another chance to check out Carrion, a horror game where you are a horrible mass of sticky tentacles.
]]>Google held another one of their Stadia Connect conferences today, and this one was meant to be all about what games you'll be playing in the "scary" cloud come November. Sure enough, there were new Stadia games aplenty announced this evening, with the biggest addition being Cyberpunk 2077.
To help keep track of them all, here's a list of every Google Stadia game confirmed so far, as well as which games are coming at launch, which ones will be arriving a little bit later, and which games you'll only be able to play by subscribing to one of the special Stadia publisher subscriptions.
]]>Remember that thing you like from 10 years ago? It’s probably getting a sequel. Shenmue 3. Evil Genius 2. Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines 2. The calendar of upcoming games is packed with throwbacks that will revisit the worlds we left behind over a decade ago. Oddworld: Soulstorm is heading back to the strange homeland of Abe the skinny green freedom farter. Mechwarrior 5 is booting up a bipedal destruct-o-bot that was powered down in the year 2000. If your favourite childhood game is not getting a sequel, it's probably getting a glittering remake.
Reviving forgotten entertainment relics is nothing new (hi, George Lucas) but the recent glut of resurrections has made me wonder: why are developers and publishers so keen to go back to old ground? Why do they want to chase this sense of nostalgia? So, I asked them.
]]>Forming a boundless ouroboros of nostalgia and referential humour, mid 2000s B-movie sandbox shooter Destroy All Humans is getting the remake treatment. For those who missed it the first time, it's roughly Grand Theft Auto wrapped around the aesthetics and tone of Mars Attacks and Invader Zim. Playing as big-headed invader Cryptosporidium, players probe, mind-scan and otherwise explode a bunch of '50s American stereotypes. While the original game was made by the sadly-defunct Pandemic Studios, the remake is being handled by Black Forest Games. Below, a debut trailer with a similarly dated Rammstein song.
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