February 2021

Not everyone wants their gaming chair to look like it rolled off the set of a straight-to-VHS ‘80s sci-fi film. Some of us have work to do too, especially in this age of the home office. If you want a chair that doesn’t fire on all cylinders in the gamer chic department, MSI isn’t the first brand you’d normally check in with, but the CH 120 I is probably the closest they’re going to get to muted, even if “True Gaming” is embroidered on it. Twice.  It’s a predominantly black PVC leather affair, save for its thick dark grey trimming…

Can’t decide where to place your server’s newest base in Valheim? Furious that your buddy took the last bars of iron to upgrade their axe when you don’t even have iron tools yet? Here’s a way to resolve your dispute: Viking beer pong. Or mead pong, if you haven’t unlocked barleywine yet. Just use something like an amber pearl or a cloudberry and chuck it out of your inventory at the traditional beer pong setup. The idea first popped up a few weeks ago. Here’s an great example, also from Reddit: Some Viking beer pong with the boys from r/valheimTo…

Whispering Hills is a Fallout 4 mod that adds a whole lot of fog and a variety of familiar monsters to the Commonwealth. While an earlier version of it has been around for a while—we’ve been writing about it since Jon said no thanks to the Sirenhead update in 2019—the Episode 1 update brings some significant additions. Chiefly, a questline to follow complete with a voiced NPC. Said questline will introduce you to Midwitch Elementary School (based on the original Silent Hill’s school, Midwich), and part of the town of Whispering Hills. It’s based on Centralia, the town used as…

Documents for an upcoming meeting of the Los Angeles Convention and Tourism Development Board (found by a poster on the Resetera forum) list E3 as a “Cancelled live event in 2021”. E3 2020 was cancelled due to the Covid-19 pandemic, and while the ESA looked for ways to replace it with an “online experience”, in the end nothing came of it. Earlier this year the ESA suggested said that, “we are transforming the E3 experience for 2021 and will soon share exact details on how we’re bringing the global video game community together” and the above document contains the note,…

Cooperative mining and shooting game Deep Rock Galactic is getting more new updates into 2021, including what looks like the largest update in the game’s three year history. The sci-fi dwarves aren’t stopping their bug-killing any time soon, it seems. The first update will be smaller, coming in April, while the second is planned for some time between July and September. The first update is called Bits N’ Pieces, and will include official modding support (on Steam.) It probably won’t include Steam Workshop integration in the first release. There’ll also be a big balance pass on weapons, as well as…

Whether it’s a CS:GO gun skin, set of Second Life clothes, Hearthstone card back, PUBG bandana, or Team Fortress 2 hat, what fancy in-game cosmetic have you acquired? Armor effects in Path of Exile go for a fair bit, but then someone once paid $38,000 for a pink war dog courier in Dota 2, which puts everything else in perspective. What’s the most valuable cosmetic item you own? The Steam Tools item value sorter might help if you don’t know the value of items or aren’t even sure what you own. Here are our answers, plus a few from our forum. (Image credit: EA)Alan Dexter:…

Just a few days after it dropped a new trailer for Dishonored plus Groundhog Day shooter Deathloop, which featured some absolutely slapping music, Arkane has released a lovely explainer of just what’s going on in the game and what it looks like to do that.  The explainer talks about how you’ll play the same day over and over, trying to take down a set of bad assassins in the name of freeing yourself from the loop. Each time you loop you’ll have a better idea of what the bad guys’ schedules are for the day across the island sandbox—eventually allowing…

Map control is power in Valorant, and the newest agent joining the roster has a ton of it. Astra, a cosmic caster hailing from Ghana, brings a boatload of utility and a powerful astral form that allows her to divvy up her abilities wherever she wishes. It’s too early to say how prominent Astra will be, but it’s hard to see why you wouldn’t want her on your team with a skillset like this: C: Gravity WellACTIVATE a Star to form a Gravity Well. Players in the area are pulled toward the center before it explodes, making all players still…

In 2013 I volunteered to play a game design student’s project on an Oculus Rift DK1, a simple maze and a rollercoaster demo. They were just prototypes so it wasn’t a spectacular first impression of virtual reality, but I kept thinking about it for years after, and in 2018, lacking a suitable PC, I invested in a PlayStation VR.  I wish I’d jumped to PC VR sooner. PSVR’s pricing was more accessible for a call centre worker, but it came with trade-offs—wires were everywhere, PlayStation Move controllers weren’t great for VR, and on a sunny day the light-sensitive motion tracking…