Generally speaking, videogame trailers are a promotional, sometimes informative type of thing: “Here’s our new game, here’s what it looks like, here’s when it comes out,” and all that. But today we’ve got something different to share with you: A trailer celebrating Microsoft’s $68 billion swallow-up of Activision Blizzard, which finally happened today following the long-awaited green light from the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority.

The trailer is essentially a mash-up of Microsoft and Activision Blizzard’s greatest hits: There’s Master Chief, there’s Captain Price, there’s Forza, Sea of Thieves, Diablo, and Starfield. But then we cut to a pair of toothy bois from World of Warcraft, and the schmaltz begins: “So… this is home now,” one says. The other replies, “Home… famil…

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The very first Monster Hunter RPG is now available on PC via Steam in a remastered format with full voice acting. Monster Hunter Stories was first released in 2017 as a Nintendo 3DS game, and while its sequel got a release on PC in 2021 the first game hadn’t made its way to a port yet. It’s the story of a person who rides monsters and can befriend them.

The Monster Hunter Stories series are family friendly turn-based RPGs to Monster Hunter’s more action-focused combat. The remastered version of Stories includes full Japanese and English voice acting alongside new museum modes for both music and concept art. It also includes content only ever released in Japan for the 3DS, with several extra monsters.

Reviewer Daniella Lucas called the PC release of Monster Hunter St…

Amnesia: The Bunker is the fourth instalment in Frictional Games’ survival horror series, and it’s a bit of a departure from earlier games. You could say that about 2020’s Amnesia: Rebirth too, with its sun-blanched Algerian setting, but The Bunker has guns. That’s quite something, because Amnesia basically popularised the cat-and-mouse format of modern survival horror, later adopted by games like Outlast and Visage, to name a few. 

Originally primed for a March 2023 launch, Amnesia: The Bunker will now release a couple of months later, on May 16. “The team here at Frictional has had a tough winter with a slew of illnesses that has affected the development,” the studio said in its announcement. “We are a small team and things like this heavily impact pr…

Just as it did the last few years, June’s bringing more to Minecraft in the form of the Tricky Trials update. Released today, Minecraft 1.21 combines the features doled out in recent preview snapshots, adding new blocks, new bad guys, and new bludgeoning implements.

Trial Chambers are the main thrust of the update. They’re a new, procedurally generated underground structure you might find in your subterranean expeditions, filled with traps, enemies, and—if you survive—rewards. In addition to new blocks and decorations, Trial Chambers feature the Trial Spawner block: a new variant of mob spawner, which generates a specific number of enemies on a cooldown. Kill all the enemies, and the Trial Spawner will generate some loot as a reward.

Trial Chambers are also where…

The Metal Gear Solid Master Collection is here, bringing Metal Gear Solid 3 (the best one) to PC for the first time in a package that also contains MGS 1 and 2 plus the original MSX Metal Gear games. It’s a day I’ve been hotly anticipating for literal years: The Metal Gear games are some of my favourites ever made, and to have the classics finally start trickling over to PC should be great.

Except, ah, these ports leave something to be desired. A few hours out from release, all three Metal Gear Solid games have grim beige “Mixed” ratings on Steam, and players have drawn up a long litany of complaints about Konami’s work. Having played a little of the collection myself I can’t help but agree.

Let’s start with MGS 3, given that the Master Collection marks the game’s P…

Deadline reports that Return to Silent Hill, the movie based on Silent Hill 2 being directed by Christophe Gans, has cast both of its leads. Jeremy Irvine (War Horse, Great Expectations, The Railway Man) will play James Sunderland, while Hannah Emily Anderson (Jigsaw, X-Men: Dark Phoenix, The Purge) will play Mary/Maria.

“Return to Silent Hill is a mythological love story about someone so deeply in love, they’re willing to go to hell to save someone,” said Gans, who directed the 2006 Silent Hill movie but was not involved with the 2012 sequel Silent Hill: Revelation. “I’m delighted to have the wonderful talents of both Jeremy Irvine and Hannah Emily Anderson take us on this journey into a psychological horror world that I hope will both satisfy and surprise fans of Silent Hill.” Read more

Star Wars Jedi: Survivor director Stig Asmussen said when he left Respawn in September 2023 that he wanted “to pursue other adventures,” and now we know what he meant. Asmussen announced today the launch of a new studio called Giant Skull, “dedicated to building gameplay-driven, story immersed action-adventure games set in captivating worlds.”

“The Giant Skull studio culture is founded on creativity and curiosity,” Asmussen said. “We have assembled a talented team renowned for immersive storytelling, heroic combat and exhilarating traversal, and our goal is to craft a rich universe that players will want to lose themselves in for years to come.”

That team includes Star Wars Jedi: Survivor technical director Jon Carr and design director Jeff Magers, fo…

Dell has an Alienware Aurora Ryzen R14 desktop deal with a Radeon RX 6900 XT for $1,699, $1000 off its regular price. It’s often a rarity that we spot a deal on exclusively AMD-powered desktops, so when one comes up, it’ll always grab our attention. 

This Alienware battle station has an AMD Ryzen 5 5600X CPU and a Radeon RX 6900 XT GPU combo with 32GB of DDR4 RAM. It’s a solid PC if you’re looking to top out at 1440p on high settings but also want to give 4K gaming a shot. 

Radeon RX 6900 XT sits between the RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 in terms of performance but has more power efficiency and easier overclocking. Our biggest problem with the GPU is its mediocre ray tracing performance, which felt overpriced at launch. Thankfully with this big of a discount, that’s …