I’m so happy for Akira Toriyama right now. The man behind Dragon Ball Z and the art of wonderful RPGs like Dragon Quest and Chrono Trigger has spent decades drawing cartoony fantasy and sci-fi heroes instead of putting all of his time and passion into sketching his true love: cars. During today’s Summer Game Fest stream, Bandai Namco revealed a new game, Sand Land, that puts Toriyama’s cute, bubbly trucks, tanks, and buggies front and center.

Sand Land is based on a lesser-known comic by Toriyama from the year 2000, a short story he did a few years after finishing with Dragon Ball (the manga, anyway). Here’s the pitch from the official site: “Dive into a desert world where both humans and demons suffer from an extreme water shortage. Play as and watch the Fiend Prince, Beelzebub, …

The surreal action-adventure game Figment 2: Creed Valley is now set to launch on March 9, and until then, the original Figment—a “musical action-adventure set in the recesses of the human mind”—is free for keeps on Steam and GOG.

“If Dr. Seuss made a puzzle game, it would probably look like Figment,” is how we described the game following its 2017 launch. While ostensibly an action-adventure game, it played more like an environmental puzzle game, each puzzle a short story unto itself. Figment: Creed Valley was announced in 2019 as “encore” DLC but somewhere along the line—late 2020, going by the news updates on Steam—it became Figment 2.

Like the first game, Figment 2: Creed Valley takes place within the very strange confines of the human mind, which…

Space stations are rad as hell, and now one of these outposts of the final frontier is becoming Helldivers 2’s latest frontier in audacious, community-driven storytelling. The game’s new major order sees players engaging in the first of a four-part sequence to build the Democracy Space Station. Once built, the community will get to vote on where and how the Democratic Death Star will be deployed.

Maybe the coolest part of the whole deal is that you can actually see the under construction DSS in-game orbiting the planet of Gaellivare. Presumably it will change and grow as players complete the major orders involved in its construction, an exciting development in Helldivers 2’s unique brand of collaborative storytelling. It’s one thing to get those fun lore updates on what Major Or…

League of Legends Worlds is a prestigious yearly tournament that wrapped up its 2023 run recently. The victors, T1 from Korea, took home $445,000 along with the gold. In a sad twist of fate—one that belongs in some Greek tragedy—a member of the winning team still didn’t get what he wanted.

See, Worlds winners get to work with Riot on crafting a skin for their chosen character. The players get a cut of the skin, Riot gets a little more revenue off its tournament hype, everybody wins. The catch? You have to play the character at least once.

As spotted by GamesRadar, Keria, the team’s support player, was really excited about being able to get a skin for his personal best girl Lux, whose whole deal is being adorable and shooting big beams of light. Despite playing a …

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 …