Author: Rich Stanton

Counter-Strike 2’s latest patch makes a bunch of changes to the competitive shooter, and one in particular has been on player wishlists for a long time. As Valve puts it: “Lefties rejoice!” Players can now set a default preference for which side their character holds their weapon, and switch between sides on-the-fly during rounds (by…

Grand Theft Auto 5 first released in 2013 (coming to PC in 2015), and from the vantage point of 2024 we can see it was a live game in disguise. The singleplayer side of the game, which for the first time featured three protagonists players could switch between on-the-fly, acted as Trojan horse for Rockstar’s…

The Konami code is one of those Easter eggs that has long since travelled outside of its origins. It first appeared in the seminal shooter Gradius in 1986, but came to prominence in the west thanks to the NES release of Contra (it is sometimes called “the Contra code”), and basically gives the players bonuses…

Thanks to the excellent new Amazon show, the world is currently going wild for Fallout, to the extent that the old games are rocketing up the charts again. The series was instantly renewed for a second season, and modders have got to work cramming TV stuff into the games. It’s Fallout mania! Wait, didn’t Bethesda…

A huge part of Helldivers 2’s appeal is the game’s ongoing galactic war, a push-and-pull conflict between the players and the enemy factions that sees planets liberated, territory lost, and casualties on a multi-planetary scale. The conflict is guided and shaped by major orders, which identify targets and offer rewards, with yesterday’s example being a…

Elden Ring’s Shadow of the Erdtree expansion (due June 20th) is currently looming large over my gaming time, inspiring the urge to return to The Lands Between and hoover up everything I missed in my first playthrough. There’s plenty to be getting on with, because not only is this world vast but absolutely riddled with…

A 36 year-old man from Kyoto Prefecture has been arrested by Japanese police for creating and selling rare varieties of Pokémon online. Yoshihiro Yamakawa, an interior decorator by trade, used an unspecified modification device to alter the stats and characteristics of Pokémon in the popular Nintendo Switch title Pokémon Violet before offering them for sale,…

The WoW expansion Mists of Pandaria, initially released in 2011, built out a faction and region of Azeroth that had been a part of Warcraft since 2003: essentially, boozed-up kung fu pandas. It’s definitely one of my favourite expansions purely for the change in tone it brought to the game, and now Blizzard has announced…

EA Motive studio director Patrick Klaus has written about what’s going on at the studio in an update post that touches on both the studio’s upcoming Iron Man game and the wider situation with the Battlefield series. What we already know about the Iron Man game is what you’d expect. EA calls it a “third-person,…