What are we all playing this weekend?
The weather has broken in spectacular style, with a lot of huge thunderstorms. Portentious indeed! Fortunately this weekend the only things I can see in our future are a buncha fun video games. Wahey!
Forza Motorsport 7 is getting delisted in September
Forza Motorsport 7 is driving off into the sunset in September. Turn 10 Studios have announced that Motorsport 7 is reaching its "end of life" status, which mostly means they're removing any way for you to buy it. It's a routine part of the Forza game lifecyle, they explain, so they've got plans in place for current owners to keep playing online and Xbox Game Pass folks to snag a permanent copy.
Excellent alchemy shop sim Potion Craft has brewed a new playtest
I would be a terrible potion barterer because I simply cannot be coy about cool things. On that note, crafting and haggling sim Potion Craft is excellent. If you happened to miss giving it a shot when it showed up in the Steam Festival from February, not to worry. Potion Craft has just brewed up a new playtest that you can tackle for the next two weeks with all sorts of new characters and its mysterious alchemy machine.
Valve say Steam Deck's progress is thanks to the Steam Machine's failure
More than likely, I'm not the only person whose first reaction to the Steam Deck was something along the lines of "didn't Valve already try this?" Valve's hardware products have really run the spectrum from the VR gold standard Valve Index to the less impressive console-like Steam Machine. Sure enough, Valve say that "Steam Deck feels like the culmination of a lot of that earlier work." They say that Proton has been the route to help them solve the "chicken and egg" problem that the Steam Machine fell victim to.
Session-based survival game Icarus is delayed to November
The extraterrestrial survival game Icarus may have just made RPS's list of top games in August but, oh dear. It's now delayed until November, actually. It will still be playable for some folks next month though, it turns out. RocketWerkz have announced that they'll be running a handful of beta weekends for pre-order players focused on different areas of the game beginning at the end of August.
Valheim's Hearth & Home update will also add giant, luxurious gold piles
The next major update for viking craft 'em up Valheim is still being cooked up in the kitchen, but it's starting to smell just about done. Iron Gate have previously revealed several new foods and tasty cooking stations, but now they're taking us down into the cellar. That's right, iron cells, treasure chests, and giant piles of gold are also getting thrown in the Hearth & Home pot when the update lands this autumn.
TFI Friday: three new indie games that have nothing in common
It has been a hot minute since I hit you with some fun new indie games (I was on holiday! Gimme a break!) but I'm very excited to be back with some crackers this week. I was too tired to come up with a theme, though, so instead here are just some fun games that I think you'll like, woooooo!
In fact, I've managed to pick three games that are so disparate in style and tone that I don't think I could link them by a theme even if I really, really tried. I can start with a more topical one, though. Yes, it's about vaccines. But like, in a fun way. I promise.
The Artful Escape is "like if David Bowie went on a space journey and came back as Ziggy Stardust"
The Artful Escape has been a long time coming for Beethoven & Dinosaur founder and designer Johnny Galvatron. While his side-scrolling platformer - about a teenage musician going on a fantastical journey to find and create his own stage persona - made its initial debut back in 2017, Galvatron tells me this game has really been 38 years in the making. He's a professional musician himself, having been the lead singer of electronic rock band The Galvatrons in the mid noughties, but he's also been raised on a diet of video games since the days of the Sega Master System. He started designing his own games during the Nintendo 64 era, but it wasn't until 2012 that he finally decided to make a proper go of it.
"Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP really made me want to make an indie game for iPad," he tells me, "[while] Kentucky Route Zero pushed me into the mindset of making something for PC. And, look, things spiralled out of control and here we are."
Ultimate Audio Bang #11: pursuing our Destiny
On this week's episode of Ultimate Audio Bang, Imogen shares some juicy news nuggets with us. Splitgate – a Halo meets Portal FPS – seems to have garnered some serious interest. Naturally, both of us haven't played it. Sounds cool, though. Elsewhere Halo Infinite's doing a thing this weekend, which we also aren't playing. To be fair, we're waiting for John Masterchief's invite. And just to round things off, Apex Legends has a new character, while PUBG might be going free-to-play. It's a stacked one, folks.
The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles has some great musical off-cuts
It's been a great week for Ace Attorney fans. Not only has The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles finally arrived on Steam, giving us two brand new courtroom dramas to sink our teeth into, but there's also a rather brilliant double-pack deal going on right now that gets you The Great Ace Attorney and the Ace Attorney Trilogy for just £40, which is a mega saving considering both games currently sell for £30-odd apiece. If you've yet to experience Capcom's legal dramas and don't know where to start, I strongly suggest buying both.
It's also a good week for Ace Attorney music lovers, too. Capcom's had the soundtracks for both games on Spotify for a while now, but hidden away in Great Ace Attorney's special content menu is a treasure trove of unused music by composers Yasumasa Kitagawa and Hiromitsu Maeba. Accompanied by little notes describing their thought process and why they ultimately weren't selected, it's a great little peak behind the curtain as to what goes into making a rollicking Ace Attorney theme. And I wish more games did this as a rule, too.
website is back online .. updates are on the way
I know twitch must make money, but forcing these new ads every-time you watch a stream is beyond a joke, It seems twitch.tv has gone down the route of injecting there ads into the html player, in doing so they made it get pass ublock origin + adblock ect so you now have to use Twitch 5 addon, this does remove all current ads and also is a lot faster and uses less ram , win win
firefox users
addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/twitch_5/
chrome users
chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/twitch...ihifpc/reviews?hl=en
glhf
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