All aboard the nostalgia express! Free toy train set builder Tracks [official site] is getting a proper commercial release later this year, hauling a carriage-load of new features into the Steam Early Access station. Arrival date: September 28th.

I’m buying a ticket early for this one. The free version (which you can get here) is a pretty great, serene experience but lone developer Dr_Whoop (or Tom, if you prefer) is clearly been hard at work preparing new goodies for the full release. There’s pretty decorations, new music, mechanisms to play with and objectives to complete.

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I’m eagerly following the progress of free-to-play shooter Quake Champions [official site]. I spent a good year of my life in the browser-based Quake Live bunny hopping, insta-gibbing and failing to rocket jump over the smallest of obstacles (seriously, I can’t rocket jump in any game), and had a blast. I haven’t had the chance to play the beta yet but I’ve watched a few streams and the feedback seems to be positive, including from Rick Lane, who was pleasantly surprised with it.

Currently the beta is only available through the Bethesda.net launcher, but Bethesda have now confirmed that it will come to Steam too when it launches properly later this year.

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The incredible rise of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds [official site] continues. The early access Battle Royale ’em up has surpassed 4 million copies sold, developers Bluehole Studio announced yesterday, which is… er… a lot. The game hasn’t even come out yet and it’s sold more copies than Zelda: Breath of the Wild (that’s at 3 million, and Link had a 20-day head-start). Pretty staggering.

Bluehole also boast that the game has hit $100m of revenue, 230,000 peak concurrent users on Steam, and 350,000 simultaneous viewers on Twitch. In case you didn’t realise, these are BIG NUMBERS.

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Grand Theft Auto V [official site] developers Rockstar Games appear to have talked parent company Take-Two Interactive out of shutting down OpenIV, a modding tool for GTA IV and V. This is good news. The makers of OpenIV received a cease-and-desist letter from Take-Two earlier this month, prompting outrage from players, but Rockstar have confirmed that Take-Two will now focus their ire only on mods that affect GTA Online in an attempt to crack down on hackers.

Open IV has just been updated with a new version, too, so it definitely lives. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m constantly getting stuck in Thimbleweed Park [official site], the old-school adventure game from the creators of Maniac Mansion, Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick. I always seem to have an inventory full of loose popcorn, soot, a t-shirt and some dynamite with no clue as to how to combine them in order to get ice cream cake to a hungry ghost.

I thought I was just being dense, but it turns out that I’m not the only one who’s had issues. Fans and critics have remarked that the game needed a hint system and the team has, somewhat reluctantly, obliged. And not just any old hint system: a proper hint hotline you can call from the in-game phones, reminiscent of the real gaming hint lines of the ’80s.

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Love a duck and stone the crows, Activision are finally going to sell Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Remastered [official site] seperately. Because they’re a gaggle of silly sausages, they originally launched the revamped version of 2007’s wildly popular Call of Duty 4 only as a bonus included in expensive editions of the wildly unpopular Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare. Seven months later, Activision have announced they’re putting an end to this foolishness and releasing Modern Warfare Remastered separately. Oh, but it’s never that simple. The June 27th release date announced today is only for PlayStation 4, with other platforms to follow. What are you like! The silliest sausages. Read the rest of this entry »

Homeworld: Cataclysm, the standalone expansion to Relic’s splendid spacefaring strategy game, has popped up on GOG after years of not being sold anywhere. Though the original Homeworld and its sequel were rereleased and remastered in 2015, playing Cataclysm has been the preserve of pirates and that ‘physical media’ rabble. No more! Homeworld: Cataclysm can be yours for £7, though it is now renamed Homeworld: Emergence because Blizzard have since swiped the “Cataclysm” trademark for that World of Warcraft expansion. Read the rest of this entry »

I do like games where I control machinery through a (virtual) physical interface, yanking on levers and tapping buttons on a control panel. The upcoming 20,000 Atmospheres [Itch page] adores fiddling too, putting players in the cockpit of a legged submarine-sort-of-thing walking across the surface of a planet with a crushing atmosphere (so a supermarine?). Pull levers, press buttons, and try not to die terribly as your doodad stomps, clanks, and hisses across the planet. Here, watch this trailer: Read the rest of this entry »

The thrills, chills, and slurry spills of Farming Simulator 17 [official site] are off to South America in an expansion this November, publishers Focus Home Interactive have announced. The ‘Platinum’ expansion will add a new farm set in an unnamed pretty South American country, where sugar cane is a new crop to harvest. Supposedly that terror ↑ up there is a machine made to harvest sugar cane but I’ll not give that man-mulching deathbot a chance to catch me. Read the rest of this entry »

Experimental project Everything Is Going To Be Okay [Gamejolt link] is having an early access-ish period to help developer Nathalie Lawhead (who you may know from her 2015 IGF award-winning project, Tetrageddon Games) finish it off. I hesitate to use the word game because that doesn’t really encapsulate anything about the project – instead let’s go with Lawhead’s own description: “Interactive zine”. Read the rest of this entry »