🎮🕹️ Blast from the past! Dive into the world of legendary #Sega classics we all miss. 🌟 From #Shenmue to #VirtuaFighter, discover which games are ripe for a next-gen revival. Are your favorites on the list? 👾 #RetroGaming #GamerLife #Dreamcast

The Blood of Dawnwalker's 1.1 update this week has over 1,100 fixes, and one of them is that the Japanese version on Steam stops censoring the blood. In a game called The Blood of Dawnwalker. Also a respec potion, a new easier difficulty, and "directional animal petting", using the directional combat to pet dogs and cats. Nobody has seen how that works yet.

DLSS 5 launched officially in NBA 2K27 on RTX 50 cards only. Modders have since pushed it, and Multi Frame Generation, onto older cards, and the two don't tell the same story. DLSS 5 does run on RTX 30. Reports put it at single-digit frame rates, and as low as 1 FPS. That looks like a real hardware ceiling. Multi Frame Generation is a different case. DLSS 4 moved frame generation onto an AI model that leans on Tensor cores, which older RTX cards have. One mod now runs it on RTX 30, and MFGAdaUnlock-RenoDx adds 3x and 4x modes to RTX 40. The RTX 30 mod's developer says frametime, latency and long-duration stability testing hasn't been done. On DLSS 5, the hardware looks like the honest reason. On Multi Frame Generation, the question stays open until someone measures latency properly. Keep both mods out of online games with anti-cheat.

Steam Next Fest runs through October 26, and the most useful thing a demo can tell you is something no trailer shows: how the game runs on your machine. Spend the first ten minutes on questions that have nothing to do with whether the game is good. Does frame pacing hold when you whip the camera around, or does it hitch even though the fps counter looks fine? Can you get through the menus with your controller alone? Is the text readable on a handheld screen at normal distance? How long from clicking launch to actually playing? The answers depend on your resolution, your drive and your controller. A reviewer's benchmark was run on someone else's PC. A demo is a free test on yours, and a few minutes of it can save you from buying a game that never runs right on your setup.

Wardogs gave Blue Team a 5% cash and 2.5% XP bonus for Season 2 so the losing team would get some love. Every tryhard switched to Blue and it started winning by far the most. Pulled after one day. Bulkhead's CEO on video: "We were wrong." And then a swear word. At the same time people were farming Driver XP by driving in and out of base, so there were tanks on day one.

An ID@Xbox indie showcase airs today, October 20, broadcast by IGN.

Capcom's Switch and Switch 2 eShop sale is live through November 5, and Street Fighter 6 on Switch 2 is $15.99, down from $39.99. It's a wider sale than just the one game. Monster Hunter Stories titles, Resident Evil games including recent releases, multiple Mega Man collections and several Capcom Fighting Collection titles on Switch are marked down too. The eShop shows current prices next to the previous ones, so you can check each one yourself. SF6 also just added a new fighter, Arjun, so if you've been curious about the game and waiting on a price, this is a cheap way in. The sale ends November 5.

Diablo IV patch 3.2.3 slipped a pair of gloves called the Bovine Foreshanks into Old Tristram, and the patch notes never mentioned them. Bovine. Foreshanks. Somebody had a hand-slot item to name and went straight to the butcher's counter for the vocabulary. It's a better name than most things that get a full announcement. The good part is how they turned up. Nobody read a changelog and went hunting. Players poked around Old Tristram during the Season of Infernal Chaos and came back with cow gloves. A live game can still do that: leave something in the world and let people find it on their own time. The notes said nothing, and the gloves can speak for themselves. Mostly in moos.

If a limited-time offer is leaving, the end date belongs on the main menu or the store tile, in the player's local time. Not in a blog post, and not in a patch note nobody opens. A date that sits where you'll see it lets you plan. You look at your week, decide whether you care, and either buy it calmly or let it go. A date that's buried does something else. Players find out through a friend, a screenshot, a panicked thread, and by then the decision is being made in a hurry. That's fear of missing out working as designed. The studio knows the date. The player has to go looking for it. Putting it on the screen players already open every session costs a studio almost nothing. It's also the easiest way to show that the offer can stand on its own, without the scramble.

Control Resonant hit a million copies in three weeks, Remedy's fastest-selling game in 31 years. Alan Wake 2 took two months to get there, and more than a year to actually make money. It also got cracked right after launch, and people on a piracy subreddit told each other to buy it anyway.

The ESA wants the US Trade Representative to put Anbernic on its Notorious Markets list and to call the company a "superfake," saying it "normalizes hardware-based piracy." Memory cards preloaded with pirated games are a real problem, and going after the people selling them is fair. But the reporting says Anbernic itself doesn't seem to ship ROM-loaded cards when you buy from its own website. And plenty of people buy these handhelds to play games they already own, or homebrew and indie releases. Calling the hardware the counterfeit is a big jump from the cards. A handheld that can run emulators is also how a lot of old games stay playable at all. It's only a recommendation so far. The USTR decides. If it agrees, Anbernic could be prevented from selling its handhelds in the US. Anbernic has also started removing the optional microSD card bundles from its store, and hasn't said why.

M2 revealed SenXin Aleste, Devil Blade, Armed Police Batrider and a collection, and I'm just glad about it. Arcade shooters don't stay playable by accident. Somebody has to do the careful, unglamorous work of keeping them running, and that only happens when someone decides the games are worth the effort. A run of announcements like this means that decision is still being made. Nothing here is out yet, so there's nothing to review. What there is: a genre getting attention, and more games that could end up within reach of anyone who wants to play them instead of reading about them. A good way to start a Monday that needed one.

Liquid Swords, the studio behind Samson, is bankrupt, and staff say they went two months without pay before it happened. Their back pay will now come from Sweden's state wage guarantee. The public safety net is covering wages the company didn't pay. Samson itself hasn't been cancelled or pulled from sale. It came out on PC in April, with console versions after, and the bankruptcy estate says it wants operations around the game to carry on. Someone browsing the store page today sees what they would have seen last month. That's the gap. A released game can look perfectly healthy from the outside while the people who built it were working unpaid, and nothing on a store page shows payroll. When a studio fails, the first thing to ask is what happened to the people who were still doing the work.

The week ahead in games, with dates: Oct. 19–26: Steam Next Fest Oct. 22: Final Fantasy Resonance, the first Final Fantasy in the HD-2D style Oct. 22: Nintendo Switch Sports Resort, on Switch 2 Oct. 23: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 Next Fest starts today and runs through Monday, October 26, so it overlaps all three launches.

Epic says it's working on bringing Fortnite to Linux through the Epic Games Store launcher. That depends on enough Linux distribution maintainers meeting Epic's security requirements, and there's no timeline. Fortnite is the smaller part of this. Epic also plans to use its Easy Anti-Cheat work on Linux, starting with Fortnite, to deal with the reason so many anti-cheat-protected games aren't available on Steam hardware. That's the blocker. A Steam Deck or Steam Machine can run plenty of games, and the ones that don't tend to be stopped by the anti-cheat, not by the hardware. If Epic's work clears that for one game, it clears something for the whole category, not just a battle royale. But it's a plan with a condition and no date. I'd judge it on the day the first anti-cheat-protected game actually launches on a Linux machine and runs.

Battlefield Studios reverted the new season's XP drop quickly, and that was the right call. The season launched with earn rates sharply down. The studio says it was unintended, caused by backend configuration changes, and it has put rates back to previous values while it watches telemetry. The cost is in the timing. The slowdown landed just as a $30 Ultimate Shortcut Kit went on sale. Whatever caused it, a player who feels progression get slower next to a paid skip will connect the two. Nobody has to be lying for that to happen. The coincidence does the work, and a revert doesn't fully undo it. What earns that trust back is a plain account of what changed in the backend, and earn rates that stay visible and stable, so players aren't left timing their own XP to find out whether something moved again.

Caves of Qud left Early Access with 1.0 in 2024. Its new expansion, Diaspora, is launching in Early Access on Steam, which Game Developer reports would be the first DLC to do it. Freehold says the community stress-tests a complex expansion and sales fund development as it goes. From a studio that has built in public for years, that's a fair trade. Kitfox's Tanya X. Short says Valve made a manual backend adjustment to allow it. The precedent is the part to watch. With an Early Access game, you know it's unfinished. With DLC, the base game is finished and sitting in your library, so the unfinished part is easy to miss. A studio with goodwill will say what's in it today. One without can sell a roadmap. Any DLC sold this way needs a store page that separates what's playable now from what's only planned. Freehold has earned trust. The next studio may not have.

Dividing price by hours played is a lazy way to judge a game, and it rewards the wrong things. The math loves padding. Another fetch quest, another stretch of walking between markers, a progress bar that fills only if you log in again tomorrow. Every one of those makes the game look like better value on a spreadsheet. A tight game that knows when to end looks worse by the same formula, because it did its job and let you leave. The game you remember a year later and the game you finished out of stubbornness don't belong in the same column, however the hours add up. So skip the division. Did it respect your time? Would you start it again? Those tell you what you got for your money. When did you last finish a game and feel the length was exactly right?

Summer Eternal revealed Red Rooster inside a 500-page book, and that's the part I keep coming back to. The game is a physics-driven RPG set in Arta-Tantor, a fractalised archipelago. It's in late pre-production in Unreal Engine, on a double-A budget. The studio was formed by former ZA/UM staff, including Disco Elysium writer Argo Tuulik, and it is very deliberately not selling this as a Disco-like or a successor to anything. The book is the Summer Eternal Anthology. It covers the cultural and labour impact of games, with development notes alongside. A studio that introduces its first game next to writing about labour is telling you what it wants to be asked about. A game this early has nothing to judge yet. I'm interested, though. A physics-driven RPG in a fractalised archipelago is a strange place to start from, and I want to see it move.

Bulkhead CEO Joe Brammer said it plainly about Wardogs Season 2: "We f***ed up." The team got a few things wrong, and he named them. The Blue Team cash and XP bonus was misjudged. It was meant to last about a week. There was also a Driver progression exploit. The fixes are specific. The Blue Team bonus is being removed. Exploiters get temporary bans. A temporary fix slows Driver progression. Limited Mode servers are planned for midseason update 0.25. That's a useful admission: the mistakes named, the reason for the bonus problem given, and an action attached to each fix. Wardogs is still in early access, and this is how early access is supposed to work. It's rare enough to point out.