Yuji Naka, the former head of Sonic Team and one-time lead programmer of the original Sonic the Hedgehog, has joined Square Enix. Since parting ways with his former employer in 2006, Naka has led his own outfit Prope—since releasing a number of mobile games—however joins Square Enix as a developer. “Just a quick note to let you know, I joined Square Enix in January,” says Naka via Twitter. “I’m joining game development as before, and strive to develop games at Square Enix. Just a quick note to l

Bob Wakelin, the artist behind some of the most iconic videogame cover art of the 1980s, has passed away. And while Wakelin may not be a household name, if you’re at all familiar with videogames in the ’80s then you’ll almost certainly be aware of his work. If you’re short on time, I found this excerpt particularly interesting:I smoked cannabis by day and drank beer at night. Touching tributes to the late artist have since appeared on a number of social media outlets. The following image has bee

Last year, I wrote about developer Automaton’s bold plans to make a 1000-player online game with a 400-person battle royale-style PvP mode. At the PC Gamer Weekender in London on the Saturday (17 February) at midday, they’ll take to the stage to show off the first footage from inside the game, as well as discussing how they built its world. ‘Project X’ is powered by Improbable’s SpatialOS technology, which allows for ‘meaningful persistence’ that can apparently enhance the level of simulation in

The 2017 Hearthstone Championship Tour concluded in Amsterdam this weekend, sending off the tournament and kicking off the year with a bang. The four-day world championship saw the rise of underdogs, the fall of fan-favorites, and some of the finest matches to ever grace competitive Hearthstone. Kolento vs. SamuelTsaoTo the surprise and disappointment of virtually everyone, Kolento, a multi-tournament winner and the top-ranking ladder player worldwide, was among those sent home on the first day.

The year-long Hearthstone Championship Tour has dealt its last card, and Taiwanese player tom60229 has ended up on top of the pile. Austin was in the city to watch the match live, and he’ll bring you an in-depth analysis of what happened soon. But for now, you can watch the entire final in the video below. Earlier this week, tom60229 was involved in one of the best competitive matches in recent memory, beating DocPwn in a real back-and-forth. You can read Austin’s take on that match here, and cl

Occupy Mars, another colony builder, is one, and now there’s also Memories of Mars, a multiplayer open-world survival game releasing in Early Access this Spring. Humans that were trying to colonise Mars have abandoned their posts, and you’re a human clone waking up to the chaos. You’ll inevitably end up in one-on-one duels, although if you band together with another player you’ll be able to gather resources more efficiently and build a more elaborate base. I’m imagining a redder ARK: Survival Ev

Kursk is a game about a nuclear-powered Russian submarine that was lost along with its entire crew in the year 2000. Developer Jujubee first mentioned it in 2015 and then went quiet, but in a blog post this week it revealed more details about what type of game Kursk will be and confirmed a 2018 release date for PC. Jujubee said it’ll be the “first fully fledged adventure-documentary game in history”. Most of the game will take place on the Kursk submarine, but you’ll also visit Moscow and the ga

Faeland looks gorgeous, in my opinion (although I am a sucker for this sort of thing). It’s a pixel art Metroidvania with role-playing elements that’s coming to Kickstarter “soon”—and yes, I know, there are more pixel art Metroidvanias on the horizon than you can shake a short sword at, but give the teaser trailer a chance before you dismiss it. I like how grounded its art style is. The role-playing bits sound more equipment than story-based: you can switch out armour and weapons to suit your pl

Battlefield 1’s next DLC, Apocalypse, will fly out next month with five maps and a new game mode centred on aerial combat, developer DICE has announced. Three of the maps—Passchendaele, Caporetto and the River Somme—are made for the usual mix of infantry and vehicle combat, while London Calling and Razor’s Edge are designed “exclusively for aerial combat” in the new Air Assault game mode. Apocalypse also introduces a new specialisation type: afflictions, which basically make the game harder. “Fo

PUBG is regularly pulling in three million concurrent players and more than 25 million people own it on Steam, while Epic’s action game has 40 million players, and recently passed the 2 million concurrent player barrier. But there’s a game that’s outstripping them both: Minecraft. New head of Minecraft Helen Chiang has revealed that the game had 74 million active users in December—the most in a month since it released nearly nine years ago. But still, 74 million active players is a hell of a lot

He will walk away with the diminished fringes of the Hearthstone World Championship prize-pool. Perhaps it’s overbearing to say $250,000 is life-changing money, but it’s certainly life-altering money. He wants to buy a house in Los Angeles to be closer to esports events, but not before extending his vacation in Amsterdam. The weary, thin-lipped concession as a world-title dream flatlines is one of the most harrowing things to watch in esports. The bespectacled Taiwanese kid Tom60299 is probably

At a press conference ahead of his quarter-final match against Sintolol, Fr0zen admitted he didn’t expect to win. Yet somehow, he made it to game five—which turned into the tightest, most ridiculous tie-breaker of the 2017 Hearthstone Championship Tour’s finale. Fr0zen wants to grind Sinto out of resources, while Sinto is trying to build a giant minion and one- or two-shot Fr0zen. With no Meteor or Polymorph to handle Sinto’s enormous minions, he’s going to have to high-roll again. Sinto plays t

Metal Gear Survive, Konami’s Kojima-less game about staying alive in a zombie-infested desert, will offer players stat-boosting microtransactions and will require a constant internet connection to play, even in single-player, according to a report. “Metal Gear Survive’s online connectivity requirements were built to support a seamless integration between single player and co-op. Fair enough, but not everyone has access to a steady internet connection 100% of the time, and this could be a pain fo

I’ve had a lot of fun with it in other games, and I can’t see why this would be any different. For the same period, you can also play Demolition, the classic Call of Duty game mode that didn’t make the cut for WW2. You’ll be able to jump into a Demolition 24/7 server for the duration of the event. We still haven’t got a PC release date yet, but I presume it will be some time in February. It actually lasts just over a month, but the event calendar is only available for the first two weeks.

MMO Rift went free-to-play in 2011, opening its gates to more players but also ushering in loot boxes and a store packed with items you could buy with real money to make the game a lot easier. After a long think (and no doubt influenced by player pushback against microtransactions), developer Trion Worlds is going back to its roots by introducing a paid subscription model for a server free of loot boxes. The Rift Prime server will launch in Spring. I’ve never played Rift, but Jonathan was very i

It never made it to PC, but thanks to a couple of fan remakes you can now give it a whirl on your mouse and keyboard. The first remake is called Corridors, and is a recreation of the game in Unreal Engine 4. It’s still very much a work in progress (expect bugs), and creator SmoggyChips plans to update it with more levels in the future. Some of the files are difficult to work with, but you can play a very early prototype of it here. I can’t wait to see how they both turn out, and I’ll keep my eye

I’ve had my eye on Tangledeep for a while: it’s a roguelike dungeon crawler where you start underground and your goal is to reach the surface, which is a decent twist on an age-old formula. It entered Early Access in July and developer Impact Gameworks has just announced that its full release will be shooting out on February 1. You’ll be fighting strange creatures in turn-based battles throughout the game’s labyrinth of underground villages and dungeons, which mix handcrafted locations with proc

Ys 8: Lacrimosa of Dana’s PC port has been delayed indefinitely, just 10 days after it was given a concrete release date of January 30. The game is suffering from massive framerate drops in certain sections, and publisher NIS America is bringing in a new developer to sort it out. NIS America said all of its PC builds had suffered from “low framerate issues and memory leak problems” but admitted that it “underestimated the severity” of the issues. “As the PC version of the game was originally env

Positech Games, developer of Gratuitous Space Battles and Democracy, will be bringing a trio of fine titles to the PC Gamer Weekender—one developed in-house, two others published by the firm. First up is the in-house game, Production Line—a strategy/management game that sees players running a small car company with the intention of growing the business and making your output as mass market-friendly as possible. Next up is Basingstoke, being published by Positech but developed over at Puppy Games

Not got your PC Gamer Weekender ticket yet? Our friends at Fanatical are giving each attendee four copies of projectile fighting game Lethal League. This four pack of keys will be mailed to attendees the day after the show, on the 19th, at which point you can jump into Lethal League and hit balls in each other’s faces. Share your surplus keys with pals, or maybe even an enemy or two to resolve those unfinished rivalries. User reviews on Steam for Lethal League sit at a very respectable 95% posit