Essayprocodes

More than 21 years after it was originally released, one of the true holy grails of Japanese-only games has been translated into English. Fan translator Hilltop Works, who previously translated cult favorite Square Enix carPG Racing Lagoon, released an English patch for life sim Boku no Natsuyasumi 2 on Thursday. The trailer above celebrates the release, showing off a two minute slice of the game with English subtitles, UI, and in-game artwork.

If you had to compare Boku no Natsuyasumi 2 to other well-known games, it’s most similar to the likes of Animal Crossing and Harvest Moon or Stardew Valley, but only broadly. You’re not tending crops or doing much at all that feels truly “gamey” in Boku no Natsuyasumi (which translates to My Summer Vacation). You take on the role of a young boy living a month of summer break in the Japanese countryside circa 1975. That may sound mundane, but the series seems to leave a deep mark on those who’ve played it. I’m very excited to be one of those people, soon, thanks to Hilltop Works’ translation. But don’t take my speculative word for it—take it from Tim Rogers’ six hour video:

There aren’t many games that feel truly autobiog…

Continue Reading

Something you see a lot in cozy games is a scenario where you move to a small island or a rustic neighborhood, then use your farm or shop to revitalize it, bringing new life to a sweet but neglected little town. Those vibes are definitely present in supermarket management sim Discounty… at least at first. 

In Discounty you’ve been summoned to the quiet little harbor town of Blomkest by your aunt to take over a run-down grocery store. You’ll have to clean the place up, stock your shelves, make deals with local manufacturers, keep your customers happy while getting to know them, and grow your dumpy shop into a beautiful and efficient store. Sounds great!

Watch On

But there’s something else going on in the Discounty trailer revealed today at Wholesome Direct today. The act of becoming a successful businessperson is seasoned with a dash of capitalist dystopia.

“By opening a Discounty franchise, you can transform the most unassuming small town into an attractive regional business hub,” says the upbeat narrator, using the soulless corpo-speak we’ve heard a thousand times in press releases and earnings calls. I get the feeling that opening a charming littl…

Continue Reading

Axis Studios, the Scottish animation and VFX company who made the 2011 Dead Island rewinding teaser, is shutting down. Per GamesIndustry, the studio has ceased production on all its current projects, with 162 employees laid off as the company enters administration.

Back in 2011, Axis produced a cinematic E3 premiere teaser that singlehandedly catapulted Dead Island to the forefront of public consciousness. In a slow-motion, rewound sequence, the trailer revealed how a family’s White Lotus-ass vacation met an early, grisly end at the hands of an amassing zombie horde. Even without any gameplay footage, the response at the time was huge. (Zombies weren’t quite as played out in 2011.)

I didn’t end up enjoying Dead Island very much, but I sure as hell bought it and that teaser is to blame. Imitated and parodied countless times since, Axis’s Dead Island trailer left a profound fingerprint on the long-running trope of big budget game reveals pairing gruesome violence with moody, contemplative backing music. Coincidentally, Axis eventually worked on Gears of War, too.

Since then, Axis provided animation and VFX for some of the biggest names in games, h…

Continue Reading

I come to you, PC Gamer reader, hat in hand to report once again that Fallout/Outer Worlds co-creator and Troika Games co-founder, Tim Cain, has said something in a YouTube vlog that blew my damn mind. He’s already regaled us with tales of a Lord of the Rings RPG that never was, “the true purpose of the Vaults in Fallout,” and the rough plans for a Vampire: the Masquerade – Bloodlines sequel/expansion set in Barstow and Vegas. A few days ago, he also dished on helping train a US Department of Defense AI to play grognard holy grail and “The Most D&D” D&D game, The Temple of Elemental Evil.

According to Cain, in 2004 he was approached by a former graduate school classmate who had moved on to working for the DoD. “He wanted to know if I could take Temple of Elemental Evil and write an API (a programming interface) so that an external AI could run the game,” Cain explains in the video.

The contract paid for Cain and ToEE’s original lead programmer, Steven Moret, to produce this version of ToEE in the waning days of Vampire: the Masquerade – Bloodlines’ development. Cain says that they never actually witnessed the DoD’s AI first hand⁠—he and Moret woul…

Continue Reading

Barely a week after a strange PEGI rating for the original PC version of Resident Evil appeared on the ratings board’s website, the aura of mystery has been broken. Turns out the entire original RE trilogy is due for its first release on digital storefronts.

The release comes courtesy of, you guessed it, GOG, no doubt flush with the success of rescuing the excellent spy RPG Alpha Protocol from licensing hell. The company says it’s teamed up with Capcom to put 1996’s Resident Evil, 1998’s Resident Evil 2, and 1999’s Resident Evil 3 on the world wide web. They’re not all releasing simultaneously: for now you can only buy and play RE1, with 2 and 3 following later down the line.

There is, of course, already a version of Resident Evil 1 on digital storefronts, but that’s Capcom’s 2015 HD remaster of the 2002 GameCube remake. It isn’t the original game that hit PS1 and PC back in the ’90s, which is what we’re getting today.

As per GOG standard practise, the RE1 you can find on the store is totally DRM-free and comes with “quality of life improvements and enhanced compatibility with modern systems,” which is how the company usually refers to the little tweaks it make…

Continue Reading

Watch On

Nightdive’s next remaster of a classic game isn’t an obvious one: It’s The Thing, the 2002 combination of survival horror and squad shooter that was developer Computer Artworks’ last game. Critically and commercially acclaimed at the time, it has been pretty hard to get on its original console platforms since—or required some technical wizardry to get running well on PC.

The Thing: Remastered is set after the events of the famous 1982 John Carpenter movie, showing a possible sequel where a military squad it sent to the abandoned outpost—naturally, the shape-shifting alien is very much still alive and ready to murder you all. 

The remaster will bring it up to modern performance, “including Antialiasing, Per Pixel Lighting, 4K Resolution and up to 144 FPS” and an implementation of “dynamic lighting, specular mapping, shadows, depth of field complemented by improved models, textures and environments to create a deep level of immersion.”

The remaster will have everything from the original game, which presumably includes the cameo of a character played by movie director John Carpenter himself, plus some as-yet-unspecified quality of life im…

Continue Reading

The Persona series has a rich tradition of suddenly replacing its English voice actors. Kanji Tatsumi got a new voice in Persona 4 Arena Ultimax, Tae Takemi got one in Persona 5 Royal, and we were forever deprived of this absolutely divine reading of “Aha! Is this our chance?” when Chie’s voice actor changed in Persona 4 Golden. 

Now, Persona 3 Reload—the upcoming full-blown remake of Persona 3—is replacing its entire dang English voice cast, and we got our first listen to the new line-up in the game’s new English Gameplay Reveal trailer. Bad news, everyone: Fuuka no longer sounds old enough to draw a pension.

Although several cast members—notably Ken and Aigis—don’t feature in the trailer, we still got ears on Yukari, Akihiko, Mitsuru, Junpei, and Fuuka, a major chunk of the game’s main squad. I have to say I like what I’m hearing, at least for the most part. I probably wouldn’t even notice that Yukari and Mitsuru have changed unless you pointed it out to me, and Fuuka’s new voice actor—Suzie Yeung—actually sounds like a young girl now, rather than the pack-a-day smoker voice she had in the original (although that performance…

Continue Reading

Remember the Delta Force games? It’s okay if you don’t: It was a reasonably popular shooter series that debuted in the late 1990s, but the last addition to the lineup, Delta Force: Xtreme 2, came out back in 2009, and wasn’t very good. The last we heard from it was in 2016, when THQ Nordic picked up developer NovaLogic and all its games. Seven years later, Delta Force is finally making a comeback, with a brand-new game being developed by Tencent subsidiary TiMi Studio Group.

The new game will feature a singleplayer campaign based on the movie Black Hawk Down, producer Shadow Guo told IGN, but it will also feature “large-scale multiplayer PvP,” a central component of the original game.

“Our game designers chose to build an immersive multiplayer battleground that could accommodate even larger-scale PVP than the previous 32-player limit,” Guo said. “To create a grand atmosphere of combat on ground, sea, and air, we designed a variety of methods for engagement and maps that integrate diverse terrain features such as vertical height differences and caves, as well as different vehicle routes.

“We also created unique, technologically advanced vehicles that players can…

Continue Reading

As a stubborn and insufferable Fallout: New Vegas fan, I actually liked Fallout 4 more than I thought I would, but I still think it has its problems. Chief among them has got to be that intro, which sees the nukes drop at the exact moment the Sole Survivor and their family begin descending into the vault, narrowly avoiding doom. It’s totally unbelievable, but there’s a mod to fix it. More Realistic Intro for Fallout 4 gives the game a much more plausible start, incinerating the protagonist and their family well in advance of their entry to Vault 111, and ending the game about five minutes in. Sorted.

The mod comes from a creator called UnrealSeptim, who describes the mod’s “two major gameplay effects” like so: “one, it makes the intro sequence much more believable. Two, it effectively prevents your character from progressing beyond the intro sequence, making the game essentially unplayable”. That second effect, says the creator, “makes the mod ideal for New Vegas fans”.

It is, of course, a gag, and the maker recommends sending the mod to your friends about to fire up a new game of FO4 “without telling them what it does”. If you do that, then “Voice Chat and/or livest…

Continue Reading

Sony’s policy toward PC has shifted noticeably over the last few years. The publisher has gradually been bringing more of its exclusive titles to PC, and more recently, launching games like Helldivers 2 concurrency on PC and PS5. Now, the company’s soon-to-be co-CEO Hermen Hulst has outlined the whys and wherefores of its current strategy, and how we can expect them to approach releases in the future.

Speaking at this year’s Sony Business Briefing, Hulst explained that Sony has a “dual approach” to game releases. “On the live-service side, we’re releasing our titles simultaneously, so day-and-date on PS5 and PC,” he explained. But with the publisher’s “tentpole titles” (big budget singleplayer games like God of War and Horizon: Forbidden West) Hulst says they take a more “strategic approach” with the goal of introducing their “great franchises to new audiences”. Hulst doesn’t say how they approach this, but he presumably means releasing them as PlayStation exclusives first, and onto PC later.

What he does explain, however, is what he hopes Sony will get out of this. 

“We’re finding new audiences that are potentially going to be very interested in playing, …

Continue Reading

Vampire Survivors has gotten its second round of DLC, Tides of the Foscari, and like the first, Legacy of the Moonspell, there’s a lot to love here: more characters, maps, items, and secrets for 2022’s best roguelike, all for just two bucks. While the starting map, Lake Foscari, didn’t immediately light my fire, the continuation of Vampire Survivor’s signature secrets and unlocks really won me over.

I missed Moonspell on the first go-around, so I wasn’t sure exactly what to expect when I broke my long absence from Vampire Survivors and loaded into Foscari. If I have one complaint about the whole package, it’s that this primary new map just needed some more visual flair. It’s got a great layout with more distinct landmarks (including a cheeky hedge maze) than many of the base game’s stages, but while December’s Mt. Moonspell hit us with an evocative, snow-clad Japanese Village, Foscari’s look just reminds me too much of vanilla levels like Mad Forest, Il Molise, or Green Acres.

[Some light spoilers of DLC unlockables follows]

I’ve yet to reach the second map, Foscari Abyss, though, and that name already has my interest piqued⁠—I only…

Continue Reading

Paradox has released a new “immersion pack” for the excellent Victoria 3, called Voice of the People and focusing on a slew of new (old?) historical characters and an ‘Agitator’ mechanic. The immersion pack name is something the company’s hit upon to distinguish between the scale of the DLCs it releases for its titles: These are the smaller ones (though it’ll still set you back $14.99/£12.99/€14.99) with Victoria 3’s first major expansion yet to be detailed.

Wordplay aside, Voice of the People also adds a deeper simulation of French politics of the century, which sits very nicely alongside that Agitator system. The latter will see individual characters appear that push for political reforms which governments, bluntly, don’t want. Given the era this means there are some real ballers in here, including Emmeline Pankhurst and the Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini. And any Tsars better watch out: Here comes Lenin!

The Paradox press material lists the expansion’s main features thus:

• Over 60 New Historical Agitators: Explore new alternate histories with real historical characters, including John Brown, Emmeline Pankhurst, and Enver Pasha. …
  Continue Reading

There are plenty of survival crafting action sandbox games, but only one of them is purely focused on the concept of being a wizard with a gun*. That’s the aptly-named Wizard with a Gun, which got an upgrade to four-player co-op this past week in its new Better Together update and so I guess they’ll have to rename it to Wizard with a Gun and Several More Friends.

To celebrate it’s free to try on Steam this weekend, and 50% off until May 23 if you’d like to buy.

The Better Together update also added more stuff to the game: New difficulty levels let you experience it easier or harder, and customized difficulties let you tweak how it feels to play. There are also new libraries for your wizard’s tower, a proper upgrade to just regular bookshelves. And, apparently, a new ending or boss or something nasty lurking in the void at the end of time.

Wizard With a Gun is a cool pitch, giving you five minute jaunts into the collapsing apocalyptic world outside before you’re forced to return to your grubby little wizard’s tower to rearm, restock, and rewind the clock to before the apocalypse. Over time you collect stuff to upgrade your tower, your guns, and your magic clock …

Continue Reading

If you’re looking for a new Wordle angle, hoping to refine your game or want to win today’s Wordle at all costs, then you’ve clicked through to the right place. You’ll find everything from our extensive Wordle archive to hints, tips, and clues just below. If you need the answer to the January 21 (581) puzzle, then that’s just a quick click away too.

I almost came unstuck at the end of today’s puzzle, as I found myself staring at four greens, and all of the most obvious consonants had already been used or eliminated. Luckily there’s no time limit on Wordle, so a quick break gave me the fresh perspective needed to finally see what I’d missed the first time around—and kick myself for not spotting it earlier.

Wordle hint

A Wordle hint for Saturday, January 21

Today’s answer is used to describe a short piece of text often found on the back of books, usually praising the work and designed to attract someone’s attention and encourage them to open their wallet. 

ViewViewViewView

Is there a double letter in today’s Wordle? 

Yes, there is a double letter in today’s puzzle. 

Wordle help: 3 tips for beating Wo…

Continue Reading

Need a clue for today’s Wordle? The answer in a flash? Or perhaps you’d just like to read some general hints and tips designed to make the February 14 (605) game that little bit easier. Whatever Wordle help you’re after, you’re sure to find it here.

My opener slotted the first green neatly into place. My follow-up gave me the last green and a handy pair of yellows. And then it all came together beautifully on the third guess. Another victory: Wordle done. Time to celebrate with a chocolate biscuit and look forward to tomorrow’s puzzle.

Wordle hint

A Wordle hint for Tuesday, February 14

Today’s answer concerns the act of creating audible vibrations: banging a drum, singing a song, etc. If something emits a noise or note it would make a _____, wouldn’t it? There are two different vowels to find today. 

ViewViewViewView

Is there a double letter in today’s Wordle? 

No, there is no double letter in today’s puzzle. 

Wordle help: 3 tips for beating Wordle every day 

Looking to extend your Wordle winning streak? Perhaps you’ve just started playing the popular daily puzzle game and are looking for som…

Continue Reading

Gamescom is right around the corner, and you definitely don’t want to miss the opening night on August 21. Our sister site GamesRadar+ will be there powering the Future Games Show, dazzling our screens with over 50 games from publishers like 2K, Plaion, and Nacon, as well as some extra treats along the way.

If you’ve tuned into a Future Games Show before then you’ll know each one is hosted by two iconic videogame voice actors, and this upcoming showcase is no different. These folk are real Rockstars, with Red Dead Redemption 2’s Alex McKenna (Sadie Adler) and Grand Theft Auto 5’s Ned Luke (Michael De Santa) helping to present everything the Future Games Show has on offer. McKenna promises the showcase will have “an exciting mix of games from indie to blockbusters you don’t want to miss,” while Luke said “We’re going to be showing off some world premieres and going hard on some of 2024’s hottest new games.”

They’re not the only guest stars this time, either. The Future Games Show is teaming up with Civilization 7, which I’m sure has made quite a few of us over in the PC sphere pretty dang excited. The partnership means we’re getting not one, but two …

Continue Reading

You’re now just one click away from winning the December 27 (921) Wordle—the answer’s ready and waiting if you need it. You’re also in the right place if you’re after a tailor-made clue for today’s game too, if you’d like a bit of help without being handed the solution on a plate. Whatever Wordle support you need, we’ve got it.

I soon found myself staring at (almost) all the right letters in all the wrong places after two guesses this morning, which usually means I’m either in for a very long game of “Where the heck does this go?” or I’m just one more attempt away from a win. Luckily for me, today’s Wordle was the latter. Hopefully tomorrow’s game will be just as simple—hopefully.

Today’s Wordle hint

Wordle today: A hint for Wednesday, December 27

The word you need to find today is a type of flower, the most common type having white petals and a bright yellow centre. If something is a fresh as one of these, it’s full of energy and ready to go. 

ViewViewViewView

Is there a double letter in Wordle today? 

No, there is no double letter in today’s puzzle.  

Wordle help: 3 tips for beating Wordle …

Continue Reading