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One or more of you raised suspicions a couple weeks back that I was a stone-cold liar. I told you that I was going to hide a smiley face inside every Playing This Weekend header image, and here's the proof! Naysayers, the lot of you! You may redeem yourselves by finding today's one above. And once you've done that, have a scroll below and tell us what you'll be getting up to this weekend, eh? Here's what we'll be clicking on.

Spacefaring RTS Homeworld 3 is good sci-fi. Monolithic structures scorched with plasma burns. Sleek spacecraft. Alien sunrises. It’s also good sci-fi because its characters converse through reams of inscrutable but cool-sounding space science, and at no point does a grinning quipster tell a scientist: “Whoa there, professor. Why don’t you try saying that again... but in English!” Basically, if your wishlist for Homeworld 3 has tone and atmosphere at the top, rest easy. At no point did I get the sense that Blackbird ever took making the first proper Homeworld in eight years lightly.

What is it Wendy Cope wrote? “Bloody Fallout 4 patches are like bloody buses. You wait half a decade for one, and as soon as that one breaks everything, Bethesda releases another just days later.” Yeah, pretty sure that’s it. Anyway, Fallout 4 will get another patch for the near decade-old game next week, presumably to help fix a lot of the problems its long-awaited “next-gen update” introduced two weeks ago.

The Rogue Prince of Persia, a game that is pleasingly candid in choosing its name for a roguelite Prince of Persia spin-off, has been delayed. It turns out that developers Evil Empire - they of very good roguelite platformer Dead Cells - saw the Hades 2 train steaming down the tracks, and decided to sensibly dodge-roll out of its way.

Having brought the likes of Resident Evil’s Nemesis, Silent Hill’s Pyramid Head, Stranger Things' Demogorgon and Alien’s Xenomorph to its one-versus-many game of deadly hide-and-seek, Dead by Daylight is digging back into the vaults for its next classic killer. This time, it’s not horror video games or scary movies serving as inspiration for DBD’s next chapter, but 50-year-old tabletop fantasy RPG Dungeons & Dragons.

Halo and Destiny developers Bungie have released their classic shooter Marathon for free on Steam, with sequels Marathon 2 and Marathon Infinity to follow. The Steam ports are the work of the celebrated Aleph One community developers, who've kept Bungie's old Marathon 2 game engine going as an open source project - and who still have PC ports of all three games available on their own site, if you'd rather not truck with Steam.

The director of Paradox’s grand sci-fi strategy game Stellaris has insisted that the studio’s use of any AI-generated assets will be “ethical”, after revealing that latest expansion The Machine Age features AI voices for characters and used AI-generated art and text during its development.

Harken to me, serfs! There's a big new patch for Manor Lords now available in beta testing for all players. Developer Greg Styczeń has blogged about it in depth. Yes, this is one of those update changelogs, the ones that keep on scrolling with hypnotic insistence till at last you tear your eyes away and look around and oh hell, it's night and why am I standing over this altar, holding a skewered doll?

Regular Nic Reuben enjoyers, should such people exist, will remember I wrote a supporter post a few weeks back about wanting to spread my personal gaming fun time out among new and exciting games. And by ‘spread it out’ I mean maybe play 15% less Total Warhammer. As is often the way of things, I followed what I thought was prudent advice, and now there are bugs everywhere. Big bugs. Also, robots. Helldivers 2, it turns out, is really quite excellent. Who woulda thunk! Everyone else. Everyone else woulda thunk.

As I have now casually mentioned in about 400 news posts, I'm moving flat soon. During the quest for a new flat - a quest I would slot somewhere between return to Ravenholm in Half-Life 2 and the Shalebridge Cradle in Thief: Deadly Shadows in terms of overall hopefulness and unpleasant surprises - I toyed briefly with the idea of living in a mobile home.

You can find all kinds of weirdo moving property on Gumtree - houseboats, caravans, yurts, large coats, coffins - but they all share the disadvantage of being cramped and more expensive than described and inadequate to the power and internet needs of a Maxed-Out Videogame Journalist. If I'd seen a house with chicken legs, though? It'd have been worth the sacrifice. Just think, whenever James Archer gives me grief about my performance in Lethal Company I could send my house to step on him.

Open world fantasy RPG Runes emits a deeply powerful aura. I can tell it’s deeply powerful because MSI Afterburner’s fan control immediately went mental after I loaded up its free Steam combat demo. What do you mean ‘unoptimised’? That alarming sound is simply my computer shaking with awe at the fearless flippancy required to leave enemies fully untextured so they resemble Metal Gear Solid’s cyborg ninja. The promise of an indie fantasy RPG drew me in, but I must admit, I almost didn’t bother writing about this upon learning the demo is just a pre-Kickstarter combat slice. But something about it entrances me. What it lacks in textures, it makes up for in sheer moxy. You can’t optimise moxy! You can either make MSI shudder in terror or you can’t.

Pteranodon-fanciers and Stegosaur-whisperers, please throw your velociraptor-skin hats skyward in adulation. Frontier have partnered with Universal to make a third Jurassic World videogame. It's one of three new management games inbound from the Elite Dangereux developer over the next few years, including a game based on one of Frontier's own intellectual properties.

Good news DayZ fans, there's a new map inbound that'll make survival even tougher than it already is! That's right, the upcoming Frostline DLC adds the Sakhal archipelago, home to a rugged environment where you'll battle against the cold and attempt to shoot nasty players at the same time. Oh, there are also volcanoes that prove an extra threat, too. And new diseases. Wonderful.

Former Microsoft senior PR manager Brad Hilderbrand has blogged about the recent closure of Tango Gameworks and Arkane Austin, making a familiar case that Microsoft’s gaming division are now expected “to cut expenses to the bone” in the wake of the wildly expensive acquisition of Activision Blizzard and amid slowing growth of the Game Pass subscription business. In Hilderbrand’s view, Game Pass will likely never be sustainable or profitable. Microsoft’s only chance on this front, he says, is “to put all the world's biggest games on the service” – namely, Call of Duty, which still earns hundreds of millions annually in direct sales, or GTA 6, which, hahahaha.

“I like the look of Prey but I haven’t picked it up yet,” sounds the lament of the perma-wastrel, content to watch life’s most precious resource tick away then dissolve into the ether, never to return. “Looks good but it’s still 25 quid on Steam” sounds the cry of the fool unaware that all their possessions are but substanceless adornments to a life hollow for not having played, arguably, the only good video game ever made. “I didn’t like Prey anyway,” blowfish-ly puffs the deeply incorrect naysayer, unaware that they will never be invited to any of my birthday parties. Well, no excuses now*. Fanatical are doing a thing where you can buy FPS imsim Prey and two others from a respectable selection for a fiver.

Role-playing musical Stray Gods is getting DLC in which you'll play as sorrowful ghostly rocker Orpheus, the developers have announced. You briefly meet Orpheus in the base game while playing as leatherclad muse Grace, finding him moping in the underworld, eyes dripping with glam rock mascara. In the DLC he makes a musical comeback on earth, alongside messenger god Hermes. I've not stumbled on Orpheus in the other mythical game of this season, Hades 2 (he showed up in the first Hades but there's no sign he's reappearing in the sequel). So it looks like fans of the ancient Greek sadboi will have to flock to Summerfall's expansion when it comes out this summer.

Ah, it feels like only yesterday that Microsoft shut down Tango Gameworks, creators of Hi-Fi Rush, and now here's Matt Booty, head of Xbox Game Studios, telling Microsoft staff at an internal townhall meeting that "we need smaller games that give us prestige and awards" - a sentence we might plausibly lengthen to "...like Hi-Fi Rush".

See, these are the kinds of glacial changes of focus and ponderous shifts of strategy you often get at very large videogame publishers such as Microsoft. Trends are cyclical and corporations are sort of just these massive, sleepy hamsters, trundling around the wheel to rediscover practices and projects they once deemed bad for business. Hang on, let me go look up "yesterday" in the dictionary and fetch some sellotape - my brain appears to have exploded.

I spent this morning being pseudo-profound about Animal Well and pseudo-elegaic about Tango Gameworks, so now it's time to get back to the Real Business - being a pseud on the subject of videogame gun balancing.

The game in question is cheery co-op shooter Helldivers 2, over which Aunty Sony recently upended a can of furious worms by abruptly insisting that Steam players have a PSN account for security reasons and so, blocking players in regions where PSN isn't available. Sony have subsequently walked back the requirement following a backlash of truly hellish proportions, though I understand that the game remains unavailable on Steam in certain regions. By comparison, Arrowhead CEO Johan Pilestedt's remarks overnight that the developers might have been "removing the fun" with their gun balancing seem pretty innocuous.

In the grand tradition established by one (1) prior release, Supergiant dropped Hades 2 over the weekend and we at the Electronic Wireless show podcast have all been playing and enjoying it bunches! So we wanted to talk about the game, why we're enjoying it, some of the new aspects over Hades the first, and just generally go 'Ooh, this game is fun, innit?'. Not a complex podcast this week.

James isn't here, so Nate makes up some hardware news that's very exciting and yet disturbing, while he does have a mythology-themed mini game in the tower of jocularity. Plus: the games we've been playing this week, including a cute survival horror and RimWorld, still. Also, Nate asks me to explain what the hap was heckening with Helldivers 2, and if Joel remains safe.

You can listen above, or on on Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, or Pocket Casts. You can find the RSS feed here, and you can discuss the episode on our Discord channel, which has a dedicated room for podcast chat.

When I asked Tango Gameworks creative director John Johanas whom he'd give Hi-Fi Rush's Best Audio trophy away to at this year's GDC Awards, he said he'd split it between the game's audio team and "the person who taught me everything I know" - Shinji Mikami, Tango's founder and one of the erstwhile Capcom and Platinum big brains behind Resident Evil, Vanquish and much more besides. I confess, I found this response annoying - partly because I was hoping Johanas would bring up some obscure indie composer I could then namecheck at parties, and partly, because I have spent years waiting for Tango to escape Mikami's shadow after essentially announcing themselves as a Mikami fan project back in 2010.

My older brother (as opposed to "big"; my younger brother is my big brother, because he's built like the kind of hearty giant in a JRPG who laughs a lot and carries an anchor as a weapon, while my older brother is a loathsome scribbling wizard like myself) is a gamer in a very normal sense. He was way more online when he was younger, and is the one who got me into the games of Lucasfilm, Troika and Blizzard, but these days he plays the games he likes a lot and does not read specialist websites that tell him why he shouldn't like them. He used to play loads of League Of Legends, but the game he was most into more recently was Hades. This is because he studied Classics.

I won't tell you how many years its been since he was at university, but for many years - and still sort of now, to be honest - "liking Apollo" was a key part of his personality. It's interesting, therefore, to text him about Hades 2. Partly because he wasn't even aware it was happening.

Computers have always been animal wells, in a sense. They're havens for creatures of many shapes and degrees of literalness, all the way down to the metal. As in ecologies at large, the most abundant and widespread are probably the bugs, beginning with the moth that flew into that Harvard Mark II in 1947 and ending with the teeming contents of the average free-to-play changelog. A little further up the food chain we find "worms", like the Creeper that once invaded the ARPANET, and "gophers", a directory/client system written in 1991 for the University of Minnesota. There are computer animals spawned by branding - foxes of fire and twittering birds and the anonymous beasts that haunt the margins of Google documents. There are computer animals that are implied by the verbs we use in computing - take "browser", derived from the old French word for nibbling at buds and sprouts, which suggests that all modern internet searches are innately herbivorous.

How to best describe strategy game Be the Ruler: Britannia when its alchemic reduction of traditionally full-on genres is what drew me to its free Steam prologue in the first place? A less demanding Manor Lords? A more casual Crusader Kings III? Total War with training wheels? It’s got shades of all these games, but thrown together with a wonderfully vibrant wood craft art style. It ends up as something I feel is going to be a lot more approachable for players who like the idea of massive medieval simulations but don’t care to spend time reading a Magna Carta-fat wiki to learn exactly what pop growth percentage is. I know what it is, and most days I wish I’d saved that brain space to e.g learn how to keep house plants alive instead.

I'm playing Rusty's Retirement as I type this article. This cute farming sim runs at the bottom of your screen as you go about your working day. You can plant crops, hire watering robots, harvest blueberry bushes, raise pigs, all while validating the spreadsheets from Paula in accounts. Paula! Where are the running totals!? I can't find the running t- oh, they're under the turnips. Sorry, Paula. My bad.

But can you actually play "idle games" like this while getting your work day done? Aren't they distracting and obstructive? These are important questions. I plan to find the answers by playing Rusty's Retirement while simultaneously - and dutifully - completing days of work. Let's go!

Among Us, the super popular game where you control a little bean guy to bamboozle your pals, is getting a bunch of new things this year. Developers Innersloth unveiled the game's 2024 roadmap, which promised new roles, lobby tweaks and better "Bean Fashion" among a few other bits and pieces.

Like us, you’re probably still reeling from Tuesday’s news that Hi-Fi Rush studio Tango and Prey’s Arkane Austin are getting shuttered by Microsoft. According to Bloomberg, these closures were just a part of a “widespread cost-cutting initiative” that’s still underway. All signs point towards more cuts to come, basically. ZeniMax studios seem to be the main target.

A recent update for procgen whodunnit sim Shadows of Doubt added "Sharpshooter Assassins" with high-powered rifles to the game's glowering alternate-1980s cities, with players having to work out the killer's vantage point by deducing a bullet's trajectory, before proceeding to a secondary crime scene to search for a murder weapon and witnesses. The prospect of snipers certainly adds menace to the game's forensic sandboxing. The trouble is, the shooters aren't always as sharp as they could be.

It’s coming up on three years since the sequel to Darkest Dungeon hit early access, and over a year since it exited early access into 1.0. That means, however you count the days, it’s been a long time coming for one of the original game’s features to find its way into Darkest Dungeon 2: mod support.

The next Battlefield game after the underwhelming Battlefield 2042 will continue to lean on the series’ evolution into a live service offering, the CEO of EA has said, while revealing that the largest development team in the series’ history is currently working on the upcoming shooter.

Ready for a sentence that could only apply to the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink pop-culture smorgasbord of modern-day Fortnite? Here we go! A rucksack containing Star Wars’ Yoda has been temporarily banned from the battle royale game, after crashing games when players wearing the green Jedi master on their back do the Zoidberg Scuttle emote from Futurama.