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Remember that bit in that Guy Ritchie film where Dexter Fletcher shoot a guy and then throws a glowing jar over his soldier that summons a bunch of skeletons to help him out? Me too! Must have been the direct influence for Sea Of Thieves' new Season 12, which launched earlier this week with a bang - from two smoking barrels! Among the additions in this season of the ever popular salty sea-dog open-world adventure are double barrel pistols. They deal less damage per shot but have higher rate of fire, and you can charge them up to fire both barrels at once.

On the other end of the weapon scale are new throwing knives, capable of sneak attacks, light slashes, or, you know, throwing. You can nab any throwing knives you see lying around, too, which is fun. But honestly, the Bone Caller tool (the aforementioned jar of skeletons, which has a great Jason and The Argonauts vibe) and the Horn Of Fair Winds are are probably more useful. The winds from said horn can make your ship go faster, but can also put out fires or crowd control enemies, or for some reason make you swim faster? I don't think that makes sense, to be honest, but the horn has limited uses so as not to make you an unstoppable wind machine.

I haven't ever raided in an MMORPG like World Of Warcraft for several reasons, one of which is the time commitment. I've never put in the many, many hours needed to earn the requisite gear nor partied up with the many, many people necessary to slay a big dragon. If only raiding was possible without these things… well, my saviour seems to have arrived in a form I wasn't expecting: 2D anime bunny girls. Rabbit And Steel is a co-op action roguelike that's raiding without the pre-grind and it looks rather wonderful.

I don't tend to do a lot of videogame discount posts because I have a mortal fear of enriching my backlog, but when I see the entire Mass Effect trilogy and all of its expansions for around the price of a slightly more aristocratic sandwich, I am compelled to share. The Legendary Edition of BioWare's ravishing sci-fi RPG series is 90% off on Steam until 13th May. That translates to 6€, $6 or £5 for all three main games and 40 DLC packs, plus bells and whistles such as 4K Ultra HD and beefed-up character models. If you haven't played a Mass Effect game before, this is a pretty good place to start.

Roll7, developers of bright skateboarding games OlliOlli World and dual-wielding bloodsport Rollerdrome, are being closed down as part of large scale layoffs by parent corp Take-Two Interactive, according to documents seen by Bloomberg. The British studio has been responsible for some great stuff over the years but the report says they'll be following the fate of Kerbal Space Program 2 developers in being laid off.

Starfield’s biggest update since the Bethesda space game came out last year (remember that?) is arriving in a couple of weeks - with its Steam beta already live now, if you’re interested in poking around. The chunky patch finally tidies up the game’s oft-complained about surface maps to make them easier to navigate, as well as introducing new difficulty options, a decoration mode for the inside of ships and a bunch of other tweaks and fixes.

Good news! There’s a new Batman: Arkham game on the way that’s not Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. (Potentially) not-so-good news! It’s a virtual reality game that you’ll only be able to play if you own a Meta Quest 3. Hmm.

Your feelings on Funko Pop probably fall into one of two categories: you either hate the black-eyed, copy-paste figures modelled on pop-culture characters with a burning passion, or you own enough of them to construct a small fortress and defend your newfounded Funko nation from the government. Either way, it looks like the first video game starring the ubiquitous toy collectables might somehow scratch your itch.

While they ponder which developers should face the difficult task of following up one of the most acclaimed games in a long time by making a sequel by Baldur's Gate 3, the makers of Dungeons & Dragons are also putting their own money into making video games themselves. Over a billion dollars of their own money, in fact.

Last month, GTA 6 publishers Take-Two Interactive announced plans to "rationalize" their "pipeline" by laying off five per cent of their workforce - around 580 people - and cancelling various games. As part of that, they're reportedly now doing away with 70 positions at their Seattle offices - Seattle being the home of the Take-Two-owned Intercept Games, the current developers of space sim Kerbal Space Program 2.

The Amazon Gaming Week sale kicked off on Monday, although you wouldn't know looking at the Amazon homepage. Despite little fanfare, however, there are some good discounts on gaming hardware and accessories to be had. These limited-time deals will run until 5th May, or until they sell out.

And of course, it wouldn't be an Amazon sale if the most reliably discounted gaming mouse, the Logitech G502 Hero wasn't included in the sale. This time, the classic wired mouse can be yours for just £30:

4X-meets-real-time-strategy game Sins Of A Solar Empire 2 will finally launch on Steam this summer, Stardock and Ironclad Games have announced, a couple of years after going into technical early access on Epic Games Store. I loved the first Sins and so did Kieron Gillen (RPS in peace) whose 16-year-old review dwells appreciatively on the spectacle of cruisers and frigates bouncing to hyperspace on the very edge of a solar system. We don't seem to have written about the second one - time to change that, I guess. Here's the Steam release announcement trailer.

Last week a Catholic media ministry (not sure what that is but okay) called Catholic Answers created a generative AI priest chatbot called Father Justin. Fr. Justin used a large language model to answer questions about the Catholic church and Catholic orthodoxy, and if you have any familiarity with how people love to test AI chatbots - or you read the headline of this article - then you know where this is going. Fr. Justin, who was already kind of controversial anyway, offered the sacrament and claimed to be a real priest to Futurism, and gave the thumbs up to baptising a baby in Gatorade in an emergency.

Catholic Answers (who have the domain Catholic.com; gotta imagine His Holiness wishes he'd moved quicker on that one) then defrocked Justin, making him a lay theologian in a suit jacket, jeans and an open collar shirt that gives him a "me and my wife saw you across the bar" kind of vibe, when before he had the whole dog collar kit and caboodle.

Following a report by Game Developer on the ESA’s refusal to budge during a hearing on easing copyright restrictions around academia’s remote access to legacy games, Deus Ex creator Warren Spector has written for the website on his own frustrations with, and efforts to aid, game preservation. Channeling some of the classic immersive sim resourcefulness he helped pioneer, he writes that he’s “literally dumpster dived to retrieve information other developers have simply thrown away, believing it to be worthless.”

Yesterday, coinciding with the release of the Thrones of Decay DLC, Total War: Warhammer 3 jumped 90 places in the Steam charts, trailed closely by the three lord packs that make up the strategy game's latest expansion. Those lord packs are now the three top rated expansions in the series’ history, and the base game itself saw a huge uptick in positive reviews. The last day also saw a peak player count of around 66,000, putting it ahead of giants like Palworld, Rimworld, and Fallout 76. None of this would be especially notable, however, if this wasn’t a complete turnaround from how things have been for the best part of a year now.

A player-run troupe of actors will be performing an adaptation of Richard III in Fallout 76, featuring a "ghoul" in the lead role. They're partly inspired by the recent Fallout TV show, which puts a jaded cowboy ghoul in a pivotal role and has led to an increase in players of the online multiplayer RPG. This production will likely be more faithful to the bard than to Amazon Prime. It will open with the line: "Now is the nuclear winter of our discontent."

We learned a bit about Deep Rock Galactic's upcoming Season 5 update a few weeks ago, and now we know a bit more thanks to a Ghost Ship dev stream. Not only has it gifted us details on the new mission type and the new season event, it's also given us an idea of when we might see Season 6 emerge. I suppose you could liken the stream to a bushy Dwarven beard, from which the devs pluck out announcements like it's show and tell. And the show and tell is set in a dingy mine. And there are multiple pints involved.

The high-fidelity rustic hurly-burly of Manor Lords is all very well, but some of us yearn for a simpler and perhaps, more elegant age, when city builders looked like a bunch of copulating squares, and could run on PCs with approximately the computing power of a slice of bread (toasted, but not buttered). Step forward Mini Settlers, which has a free prologue version you might try if you're weary of Manor Lording, or you've already exhausted the play possibilities of early access Franconia.

Microsoft's Xbox summer showcase in June will reportedly include a hefty post-show segment on the next and currently untitled Call Of Duty, alongside release dates for such first-party headliners as Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, Avowed and Indiana Jones And The Great Circle. As rumoured in April, they're also apparently going to show off a new Gears Of War game. Nice to see the COG and Locust still getting work.

I'm not sure how I, a committed Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy fan, managed to miss A Difficult Game About Climbing. It is, like its obvious inspiration, a difficult game about climbing, but here you're using your arms independently to grip and hoist yourself rather than hooking and swinging a pickaxe. It is, also like its obvious inspiration, frustrating and moreish, like a scab you keep picking at.

Square Enix have announced 22.1 billion yen (around £112m) in "content abandonment losses" for the fiscal year ending March 2024. The loss is the result of the publisher being "more selective and focused in the allocation of development resources," suggesting they have cut funding to or cancelled undisclosed projects.

The developers of sci-fi action-adventure Deliver Us Mars have laid off all their staff. The news was announced by KeokeN Interactive's leadership in a statement in which they state they have "exhausted all our possible options" of finding funding for a new project. They also say they plan to rebuild the company.

A new batch of games have been announced for Game Pass in May, including five that are playable on PC. There are siblings, felines, reapers, and a Croft. I'm struggling to identify a theme.

Recently, I spent around two hours with Shin Megami Tensei 5: Vengeance, the Persona 5: Royal-fied version of the original SMT V. Vengeance promises many new things: a revised battle system, a new story branch, new areas, and more. What I found when I played, was several punches to my metaphorical ribs. A few to my gut. Sure, I spent some time with the new stuff, but really, I spent most of my time being absolutely demolished in turn-based battles against various demons of a phallic and non-phallic nature. I will now attempt to summarise my time against these creatures, wish me luck.

Dread Delusion is a creepo-tastic open world RPG that positively reeks of King's Field and the Elder Scrolls of yore. Created by Lovely Hellplace and published by horror anthology specialists DreadXP, it's so far up my alley it's probably been mugged by some kind of hideous clockwork cutthroat - and yet somehow, I've never played the thing. I'll be rectifying that on 14th May, when Dread Delusion leaves early access.

Razer, makers of various pretty good gaming peripherals and one deeply questionable face mask, have been slapped with a $1.1 million fine by US regulators after said mask was determined to have misled buyers over the amount of protection it afforded. Kotaku reports that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) took issue with Razer’s claim that the Zephyr, an RGB monstrosity released during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, could act as a medical-grade N95 respirator – it could not – and will allocate $1 million of that fine towards refunds for fooled, if colourfully illuminated, buyers.

I once went back to a gathering after a friend-of-a-friend’s metal gig that I distinctly remember not because of either the party or the show, but because we drunkenly went to a big Tesco afterwards to get snacks. I also distinctly remember making a not-completely serious but also somewhat true statement at the party about how that Tesco trip was the most fun I’d had in months, after which one of the metal men sneered at me. I felt self conscious at the time, but I’ve since grown comfortable enough with myself to realise that the metal man was a joyless fool, and going to big supermarkets is at least as fun as going to average metal gigs. There is nothing a drop D power chord can evoke in me that compares to the feeling of blurrily espying a chocolate trifle in the reduced to clear section. So I wish to bring your attention to Supermarket Times.

Harold Halibut has the vibes of a game that should be 4-6 hours long and is, inexplicably, 10-12. It's inexplicable not only because it's a slow game low on interaction - the game is really just a plot delivery mechanism; a TV show you can walk around where you advance the story by pressing A - but also because it's a game created using handmade miniatures. It's a sci-fi animated dolls house under the sea, self described as "a cross between a game and a stop motion film", and if my game required that amount of labour I'd edit that script down. Then again, there aren't that many locations, so maybe you'd really want to show them off.

I love miniatures, and Harold Halibut is beautiful. It's also a lovely story about finding yourself and your place in the world, even if that place is unexpected, and having the courage to take that step. There are unexpected silly bits and strange bits and bits where people break into song, and bits where you read undelivered letters. But, at the same time, I totally understand why some people would find it boring.

I don't have a lot of interest in VR these days, but I do have an interest in the beautifully realised miniature doings of your villagers in Manor Lords, the city builder that is currently rather popular on noted purveyor of ye finest interactive entertainments Steam - and which now has unofficial VR support care of Flat2VR and Praydog's UEVR.

Bethesda Games Studios are thinking about how they can release games more frequently while still ensuring that they have a healthy audience for years, the Elder Scrolls company's king wizard Todd Howard has remarked in an interview with Kinda Funny, from which Alice B has already scientifically extracted some titbits about forthcoming Starfield expansion Shattered Space.

The debate on whether sticking the word ‘space’ in front of something instantly makes it better rages eternal with the heat of a thousand space-air fryers, but the yaysayers are at least victorious in the case of retro-futuristic RPG Beyond Galaxyland, in which turn-based combat is aided by your pal Boom Boom, who is a space guinea pig with a gun and a little waistcoat. I like this creature , but honestly, you could replace them with a sentient bin bag, and I’d be happy. With pixel art this vibrant and detailed, I reckon even a bulging sack of coffee ground and banana peels would be worth adventuring with. Don’t do it, though. It’s a good guinea pig.