Nis America - gamebastion.com

As much as I love throwing myself into the depths of ravines on a desperate hunt for diamonds, or trekking to the Nether and immediately plunging into lava, sometimes I think Minecraft needs to chill out a bit. There are only so many times a creeper can blow up your house before you go into your settings, switch from hard to peaceful, and start a new life as a surface-level farmer. Yes, I might be projecting, but there's a limit to how often I can lose my inventory before I lose my mind. 

We're still getting our heads around Intel's latest Arrow Lake desktop CPUs (actually you could say, so is Intel). But here comes news of its successor, namely Nova Lake.

Continuing the development of Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, director Hideo Kojima announced through a post on social media platform X that actor Shioli Kutsuna has wrapped up her part of the filming, scanning and acting required for the upcoming game.

As promised, S-Game has released a new gameplay trailer for Phantom Blade Zero, showcasing extensive uncut footage of a boss fight. Known as the Chief Disciple of the Seven Stars, it’s a fight against a chief puppet and his cronies. Check it out below.

Each year, the Game Developers Conference (GDC) release the results of their State Of The Game Industry Survey, which collects responses from over 3000 developers. The 13th annual survey - which you can find in full here - queries respondents on topics including layoffs, generative AI, the live service boom, and funding. As is the nature of our times, it's a big grim salad with a few bright crouton sprinklings. From the report's introduction, which does not mention croutons even once:

Halo has a history of embracing wacky game modes, and Halo Infinite players are seeing that tradition continue this week with a new playlist of game modes. "Action Sack" is a returning playlist for the series. It first appeared in Halo 3 as a rotating set of modes that would see you quickly cycling through various deadly minigames, from chaotic rockets-only nukefests to panicky punch-ups with ammoless pistols. This time, the playlist includes a familiar geometric hazard that has seen the death of many a bean: the "hex-a-gone" level from Fall Guys.

In the UK, May has hitherto been a month of innocent delight and sacred observance, with no less than two bank holidays. On May Day - a festival of ancient origins that shares a date with International Workers' Day - the youths of the village garb themselves in daisies, erect huge candy-striped maypoles, and dance around them in an effort to get all entangled and possibly end up kissing. NO MORE. For May is now the month of DOOM. It marks the coming of a new Dark Age.

"Your grace, the act of assigning blame is often as satisfying as resolving the issue itself," opens brilliant little browser strategy Vox Regis by Sheepolution. From your tower, you gaze down at four factions, each with their own members and complaints. If any one faction gets too large, they'll rebel against you. Luckily, you're very good at speeches, which you can use to blame all the realm's ills on other people. "It was the lion faction! They raised taxes!" you shout and point with one hand, holding a big bag emblazoned "taxes I done stole from the people" with the other. It worked! Now, the members from the other factions that are personally annoyed about taxes will come cull the lion faction down to a more manageable size. Bloody love a bit of politics, me!

The 14th annual New York Game Awards took place last night, with Astro Bot taking home Game of the Year.