Matt Clarius

I have spent most of the last week doing little else but play Obsidian’s Pillars Of Eternity [official site]. But I cannot yet tell you wot I think, as such brainthoughtss are under embargo. I can, however, stream or “let’s play” the first fifteen hours of the game. But I’m not going to do that, because it would be the most awful shame for you to have such things spoiled.

Instead I’ve videoed and chatted over the first half hour, from the character creator to the opening scenes, stopping right before the plot kicks in. Because you don’t want to know the story before you play an RPG, because you’re not a complete clot.

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I can't get Hotline Miami 2 out of my head.

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We knew that Ridley Scott wasn't planning on directing the sequel to his 1982 masterpiece Blade Runner, and now it's official. According to The Hollywood Reporter and Variety, Denis Villeneuve is in talks to direct Harrison Ford in the new film. If you don't know Villeneuve's name, you should: he's the filmmaker behind both Prisoners and Enemy, two films from 2013 that demonstrated a keen ability to generate tension, not to mention eliciting incredibly strong performances from his actors.

The as-of-yet untitled sequel to Blade Runner is said to take place several decades after Rick Deckard and Roy Batty battled it out in the original film, and while Scott won't be directing his presence should be felt. He's producing the film and came...

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Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number is coming to PC and PlayStation platforms on March 10, developer Dennaton Games and publisher Devolver Digital confirmed today. The ultra-violent top-down shooter is also getting a promotional tie-in with another shooter, Overkill's Payday 2; owners of both games on PC will get special Hotline Miami-themed masks and jackets to wear in Payday 2.

Overkill and Dennaton previously collaborated on a Hotline Miami expansion pack for Payday 2, which was released in 2014. Their collaboration for Hotline Miami 2 includes a varsity jacket skin, chicken mask, bloody hammer and Mark 10 SMG skin, as well as a batch of masks — swan, cobra, bloody tiger, biker and zebra.

Hotline Miami 2 will be released for Linux, Mac,...

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Hello youse. With XCOM being a game that is significant in the history of PC gaming, I thought I would do something a bit different with my coverage of XCOM: The Board Game on Rock, Paper, Shotgun. Often, when a board game supports solitaire play, I’m asked how well the single-player aspect works. And I’m often unable to answer, because I rarely play board games alone. But with XCOM, I thought I would make an effort. The PC game series is a real single-player, one-mind-against-the-machine experience. How does the board game stack up?

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Though they're certainly not inviting, spike-filled pits and knee-high spiders aren't the leading cause of death in Darkest Dungeon. What's going to kill your four-hero party in this dungeon-crawling RPG — and kill them often, without mercy — is stress. See too much gnarly stuff when you're below ground, or take too many big hits, and your stress levels will rise, sending you into wholly uncooperative states. Like Paranoia, which causes you to tell your teammates about their imminent doom. Or Selfishness, where you sneak into the rear of your party, formation strategies be damned.

Check out the Overview above to see Darkest Dungeon, which is out now on Steam Early Access, in action. Things don't go well! Don't do what we did.

PlayStation Plus members will get access to six games as part of their monthly subscription in February, including Supergiant Games' Transistor, Sega's Yakuza 4 and Cellar Door Games' Rogue Legacy, across PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4 and Vita.

Alien Trap Games' Apotheon, a side-scrolling combat adventure with with an ancient Greek pottery aesthetic, will debut on PS4 next month as a PS Plus game.

Here's the full lineup for PS Plus in February:

• Transistor (PS4)
• Apotheon (PS4)
• Yakuza 4 (PS3)
• Thief (PS3)
• Rogue Legacy (Vita, PS4, PS3)
• Kick & Fennick (Vita)

February's PlayStation Plus games will be available to download free for subscribers on Tuesday, Feb. 3. Members currently have access to Infamous: First Light, The Swapper, P...

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Turtle Rock's four-versus-one multiplayer game Evolve will get a slew of downloadable content this spring, including two new playable monsters and a total of six new Hunters spread across the game's pre-order incentives, a season pass and a pair of digital special editions.

Publisher 2K Games and Turtle Rock unveiled the game's fourth playable monster, the Behemoth, in a new teaser trailer today. The Behemoth will be available via pre-orders of Evolve on Xbox One or through the Digital Deluxe Edition, which costs $79.99 and is available for PlayStation 4, Windows PC and Xbox One. The game's Behemoth can also be purchased individually for $14.99.

Four additional Hunters will be made available through the game's season pass, which costs...

The January haul for PlayStation Plus members includes Infamous: Second Son stand-alone expansion Infamous: First Light, as well as The Swapper, Prototype 2 and more, Sony announced today on the PlayStation Blog.

First Light is available on PlayStation 4, while players can pick up puzzle game The Swapper on PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4 or PlayStation Vita. PlayStation 3 owners can nab action-adventure game Prototype 2 and platformer DuckTales Remastered.

Duke Nukem 3D Megaton Edition is available on PlayStation 3 and PS Vita. PS Plus members will get Whoa Dave!, a new game from the creators of the Bit.Trip series, on PS Vita; the PS4 version is expected to release at a later date.

The aforementioned titles will be available Jan. 6....

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Valve just kicked off its annual Steam Holiday Sale, with discounts galore on games across the Steam Store.

The sale follows Valve's three-day Steam Holiday Auction, in which Steam users could bid on games with Steam Community items such as trading cards, backgrounds and emoticons. It will run until 10 a.m. PT on Jan. 2, 2015. New deals will appear every 12 hours.

Valve ran the Steam Exploration Sale around Black Friday, and offered discounts earlier this month on titles nominated for The Game Awards. You can check out the holiday discounts on the Steam Store.

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A sequel to Blade Runner has been in the works for a few years now, but it appears that Ridley Scott no longer plans to direct it. In comments to Variety, Scott is reported to have said that he will be producing, but not directing, the sequel to Blade Runner, unlike what's been planned up until now. The change of course is likely due to the full plate of films that Scott has been lining up. In addition to the Blade Runner sequel, he was also working on a Prometheus sequel and an adaptation of the novel The Martian.

Scott says that the new Blade Runner should start filming within the next year, according to Variety. He also gave some of the first details on what the movie will be about. Scott reportedly says that Harrison Ford has signed...

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When consumers think of Google's Nexus devices, they think about the promise of receiving the latest updates for Android essentially as soon as they release. They also think about the value proposition that Nexus devices provide by giving good hardware at a price significantly lower than other smartphones. However, this was not always the case. The Nexus One, Nexus S, and Galaxy Nexus were all priced at the same level as other flagship smartphones. It was only with the launch of the Nexus 7 at $199 that we began to see a trend of inexpensive but still high quality devices coming from Google. That hasn't changed at all in the past few weeks. The Nexus 5 and Nexus 7 are both still available, and they still provide a very high quality experience, arguably better than some other smartphones that are both newer and more expensive. But Google's newest devices take aim directly at other flagship devices with both their specs and their prices. At $399 the Nexus 9 positions itself against Apple's iPad Mini 3, while the Nexus 6 at $649 goes up against essentially every other flagship smartphone. Read on for our full review of Google's Nexus 6.

XCOM: Enemy Within goes mobile on Thursday, delivering a home gaming experience to smartphones and tablets for $12.99.

Following in the footsteps of the mobile port of Enemy Unknown, XCOM: Enemy Within is a perfect experience for touch devices. Having spent about a week with the game, I'm surprised at how well the port plays on an iPhone 6 Plus. And this time around, the XCOM mobile port arrives with multiplayer support out of the gate. You can watch my terrible XCOM antics on the iPhone 6 Plus in the video above.

XCOM: Enemy Unknown for Mobile proved that turn-based strategy games are a natural fit for touch interfaces," said Ananda Gupta, lead designer at Firaxis Games. "In XCOM: Enemy Within, players can return to the XCOM universe,...

The vibrant cities of the French Revolution are one of the few bright spots in an uninspired Assassin's Creed entry.

If you’re still in need of a graphical justification for the horsepower in the latest generation of consoles, it's in the first hour of Assassin's Creed: Unity. Arno Dorian, soon to be the latest in a line of assassins stretching back to the crusades (or at least 2007), is first introduced as a young man in what could be mistaken for a high budget, interactive French period drama. He needles the local thugs with crisp, airy quips through perfect lips. His nearly uncanny smile and facial animation sell his charisma a hundred times better than voice acting alone ever could.

It's all such a waste, really.

After those first 60 minutes, the assassinating begins. Arno is still there, plus two dead father figures, minus the smile. He's traded in his ability to banter for a jump cut and a hoodie. For the next 15 hours, I was left wondering what happened to all that energy and personality Unity led with. Perhaps I missed some context for why I ought to continue caring about this suddenly grim Parisian.

Assassin's Creed games have always lived and died on the strength of their leads. The overarching, sci-fi plot jumped the shark a long time ago—something the developer itself recognized and adapted to in last year's game. That leaves the leading men (and leading woman Aveline from the under-discussed Assassin's Creed: Liberation) to hold a player's attention.

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Microsoft may be working on something related to the beloved Battletoads franchise — the company filed an application with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office last week, and now holds the Battletoads trademark.

The trademark application, which was discovered this afternoon by a user on NeoGAF, was filed Nov. 5. Microsoft's trademark for Battletoads applies to "game software" and "entertainment services, namely, providing online video games."

Reached for comment, a representative for Microsoft provided Polygon with the following statement: "Microsoft often acquires various trademarks as part of its ongoing business strategy, but beyond that we have no comment."

The Battletoads series kicked off in 1991 on the Nintendo Entertainment...

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Every Sunday, we reach deep into Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s 141-year history to pull out one of the best moments from the archive. This week, Adam’s celebration of videogame cartography, from cloth maps to digital records of procedural worlds. This article was first published in 2011.

Some of my earliest memories of gaming are not of the games themselves but of the things that came bundled in the box with them. Whether it was a hefty manual, full of lore and encyclopaedic listings, or a little extra something. My games don’t even come in boxes anymore. Recently, I’ve been thinking about the shelves in the house where I grew up, full of big cardboard slabs with none of this DVD case finery. I’ve been remembering the excitement of opening the box on the bus, surreptitiously because my parents always thought I’d lose the manual or disks before we reached home. And I’ve been thinking about what else I sometimes found inside.

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Blizzard Entertainment announced a new title at BlizzCon today, Overwatch, a team-based multiplayer shooter and the developer's first new property in years, that focuses on an international team of soldiers — humans, humanoids and what appear to be mechs. And cyber-gorillas.

In a pre-rendered video, Blizzard showed Overwatch's characters and action, including stealth-snipers, gorillas wearing armor and masked mercenaries engaging in firefights. Overwatch appears to be heavily focused on action and gunplay, with characters teleporting mid-gunfight and others using grappling guns to move quickly through a clean futuristic environment.

Blizzard's Chris Metzen says Overwatch — which is a game, he confirmed — is coming "sooner than you...

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The dirty, crushed and crumpled Atari 2600 cartridges that sat buried in a New Mexico landfill for more than 30 years are now up for auction on eBay, and some of those unearthed treasures are going for hundreds of dollars.

The city of Alamogordo, New Mexico — where thousands of Atari items were dumped and buried in 1983 — is now selling copies of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Asteroids, Defender and other classic games via the Tularosa Basin Historical Society on eBay. About 100 cartridges, some still in the box, are up for auction with starting bids of $50. Boxed copies of E.T. are commanding the highest bids, upward of $405 as of this writing.

The exhumed Atari cartridges come with a numbered certificate of authenticity from the city...

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Have You Played? is an endless stream of game recommendations. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.

It feels like stepping into Ridley Scott’s film. Sets and touchstones are lovingly recreated. Machinery clicks, beeps, and wheezes exactly as you’d expect. The atmosphere is malevolent, and you’re quickly in over your head. But wait, I say as if the headline and screenshot haven’t made this abundantly clear, I’m talking about Blade Runner, not Alien: Isolation. Westwood’s 1997 adventure game is a bit of a mess, but it’s a special one.

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Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare developer Sledgehammer Games has the unappealing responsibility of cleaning up someone else's mess.

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Liverpool artist Boneface grew up absorbing 1990s pop culture like video games and comics, and in a lot of ways, little has changed since then. "I used to draw superheroes and video game characters and monsters and crap back then," he says. "I just get paid to do it now."

His vibrant, violent illustrations include everything from beaten down superheroes to badass bikers that look ripped out of the best anime never made. Many of his pieces feature original creations, but he also tackles...

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To celebrate National Cat Day, a thing I did not know existed until I began this post, Marvel published a few illustrations of cats dressed as its popular superheroes. The images are available on the company's Facebook page. The Thor illustration, shown above, and the Spider-Man art, post below, stand out because they most capture that je ne sais quois of a cat's inner catness.

Be sure to see the other images on the Marvel Facebook page, and celebrate National Cat Day with my favorite Birthday Cat video, pasted onto the bottom of this page.

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Last week backers of the Wasteland 2 Kickstarter finally began receiving their physical rewards, including a limited edition cloth map.

In the fiction of Wasteland 2, it's approximately 100 years since an apocalyptic nuclear event killed off much of humanity. The game takes place in Arizona, where a group known as the Desert Rangers works to protect the innocent from violent clans of bandits, robotic killing machines and the beasts that live in between.

The cloth map is based on an old, faded map of Arizona. In the lower left is a Desert Ranger badge and the name Joshua, presumably the ranger who owned this map previously. It's stained with dirt and blood and the whole thing looks like it's been in a soldier's pocket for a...

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One of the longest running gaming franchises around, the Civilization series goes all the way back to my high school years. There have been many changes along the way, but the core turn-based strategy gameplay remains. With this latest release, Civilization once again heads beyond the confines of our planet. What sort of hardware does it require to run the game, and does this fifth Mantle enabled title add anything new to the mix? That's what we're here to find out.

Two and a half years after we were delighted by Legend Of Grimrock, developers Almost Human return with a sequel – Legend Of Grimrock 2 – that aims to expand on the original, go outdoors as well as in, and remind us it’s hip to be a square (-moving person). Have they managed it? (Hint: OH GOOD HEAVENS YES.) Here’s wot I think:

Legend Of Grimrock 2 is bigger, deeper and more wonderful than I could ever have expected. I absolutely loved the original, its descending dungeons of tile-based first-person RPG not just reminiscent of Dungeon Master, but as good as it. Grimrock 2, I say without hesitation, is better.

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