The majority of well-known networks are running the Pixel 4 and free Chromebook deal, so it’s simply a case of going with your favourite or hunting down the best offer that’s available. You can get the phone in all three possible colours, too - that’s Just Black, Clearly White, and Oh So Orange. Of the lot, we reckon the best is this O2 deal via mobiles.co.uk. You’ll get unlimited texts, unlimited minutes and a massive 45GB of data for £35 per month with a £150 upfront fee....

This particular project is the work of YouTube channel DIY Perks, which specialises in videos about designing and building gadgets and technology at home, and begins with a tear-down of Sony’s behemoth console to figure out exactly which of its innards should stay and which can go to hit that self-imposed 2cm limit. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the majority of the PS5’s bulk comes from its steel shrouding and CPU-cooling heatsink, and with those gone DIY Perks’ target seems a little closer to reality....

Just days after announcing it was pulling the plug on first-party game development, a post on the community blog confirmed games like FIFA 21 and Judgment were on the way to the streaming service. After listing a handful of releases coming to the service in the next couple of months, the Stadia Team said in a blog post: “These games represent just a sampling of the more than 100 games that will be added to the Stadia store for our players in 2021 to share, experience, and play with friends” (thanks, Engadget)....

With that said, it seems that some users have had issues and we’re not entirely sure why, as we didn’t encounter any problems with the game during testing. Maybe the fact that we were given specific Xbox Series and PlayStation 5 review codes allowed us to side-step some of the problems others are facing - no upgrade was needed, no existing code was sat on our hard drives - but the fact is that the game just worked with no problems in the time we spent with it....

The video has a roll-call of every type of PC-specific feature you could imagine while emphasising that the PC build isn’t just a port of the Xbox version of the game. To name just a few of the features announced, there will be a minimum FPS value which the game will scale down to meet; extensive ultrawide support; triple key bindings; low-latency between mouse click and action; performance scalability from the lowest-end to the highest-end PCs; and cross-save between console and PC....

As far as Cyberpunk is confirmed, well, that point is now all moot. But it’s an interesting question, and as pretty much every big budget game employs support studios, it’s a topic well worth exploring. This month, Chris Bratt (who?) does just that in the latest video from the Patreon-funded People Make Games. In it, we hear from young developers working unpaid overtime on numerous big AAA projects, in support studios based in Malaysia and Indonesia....

Technically, mechanically and even narratively, Requiem is a massive improvement over the already impressive debut game. The mix of stealth and puzzle-solving returns, but it’s more robust and varied, offering you larger areas to carve your own path than the original. The visuals are an immense improvement with an extraordinary level of detail, phenomenal materials work and absolutely sublime lighting. Then there’s the series’ signature hoards of rats. In the original, Asobo’s engine rendered 5000 rats on-screen at once, their detail scaling down the further you go into the distance....

I’ve had a little poke around and, alright, it’s a room with some game art in it. Stills from Norco’s early-game environments, static captures of a scene of a distant, rusty skyline pocked with dead trees, another with plumes of chemical exhaust. Silhouettes of chemical plants, overpass bridges, degrading swamps. Plus a few snapshots of the rooms and places you’ll get to poke and prod more thoroughly in the game itself (as I did in my first look at the game), and a secret room I won’t spoil....

Northgard, if it’s so far managed to pass you by, is a game of exploration, resource management, and land acquisition, tasking players with establishing and expanding a thriving Viking settlement - a process that involves constructing specialist buildings, maintaining production loops, and maiming ne’er-do-wells, both humans and mythological, along the way. It’s a wonderful thing, both brutal and elegant, packed full of tough decisions and various strategic wrinkles depending on the particulars of your chosen clan....

As reported by Bloomberg, the unannounced project - internally known as Neptune and in development for three years - wasn’t a direct adaptation of the existing WoW MMO, but rather an MMORPG spin-off set in the same universe but during a different time period. However, despite the project’s already lengthy development, NetEase is now said to have disbanded its creative team - consisting of more than 100 developers - after a disagreement with Activision Blizzard “over financial terms” resulted in both parties pulling the plug....

There’s still some way to go until the deal is finalised, however; while Activision Blizzard stockholders - and, earlier in the week, board members - have now given the deal the go-ahead, it’s still subject to regulatory review around the world, by the likes of the Federal Trade Commission in the US, to determine if the deal constitutes unfair competition. Should the deal make it through regulatory review, the acquisition has until June 2023 to close, whereupon Microsoft will welcome some of the industries most recognisable franchises into its fold, including Call of Duty, Warcraft, Overwatch, and mobile hit Candy Crush....

Occasionally, during its grazing, the Kingdom uncovers a town, a tiny toe-nail clipping of huts and cooking fires, poking from the dusty mosaic tiles and cracked flagstones of the map. It sends emissaries to gather up the people of the earth and transform them into creatures of the air. Some surface-dwellers are easily won over by tales over high adventure. Others are resistant, put off by hints of dissatisfaction in the streets above....

Amnesia: Rebirth - the third game in the series, following on from Frictional’s 2010 original and the Chinese-Room-developed A Machine for Pigs - launched last year, taking players on an unsettling adventure across the Algerian desert in the 1930s. Its tale - focusing on protagonist Tasi Trianon as she traverses the hostile expanse, pulling together fragments of her past - earned much praise on release (Eurogamer reviewer Vikki Blake called it an “impressive horror subversion” and a story that “gripped me right up until the credits rolled”), and Rebirth’s new Adventure Mode aims to make it more accessible to all....

With Ash as the latest character to join the Apex Legends roster, you can expect a set of skins for her, as well as new looks for existing legends and weapons as well. This page outlines the Apex Legends Season 11 skins and all brand new weapon skins, alongside what to expect from the Escape Battle Pass’ tiers. On this page: Below you’ll find an overview of all the skins included in the Apex Legends Season 11 Escape Battle Pass:...

37-year-old Ronaldo, who for years had been one of the two best cards in the FIFA games alongside World Cup winner Lionel Messi, had already dropped three positions for the FIFA 23 top 10 with a 90-rated card. Now, after Ronaldo’s poor performance at the World Cup and his move to the Saudi Pro League, EA has knocked Ronaldo down a further peg to his lowest rating since 2007, when the forward broke through at Manchester United....

Going back to test these 2017/2018 releases, Origins and Odyssey still visually impress. Lighting is beautifully saturated, with strong volumetrics and great global illumination, while while cutscenes feature a solid depth of field that cascades into beautiful bokeh shapes, all aided by a stable temporal anti-aliasing (TAA) that gives the titles a clean, filmic quality. Even against contemporary open-world titles, there’s little to complain about - perhaps some spotty texture work in places, but that’s a minor blemish on an otherwise spotless work by the developers at Ubisoft....

Although the team said it would “love” to confirm the release date, it needed “a bit more time” but served up a single new screenshot - you can see it in the embedded tweet below; there’s a cult, body parts, and some strange symbols daubed around the place - to whet our collective appetites. It also teased that the new expansion will probably include Act 5 with some clever word play on Twitter....

That’s according to games journalist Imran Khan, who offered an insider peek at the sequel’s lengthy delay on his Patreon, reflecting on why those open world rumours seemingly didn’t amount to anything in the end. “At one point in development, Bayonetta 3 was scoped as a semi-open world game,” Khan wrote on a public Patreon post. “The design was going to draw more off Astral Chain than Nier Automata, but the idea was that a large hub world would send Bayonetta (or whoever else) to different worlds which would themselves be fairly open....

Each recommendation here is suitable for use with laptops and desktop PCs, and both the mid-range and high-end picks also include Bluetooth and optical inputs to work with games consoles, smartphones and tablets too. We’ve also included a single soundbar recommendation, and may look to expand this category in future. For the purposes of this article, a budget speaker is under £50/$50, a mid-range speaker is around £100/$100 and a high-end speaker is sub-£250/$250....

This week, Levine appeared on a fresh podcast to discuss his career and ongoing work at Ghost Story Games - Levine’s current studio which was focus of a critical report earlier in the month. In that earlier report, published by Bloomberg, former colleagues of Levine described the studio head as a “perfectionist” who had scrapped vast amounts of work, leading to staff having nothing to show for years of their lives, and causing many to leave....