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Developer Hopoo Games' enormously well-received rogue-like co-op shooter sequel, Risk of Rain 2, will be leaving Steam early access and launching in its Version 1.0 guise this August.

Autonauts, developer Denki's automation-focussed colony management sim (complete with cute robots), has now entered the Age of Enlightenment, with this latest free update bringing the game's existing post-launch content roadmapto a close.

Developer Twice Circled's enormously enjoyable aquarium management tycoon game, Megaquarium, is dipping its toe into new waters next month with the arrival of its first paid expansion - titled Freshwater Frenzy - which comes to PC on 4th June.

Microsoft Solitaire, probably the game responsible for more lost productivity than any other, is celebrating its thirtieth birthday today.

It all seems to be happening in the world of Call of Duty, as after players managed to burst into Warzone's bunkers for the first time (and found a nuke amongst other things), we've now got the first real teaser for Modern Warfare season four - and it looks like it'll feature a very familiar face.

Five of the Best is a weekly series about the small details we rush past when we're playing but which shape a game in our memory for years to come. Details like the way a character jumps or the title screen you load into, or the potions you use and maps you refer back to. We've talked about so many in our Five of the Best series so far. But there are always more.

It was never meant to take as long as it did. As far as the GoldenEye team were concerned, Perfect Dark should have come out a year or two after their seminal console first-person shooter, a quick-fire follow-up to one of the greatest games ever made. But it wasn't long before trouble knocked on the door of Rare's countryside farmhouse in Twycross. First, Martin Hollis, the genius programmer who led the GoldenEye team to stardom on the Nintendo 64, left the company at which he had become a legend. His acrimonious exit set off a chain reaction that led to the Free Radicals - Dr. David Doak, Karl Hilton, Steve Ellis and Graeme Norgate - walking out soon after to form their own studio. Those who remained were left to pick up the pieces. Struggling to cram a game bursting at the seams with ambition into the Nintendo 64's tiny memory limit, the developers of Perfect Dark achieved what once looked impossible: the highest-rated Rare game of all time.

Video games are so complex and rich and filled with promise that they can sometimes seem a bit daunting. If you're anything like me, you probably have a few genres you stick with and a few games that you return to often. Staying close to your favourites can be very comforting. It can be nice to become a sort of expert at something.

Hello and welcome to the first of our Clash of Fans write-ups. This week we'll be getting together in pairs (virtually) and forcing each other to play a beloved game. Then we'll chat about what we made of it all. First up is Spintires and Thronebreaker!

Hello and welcome to the second of our Clash of Fans write-ups. This week we'll be getting together in pairs (virtually) and forcing each other to play a beloved game. Then we'll chat about what we made of it all. Next up is Old School RuneScape and Shenmue!

Hello and welcome to the third of our Clash of Fans write-ups. This week we'll be getting together in pairs (virtually) and forcing each other to play a beloved game. Then we'll chat about what we made of it all. Next up is World of Warcraft and Apex Legends!

Hello and welcome to the fourth of our Clash of Fans write-ups. This week we'll be getting together in pairs (virtually) and forcing each other to play a beloved game. Then we'll chat about what we made of it all.

This week we've been running a series called Clash of Fans. The idea is that we'd pair up - virtually of course, please stay at home if you can - and we'd trade our favourite games. Everyone would have to play a game someone else loves and everyone would get to make someone else play a game they love. And then we'd get back together and exchange notes.

Hello and welcome to the fifth and final write-up in our Clash of Fans series. This week we have been getting together in pairs (virtually) and forcing each other to play a beloved game. Then we chat about what we made of it all.

When you think of the highest-level Fortnite player in the world, chances are you'd imagine one of the best players in competitive Fortnite. Perhaps even a streamer, or one of the dedicated players currently leading the pack for most wins in the game.

You've got to give credit where it's due - against all expectations, the new remaster of Saints Row The Third isn't just good, it's very special indeed. After the disappointment of the Switch conversion, PlayStation 4, PC and Xbox One users get the deluxe treatment: there's carefully updated, more detail-rich artwork, a totally revamped lighting model, a switch to physically-based rendering, temporal anti-aliasing/upscaling and a profound improvement in performance. If you're gaming on Xbox One X, much of the game can even play out at 60 frames per second. Short of a full-on Bluepoint-style remake, you aren't going to get much better than this.

Nvidia reveals today that it has created a neural network that fully simulates the classic Pac-Man on the event of the Namco coin-op's 40th anniversary. On the face of it, this might not sound like a big deal - Pac-Man is a relatively straightforward game that takes place in a simplistic, static environment, so using an AI to study its rules and perfectly replicate its game logic doesn't sound outlandishly complex. Except that isn't what's happening. There is no engine here, no game logic and no traditional rasteriser used in the AI recreation of the game. Instead, everything generated at a per-pixel level is coming directly from the neural network, based on what it 'knows' about how Pac-Man works. This rendition of Pac-Man essentially plays out as an AI 'thinks' it should - and remarkably, it works.

Pokémon Go will take its servers offline and be unplayable for seven hours on Monday, 1st June. It'll be like 2016 all over again!

UPDATE 22/5/20: Fortnite's Tenet trailer reveal included the additional tibdbit that the game will host a full length showing of a Nolan movie later in the summer.

I suspect everyone has a game like Ghost Recon: Shadow Wars. A game that didn't launch to much fanfare, and perhaps wasn't even bought with particularly high expectations. Even so, a game that has stubbornly stuck around, being played and replayed, until the whole thing is pebble-smooth with the force of sheer repetition and fondness.

After two long years, Intel's 10th-generation Comet Lake processors have arrived. These are the first desktop CPUs that Team Blue has released since AMD's immensely popular third-gen Ryzen chips launched in 2019 - and it's clear to see that Intel isn't taking this unprecedented threat lightly. There are spec bumps and new features across the entire Core lineup, plus a new Z490 motherboard platform, making this one of the most interesting Intel launches in recent memory.

It might be a little late out of the gate due to coronavirus-related complications, but Marvel's Iron Man VR is finally almost here; and for those itching to take a test flight ahead of its PS4/PSVR release on 3rd July, a demo is now available on the PlayStation Store.

There's some rootin' toontin' first-person shootin' in-store for Borderlands 3 next month, when the game's newly revealed third chunk of story DLC - the Wild-West-themed Bounty of Blood: A Fistful of Redemption - heads to Xbox One, PS4, and PC on 25th June.

Surprise! Or maybe not, as it turns out those rumours were true: Civilization 6 is the latest free game on the Epic Games Store, hot on the heels of GTA 5.

UPDATE 21/5/20: Microsoft has now dated Sea of Thieves' Steam release for 3rd June. As previously announced, below, it'll include full crossplay with both Windows 10 and Xbox One editions of the game.

Even though it's not yet fully available to the masses, Riot's tactical shooter Valorant has been making plenty of headlines since the closed beta launched in April. And soon you'll be able to see what all the fuss is about, as the game launches in full on 2nd June, free for all on PC.

If the recent crashing of the Epic Games Store wasn't enough to convince you of the ridiculous popularity of this nearly seven year-old game, maybe the latest sales figures will, as Take-Two has announced GTA 5 has now shifted 130m copies worldwide.

UPDATE 1.30pm UK: G2A has forwarded the following statement intended to show clearer contrition than in the blog post it published last night. It does not include the words apology or sorry.

Think of an action RPG like Diablo and then envisage it turn-based. The enemies and every other character won't move until you do. Stand still if you want a breather and to think. And you will need to think because Stoneshard is brutal. It might look like a child-friendly SNES game but in reality it's, well, as friendly as most SNES games actually were. Even in what ought to be beginner battles, you'll be killed, and as you only get one life, this can be a bit of a bummer. (You can reload when you die but you have no manual control over saves.)

Anti-cheat software has been a particularly prickly issue of late, and the latest kerfuffle over the introduction of Denuvo Anti-Cheat to Doom Eternal has been no exception. After Update One rolled out on 15th May, fans expressed unhappiness that Denuvo's Anti-Cheat software (not the same as Anti-Tamper) was being implemented on the PC version as part of the patch. In particular, concerns were raised that Denuvo's software was too intrusive, as it uses a kernel-level driver - while some players attributed performance issues to the addition of the anti-cheat software. And, of course, this was all being added after many players had already purchased the game, with no ability to opt-out.