Mac News, Tips, Tricks & Ideas

No Rest For The Wicked, the top-down soulslike that released yesterday in Steam early access, is already seeing its fair share of performance and QOL issues, including instability, lack of keybinding options, and players losing their progress. In response, developer Moon Studios have put out a blog saying that, yes, they’re aware of the problems and, yes, they’re actively looking to address the most common hiccups.

An artist has drawn the characters of Stardew Valley in the world of Fallout, providing a glimpse of how Pelican Town's citizens would fare in the post-apocalyptic Wasteland. Both franchises are incredibly popular among gamers.

EA has announced the EA Sports FC 24 Team of the Season for the Premier League and Women’s Super League.

Players of The Elder Scrolls Online who were temporarily locked out of their accounts due to server issues will receive compensation in the form of in-game items, developer ZeniMax Online Studios revealed as it outlined how it will deal with the incident. The Bethesda Softworks-published MMORPG recently celebrated its 10th anniversary.

Next week’s free Epic Games Store title has seemingly been revealed ahead of its official announcement.

‘s next major update is here, allowing players to befriend Daisy Duck and adding a ton of new items and activities into the game.

Royale-battler Fortnite will soon allow players to hide a handful of emotes the developers concede are "sometimes used in confrontational ways". This includes the emote reported as the most-used in Fortnite's seven-year history. That's either a worrying indictment of the game's players, or a (more?) worrying indictment of universal human psychology. What is the offending animation? Well, turns out people don't like being laughed at.

Darkest Dungeon 2, the sequel to developer Red Hook Studios' acclaimed Lovecraftian roguelike RPG, is launching for PlayStation 5 and PS4 on 15th July.

Warhorse have revealed Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, sequel to the 2018 open world action-RPG which you will likely remember for a couple of reasons: 1) its ostensibly faithful but inevitably skewed representations of race, gender and class in medieval Bohemia, which were amplified by its creative director Daniel Vávra's qualified endorsement of Gamergate, and 2) being a moderately entertaining, buggy and mucky chivalric fable in which you have to worry about keeping your sword sharp and eating food before it rots.

Warhorse Studios has announced Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, a sequel to its medieval dungeons-and-no-dragons action RPG.

The Anniversary Edition of Braid was originally announced almost four years ago, and originally meant to be out sometime in 2021. As such, the latest delay to Jonathan Blow’s time-rewinding puzzle-platformer - which sees its date pushed back two weeks into the middle of next month - feels like a relative drop in the hourglass.

Sonic Dream Team's Content Update 2, or Version 1.3, has introduced a host of new content to the game, including a new zone. The last big content drop for the title was released in February.

World of Warcraft will, in its 20th year of operation, implement an arachnophobia mode. It's been developed for the new War Within expansion, which heavily features the spider-like Nerubian race, but it won't be exclusive to it.

Braid: Anniversary Edition (or Braid, Anniversary Edition as it's officially styled) has been delayed by two weeks. The remake is now set to launch for PlayStation, Switch, and PC on 15th May, with Xbox Series X/S and Xbox One versions arriving a day later, on 16th May.

In the autumn of last year, Holly Longdale, the executive producer and vice president of World of Warcraft, made headlines by saying the team talks about putting WoW on console «all the time». It's a question the company has been asked repeatedly over the game's near 20-year lifetime, and it's an answer we've heard before, but it gained new momentum in light of Microsoft's recently completed acquisition of Activision Blizzard. When better to bring the game to Xbox than now?

I briefly posted about this in The Maw, but was unsure at that point if SteamWorld Heist 2 was coming to PC day and date with the launch on Switch. That date is August 8th, by the way, and the answer is: yes it is! Though it was revealed at Nintendo's Indie World Showcase earlier this afternoon, strategy action-adventure-with-robots sequel SteamWorld Heist 2 isn't a timed platform exclusive, so that's fun!

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles games have come in many different shapes and sizes over the years, leaving no genre untouched. Last year, we got a roguelike in the form of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Splintered Fate, which released in May for Apple Arcade. Soon, the game will be making the jump to Nintendo Switch.

According to a new survey by the Game Developer Collective, 70 percent of developers have concerns about the sustainability of live service games.

Another The Sims 4 update reached the PC and console versions of the game on April 16. The new build is primarily geared toward polishing the hit life sim and packs nearly two dozen changes that resolve some annoying The Sims 4 bugs and other issues.

World of Warcraft is setting a whole new story arc in motion with its next expansion, The War Within. If you can’t quite wait until this summer to see what the first chapter of the new Worldsoul Saga trilogy has to offer, you might not have to wait so long. Blizzard are running a beta for War Within that will give testers the chance to delve into the subterranean addition early - and sign-ups are now open.

If you've been itching to dive into World of Warcraft's new subterranean expansion The War Within, there's an opportunity to do so ahead of release, with beta testing sign-ups now open.

Need anything from the shop? Mushroom milk? Fresh tarts? Mystical bejewelled skull? I'm just popping out to Dépanneur Nocturne, a lovely little game which came out in 2020 and I kept forgetting to post about. It's a small first-person explore-o-chatter set within a corner shop in a magical, mystical Montreal, full of things to admire, find, poke at, and chat about with the owner. And it'll only cost you about as much as a pint of semi-skimmed and loaf of Kingsmill from your own local shop.

User-generated content, or UGC, has been a continued source of discussion recently, particularly when it involves minors doing the creating and, in some cases, earning off the back of it.

Back in September of 2023, the European Union officially designated Apple a «gatekeeper» under the Digital Markets Act (DMA), stipulating that it must open its App Store on iOS in a number of ways, including adding the ability to «side-load» apps from the web rather than the store, to have other storefronts available, and more.

When I was a wee lad, my grandfather, an avid gardener, walked with me down to the end of his immaculately tended botanical kingdom, and bid I look upon his favourite flowers, bright blooms of Geraniums. He was a humble man, but even he could not disguise his pride at how wonderfully full and rich their colours and forms had come in this year. “Does the fragile beauty of these blooms not fill you with tender hope for the future?” he asked. “No, Grandad,” I replied, “these flowers are mid.”

The BAFTA Games Awards 2024 winners have been revealed, with this year's big victor — perhaps unsurprisingly — being Larian Studios' hugely acclaimed Baldur's Gate 3.

There's good news if you've been awaiting the next Sims 4 DLC announcement to reassure yourself of the continuing passage of time; EA has revealed two new Kit packs — Urban Homage and Party Essentials — are launching next Thursday, 18th April.

Poncle has announced plans to release Vampire Survivors for PlayStation consoles, as well as new Contra-themed DLC for the game.

Mega Crit has announced a sequel to its popular roguelike deck-building game Slay the Spire.

Today is Tuesday, statistically the day of the week least rife with wacky hijinks, whimsical calamity, or even, dare I say, madcap antics. However, if you want to buck tradition, you could do worse than playing What the Car?, the upcoming absurdist physics game from What the Golf? and What the Bat? devs Triband. You can do it right now, actually. It’s just gotten a free demo on Steam, alongside a proper release date of September 5th 2024. Don’t do it if you’re actually driving, though. That’d be lunacy. We only promote the fun kind of lunacy here, like the type shown off in What the Car?’s trailer at the Triple-i initiative.

World of Warcraft Classic is steadily embarking on its time-travelling trip through WoW of old. The next stop is apocalyptic 2010 expansion Cataclysm, which we now know is due to, uh, re-shatter Azeroth at the end of next month.

Sony has announced the game catalogue additions for PlayStation Plus this April for Extra and Premium subscribers.

Fortnite fans are upset over the game's removal of cosmetic item rarities, which graded the game's vast vault of character skins, pickaxes, back blings and so forth with various different 'quality' levels.

Blizzard games are set to return to China, thanks to a new agreement with publisher NetEase.

World of Warcraft Classic, the nostalgia-tweaking old-school version of Blizzard's long-running MMORPG, is set to move into the next era of history next month, with World of Warcraft Cataclysm Classic now confirmed to be launching on 20th May.

Paradox have a reputation for updating their games in perpetuity, with both free patches and DLC, even if players would rather they stopped. Star Trek Infinite is bucking that trend, it seems.

Balatro, the acclaimed poker-themed roguelike from developer LocalThunk, has just received its first big content update — officially known as Update 1.0.1c — with the patch currently in Steam public testing ahead of a full release «in about a week».

As World Of Warcraft Classic - an MMORPG that is, confusingly, a new version of the old version of World Of Warcraft - enters phase 3 of its Season Of Discovery, PCGamer has an interview with some of the devs where they talk about the decision to not run Player Test Realms - servers where they roll out the new content to smaller numbers of players to road test it. This means that when they launch new stuff for Seasons Of Discovery it'll probably break more often, but it means players get to discover brand new things together. Which is great! And the developers think it's good too.

Vlambeer, developers of Nuclear Throne, Luftrausers and Super Crate Box, among others, called it quits back in 2020, so that co-founders Jan Willem Nijman and Rami Ismail could work separately on other projects.

Four years after Nuclear Throne and Ridiculous Fishing developer Vlambeer announced it was shutting its doors, the highly regarded indie studio is back in the news, with co-founder Jan Willem Nijman now its full owner following Rami Ismail's decision to sell his shares.

The PC and console market grew by 2.6% to $93.5 billion in revenue last year, according to a new report by video games date company Newzoo (cheers, Kotaku!) That’s good, right? Growth is universally a good thing, otherwise all those nice, dead-eyed men in suits wouldn’t keep saying it was. You can’t just lie about growth, that’s a business crime. However, here’s some slightly more worrying news, depending on how much you value new ideas: Of all the game time that gamers spent gaming in quantifiable Big Year for Gaming 2023, just 20% of that time was gamed on games other than the 66 specific games mentioned in the report.

Games that are at least six years accounted for more than 60 percent of playtime in 2023, a new report suggests.

The Elder Scrolls Online is the elephant in the room where discussions of The Elder Scrolls 6 are concerned, though calling it an elephant is obviously missing the opportunity for a banger lore joke – “dragon”, perhaps, or even “Numidium”? Launched back in 2014 after seven years in development, ESO's hybrid of deceptively single-player-ish Elder Scrolls presentation with MMO fixtures attracted a lukewarm response, initially. “At its best The Elder Scrolls Online looks like a faithful addition to the lore,” intoned Brendy in our own launch impressions. “At its worst it is a derivative and uninventive anachronism.”

Tales of Kenzera: Zau is coming to Sony's PlayStation Plus subscription on day one of its release.

Tales of Kenzera: Zau is coming to PlayStation Plus Game Catalogue on the day of its release.

Dave the Diver will be coming to PS5 and PS4 later this month, and will be added to the PlayStation Plus Game Catalogue on the same day.

I still think of Rain World as the beautiful, brutally hard game about accidentally going down tunnels butt-first and being crushed to death by weather, but it's grown and expanded a lot since its release almost seven years ago. It's about to grow again with a new DLC: The Watcher.

April 12 is going to be a big day for players of Diablo 3, as the critically acclaimed hack and slash is set to receive a new update on that day. Blizzard Entertainment's third mainline entry in its beloved series of action RPGs was released over a decade ago, but the title still continues to receive new content and tweaks even after the launch of its successor, Diablo 4, last year.

The Sims 4 will soon be giving away its Blooming Rooms Kit, Electronic Arts has revealed. But unlike some of the most recent The Sims 4 freebies, this one may not be available across all platforms.

A cavalcade of indie talent — including the studios behind Dead Cells, Darkest Dungeon, Vampire Survivors, Deep Rock Galactic, and Slay the Spire — has joined forces to launch a new 45-minute «no-nonsense» indie games showcase that's set to air on 10th April this year.

Embracer has entered an agreement to sell Gearbox Interactive to Take-Two for $460m.

Fallen London and Sunless Skies developers Failbetter Games have blogged about the dark art of running a sustainable business, while sharing a tiny bit more about their next, unannounced game. Said game is apparently a change of genre from Failbetter's previous, exceedingly narrative-driven open world titles and free-to-play RPGs. It'll also be a little less oppressive, aiming for a feeling of "fireside menace" - that is, "an awareness of the world's dangers, but also warmth and comfort", which certainly feels like an appropriate mood for a time of mass layoffs and game cancellations, to say nothing of recent conspiracy-fuelled harassment campaigns.

Lego Fortnite's latest update lets players construct their own vehicles. The Mechanical Mayhem update, out now, adds three vehicle builds, and new items which let players craft their own custom designs. It's the second major update to the blocky survival game since its launch last year.

Lego Fortnite gets its second major update today, with the arrival of vehicles to build and drive around.

Fortnite, one of the biggest third-person shooters in, well, ever, could be about to become one of the biggest first-person shooters ever. Epic have revealed that a first-person camera mode is headed to their ridiculously popular battle royale game later in 2024, letting you blast Peter Griffin, Solid Snake's flat butt and other pop-culture icons up-close.

A Pokémon website which hosted links to fan-made Pokémon games has been taken offline.

The European Union has targeted Apple over the past few years for monopolistic and anti-competitive practices, forcing the company to allow alternate app stores and other features in the EU. Now, the United States government is suing Apple on similar grounds.

User ratings and reviews help developers improve their apps but nagging users with in-app pop-ups asking for reviews or ratings isn't acceptable. Thankfully, Apple lets you turn off these pesky rating and review requests on your iPhone and Mac. Here's how.

Before a month of my life vanished into customising cards and rigging decks in Balatro, my desire to conquer dungeons by fixing gambling tools came from playing Slice & Dice. First released in 2020, it's a gauntlet of fantasy turn-based battles where most attacks, abilities, buffs, debuffs, and items are very cleverly handled by mapping them onto the faces of dice. Oh, you're going to make your dice so much better! Now Slice & Dice has finally arrived on Steam in search of a wider audience, accompanied by an update adding oodles of new heroes, enemies, items, and more. For newcomers, hey, it has a demo.

A Sims movie adaptation is in the works from Margot Robbie's production company, to be helmed and co-written by Loki director Kate Herron.

Epic Games has discussed the future of Fall Guys, following today's announcement that its game assets, animations and characters are coming to Fortnite's UEFN creative mode.

Epic Games has shown off the future of its powerful Unreal Engine, including a first glimpse at Amy Hennig's Captain America and Black Panther game, and closer integration of the eye-catching MetaHumans tech into UEN, during this year's annual State of Unreal broadcast by the company.

Pirates make everything better, so if Blizzard's announcement that World of Warcraft now has a standalone battle royale mode isn't enough to get your tootsies twitching with excitement, then how about this: it's called Plunderstorm and is all about the piratical booty.

Just when I thought I was past being surprised by games adding battle royale modes, Blizzard today announced one for World Of Warcraft. Plunderstorm will drop 60 pirates onto the Arathi Highlands to fight monsters, loot chests, level up, acquire abilities, and beat the hell out of each other as a storm closes in. It's initially due to run only for several weeks and will use wholly separate characters, though you can unlock cosmetics for your main wizards.

GOG has partnered with Amazon Luna to make its DRM-free titles playable on the cloud gaming service.

GOG has announced a new partnership with Amazon Luna that'll let its customers play the games they own across a range of supported devices via cloud streaming, starting «soon».

Oh, look – Steam's gone and broken its own concurrent record. Again.

The co-creator of long-running free-to-play fantasy MMO RuneScape has revealed the project his new studio has been working on for the last ten years. Surprise! It’s a new free-to-play fantasy MMO. But Andrew Gower and developers Fen Research insist that Brighter Shores will balance its nostalgic feel with a fresh approach to the well-worn genre that Gower himself helped wear in over two decades ago.

Fen Research, the studio founded by original RuneScape designer Andrew Gower, has unveiled Brighter Shores — a «cosy» new free-to-play fantasy MMORPG coming to PC and Mac later this year that promises a «relaxing respite from daily life».

Paradox Interactive has unveiled The Machine Age, the next major expansion for its space-faring 4X strategy game Stellaris, which will focus on «cybernetic, synthetic, and machine themes» when it launches for PC in the second quarter of 2024.

Stardew Valley is about to make it easier to get pets to move out of the way. This quality-of-life improvement will be part of the 1.6 update that is scheduled to reach Stardew Valley in a few days' time.

Apple has announced five titles coming to the Apple Arcade service in April, including two spatial games for the Vision Pro Headset. New games Puyo Puyo Puzzle Pop, Super Monsters Ate My Condo+, and Sago Mini Trips+ will be available on April 4 across Apple devices. Meanwhile, Apple Vision Pro users will get Crossy Road Castle and Solitaire Stories on April 25. The Vision Pro mixed reality headset launched last month and boasts over a dozen spatial gaming experiences.

Epic Games has announced its pricing for the use of Unreal Engine by non-game creators, who will now typically pay $1850 a head each year to use the powerful development software.

A Stardew Valley player turned their farm shed into a cozy, little coffee shop after they saw other creative building layouts for the game and became inspired. The critically acclaimed farm life simulator that was released in 2016 is set to receive a major update soon that will add plenty of new content for players to enjoy.

Former Xbox, Sega and Electronic Arts executive Peter Moore believes that “serious questions” are being asked about the future of console generations.

After cracking open its virtual Pandora’s Box using the magical key of “shooting it with a lot of bullets”, Fortnite’s mythical next season is due to roll out later today. Chapter 5 Season 2 - or Myths & Mortals, if you prefer - will bring a pantheon of god powers, locations from Greek mythology and, uh, Korra from the Avatar: The Last Airbender sequel, who has a gun now I guess.

Today's long-awaited arrival of Greek gods and legendary lands on the Fortnite battle royale Island is taking a little longer than planned, developer Epic Games has now said.

Roguelike, rhythm-based dungeon crawler Crypt of the NecroDancer's multiplayer Synchrony DLC will release on PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch next week.

The EU is stepping in to investigate the latest development in the feud between Apple and Epic, with European regulators now seeking answers from Apple on yesterday's news — that it had banned Epic's developer account.

Epic's plans to launch a version of its Epic Games Store on iOS in the EU have stalled after Apple terminated its developer account, calling the company «verifiably untrustworthy» — and the much-trumpeted return of Fortnite to iOS has been impacted too.