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Capcom are making literal big bad Lady Dimitrescu a wee bit shorter for Resident Evil Village’s The Mercenaries Additional Orders DLC, out later this month. Game director Kento Kinoshita told Polygon that although playable Lady D is still taller than any other character in Mercenaries, she’s been shortened to “a little under nine feet tall” from her canon height of around nine feet six inches. Kinoshita also went into some detail about Additional Orders’ other characters, including punch-maestro Chris Redfield.

You could see world-famous ballkickers Messi, Pogba, and Neymar battling in Modern Warfare 2 later this year if a Call Of Duty leaker’s claims are on the money. TheGhostOfHope has tweeted a list of what they say are upcoming operators for the military FPS sequel, launching later this month. Among the other spots are a potential return for the controversial Roze skin, and Call Of Duty: Infinite Warfare’s protagonist Nick Reyes.

If you're a fan of MOBAs but aren't a fan of battling other human beings over the internet, then Vela Games' Evercore Heroes may pique your interest. It's a competitive PVE game where teams of heroes fight it out to finish a dungeon run the fastest. And having seen a brief presentation of it behind closed doors, it looks like a good time - albeit one taking heavy inspiration from its main competitors.

A DDoS attack on Blizzard caused issues for Overwatch 2 players earlier today, following on from similar attacks on the company during the free to play shooter’s launch last week. The latest attack came just after Overwatch 2 had finished a period of emergency maintenance. Although Blizzard have confirmed the DDoS attack has now ended, the recurring attacks aren’t exactly a good sign for a game already beset by technical issues.

Time-bending sci-fi shooter Deathloop is one of the possible futures of the Dishonored universe, Arkane’s Dinga Bakaba revealed during a recent episode of the Xbox podcast. Bakaba was the creative director on Deathloop, and lead designer for Dishonored 2 and Dishonored: Death Of The Outsider. He’s finally spilled the tea, confirming players’ suspicions that the two Arkane series beginning with a D and featuring magical abilities are linked.

Over at Walmart in the US, you can pick up a set of Klipsch ProMedia 2.1 Bluetooth PC speakers for $59, rather than the $95 they normally cost. This is a better deal than I expected to find for this model, which offer a small but powerful 100W subwoofer and two speakers with 'exclusive horn-loaded tweeter technology'. No, I don't know what that means either.

If I remember correctly, Action Man: Raid On Island X dropped out of a cereal box. This was back when cereal had that Happy Meal generosity, and you'd look forward to that thump as a gift caked in dust landed in your bowl. You won't find any game demos in those wheat crunchie crumbs anymore.

Definitely not one on the level of Action Man: Raid On Island X at least. It was the absolute business.

Remember when Overwatch 2 launched last week and people were struggling to register their pre-paid, or pay-as-you-go, numbers so they could play the game? Well, now Activision Blizzard are planning to insist people sign up for two-factor authentication to play the upcoming Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, too. They’re also warning that players with pre-paid plans might not be able to get the process to work.

Wild Hearts is Koei Tecmo and EA Original's effort to muscle in on Monster Hunter's monopoly on video games where your primary goal is to make nice pants from gigantic fire geckos. I was lucky enough to go hands-on with an early build of the Wild Hearts's opening hours to see how it stacks up against its age-old competitor, and whether it has any chance of melting down Monster Hunter's trophy cabinet and forging itself a golden crown.

Owners of Valve’s handheld PC Steam Deck have been fiddling about with creating and sharing their own ten-second animations for the machine’s new custom boot video feature, implemented in a client update last week. Some pay homage to Valve and Steam, while others nod towards games in general, or even classic telly and film. I’ve had a rummage around to help give you some ideas, and found the batch below.

Here comes the pain train, next stop: you. Locomotive-themed survival horror Choo-Choo Charles brings its twisted take on Thomas The Tank Engine to PC on December 9th. A new trailer for the game shows some more of the mysterious island that freakish spider-legged Charles calls home, and the helpful people you can meet there. Fumble in fear for your rail pass as you watch below.

A release window for Nightdive Studios’ long-in-development remake of sci-fi immersive sim System Shock has popped up on Steam, like a rogue AI on a futuristic space station terminal. Nightdive now appear to be aiming for a March 2023 release for System Shock, according to the game’s recently updated Steam store page. Although there’s nothing more than that, and Nightdive haven’t announced anything themselves, it’s a step forward for the game.

Every weekend, indie devs show off current work on Twitter's #screenshotsaturday tag. And every Monday, I bring you a selection of these snaps and clips. This week, my eye has been caught by sikk skateboarding faking, a good flying kick, and more than a few spoOoOoky games for the season.

The director of an upcoming movie based on Konami’s survival horror Silent Hill series has seemingly confirmed that more than one new game is being worked on. Christophe Gans, who directed the iffy 2006 adaptation of Silent Hill and is working on a second film, spoke about his involvement with Konami on the series in a French language interview. The interview was picked up by fans on ResetEra, who translated Gans’ comments.

NZXT's awesome H1 v2 small form factor case, complete with 750W SFX power supply, 140mm AiO water cooler, fans and PCIe 4.0 riser, is down to $200 at Amazon. That's half-price and the best deal we've ever seen for this critically-acclaimed (and Will Judd approved) ITX case.

Microsoft's official Xbox controllers, whether from the Series or One generations, are an awesome gamepad for PC gaming too. By default though, your options for connecting the controller are Bluetooth (on later models) or a wired USB connection - rather than the low-latency 2.4GHz wireless you get on Xbox consoles, which requires Microsoft's $25 Wireless Adapter for Windows. That adapter is down to $18 at Newegg today, and is well worth picking up while it's discounted.

Sundays are for slapping your knees and saying "Right!" just before you leave. Before you announce your exit, let's read this week's best writing about games (and game related things).

There being no actively updated Overwatch game has meant there's been no Overwatch animated shorts in recent years. Now Overwatch 2 is live, there's a new nine-minute, fully-animated short introducing the hero Kiriko, one of the free-to-play sequel new characters. You can watch it below.

Modern Warfare 2's remake edges ever closer and the day after the launch trailer brings a dedicated PC trailer. It crows about, well, all the things my PC isn't powerful enough to run, frankly.

One of the things you can do with a Steam Deck is use it for emulation. Someone at Valve is evidently aware of this, given the recent Steam Deck video - which we wrote about two days ago - contained a shot of a Steam library with a Nintendo Switch emulator in it.

Oops. Valve have since deleted and re-uploaded the video with the emulator removed.

It's easy to take backwards compatibility for granted on PC, so much so that we rarely even use the phrase "backwards compatibility". Most old games will simply run, and for everything else there's usually a compatibility mode built into Windows or DOSBox to get it going.

This didn't happen by accident, as an old blog post by a former Microsoft programmer explains. When Microsoft wanted users to switch to Windows 95, for example, they went so far as to add specific code that looked for SimCity and, if it was running, changed how memory allocation worked so that the game wouldn't crash.

I've not yet started my spooky celebrations but I am enjoying seeing other people get into the spirit. What else are going to do in a rainy early October? Do tell me if you have good ghoulish plans, reader dear. Oh! And while you're at it, what are you playing this weekend? Here's what we're clicking on!

Graphics cards are getting bigger, hotter and more expensive - and that first one is more of a problem than you might think. With the RTX 4090 and a whole family of oversized GPUs on the way, those tiny PCIe slots on your motherboard are taking on an incredible amount of weight, such that even mid-range cards can sag and bend over time.

The best way to prevent this is with a brace, which pushes up from the bottom of your case to the far end of the graphics card, holding it level and preventing all that force from affecting the card or the PCIe slot. You sometimes get a support brace like this free with your graphics card, but otherwise you can pick one up fairly inexpensively from a range of manufacturers.

It's not every day that you see a top-end gaming laptop for £598 off, especially not when it's a 15-in RTX 3080 model from MSI. This GP66 Leopard is one of the fastest gaming laptops on the market, with a Core i7 processor, 16GB of RAM, 1TB NVMe SSD and a 144Hz screen - not to mention that flagship-grade graphics card.

It normally retails for a cool £1998, but today Laptops Direct has discounted it to £1399.97, making it the cheapest RTX 3080 laptop we can find right now.

I keep forgetting Valkyrie Elysium's PC release date is later than its console one. The action platformer came out on PlayStation late last week, but it's not coming to Steam until November 11th. So far, reviews have been quite middling, which isn't wholly surprising in some sense, but having played the public demo the other week, I'm not ashamed to say that I had a pretty all right time with it! Based on two hours of play time, I'd say it's very much in the same kind of vein as your Bayonettas and Nier: Automatas, and I'm 100% down for that.

It feels odd saying "Overwatch 1", but Overwatch 1 occupies an important place in my personal and professional life. And all things considered, I do not miss it in the slightest. I spent so much time straining against the game's tug-of-war matches that I simply grew tired of trying really hard at it - or perhaps more accurately, trying not to launch my head through the nearest plaster wall.

Clearly, there was a time where I adored Overwatch, though. A time when I'd grind solo-queue most evenings until 3am, in a bid to climb the ranks ever higher. To what end? My own personal satisfaction, I suppose. I'd eventually hit Master (let me brag just once, okay) and then a few months later, I applied for a job at Gamer Network writing guides about Overwatch's intricacies. I moved to Brighton for my first proper job. Now, with Overwatch 2's release, it all feels like it's come full circle.

Archtower is a roguelike and therefore bad, but... hnnnnnnngggh I like it. I might even come to love it, considering it's already so enjoyable even with a few years of early access left (a fact I forgot until I reached a "work in progress" marker several hours in).

You climb a tower and splat monsters and culty magic nerds. You loot, and avoid traps, chug red liquids, and occasionally die and have to start again. But I enjoyed every moment, and never once hit the usual aggravating points that push me out of the genre. It's good stuff all round, frankly.

A new experience: Weird RPG is the first video game to make my lips numb. My character in the action-RPG is wearing magic tousers, see, which launch explosive basketball hoops every time I make noise into my microphone. Turns out, the most DPS-efficient noise is continually blowing to trill my lips like a child pretending to be a car. Weird RPG does have some fun ideas but sadly, it's too mundane an ARPG to be truly weird—or good. Still, I was delighted when I found a helmet whose stats get better the worse your graphics card is.

Scrolling through Twitter, Daniel Griffiths' interest was piqued when he saw a post describing a mysterious phenomenon being shared in the Nier: Automata community: A2 opening a hidden door in The Copied City and strolling into a secret, never-before-seen area. Curious, he decided to pursue more knowledge, and landed in the Nier modding Discord server.

Like him, many other Nier: Automata players who caught wind of the phenomenon sat upright - metaphorically and perhaps literally - and flocked to both Reddit and Discord to check out what exactly was up with the secret area. It was dubbed the "church mystery" or "sadfutago's posts", among other monikers.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is an increasingly ancient beast, gnarled and twisted over the past decade-and-a-bit by many, many mods that sometimes conflict with one another. That’s why Tyler Hallada put together Modmapper, a free tool released earlier this year that shows which of the mods hosted at NexusMods affect which areas of Skyrim. Now, Hallada’s written about the experience of creating the tool in a blog post, and the reasons for taking on the project.