The weekend is here! So shrug off your coat, pull off your tie, throw your pants across the room, and do a little dance in your undercrackers throughout your living space. And if someone happens to peek in your windows and observe your terrible jerking and kicks? Just smile, wave, and keep doing your happy jig.
Once you’ve had enough, put some joggie-pants on, fire up your console or PC, and plop yourself down on your couch or in your desk chair and de-stress with some games.
This week, we’re getting into brawls, flying around in our spaceship, driving around in a beater, heading to the exclusion zone, celebrating an anniversary, and trying to find older games that are less expensive than a kidney on the black market.
TEKKEN 8 – OFFICIAL LAUNCH TRAILER
Connor Makar, Staff Writer – Tekken 8 and WoW
This weekend it’s all about Tekken 8, and all about WoW. I’m a tad under the weather, so I shall not be venturing far out of the bedroom. As such, it’s the perfect opportunity to level a World of Warcraft alt-character in Season of Discovery or to practice throw-breaks in Tekken 8. Also, as a side note, DXKO has a name! It’s a game I’m keen to cover, so I’ll be planning out interviews and other long-form content for that this weekend. Stay tuned!
Starfield Official Gameplay TrailerJames Billcliffe, Guides Editor – Starfield
For my sins, there’s still so much of Starfield I haven’t seen. But even if the Faction quests are a bit pedestrian compared to previous Bethesda games, I’m still enjoying flying around the galaxy and lapping up the incredible visual design of all of the spaceships.
The amount of loading screens does make Starfield feel very ‘old-skool’, however, for me, that just makes it feel cozy.
Who knows, maybe I’ll find out I missed the best bits on release, and some cool loot and adventure are just around the corner!
Dakar Desert Rally – Announcement Trailer | PS5, PS4Jim Trinca – Dakar Desert Rally (Epic Games Store freebie)
It’s difficult to openly admit to liking the work of Jeremy Clarkson, because of the things he says and does. “But he is a good broadcaster”, you’re often reduced to blubbing in polite company. “And he’s done a lot for farmers!”
The point is, I love Amazon’s The Grand Tour (and the golden era of Top Gear which preceded it, naturally). Their latest special, Sand Job, takes their usual epic three-car challenge format to the extremes of the Sahara desert, tasking them with driving modified vehicles along the Africa part of the old Paris-Dakar rally. Vehicles which were originally designed for nothing more strenuous than poncing around Surrey in the mid-2000s. It is, as you’d expect from this team, a gripping, irreverent, and gloriously cinematic road trip across some of the most beautiful and desolate scenery that planet Earth has to offer. And it’s full of nob gags and stupid schoolboy pranks. Blissful. When they make their last program together, I think there should be a state funeral for the format.
Anyway. Sand Job dropped around the time that Dakar Desert Rally became a weekly free game on the Epic store, and given that it’s from roughly the same stall as the incredible Spintires franchise (Mud Runner, Snow Runner, etc), I simply have to check it out. Arduous journeys across vast swathes of treacherous landscape in a clapped-out banger frankly make for the best experiences. I know that first hand because the other week I drove to Liverpool in a Mitsubishi Mirage with a fucked rear bumper.
I’m also extremely looking forward to Expeditions: A MudRunner Game, which is the next evolution of the Spintires franchise and tasks you with uncovering lost civilisations instead of transporting a load of wooden pallets from B&Q to a broken bridge. Combining several of my favourite things: open-world exploration, history, and driving an unwashed piece of s**t up some hills.
Pacific Drive | Launch TrailerMark Warren, Senior Staff Writer – Pacific Drive
Yup, I’m hopping in my station wagon and heading to the exclusion zone, armed with a crowbar, lots of raw materials, and the kind of road rage that can show a ground-terra morphing energy mass the what for. Maybe it and everything else Pacific Drive has to offer will chew me up and spit me out in the same way Top Gear challenges often did to the three blokes who’ll not be named.
Maybe I’ll grow a third arm from all the radiation, and discover it comes in handy for handbrake turns. Maybe I’ll pick up a hitchhiker and they’ll run off into the woods having stolen all my spare wheels. Maybe I’ll just chill out in my garage listening to music while it rains cats and dogs outside.
Maybe I’ll not do any of that, but I will play Pacific Drive.
Rebecca Jones, Guides Writer – Anniversary fun with gaming gifts
Potentially not much gaming going on this weekend, because Monday marks 14 years since my partner and I became Facebook official — yes, we’ve been together since a time when Facebook was still relevant, and that makes us feel old. To celebrate the fact that we still quite like each other we figured we might just treat ourselves to leaving the house for a change, winter be damned.
But if you want to know what anniversary gifts geeks get for one other once the relationship is well past the decade mark, I’ll let you in on the secret formula: it’s usually gaming stuff. This year, we’re looking at going in on some PS5 accessories, since my partner’s keen to try Baldur’s Gate 3 in co-op after hearing me bang on about it so much last year. A trip to our electrical retailer of choice in search of extended storage and a second controller beckons!
Evolution of PlayStation: PlayStation 2Tom Orry, Editorial Director – Browsing for second-hand PS2 games
Listen, I don’t own a PS2 at the moment, but that hasn’t stopped me from spending a lot of my free time browsing eBay, Facebook Marketplace, Vinted, and other stores for ‘bargain’ PS2 games. My conclusion so far is that there’s no such thing as a bargain PS2 game anymore. Most listings on eBay are from professional or semi-pro sellers, who all know what is valuable and what can go in a job lot of 30 games.
For some reason, I’m obsessed with buying Silent Hill 2 and 3 but refuse to pay the £50 (minimum) asking price for a half-decent copy. I won’t say how long I’ve spent carefully combing through photos of 100+ games in bundles to see if any include these expensive gems, but I can tell you that I’ve found precisely zero.
Sad times if you just want to build up a collection rather than buy to sell. Anyway, the search will continue.
That’s us! What about you? What are you playing this weekend?