Plenty of games have let us explore a fictionalized slice of Japan’s capital city, like Ghostwire: Tokyo, Tokyo Dark, and every mainline game in the Yakuza/Like a Dragon series. If you’d like to do that without having a videogame get in the way, but not actually leave the house, here’s your chance.

Anime Tokyo is an art project being made by Yan Ru in Unreal Engine 5 that lets you wander around an animed-up 3D Tokyo. At the moment it contains several city blocks of Shibuya around the 109 department store, which in this reality bears a poster for Project Anime Tokyo rather than an ad for the latest iPhone or whatever, though more areas might be added in the next version of the demo in “several months”.

As the name suggests, it’s a cartoon recreation of the city. Your avatar i…

Helldivers 2 is one of the most impressive multiplayer games in recent memory—enjoying such a runaway success that you could barely play it for the first handful of weeks, due to chronically overloaded servers. It’s also, unfortunately, a little buggy right now—and I’m not talkin’ Terminids.

As highlighted by recent patch notes, damage-over-time effects aren’t applied under certain conditions—and certain scopes, like that of the Anti-Materiel Rifle, have been busted for even longer. Sickles can’t shoot through foliage, the Spear misses more than I whiff headshots on Automaton hulks. It’s a little rough out there. Even before some of these bugs, crashes were about as common as Super Earth flags on any appropriately patriotic suburb.

Arrowhead Games has been …

Hogwarts Legacy will have more than 100 sidequests, and it won’t just give players something different to do when they need a break. Narrative director Moira Squier told our colleagues at GamesRadar that the way players take on those sideline activities can have an impact on the main campaign.

“The main storyline is complicated and engaging, and involves a variety of different characters and viewpoints, but by giving the player choice moments throughout the game, we allow them to tell their own version of that epic story,” Squier said.

“Even the sidequests, of which there are over 100, allow the player to manipulate the main campaign by virtue of the experiences they’ve had. Interacting with someone in a sidequest will impact how you interact with them in the main storyline,…

Jagged Alliance 3 continues to roll out more looks at the game over the last month, and this week’s was a long chat with developers and community about combat in the upcoming sequel to the legendary late-90s tactics franchise. The stream had Boyan Ivanov and Brad Logston, both of developer Haemimont Games, talking about some of their favorite bits of Jagged Alliance 3’s combat.

Your band of mercenaries trying to do their mercenary thing in the war-torn country of Grand Chien have a lot of interesting tactical options, it seems, very much in line with the games of the past. There’s lots of granularity to mess around with, like stances, movement, and more. An early example is putting a bipod on your weapon so that it’s more effective when you’re prone. The video then goes on to talk…

Before he owned videogames growing up, FromSoftware president Hidetaka Miyazaki loved tabletop RPGs and their source books full of quests and monsters. It’s not hard to see that passion reflected in any of the games he’s designed at FromSoftware, but Elden Ring particularly so: Its sprawling map echoes the kinds I loved to pore over and draw myself (poorly) as a kid, from Lord of the Rings’ Middle-earth to Warcraft’s Azeroth. Elden Ring also seems to directly connect back to the RPGs of the ’80s with its skeleton-filled catacombs, like tabletop-style dungeons ripped straight from the pages of an AD&D campaign. 

“You might say that trying to capture the excitement of those old tabletop games and game books was one facet of making Elden Ring,” Miyazaki told me in a recent i…