Awesome Games

8Bitdo’s new Retro 18 is the numpad version of its Retro Mechanical Keyboard. It also doubles as a standalone calculator, complete with a segmented LCD display. It comes with Kailh Box White V2 tactile switches, but you can easily replace those if you want. Like the keyboard, its colorways are inspired by the C64, IBM Model M, Famicom, and NES.

As you wander the streets of Los Santos in Grand Theft Auto V, you’ll run into all kinds of quirky characters. But in all of our hours of gameplay, we have never come across Ace Ventura. eli_handle_b․wav edited Jim Carrey’s pet detective into the game, weaving his obnoxious antics into the storyline, presumably to rescue the LS Pounders’ team mascot.

(PG-13) Mullet Mad Jack is a roguelite first-person shooter with ’90s anime aesthetics. Instead of having limited health, you have only 10 seconds to play. You must kill enemies to keep topping up your timer. It also has a mode with no timer if you just want to enjoy the animated story scenes at your own pace, as well as a randomized endless mode.

While we’re seeing handheld gaming PCs becoming a thing, console modder Didsomebodysayretro went the opposite way. He made the WoodBoy, an arcade machine powered by the original Game Boy hardware. Yep, it plays games from cartridges. It’s probably the kindest reminder that those of us from the Pokémon generation are now adults with aging eyes.

If GeoGuessr is too hard for you, check out BenjaminTD’s Unzoomed. It’s a free, quick, and, most of all, forgiving location guessing game. You start off with a zoomed-in top-down view of a city. Each time you make an incorrect guess, the map zooms out to (hopefully) give you more clues. We’d probably do better with maps from video games.

Is your day going too well? Let YouTuber Clumsy Jackdaw turn things upside down. They made A Very Normal Captcha Game, a web-based game that asks you to solve increasingly silly and frustrating captchas. If you managed to complete the game, check out Clumsy Jackdaw’s making-of video, subscribe, and then unsubscribe. That’ll show ’em.

This coffee table book from author and video game expert Mike Diver and Numskull delves into the brief but wonderful history of electronic table-top games. The book features pristine photography and information about sixty such games from the 1970s and 1980s, each designed to bring the video arcade experience to your home. Ships 7.2024.

Animal Well is a Metroidvania made by one man. It may look like an SNES game, but give it a chance and it will quickly lure you in with its creepy yet soothing aesthetic, creative interactions of puzzles and tools, and a world that creator Billy Basso promises will have gamers “discovering hidden puzzles for years”. Out now on Steam, PS5 and Nintendo Switch.

It’s been a while since we saw the early concept for Squirrel with a Gun. The finished game is almost here, and it’s just as deranged as the title sounds. The sandbox shooter lets players use their squirrel’s jumping and climbing abilities while wielding firearms to shake down the neighborhood for treats. Coming to PC, Xbox, and PlayStation 5 Fall 2024.

Kill time, literally and figuratively, in Hades II. A direct sequel to one of the best games ever made, Hades II sees you playing as Melinoë, the Princess of the Underworld and Zagreus’ sister, as she enlists the help of Olympus against the Titan of Time. The Early Access version is meant to give PC players a peek at the new story, gods, weapons, spells, and more.

I hope you’ve saved up enough runes, Tarnished. Pure Arts has unveiled its life-size replica of Malenia’s prosthetic arm from the legendary action-adventure RPG Elden Ring. This highly detailed collectible is made of polyresin. It measures about 37″ long and has an articulating wrist. It comes with a metal base and a pair of metal wall mounts.

As if both games weren’t hard enough on their own, Kertis Jones infused Minesweeper into Tetris to create Tetrisweeper. It lets you place tetrominoes and clear lines as you would in the original game. But you also have the option to clear lines by correctly flagging tiles and revealing mines within the puzzle pieces. Check out Icely Puzzles’ demo for more.

The latest edition of Razer’s Viper Pro mouse takes the versatile wide and flat shell of the Viper V3 HyperSpeed and packs it with its latest proprietary optical sensor that promises virtually 100% resolution accuracy for pixel-perfect aiming. The Viper V3 Pro also has a smoother matte finish, satisfyingly clicky side buttons, and improved tactile mechanical switches.

The retro emulator formerly known as GBA4iOS is now Delta, and can now be installed on iOS devices. It can play NES, SNES, N64, GBC, GBA, and Nintendo DS games, with more systems to be added. It supports most modern controllers and even has built-in cheat systems. Just bring your own game ROMs.

YouTuber Not from Concentrate was so disappointed with the “slim” PS5 that he painstakingly showed Sony what a truly compact version of the console should be. The result is a box with almost half the size and nearly 40% of the volume of the PS5 Slim. It even has a removable magnetic charging dock for the controllers and an external disc drive.

Abandoned Films imagines what a Super Mario Bros. movie might have looked like as a movie shot in Super Panavision 70 back in the 1950s. The surreal take on Nintendo’s iconic plumbers is made extra trippy courtesy of generative AI tech. The images are by Midjourney, video by Runway, voices by ElevenLabs, and the script by ChatGPT.