The winner of this speedrunning event gets a real-life RGB katana


As part of a livestream celebrating the second anniversary of Ghostrunner (opens in new tab), 505 Games and One More Level outlined a “Legendary Ghostrunner Challenge” for speedrunners, with the grand prize being a real life, light-up katana based on the one from the game.

505 Games selected 16 players through qualifying rounds for the challenge, with participants competing for the best time with a limited amount of lives. In the final challenge, those 16 gamers will have to clear a brand new level, a dope-looking synthwave temple, as fast as possible with only one life. Those are pretty high stakes for the challenging cyborg ninja platformer.



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Peripherals manufacturer Finalmouse working on keyboard that’s one big screen



On November 2, esports influencer Jake Lucky shared a video (opens in new tab) of a keyboard whose entire backplate is a screen, one reportedly capable of playing standard video or even a GPU-rendered interactive background. 

Peripherals manufacturer Finalmouse, whose watermark graces the video, subsequently replied stating that this video was “just the tip of the iceberg,” and that more info would be coming December 17.





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Huge sale sends 6-year-old Battlefield 1’s player count into the stratosphere



Six year old Battlefield 1 (opens in new tab) is having a mini renaissance on Steam right now, breaking into the top-selling games list and peaking at nearly 51,000 players today following three prior days of big player counts. That 51K is nearly 10 times bigger than the 24-hour peak of the much more recently released Battlefield 2042 (opens in new tab). This data comes courtesy of inimitable stats-tracking site SteamDB (opens in new tab).

If you’re wondering why are gamers flocking back to the Great War, look no further than Battlefield 1’s current 88% off sale, reducing it to a measly $4.79/£4.19/4,79€. It’s not players in the United States or Europe that are driving the spike either. These big player numbers are concentrated between 12:00 and 14:00 UTC, peak gaming hours of between 8pm and 10pm in East Asian time zones like China Standard Time. 



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Mutant Year Zero is getting a miniatures game


The Mutant: Year Zero world’s getting bigger, as a miniatures skirmish game joins the tabletop roleplaying game and quite-fun tactics game Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden (opens in new tab). Publisher Free League has released a trailer and is running a Kickstarter to fund the game.

Designed for up to four players, Zone Wars is a miniatures game all about those free-flowing chaotic battles between several sides where all manner of madness can break loose at a roll of the dice. The Kickstarter (opens in new tab) seeks to fund two boxes of minis, each with two factions, terrain, rules, cards, and dice. If you’re curious you can hit up the Kickstarter to grab a free print-and-play PDF of it, which you can actually print-and-play or (like me) just toss into your favorite virtual tabletop.



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Today’s Wordle answer and hint for Sunday, November 6


Whether you need a Wordle hint to set you on the right path or would like to read a few tips to make your daily Wordle game more successful in the long run, you’re in the right place. Or if you simply want to see the answer to the November 6 (505) puzzle as quickly as possible, you’ll find all that as well as our Wordle guides and archives just below.

Today’s Wordle turned out to be another got-it-in-two experience of the week. Thanks to a little luck—and a little bravery—I was able to turn one helpful green and just the right sort of yellow into today’s answer.

Wordle hint

A Wordle hint for Sunday, November 6



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Great moments in PC gaming: Finally getting that rare mount you’ve been after in World of Warcraft


Great moments in PC gaming are bite-sized celebrations of some of our favorite gaming memories.

World of Warcraft

Developer: Blizzard
Year: 2004 – present

You know the drill. You’ve spotted another player riding a flashy mount in Orgrimmar or Stormwind and you just have to have it. Maybe it’s not a new mount you’re after but one that’s been around for a while and it just hasn’t dropped yet. And maybe you’ve been farming the same content, week after week, hoping you’ll get lucky. 



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Multiplayer Co-Op Saves Get A Brilliant Reimagining With Grounded’s Shared Worlds System

Playing online games with friends can be a frustrating experience. If the game is hosted on a server, you have to depend on that server being up and stable. If the game is hosted peer-to-peer, the host might have to be actively playing the game, or have a machine in their home they can use to host a server. Obsidian’s Grounded, however, has found a genius way around all of this–and it’s something other developers should look to replicate where possible.

WARNING: There is a close-up picture of one of the insects from Grounded, but we’ve left out any pictures of spiders.

Grounded recently hit 1.0 after spending a good amount of time in early access, and what Obsidian gave us is one of its most polished games ever. The core conceit is simple: Take the movie Honey I Shrunk the Kids and make it a survival game. You drop as one of four kids into a world where the grass is as big as trees, and the trees as big as skyscrapers. This game can be played with up to four players, and it’s meant to be a persistent world that anyone can log into at any time. Grounded is on Game Pass, so there’s no extra buy-in to get started, and no servers for the developer or publisher to eventually shut down since it’s peer-to-peer.

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When you start a new save, you have the option to make the save a single-player or multiplayer map; you can change this later. Once someone you’ve invited joins the server, they can either join when you’re hosting or host for themselves.

Instead of hosting it on a server, Grounded is hosted by the first player to boot up the world as a peer-to-peer connection. Once those players have access to the world, though, they and anyone else who has played in that world will have access to a synced save that any of them can use and sync to and from. Every time you log in, you get a persistent world that has your progression and building that you’ve done, and you can play regardless of whether the game originator is available or not. You can host on your PC or Xbox, or join another friend who’s hosting, and everything is there.

In other words, it’s all the convenience of a server-hosted game, with none of the cost.

Compare this to Satisfactory, an excellent game about building conveyor belts on alien planets for the good of all capitalism. Satisfactory is, like Grounded, hosted peer-to-peer. However, it still requires someone hosting an active server to play, and saves are not synced like this–in other words, when your friend goes on vacation for a week, you’re out of luck until they get back. The other option is to build or rent a dedicated server, which can be pretty costly, with many options costing $12 or $15 per month. If you decide to host the server yourself, you have to learn all of the commands to manipulate it and make sure to keep it active all the time.

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This method wouldn’t work for every shared multiplayer world–despite its simple appearance, a game like Minecraft can quickly balloon to take up multiple gigabytes of space. On a populated server, that means your connection is always going to be in use by some user or another, and they’ll be transmitting lots of data–not ideal in this era of bandwidth caps. Hosting on a shared save doesn’t make sense. But for many other multiplayer games like this, it’s a great option. It takes advantage of the cloud saves that most major gaming platforms now offer, it saves power by not running a game that no one is playing, and it equalizes access by ensuring that no one person has more ownership of the game than anyone else. And since users have to be specifically invited, only your friends can sabotage your save. So it’s really just on you to make sure you have trustworthy friends.

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While multiplayer games themselves and their servers come and go, the more generalized servers like those hosted by Microsoft, Valve, and the like aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. With no servers to keep alive, Grounded isn’t dependent on Obsidian or Microsoft needing to maintain game-specific servers, and players don’t have to worry about some hosting company offering an option for a specific game. And in a world where electricity is becoming increasingly expensive in terms of both monetary and environmental costs, not having to run a server all the time is going to be increasingly important in the coming years. With the popularity of shared-world multiplayer games, Obsidian is showing some major forward thinking in futureproofing its new game to make sure that people can access it for years to come.

See Raiden’s butt like never before with this MGS2 third-person mod



Modder oct0xor has been working on a mod to add a third-person camera to Metal Gear Solid 2, and now has finally released it in time for the 20th anniversary of Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance, the 2002 expanded re-release.

When the Metal Gear series went 3D with Metal Gear Solid, it originally kept an overhead camera like the previous 2D games. Though additions like first-person aiming mode modernized things a little, it wasn’t until Metal Gear Solid 3’s expanded edition, called Subsistence, that a full 3D camera was added. It’s this camera that oct0xor has modded into MGS2, which is why the mod’s called The Substance Of Subsistence (S.O.S.) Mod (opens in new tab).



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The best anime games on PC


 We’ve put together this list of the best anime games on PC to help you figure out which ones you absolutely shouldn’t miss, because there sure are a lot of them—videogames adapted from specific anime shows and movies, as well as videogames more broadly inspired by the medium.

It makes sense for there to be a lot of overlap between anime and games. Many character designers, writers, and voice actors work in both industries at once. Plus, there are plenty of game designers who grew up on Ghost in the Shell or Pokémon and went on to draw on that influence in their videogame work.



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The best anime games on PC

 We’ve put together this list of the best anime games on PC to help you figure out which ones you absolutely shouldn’t miss, because there sure are a lot of them—videogames adapted from specific anime shows and movies, as well as videogames more broadly inspired by the medium.

It makes sense for there to be a lot of overlap between anime and games. Many character designers, writers, and voice actors work in both industries at once. Plus, there are plenty of game designers who grew up on Ghost in the Shell or Pokémon and went on to draw on that influence in their videogame work.

Gargantuan JRPGs, absurdly over-the-top fighters, crime-solving visual novels—take your pick. If you’re looking for an interactive anime fix, read on for our faves. There’s a bit of something for everyone.

The best anime fighting games

Dragon Ball FighterZ

(Image credit: Bandai Namco)

Release date: 2018 | Developer: Arc System Works | Steam 

No game looks like an Arc System Works game. The company has perfected the combination of 3D and 2D animation with flashy fighting games like Guilty Gear and Blazblue, but the best example is Dragon Ball FighterZ. It turns brawls into proper anime battles, making sure you always see the best angle when you pull off a ridiculous move. And that’s why it’s the absolute best anime fighting game. 

Not only is it beginner-friendly, DBFZ also makes you feel as powerful as no other fighting game, thanks to the anime factor—in Dragon Ball, throwing a foe into space or hitting them hard enough to take out most of the surrounding landscape are regular occurrences. Thanks to Arc’s stunning animation, FighterZ looks just like—if not better—than the original.

Read more: The charming story behind Dragon Ball’s first PC fangame

Tekken 7

(Image credit: Bandai Namco)

Release date: 2017 | Developer: Bandai Namco Studios | Steam

Tekken 7 has assists and autocombos, but enabling them takes away buttons you need for other moves. It’s not real beginner-friendly. Tekken 7 expects you to learn punishes and staple combos, to pay attention to frame data. (The fact it then sells frame data display as DLC is ridiculous, of course.) It’s honest about its difficulty though, treating story mode as a tutorial because it knows most people play story mode to learn how to play. Well, that and to watch over-the-top cutscenes where Heihachi kicks missiles back at the people who shot them.

Developed for PC, and with a boisterously thriving online community dedicated to the platform, Tekken 7 is a fighting game worth dedicating hours and hours of your life to. At least until Tekken 8 comes along.

Read more: EVO 2019’s best story was the unstoppable rise of Pakistani Tekken player Arslan Ash

The best anime JRPGs

Tales of Vesperia – Definitive Edition

(Image credit: Namco Bandai)

Release date: 2019 | Developer: Bandai Namco | Steam

Best of the best

Crusader Kings 3

(Image credit: Paradox)

2022 games: This year’s launches
Best PC games: All-time favorites
Best free PC games: Freebie fest
Best laptop games: Low-specs 

Bandai Namco’s Tales series has introduced us to plenty of worlds that need saving since 1995’s Tales of Phantasia, but Tales of Vesperia, originally released as an Xbox 360 exclusive in 2008, stands out thanks to the way it hits that old school JRPG sweet spot. Its protagonists are a group of lovable misfits who for the most part just happen across each other, the battle system is a mix between turn-based and real-time, and there’s a traditional kaleidoscopic fantasy world to explore.

Tales of Vesperia also features fairly classic 2D visuals, with characters designed by mangaka Kousuke Fujishima and cutscenes by popular animation studio Production I.G. But more than just the visuals, it’s the feeling of a grand adventure in faraway lands complete with everything from pirates to dragons and mysterious magical forces that makes Tales of Vesperia such a great JRPG.

Read more: What makes a great anime game

Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch

(Image credit: Bandai Namco)

Release date: 2019 | Developer: Level-5 | Steam

With Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch a game finally captured the trademark charm of Studio Ghibli. The makers of such beloved movies as My Neighbor Totoro and Spirited Away were involved in Ni No Kuni’s creation, producing its animated cutscenes. And while Ni No Kuni wasn’t written by anyone at Ghibli, Akihiro Hino, who worked on games such as Dark Cloud, Dragon Quest 8 and 9, and the Professor Layton series, managed to hit the same heartwarming notes.

Ni No Kuni works for both children and adults in exactly the same way as many Studio Ghibli movies, telling fairytales in which young heroes gain the power to save multiple worlds—mostly by cramming loads of food into their mouths, capturing weird critters, and then rushing off into peril.

When you’re done with Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch you can move on to Ni No Kuni 2: Revenant Kingdom. Although Studio Ghibli wasn’t involved in creating the sequel it retains the distinctive animation style.

Read more: I regret to inform you Ni No Kuni’s cute new MMO has blockchain crap up its sleeve

Final Fantasy 7 Remake Intergrade

(Image credit: Square Enix)

Release date: 2021 (PC) | Developer: Square Enix | Steam, Epic

Sure, recent years have buried us in remakes. Don’t let that put you off Final Fantasy 7 Remake, though. It may look like a retelling of disc one’s cyberpunk fable of a stratified city only with a more action-y combat system and some Akira-style motorbike chases thrown in, but the way it plays with your expectations and twists the story it knows you’re anticipating is cleverer than you’d think. The combat’s not the pure action it looks like either. The combos are just something you do to build up bars you need to cast spells and use abilities, dropping the world into slow-motion as you dig through menus for the attacks that do more than just chip damage.

Read more

Need your anime games to look their best? Here are the best gaming PCs right now.

Think of Remake more like a verb than a noun. FF7R is about a struggle to remake the city of Midgar, the slum-protecting ecoterrorists of Avalanche trying to get rid of its reliance on the planet’s lifestream for power and the Shinra Corporation trying to manipulate Midgar into a war they can profit from. Meanwhile, another force is out there trying to remake the familiar plot playing out against this backdrop. It’s got layers, man. Just like the city.

While you’re looking at fantasy of the final variety, don’t go past Final Fantasy 12: The Zodiac Age. Its gambit system gives it some of the best combat the series has ever had, and the PC remaster comes with improvements like a fast-forward button to double or even quadruple the speed to help you get through the slower bits.

Read more: Why the hell do they have mouths: a Final Fantasy 7 PC retrospective

The best open world anime games

Nier: Automata

(Image credit: Square Enix)

Release date: 2017 | Developer: PlatinumGames | Steam

If you see the protagonist of Nier Automata out of context you might take her for one of the sexy body-pillow babes that give anime and its fans a bit of a bad rap (sometimes deservedly so, but that’s a different story). But how many anime babes do you know who transform into fighter jets? How many of them efficiently hack and slash their way through hordes of enemies? OK, actually quite a few, but how many of those are also grappling with the fact they’re machines built for a never-ending war?

Nier Automata isn’t just a hack-and-slash. It’s also a deep dive into what it means to have free will, about the meaning of war and whether ignorance can help us stay sane. It’s heavy stuff, masterfully showing the other side of anime. It’s not all bright colors and cute girls. Sometimes it’s about the horrors of war… and cute girls. 

If you want to go back to the start of the series, The 2010 original was remastered and finally released on PC as Nier Replicant ver.1.22474487139… in 2021.

Read more: Why people love Nier so damn much

Code Vein

(Image credit: Bandai Namco)

Release date: 2019 | Developer: Bandai Namco Studios | Steam

Sometimes more really is more, and Bandai Namco’s soulslike Code Vein is a great example of that. Its world has fallen prey to vampire-like monsters that can emit a deadly miasma, and you’re among a group of young, stylish, superpowered people trying to get the monster population under control using massively oversized weapons. As is so often the case with anime games, a simple description of the things that happen doesn’t make much sense. That’s part of Code Vein’s charm.

While it wants to be compared with the Souls games, Code Vein is a lot more approachable, as well as being different stylistically. Unlike the quiet, dark atmosphere of Dark Souls, it feels like a shonen anime—the kind where characters solve a lot of problems via fast-paced, acrobatic combat.

Read more: Code Vein is a surprisingly fun soulslike with giant anime swords

The best anime visual novels

Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy

(Image credit: Capcom)

Release date: 2019 | Developer: Capcom | Steam

As Phoenix Wright, it’s your job to prove your client’s innocence in the courtroom, which you’ll need to do by cross-examining witnesses and searching crime scenes for clues. You know, like a regular lawyer definitely does.

There’s drama and there’s murder, but Ace Attorney is rarely grim. These are games where anything is possible—and things never turn out the way you expect them to. When you put on your bright blue suit you’ve got to be ready to interrogate the witness’s pet parrot if it turns out to be necessary. (It will turn out to be necessary.)

Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy collects the first three games in the series, while The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles bundles together two prequels set in the Victorian era starring an ancestor of Phoenix Wright who teams up with the great detective ‘Herlock Sholmes’.

Read more: Why I love Miles Edgeworth in Ace Attorney

Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc

(Image credit: Spike Chunsoft)

Release date: 2016 | Developer: Spike Chunsoft | Steam

If the psychics, ghosts, and sexy clowns of the Phoenix Wright games are just too staid and serious for you, Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc takes the formula and makes it even more ridiculous. The setting is a school for exceptional students where the latest intake of talented young people wake to find they’ve been trapped in the sealed-up academy with a talking robot bear. 

Said bear explains that they’re all taking part in what sounds like a social experiment, and will only be allowed to leave if they kill each other and get away with it. If one student murders another there’s an investigation-by-trial, and if the killer isn’t uncovered the murderer goes free while everyone else is executed. If the killer is uncovered, they’re the one executed and the other students remain trapped. Until the next murder happens, when it all plays out again.

Some of the mysteries are better than others, but they’re always tense thanks to a system that sees clues you gather during the investigation phase transformed into “truth bullets” to shoot at statements those clues contradict. There are other minigames involved in the trials too, and like the mysteries some are better than others. (You can always tweak the difficulty if you don’t get on with them.) What elevates Danganronpa is its characters and atmosphere: exaggerated, colorful, and weird as anything.

Though it tells a standalone story, Trigger Happy Havoc has had follow-ups. They’re not worth it, however, falling immediately into fanservice and cliché while leaning even more on minigames. You’re better off sticking with the original.

Read more: What the hell is Danganronpa?

Zero Escape: The Nonary Games

(Image credit: Spike Chunsoft)

Release date: 2017 | Developer: Spike Chunsoft | Steam

Another option for watching outrageous characters fight and outwit each other in order to survive is the Zero Escape series. Originally handheld puzzlers, the first two games in the series (Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors and Virtue’s Last Reward) were combined together as Zero Escape: The Nonary Games and finally ported to PC in 2017, getting a graphical update over the DS original and some other new features.

The Nonary Games are two of the best anime thrillers you can play; tense and tricky escape room puzzles combined with a story that ruthlessly pits protagonists against each other. A combination of visual novel and first-person puzzle, you truly won’t see what’s coming, and you should really experience it for yourself.

Read more: The best visual novels on PC

The best free anime games

(Image credit: Konami)

Release date: 2017 | Developer: Konami | Steam

This free-to-play card game is a fun way to relive the times you dueled friends—and the time you invested all that money in pricey cards. The Yu-Gi-Oh! anime was basically just an exciting, half-hour ad for an expensive card game, but don’t worry, this time it won’t cost you quite as much. 

The Duel Links community is a big, competitive place, with regular events and seasons. There’s also a story mode making this a full-fledged game. There are microtransactions, but you can earn plenty of rewards without having to spend money. More importantly, the presentation is really good, with simple but effective animations and the original voice actors.

As well as Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Links, there’s also Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel, which is a more faithful adaptation of the original card game. That means the turn times are longer and there are more counters and combos. Duel Links uses the speed duel format, and feels like the game they played when you were watching the show.

Read more: These 9 card games are better than Hearthstone

Crush Crush

(Image credit: Sad Panda)

Release date: 2016 | Developer: Sad Panda | Steam, Nutaku

Crush Crush and Hush Hush, its counterpart on the masculine side, turn dating sims into idle games. (Several of the developers worked on the hugely successful AdVenture Capitalist before turning their hands to smut.) You meet a cast of cuties and win their hearts with moonlight strolls, showers of gifts, and outrageous flirting while managing a limited number of time blocks to work multiple jobs and build your skills. Those cuties include a mecha pilot, a time traveler, a holographic vocaloid, and a bear named ‘Bearverley’, because why not?

Read more: There’s a sea of hentai junk games on Steam, and then there’s Crush Crush

The best anime games with character creation

Black Desert

(Image credit: Pearl Abyss)

Release date: 2017 | Developer: Pearl Abyss | Steam

This popular fantasy MMO has one of the most in-depth selections of sliders around. Whether you want to adjust your hair’s length or curl strength, or tamper with the intensity of your tattoos, Black Desert Online has you covered. It’s easy to use too, breaking your face and body up into a topographic map of adjustable sections and letting you change your hair by clicking and dragging

You can also look through the Beauty Album to see what looks other players are creating for their corsairs, berserkers, and dark knights, then filter them by categories like Good Looks, Celebrity, and Ugly. You can either adopt someone else’s character design wholesale or tweak it to your preference. Tweaking is best, because if you hit the ‘Apply Most Popular’ button on a female character there’s a strong chance you’ll end up looking like a goth clown with gigantic boobs.

Read more: Black Desert Online isn’t a great MMO, but it is a great sandbox RPG

Lost Ark

(Image credit: Amazon Games)

Release date: 2022 | Developer: Smilegate RPG | Steam

Though it doesn’t have quite as powerful a set of options as Black Desert, and you can only alter your face rather than your body, Lost Ark still has a lot of options for personalizing your character. For instance, it lets you alter your iris size, color, and opacity separately from your eye color and pupil shape, and then do it all differently for the other eye. 

When you finally make it out of the character creator and past the typically slow opening hours almost every MMO seems required to have, it’s a much better game. The over-the-top action-RPG combat is some of the best around, and the storylines get progressively stranger until you find yourself taking part in dwarf musicals in between fighting on top of colossal demons.

Read more: There is so, so much weird shit in Lost Ark

The best anime VR games

VRChat

(Image credit: VRChat Inc.)

Release date: 2017 | Developer: VRChat Inc. | Steam, Oculus

In theory you can look like whoever or whatever your heart desires in the shared digital world of VRChat. In practice, there’s a reason every single article about someone’s experience in VRChat includes the phrase “anime girls”. Heck, even the official mascot Box Cat (a cat with a cardboard box on its head) has been sidelined in favor of a variety of big-eyed avatars in the official art. 

Though it does struggle with lag, VRChat has become the place to live out your anime second life. Perhaps in the waffle house on the moon.

Read more: VRChat’s surge in popularity has created a bizarre scene

VRoid Studio

(Image credit: pixiv inc)

Release date: 2020 | Developer: pixiv Inc. | Steam, Oculus

Of course, before moving your social life to VRChat full-time you’ll need the perfect avatar. Or maybe you want to become a Vtuber without having to pay thousands of dollars? VRoid Studio is the free alternative, a suite of 3D character creation tools designed for people without 3D modeling experience. If you want more assets than the preset options provide, others are available.

Read more: The best VR games