Carzy Zarx’s PC Gaming Emporium - Catch Up on All the Latest PC Gaming Related News

[JEMC]

It’s Tuesday and these are the gaming news:

SALES/PLAYER COUNTS & DEALS

Steam’s Top 10

(Click here for the Top 100)

Monster Hunter Wilds dominated Steam so hard this weekend that a new game from a Nintendo legend attracted a mere 5 reviews, and another dev tweeted they hadn't sold 'a single game' since Wilds released
https://www.pcgamer.com/games/action/monster-hunter-wilds-dominated-steam-so-hard-this-weekend-that-a-new-game-from-a-nintendo-legend-attracted-a-mere-5-reviews-and-another-dev-tweeted-it-hadnt-sold-a-single-game-since-monster-hunter-released/
The Steam concurrent player count chart for Monster Hunter Wilds on SteamDB is comically vertical: in two hours Thursday night it shot from zero to just shy of a million players, and the rest of the weekend saw player levels wax and wane from around 600,000 to 1.3 million as hunters pulled themselves away from monster slaying to catch some sleep. It was a very good weekend for Monster Hunter, but maybe not such a great weekend for smaller games on Steam capsized by Wilds' tidal wave-sized wake.
On Friday, an indie game from longtime Nintendo artist Takaya Imamura launched on Steam to virtually zero notice. Imamura's credits at Nintendo across a 30+ year career include serving as the art director for Star Fox 64 and The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask and the chief designer of F-Zero X. Basically, he's the guy who drew Star Fox and Captain Falcon as well as the other characters from those two beloved Nintendo series. His art is the star attraction of indie adventure game Omega 6: The Triangle Stars, which landed on Steam with a 40% launch discount and has so far accrued a grand total of five user reviews.
Omega 6 doesn't exactly look like the kind of game that would've pulled in 100,000 players on a slower weekend, but you have to figure a game attached to the artist behind Star Fox could've gotten a bit more attention without a launch like Monster Hunter Wilds landing on the same day.
Japanese indie developer STP Works tweeted as much on Friday. As reported by GamesRadar+ and Automaton, the developer of the Old Coin Pusher Friends series posted that its sales flatlined just as Monster Hunter Wilds released.
"Not a single game has been sold on Steam since Monster Hunter was released, lol," STP Works said (via Google Translate). I think it's fair to say the post's somewhat tongue-in-cheek—the most recent Old Coin Pusher Friends game is about seven months old, so no doubt was selling in small numbers at this point. But an outsized portion of the Japanese Steam audience, especially, probably had one thing and one thing only on its mind last weekend.
On the flip side, goofy new co-op horror game REPO, which launched on Steam shortly ahead of Wilds last week, has already proven to be an early access smash hit. So clearly it is possible to survive out in the field against Capcom's monster—at least as long as your game clearly surpasses a certain threshold for shitposting-style antics.
>> I don’t know but maybe, if PCGamer had made an article about Omega 6 before it launched, praising the art director as they’ve done in this one, more people would have known about it. Maybe.

The colder the weather is in London, the cheaper this videogame gets
https://www.pcgamer.com/games/puzzle/the-colder-the-weather-is-in-london-the-cheaper-this-videogame-gets/
As I'm writing this, the temperature in London is 9.4 degrees Celsius. Also as I'm writing this, the indie puzzle game A Good Snowman is Hard To Build has been out for 10 years. What do those two facts have in common?
To celebrate turning 10, the adorable puzzle game by Draknek & Friends has come up with the most unusual and creative pricing structure I've ever seen. Whatever the current temperature in London is (in Celsius), that's the price of the game (in dollars). The price is updated hourly, so the colder it gets in London, the cheaper the game gets. It's 9.4 C as I'm writing this, which means you can currently buy the game for $9.40.
That will change, of course. At about 9 pm tonight, the predicted London temperature will be 6 C, so if you wait a few hours you'll be able to buy A Good Snowman Is Hard To Build for only $6. At 11 pm the thermometer will drop to a frosty 4 C, so it'll cost $4. At 6 am tomorrow? The temperature is projected to be 1 C. You can do the math.

GOG has two new sales:

• The Untold Tales Publisher Sale features up to 86% discounts during the next 7 days: https://www.gog.com/en/promo/20250204_untold_publisher_sale
• The Story Rich Promo has games up to 90% off during 10 days: https://www.gog.com/en/promo/20250304_story_rich_promo

At Steam, this is what we find:

• Thank Goodness You're Here! will be 30% off until next Monday: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2366980/Thank_Goodness_Youre_Here/
• Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew gets a 50% discount until the 13th of March: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1545560/Shadow_Gambit_The_Cursed_Crew/
• The Jagged Alliance Ultimate Bundle, with 13 items, will be 68% off until the 13th: https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/36652/Jagged_Alliance_Ultimate_Bundle/
• The SpellForce Franchise, with 21 items, can be yours thanks to a 73% discount until March 13: https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/8177/SpellForce_Franchise/
• Now comes the time for the sales:
  • Publisher Spike Chunsoft takes advantahe of the Visual Novel Festival and puts its games up to 80% off until Monday, the 10th: https://store.steampowered.com/curator/32618574/sale/SC_VN2025
  • The Carnival Sale 2025 will last until March 12 and some of the featured games and bundles are on sale with up to 80% discounts: https://store.steampowered.com/curator/40645616/sale/CarnivalSale2025
  • Publisher HypeTrain celebrates its Spring Sale with up to 90% discounts. I’ve seen deals ending on March 7 and other that will last until the 13th, so be careful with that: https://store.steampowered.com/curator/26684285/sale/SpringSale2025
  • The Midwinter in Middle-Earth Sale has the games from the now defunct Monolith Production on sale, as the Lego games are full price. They are up to 90% off and will last until the 13th: https://store.steampowered.com/curator/34133273/sale/midwinterinmiddleearth2025
• And, of course, there’s also the weeklong deals... which aren’t many.

Fanatical has three new 24h Flash Deals:

• Ace Attorney Investigations Collection is 39% off: https://www.fanatical.com/en/game/ace-attorney-investigations-collection
• SteamWorld Heist II has a 63% discount: https://www.fanatical.com/en/game/steamworld-heist-ii
• And Darksiders Blades & Whip Franchise Pack, with the first three games of the series, has an 80% deal: https://www.fanatical.com/en/bundle/darksiders-blades-and-whip-franchise-pack

SOFTWARE & DRIVERS

-Today it's Empty-

MODS, EMULATORS & FAN PROJECTS

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 modder snaps, transforms all women, animals, and doors into fleshy spheres but turns all men invisible: 'It’s just spheres. Experience spheres!'
https://www.pcgamer.com/games/rpg/kingdom-come-deliverance-2-modder-snaps-transforms-all-women-animals-and-doors-into-fleshy-spheres-but-turns-all-men-invisible-its-just-spheres-experience-spheres/
At times in Kingdom Come: Circumference Deliverance 2, I've felt like my Henry is rolling around Bohemia without a care in the world. This is not what I had in mind. The "Sphere World" mod by Nexus user Omniscye takes great effort to transform the harsh, unforgiving world of KCD2 into a softer, rounder, and fleshy society of spheres.
"Spheres have taken over the game! Animals look like spheres, women look like spheres, doors are now spheres. It’s just spheres," Omniscye proclaims, presumably with madness visible in his perfectly round eyes. "Experience spheres! Ride through the sunset as you pass by so many wild spheres."
I had not considered in my first 70 hours of KCD2 that I could be having a better time if all men were invisible and chickens were spheres, but I'm looking at these screenshots and failing to find a hole (or man) in their logic. Would real life itself be better this way, this writer wonders? Somehow Sphere World has been out for a whole two days and has only been downloaded 23 times. The official list of features reveals more:
Animals look like spheres. They roll, they bounce, they’re wild.

• Women? Also spheres. Good luck flirting with that.
• Doors are spheres now. How do they even work? Don’t ask.
• Ride through the sunset, dodging or admiring the endless parade of spheres.
• Sip wine with sphere locals. They’re round, they’re friendly, they’re... weird.
• Men are mostly invisible. Radavan’s forge experiments flopped hard.

Oh, and one very important disclaimer: "Known Issues: Taking a picture in photo mode can and usually does, crash your game." Yeah, that's good to know.
>> The article has some screenshots and a very short video.

There's already a Monster Hunter Wilds mod to change your appearance without a DLC voucher
https://www.pcgamer.com/games/action/monster-hunter-wilds-character-edit-voucher-mod/
Monster Hunter Wilds has an impressive character creator, letting players make all manner of Ronalds McDonald and Hatsunes Miku (which you can use yourself by importing Wilds character design codes). It also lets me make an unsettlingly accurate recreation of my own face so I can watch my mild-mannered, writerly self annihilate condominium-scale reptiles. Capcom, however, has identified our universal desire to have cool-looking characters as a source of potential revenue.
As with the last two Monster Hunters, readjusting your hunter's appearance beyond basic hairstyle and color tweaks—something that, in an ideal world, would be a freely available feature—is locked behind Character Edit Vouchers: single use consumables that, outside of promotions and limited in-game events, can only be acquired through microtransactions.
You'll be shocked, I'm sure, to learn that modders have gotten right on that.
Enter the Unlimited Character and Palico Edits mod, which at time of writing has already been downloaded more than 13,000 times since creator Ridog8 posted it on Nexus Mods on Saturday night.
In extremely "I'm not touching you" fashion, the mod doesn't add any Character Edit Vouchers or prevent the game from subtracting one to edit your hunter or palico appearance. Instead, it simply lets you initiate appearance customization when you have zero vouchers. It's the same principle as setting the prices in a vending machine to "none money," except instead of a soda you get a new face.
>> The article has no media of the mod, but it has the instructions to use it.

GAMING NEWS

Square Enix has removed Denuvo from Final Fantasy 16
https://www.dsogaming.com/news/square-enix-has-removed-denuvo-from-final-fantasy-16/
And another one bites the dust. Square Enix has just released a new update for Final Fantasy 16 that removes the Denuvo anti-tamper tech. Final Fantasy 16 came out on PC in September 2024, meaning that it took around five to six months for SE to remove it.

GTA 5 Enhanced is your daily reminder that you should pirate every game that uses its own launcher
https://www.dsogaming.com/articles/gta-5-enhanced-is-your-daily-reminder-that-you-should-pirate-every-game-that-uses-its-own-launcher/
A couple of hours ago, Rockstar launched the Enhanced Edition of Grand Theft Auto 5 on PC. Since this new version comes with some Ray Tracing features, I’ve decided to give them a go, only to be reminded how broken the Rockstar Games Launcher is. And, after two hours of trying to make this piece of crap work, I’ve thrown the towel.