You may have seen this game making the rounds on Twitch and YouTube recently. Whos Your Daddy? puts one player in the shoes of a baby and the other in the shoes of the Daddy. The baby has one simple goal: kill themselves by any means necessary. The Daddy must stop the evil hellspawn from achieving it’s goal. Hilarity will often ensue in this physics enabled asymmetrical gameplay. Naturally our own Digmbot and Scarlet Dragon had to give it a go.

Enjoy!

Prison Architect has been around for over a year although it did spend a lot of that time in an Early Access/beta form, as the developers updated the game by adding new elements, fixing bugs and making little videos about the changes to keep everyone interested in the game up to date. It eventually did have its full release and has recently updated with its second big update, which brought women prisons to the game. So, how has all that time spent in development helped the game?

First thing to note is that this is not a big game. The install is just over 500MB and the graphics are simple, which means you don’t need a massive PC to run the thing. The game also starts off the first time you open it in the Campaign mode, the first level of which previously found use as the tutorial for earlier versions of the game. I’d recommend playing through at least some of the Campaign before you go into building your own prison if this is literally your first experience with the game – it’ll teach you how to do certain actions in the game without much pressure to get it right first time. For example, the very first Campaign mission teaches you how to build new rooms/buildings, place objects within them, hook up the electricity and water, sub-divide inside areas into new rooms and how to make sure you’re not overloading the power station (the mission deliberately makes you overload it to teach you and won’t let you fix it before time, I tried!) as well as fixing it if you do.

Into the building of your own prisons and you start with a plot of land, with Deliveries and Garbage areas pre-marked out; a team of 8 Workmen and a sum of money in the bank. I’d recommend going into the Grants option in Reports and choosing the Basic Detention Center grant at least, if only because it’ll give you a list of exactly what you need to construct at a minimum to have a working prison. Grants are quite important to take to keep your money up because it’s easy to get carried away and spend too much building facilities too fast; you basically get promised a sum of money for completing certain objectives. Since most of those objectives help your prison grow and become more effective it’s in your interest to complete them as well, so by growing your prison you get access to lump sums which is useful and quite nice.

Reports is actually one of the main hubs of the game and one of the ones you will become most familiar with throughout the game. Through it you can also control your intake of prisoners and what level of security they have, the schedule for them, their meals, the scheduling of reform programs available and many more functions, although a good number of them require you to unlock their use through assigning them as research in the Bureaucracy menu first (which require certain staff members to do the researching). The game does come with the functions to speed up and pause time as well as a planning option that lets you plan out structures before you actually build them, which can be useful when you begin constructing wings of individual cells for your guests. This does allow you time to breathe and experiment with what works for you, so you rarely feel too stressed out or that things are out of your control if things go a little wrong.

That’s not to say that the game is free of its… quirks though. The main one I fell prey to a lot was the removal of interior walls through the Foundations menu’s bulldoze option. Doing this also removes the foundation block under the wall, and while it is replaceable it’s much easier to use the Material menu’s option to remove the walls so that only the wall is removed – not the foundation under it. The dogs of the dog handlers also sometimes have trouble path finding through doors although it is possible to click on the handler and direct them to take another path if you’re finding this a bit irritating. Also, despite the Update women prisoners will still have he/him pronouns for the description of their reputation traits – more of an oversight then anything else though.

Speaking of women prisoners you can choose upon starting a new game to construct a woman-only facility, as well as choosing from a number of Wardens with different benefits to them. If you decide to play a women’s prison though, keep an eye on your incoming intake – some will arrive with babies. Prisoners with babies need a special Family Cell constructed for them to reside in, as well as the Nursery so they can take meals separately from the main prison population. Other than this though there are few gameplay differences to a women’s prison as opposed to the men’s one, although it is nice to hear that they added in female voices for prisoners that you’re able to hear if you zoom in closely enough.

So how has the long time spent in Early Access done for Prison Architect? Actually it’s done it a lot of good. It allowed the developers to get feedback that they could then use to tailor their game to the audience’s desires, it allowed for the fixing of (most) bugs and those that remain are not game-breaking. While there are some things that do need improving (see the dog path finding) I didn’t find they distracted from my playthrough, and I’ve actually started a number of prisons to make this review. If anything, some of the quirks made me laugh out loud, like the time I watched a doctor yank an injured prisoner out of bed upside down to administer healing or the time when a pathfinding quirk saw my Accountant and Foreman stuck in the Staffroom door in a somewhat compromising position.

If you enjoy games that let you build and manage facilities, you’re going to love this game.

9/10.

Its a new year, and that can mean only one thing if you are a fan of HiRez Studio’s third person action MOBA SMITE: The Smite World Championships start today. In fact, through the magic of the internet this post should be going live just about the time the opening ceremonies start. Teams from all around the world have fought through their own regional seasons and HiRez has brought the winners of each league to Atlanta, GA to fight for the title of World Champion.

The first day of competition will be the placing round. Only two teams have earned a bye on this round, Cloud9 G2A and Paradigm. The rest of the competitors will have to fight their way into the Quarterfinals via a Best of 1 format. Once the contenders for the Quarterfinals have been decided, the tournament will switch to a Best of 3 format, with the grand finals being a Best of 5.

You can expect some very tense matches over the first day of competition leading into the quarterfinals. The Australian, Chinese and Latin American teams have a lot to prove as they step onto the world stage, most of them for the first time. North America and Europe will look to defend their dominance in the Smite competitive scene. Cloud9 G2A in particular looks to repeat as world champions.

Also on display will be Xbox One Smite, with four invitational leagues. It promises to be a great weekend for you if you love SMITE. And if you are there, send us some tweets from the show floor!

You know, I have to hand it to Acer. Once derided for being a manufacture of cheap computing goods that were also cheap in quality (I recall various horror stories of laptops whose screens would fall apart with very little force, among other tales), these days the company has made a niche for themselves in making electronics that are solidly built and offer something interesting while still remaining fairly priced. So it is with their latest product lines as announced by the company today: the R1 and the H7 series of monitors, and the next generation of its XR series.

Let’s be up front here. None of these monitors would qualify as “gaming” screens for those who take gaming seriously. However, all three models offer vibrant IPS panels with 178-degree wide viewing angles; and each has a different, unique touch for their price.

Take the new R1 series monitors, which seem very much geared towards the Apple creed that “thinner is always better”. Acer claims this range contains the “world’s thinnest” monitors with under 7mm thickness, and that its ZeroFrame design maximizes the view with an ultra-thin bezel. Monitors in this range will be available in a range of five sizes – 21.5, 23, 23.8, 25, and 27-inches wide – and will be capable of pixel resolutions up to 1920×1080 (making them 16:9 widescreens). Monitors in this series will first hit Europe this month (January) with prices starting at €139. North America will see them later in the first quarter of the year with prices starting at $130; other territories are to be confirmed.

For those who prefer function over form, the next set of monitors might be more interesting. Acer’s second new range of monitors, the H7 series, will include USB Type-C connectors allowing devices to be connected to the screen. While USB Type-C is still not hugely common, the standard is gaining traction and is already used to charge and for fast data transfer between smartphones, USB Hard Drives and other peripherals; and is likely to become more popular as time goes on. While still widescreen 16:9 format, screens in this range will not only have a higher screen resolution than the R1s – with a stated max of 2560×1440 – but will also be larger, with 25 and 27-inch models. They won’t be as thin, but will feature the same ZeroFrame design, to maximise the screen space. Europe can expect these monitors to reach their shores February, America later in Q1, with prices in both territories starting at 500 euros/dollars respectively. Acer claim USB 3.0 in a monitor is a “world first”, although Lenovo also announced similar monitors mere hours before.

Last but not least, Acer also revealed the next model in its range of XR series monitors. The snappily-named XR342CK feature a curved 34-inch 21:9 panel at a resolution of 3440×1440, and could reasonably pass as a good gaming screen as it uses Freesync technology for a super-fast refresh rate. Naturally it has a price to match – this model is only currently confirmed for Europe, and will retail at €1,100 in March, with other territories to be confirmed later.

At the moment Rainbow Six Siege is thrilling people who are into counter-terrorism games… and those of us who love to watch our friends die to a suicidal NPC covered in bombs. Now the news has emerged that its first DLC will not be coming as soon as expected.

The DLC named Black Ice has now been delayed until February, coming the 2nd for season pass holders and a week later on the 9th for those without. The DLC had been scheduled to release sometime this month, but the change was announced over Twitter after a fan noticed that there was conflicting information on the game’s official site and Ubisoft’s own support pages.

Black Ice will come with two new characters as well as a new map, with season pass holders getting the characters immediately and non-pass holders having to earn those characters through spending in-game cash or the real-life equivalent. The map is free to all though.

This is just the first of Siege’s DLC, of which Ubisoft suggested there could be up to eight. All are said to be unlockable without spending real-life money though if enough hours are put into the game.