After some turbulent times in the past two years, UK game spublisher Mastertronic has announced today that it has entered administration.

The firm has confirmed that a deal is in place to buy the assets of the business, and the existing team is going to be retained with one exception. MD Andy Payne is going to be leaving with the buy out.

Mastertronic applied for a CVA in July of 2014 to avoid a winding-up order, closing its retail business and laying off up to 40 percent of its staff at the time. A new investment deal in February of this year meant that it survived, but issues with the deal forced Mastertronic to seek new funding, which didn’t happen.

“We signed an investment deal with a Bahrain/Qatar based organisation back in February 2015 which would have seen our majority Dutch shareholder exit and be replaced by these new shareholding investors and the company financed going forward,” Payne said in an interview about the news. “Sadly, this organisation did not honour the contract and as a direct result have put us in the position we find ourselves in today. We made strategic investments into game development, based on this investment deal. When the Middle Eastern investors reneged on the deal, it left us desperately needing an alternative investor. Sadly we failed to find one in time.”

The Mastertronics brand has been around in the games market for 32 years, although in the last few years its name has waned as other publishers took the limelight.

If you’ve been following Payday 2 in the last few months you’ll know all about the debacle that was the introduction of micro-transactions to the game.

The Payday Black Market uses a CS:GO style stat-boosting set of loot drops that players had to pay real money to unlock. Players at large weren’t happy with it, complaining of the pay2win factor. Even some tweaks that Overkill made to it didn’t win the community over, and neither did comments made that asserted that the system was “working as intended”. However now it seems that the company has realised that they really dropped the ball on this one.

Payday producer Almir Listo said of the issue: “The past few weeks have been some of the most challenging in the history of this community. Players have been angry with us, media have written about us en masse and our volunteer moderators went on strike. For all the distress we’ve caused the past few weeks, I’d just like to take the time and say that we’re sorry. We’ve done a lot of things right in the past, but these past few weeks we screwed up. We need to get better at many things, and we will do our best to improve as soon as possible.”

Among other things it seems that Overkill are going to assign some staff members to actively engage with gamers on their forums in an attempt to better understand the feedback they’re getting to not badly misjudge a situation. They’ve also set up studio meetings with YouTubers Last Bullet, modder ‘I am not a spy’ and PeaseMaker – one of Payday’s most active Russian players – to discuss the state of the game.

It remains to be seen what the end of this will be, but it seems like Overkill are taking steps in the right direction to attempt to fix what was broken.

Last year we had a bit of a kerfuffle over a Duke Nukem action RPG, being made by a company that no longer held the rights to do so. A lawsuit from the rightful owners followed and eventually the game was scrapped and its progress used to birth a new game: Bombshell.

The protagonist is one Shelly ‘Bombshell’ Harrison and while it looks kind of interesting, we’ll have to wait a little bit longer to see the game result of the entire ongoing story – its had the release date pushed back into next year.

Interceptor Entertainment have spent weeks now testing the game to catch and squash bugs, but it seems that they feel a little bit longer is needed to present a game they’re happy to release; not wanting to make their fans feel cheated at all.

“Our first instinct was to just get this puppy out-the-door, and that we could fix the remaining issues with a quick patch after launch. But within ten seconds we realized that’s no way to treat paying fans of our games.”

Whether or not you think it’s just trying to score points with the gamers, I’ll always be a fan of delays to squash bugs. Bombshell would have released onto Steam and GOG sometime this month, it will now drop on January 29th.

It seems that the mods over on /r/MassEffect have just received a leak of information from a source saying they have access to an early version copy of the new Mass Effect game – Mass Effect Andromeda.

Although they did get proof of the person’s identity the mods were asked not to share it publicly, so there is a chance that some of the information might not be real. On the other hand it could all be for real. We won’t know until closer to the time.

Included in the information was new of the character you supposedly play as as well as the mission the game is centred around. There were also details about some gameplay elements, including the reveal of two companions who can join you during gameplay and the fact that you can take two members of your squad on missions with you as the others stay behind on the ship.

The ship itself is said to be larger than the Normandy and there was also details provided on how you get from place to place. The enemy forces were also touched upon, with them apparently being dropped off in Cerberus ships.

Planet surfaces will be explorable and the combat will be greatly enhanced with the user of jetpacks to allow you to get to vantage points up high or across larger gaps and the omnitool now having a function to be used as a shield.

If you’re interested in reading more, or joining the discussion over on /r/MassEffect then navigate yourself to the thread over here.

Either way, we won’t get to know how legitimate any of this information will be until BioWare start releasing more official information next year.

Chaos Reborn, the wizard-warring strategy game from Julian Gallop (the creator of the original X-COM game) has just received an update that has added a lot as well as a demo having been added for those wanting to try before they buy.

The demo itself is available on Chaos Reborn’s Steam page, where you can pick up the game as well for the price of £14.99. It’s a pretty substantial demo too so you can get a really nice feel for the game before you pay up.

In an update on Steam Gallop said: “It gives players free access to the multiplayer modes and tutorials, but not realms, offline battles or social rank progression. The inventory limit is also restricted to 7 items.”

The update that has come at the same time is update 1.2 which adds a moderator to Realms to make sure that they are playable and work before they get released publicly. Kind of like what Nintendo did for the play made Mario Maker levels to ensure nothing impossible ever want public.

The rest of the update is a list of fixes and tweaks to other game mechanics:

• The maximum number of concurrent asynchronous games has been raised from 20 to 40.
• In the equipping screens the staffs and bodygear have a new display which shows the 3D model and compares stats with the currently equipped item. For staffs you can press a button to see all the spells that match the staff type.
• The new realm moderation system has been implemented. New realms have to be approved by a realm moderator before being released to the public.
• A realm design guide has been added to the realm editor, and the game guide is also accessible from the realm editor.
• Aelfscyne talisman mana cost increased from 35 to 50.
• Battle event log scrolling now works properly (and has a scroll bar).
• Paralysed gooey blobs will no longer attack trapped victims.
• Fixed a bug where a player wasn’t able to change equipment configuration that was used in classic private async game request.
• Players in private matches will now be disconnected for inactivity.
• Fixed a bug that caused the client to break if the server disconnects it during the login animation.
• Fix: talisman target selection, battle log, mega spell activation, select rider button, and select player buttons are now selectable on touch devices.
• Fixed the bug where allied victory against 2 wizards in realms is counted as 2v2 win achievement stat.
• Camera zoom key bindings fixed – no longer mixes up zoom in/ zoom out
• Fixed a bug that didn’t allow you to open equipment pack even if you have enough space in inventory.
• Added check for max inventory items when buying equipment packs.
• Fixed a bug where an encounter result offering allies, if interrupted by battle or exiting to menu, would not show the correct title and display an erroneous OK button.
• Also improved the message where you have to dismiss multiple mercenaries in order to hire multiple allies from an encounter.
• Gold awards are now given for wizard lords defeated in towns or wizard towers.