Given absolute freedom to race anywhere you choose, The Crew 2 is one of the most exciting racing concepts on PS4 and Xbox One consoles. For those who missed the original, it hands you a miniaturised version of the USA, from New York to San Francisco, remixed and remodeled for you to freely explore. Four years on, the canvas is now even bigger for this sequel - and to help with that heightened scale, developer Ivory Tower adds boats and planes to an existing warehouse of supercars, giving you more ways to get from state to state. The sense of scale is often staggering - a supersized version of Forza Horizon, if you will - and the idea is realised surprisingly well on all consoles.
Of course, you can bypass all of the game's open-world roaming, and just jump straight to set racing events on a 2D map. It's far more practical, but ultimately it's hard not to experiment with The Crew 2's engine in a more free-form manner, just to see how far it goes. Certainly in my experience escalates to a point I didn't expect going in.
First, there's the breadth of the terrain. Taken at a macro level, the breadth of landmass is a marvel - it's just as much experimenting with this side of the game as the actual racing. The engine gives you all the tools you need to migrate quickly: take a vehicle anywhere in the world, freeze the action, and then zoom out and out until you see a full top-down view. It's like an in-game Google Earth - even letting you walk around to admire your collection of boats, planes and cars. The orbital camera mechanic has similarities to Driver San Francisco - itself an unusual last-gen racer, which let you detach from your vehicle. It's curious to note this was developed by Ubisoft Reflections, who also had a hand on the original The Crew, and you have to wonder if some ideas were carried over between the two projects.

There is finally some clarity to what some many people in the the recent weeks, call streaming the future for video games. How the next generation PlayStation 5, Xbox Scarlett, Nintendo Switch, will be the last generation. Leaks coming out of Google thanks to the brilliant folks over at Kotaku. It seems Googles buying up Xbox and PlayStation executives and developers to make a hybrid streaming console called,Yeti. Is streaming really the future of games, or is this 2012 mobile games are the future all over again?

Google's DeepMind today shared the results of training multiple AI systems to play Capture the Flag on Quake III Arena, a multiplayer first-person shooter game. The AI played nearly 450,000 games to gain its dominance over human players and establish its understanding of how to work with other machines and humans.

Update, July 3: Another restriction on Fallout 76 griefers has been revealed - a protection for low-level players.
You won’t have to worry about getting griefed when you’re making your exploratory steps in Fallout 76, because you’re safe from other players up until level five. That’s one of many precautions against griefing Todd Howard mentions in a new interview.
The rule against killing low level players may change, Howard says, but Bethesda’s aware that everyone’s worried about aggressive players ruining the experience for everyone. With those precautions in place, the team wants to allow players the freedom to either engage in PvP or avoid fights if that’s their preference.
Perhaps Fallout 76 will make it into our list of the on PC.
There’s little detail on how the level restriction works beyond that, and we are working through the oddities of Google Translate - the original interview comes through Italian outlet , as brought to attention on . Even with the limitations of machine translation in mind, the gist of the answer is clear enough.
As mentioned in  on the making of Fallout 76, aggressive players will be given a wanted level. Another griefing protection is that the game's PvP system is more like a challenge system than an all-out brawl.
According to a tweet from Bethesda's senior vice president Pete Hines, "PvP is kinda like issuing a challenge [sic] to someone." You can check that tweet out below:

It's happening, Android gamers! Asphalt 9: Legends is up right now for pre-registration on Google Play, which means it will almost certainly launch very soon on our platform. If you...

While we're getting excited for , it's a great time to take a look at a little bit of news regarding Nintendo's first mobile outing, Super Mario Run. You may not think it did crazily well, but recent reports say it's just surpassed $60 million in almost two years which isn't a figure to sniff at. 
If you've not been on the internet for the past couple of years, Super Mario Run is Ninty's first whack at mobile gaming. Playing as Mario you zip through a number of courses in this autorunner and can complete it with only one hand. 
When it launched it landed with a bang, but dropped to a fizzle and wheeze as players moved on. It's Ninty's only premium mobile title and though it launched on the App Store worldwide in December 2016 (and other areas before that) it took a little while to come to Google Play. 

According to a Sensor Tower study, Super Mario Run has earned a revenue of over $60 million from worldwide player spending on the App Store and Google Play since launching in 2016. The company adds that approximately 43% of this revenue is attributed to players based in the U.S., while about 17% of the total comes from Japan accounts.

For two games that are pretty much nothing alike, it's suprisingly easy to find yourself pondering the differences, large and small, between Tetris and Lumines. Yes, one is a marathon while the other is a sprint. And yes, one is about things that collapse while the other is about things that, often maddeningly, remain fixed in place. Playing Lumines Remastered over the weekend, though, sat cross-legged on the bed as though it was 2005 all over again, I was struck by a new point of difference - or rather an old point of difference that I had simply never really noticed before. Something about the texture of your mistakes, I think. Oh yes, it's this: your mistakes feel very different in Tetris and Lumines.
A mistake in Tetris is a terrible thing indeed. This is because of the sprint-like nature, I guess, the fact that Tetris is really the survival horror of the puzzle world. Mistakes stick around in Tetris for a very long time: those gaps remain in the bedrock beneath you, a bit like a group of old friends who are always ready to remind you of a terrible faux pas you made when you were 12 (just me?). The mixture of sprint and fixed in place means that Tetris doesn't forget anything. And it in turns means so much of the game is spent trying to undo earlier mistakes in a bit of a sweaty panic. And of course, because you're in a sweaty panic you make more mistakes. Tetris thrives on mistakes.
So does Lumines, I think, but in Lumines your mistakes are often on your side. Lumines isn't about building a wall to unbuild a wall, it's about growing territory of a certain colour. You rotate the coloured sections of the blocks that fall so that the two colours for each stage will match up harmoniously before the timeline sweeps through. This is why some people get a bit bored with Lumines. They think you can beat the game indefinitely by dividing the screen up into sections and storing block types in specific silos, and inching your way to victory. I have never played golf, but I wonder if these Lumines min-maxers also turn up at Pebble Beach in early Spring or whenever it is people play golf and ask Ed "Porky" Oliver - I Googled him - if he'd considered just faxing the ball over to the hole.