Author: Nick Cowen

When Back 4 Blood was announced at The Game Awards last year, a subsect of players who revelled in Turtle Rock’s last zombie-shooter series, Left 4 Dead, hit the roof with joy. Nearly a decade after the studio split from Valve and ran into a brick wall with its next game, the ill-fated Evolve, here was Turtle Rock announcing that it was going back to the zombie-apocalypse co-op template that made it a household name. Naturally, this anticipation was cautious – once again, players all remember what happened with Evolve – and while the faithful were optimistic, one had to…

Far Cry 6 is a very easy purchase decision for anyone playing video games in 2021 to make. Either you’re on board with Ubisoft’s open-world shooter and can’t wait to get your hands on the latest instalment, or you’re tired of the same gaming loop that has been a staple of this series since Far Cry 3, and you can’t be bothered to pick up a copy of the latest Far Cry. Both positions are entirely valid, and Far Cry 6 will do nothing to either repel the former or attract the latter. Make of that what you will. Far…

Lost Judgement opens with a scene in which a couple of firefighters make a startling discovery. Investigating what they think is a fire in an abandoned building, the pair stumble across a rotting cadaver chained to a chair, its skin and teeth browned and wrinkled, with maggots crawling through what remains of its flesh. It’s one of the grisliest images players are likely to see outside of a Resident Evil game, and it seems to set the tone of what’s to come brilliantly. This is bolstered further by events transpiring at the same time as the discovery, in which a…

The Far Cry series has visited some exotic locations in its time, but for the most part, they’ve all had something in common – they exist at the fringes. Whether players were bolting through the tin-pot dictatorship in Far Cry 4, scrabbling to survive in the pirate-controlled island fiefdom in Far Cry 3 or battling cultists in the USA heartland in Far Cry 5, both the antagonists and the environments they inhabited existed off the beaten path. Far Cry 6 is something of a different beast. Set in the tropical island nation of Yara, it initially comes across as a…

With Aliens: Fireteam Elite’s arrival, one has to wonder: exactly how hard is it to make a really good Aliens video game? This is a question that warrants asking because when one looks at the vast array of titles set in the universe of this seminal horror sci-fi franchise, the overall lack of quality seems astonishing. Off the top of one’s head, the only games worth playing are Alien: Isolation, Aliens: Infestation and Capcom’s side-scrolling shooter from the early ‘90s Alien Vs. Predator. Other than that, you’re looking at a gaming catalogue that includes some pretty average games and some…

Uber is offering customers R100 off two rides to and from COVID-19 vaccination centres. The ride-sharing app has partnered with Mastercard and the Department of Health to provide one million free trips to select vaccination sites nationwide. The initiative is on offer to app users until 31 October 2021 and all people who are eligible for vaccination can take advantage of it. Take an Uber to a vaccination centre Uber users can use these discounts for themselves and loved ones who are in need of transportation – they can simply request the trips on the latter’s behalf. Users who are eligible for…

Last Friday (27th August 2021) Transport Minister Fikile Mabula announced that the government would be extending the deadline for all driver licence renewals. The previous deadline had been the end of August, initially put in place to accommodate motorists who saw their licences expire while under 2020’s series of lockdowns caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, they have until March 2022 to renew their licences. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFY-vvsaf_g On the surface, one would think this would be a piece of good news. However, anyone who has tried to renew an expired driver licence in the last year-and-a-half will likely feel nothing but…

Phumzile Van Damme has hit out at Democratic Alliance leader John Steenhuisen over the reasons she resigned as a DA MP back in May this year. Van Damme later resigned her membership to the party in June. Posting in a thread on Twitter, Van Damme said Steenhuisen “lied to the media” when he told the Sunday Tribune that she had resigned because “she migrated to Norway with her husband, and her job doesn’t allow her to be a member of any political party”. Van Damme takes to Twitter The former DA MP went onto to say that the reason she resigned…

The COVID-19 pandemic hit businesses hard. Many employees suddenly found themselves furloughed, receiving a reduced salary and in a lot of instances, without a job. The virus snaked its way into many lives with damaging and tragic consequences. Making a living under shutdown proved hard to impossible for a lot of people. But what of the YouTubers? To many outsiders, the pandemic and subsequent lockdown would seem to have little to no impact on their working lives; after all, don’t most of them create content at home in the first place? Well, no, the truth is a little more complicated…

At the weekend, my neighbourhood’s WhatsApp group started buzzing like a hive of angry wasps on PCP. The phrase #NationalShutdown had started trending on Twitter and a couple of worried souls had started digging into it. What they had learned, understandably, started to set neck-hairs on end. The hashtag wasn’t just linked to your usual angry keyboard warriors or conspiracy theorists. It was being used by reputable news services who reported that the National Joint Operational and Intelligence Structure (NATJoints) had elevated the national state of affairs to high alert following threats of a national shutdown. Given what South Africa had…