The existence of the Upper Lunch Hut implies the existence of a Lower Lunch Hut, but as far as I can tell, no such building exists. It's one of many mysteries that surround the edifice, which I discovered during a holiday in the Cairngorms this August, while everybody else at RPS was writing about some tyrannous entity called Gamescom.
First, the approach: having exited a vast pine forest of primeval aspect and supernatural disposition, with distant, daylit clearings leading the eye deeper and deeper into the undergrowth, till it feels at last as though your gaze has become tangibly enmeshed with clutching root and lowering branch - having finally escaped from that terrible, terrible forest, with its single, mournful stream crossed by a bridge of predatory bareness that is surely a haven for trolls, you set out across a grey and purple oblivion of reed and heather, a moorland rising to the border between glens, broken only by the stark red stain of a door. Nearing this otherworldly aberration, this scarlet phantasm, you realise that there is a house constructed around it, a sloping excrescence of withered planks and flaking plaster. What fell secrets could it harbour? Let us go and make our visit.
]]>Elden Ring’s very Soulslike OST will be performed live in the UK for the first time next April, as a “Symphonic Adventure” concert based on the game’s score heads to London’s Royal Albert Hall.
]]>I hereby vow for all the world to see that when Starfield launches in September, I will do my damndest to avoid having any sex at all in Bethesda's spacefaring RPG. The North American ratings board have detailed the types of content which earned the game a Mature 17+ rating, including "suggestive material" in dialogue "after sharing a bed with characters". Oh no. The listing includes several examples of post-coital pillow talk, and they are about sexy as you would expect from the studio whose dialogue is best known for inadvertently spawning memes about mudcrabs and knee injuries.
]]>Cute, free little thief homage Li'l Taffer starts you off in front of a door to a big manor, along with five instances of an ability called 'knock'. Reader, I am telling you this so that you don't waste all of them pointlessly knocking on the door like I did, as you are in fact supposed to use them to knock out guards.
It's a procedurally generated game made for 7dfps 2022, a game jam that challenges folks to make an fps game in seven days. Your manor will be different to mine, but the toilets will probably still be silly.
]]>A piece of interactive fiction that was created for a 16-bit minicomputer in the early 1980s has finally been completed, four decades later. Ferret, a Zork-like text adventure, began development in 1982 for the Data General Nova 2. The game was put together by a group of software engineers from Data General’s UK-based Systems Division. Ferret only received a final functional release complete with an endgame in August this year, according to a post on the game’s Facebook community.
]]>After five weeks, 12 posts, 14 games, and 11,146 words, my cycling tour of PC gaming ended on Friday. I've crossed the active warzones of GTA Online and PUBG, stunted down murderous descents in extreme sports games, tried to learn serious bike race tactics in strategy games, gone for a weird ride in a walking simulator, and even needed to ride my real bike for a game powered by Strava. For your convenience and enjoyment, that's now all gathered here with some bonus bike thoughts.
]]>I don't think I like the game Descenders ostensibly is, but I enjoy playing. It's a downhill mountain biking game with dangerous speeds and even more dangerous stunts, including leaping through a ring of fire over of a moving train. This is fun. The roguelikelike campaign structure this is all built into, eh, I don't think it has added any enjoyment. But it is very fun to stack a double-backflip, slam into a rock, and watch your ragdoll corpse rocket downhill. It's a good reminder to ride whichever way you enjoy, expectations and pressures be damned.
]]>My cycling tour of video games is almost at its end but we're in no hurry. Let's pause for a wee break, like in Lonely Mountains: Downhill. The mountain biking game is full of gnarly descents, dangerous jumps, and barely controlled skids, but also has secret spots where you can sit down and enjoy a nice view for as long as you like. Lonely Mountains is a collection of little adventures, each leading to your tent at the end of the day. Delightful.
]]>While the Tour De France Femmes ended on Sunday and the Tour Hommes the week before, I'll not be rushed on my own Tour De Jeux. I can't keep pace with professionals so it's fine if I run long, and today I want to take my time and enjoy the journey. I'm playing Aran's Bike Trip, a visual novel/interactive diary/thingamy where Dutch indie dev Aran Koning (the designer of Stacklands) documents a two-day bike tour with 360° photos. It's a lovely little adventure, taking in sights including an art deco radio station and the tallest waterfall in the Netherlands. The waterfall is... about what you might expect in a notoriously flat country.
]]>After the last stage of my Tour De Jeux gave me a flat tyre on my real bike, I started daydreaming about a bike repair game. A grubby game with fuzzy deductive puzzles as you rule out the many possible causes of similar symptoms. As far as I can find, no such game exists. But I did see two upcoming games with similar names: Bicycle Mechanic Simulator and Bike Mechanic Simulator 2023. Alas, I fear they might be PlayWay-style sims where you just click stuff in order then it all works tickety-boo. That is not the bike repair I know and begrudgingly enjoy.
]]>"Do you do Strava?" people often ask upon learning I like cycling. This is not the question they wish to ask. They are trying to feel out a stereotype, attempting to maintain the civil spirit of small talk by not saying aloud, "So are you a prick about cycling?" To broach the subject of stats, let's talk about Wren, an idle RPG powered by going for a real bike ride then connecting the game to your Strava or Fitbit. I got a puncture in the course of playing the game for this post, such is my dedication to you, reader dear.
]]>Cycling in video games leans towards the extreme and the exciting: bombing downhill at murderous speeds, professional racing, treasure hunt, and such. I'd like to see more of the mundane too. For many adults, a bicycle is simply a way to get to work, to the shops, or to see your pals. So after battle royale shooter PUBG: Battlegrounds added bicycles, I decided to commute around the stag & hen weekend warzones by bike as much as possible.
]]>The game I've done the most virtuacycling in is named after a whole other form of transport, but it is also a great place to ride a bike. When I'm visiting Grand Theft Auto Online for funsies, just to watch mayhem unfold, I like to do it atop a BMX. Sure, everyone in Los Santos wants to murder me, but players are a little friendlier when you're pulling sikk tricks. A little.
]]>As much as I enjoy watching the Tour De France, I have a weak grasp of professional cycling's strategic level. While individual riders get the fame, it is a team sport with complex tactics and strategies across each stage and the overall race—which sometimes leave me flummoxed. So to help me better understand, I've been playing two strat-o-management games: the flashy Pro Cycling Manager 2022 (from the makers of the official Tour De France game) and the board game-esque indie game The Cyclist: Tactics.
]]>While the Tour De France is currently zooming about the Alps, the next stage of my own cycling journey through video games leads somewhere far flatter—and weirder. Bird Snapper is a nice little free game that's just you, an endless grey desert, a bicycle, a howling night, and innumerable antennae and electricity pylons. A walking simulator on two wheels, with a bell.
]]>Last time, you decided that explosive barrels are better than hints. I suppose you don't need hints to know what a red barrel does. While we still have so many more things to assess, let's next revisit somewhat familiar ground. You previously decided romance is better than de_dust2 and now I want to escalate both things. What's better: sex cutscenes or bullet time?
]]>I had expected to dislike Riders Republic because Ubisoft's marketing made the open-world xtreme sports game look like it was about gnarly middle-aged dudes with sikk lingo and twatty hats. And it is, and they are awful. But behind the rude 'tude and Fortnite-grade fashion, Riders Republic makes riding a virtual bike feel like riding a real one in a way few video games manage. Switch to the first-person camera, turn off the music and HUD, and just cycle through American national parks with your bike humming beneath you. Bliss.
]]>After starting my Tour De Jeux with the official Tour De France game, stage 2 takes me to Knights And Bikes. Foam Sword's 2019 game evokes childhood joys of zooming around with your pal and tricking out your bicycle with reflectors and Spokey Dokeys. That might seem far from the Tour De France but grown-up cyclists are just as keen on customising their bikes for coolness, and even some Tour bikes are rocking garish decoration this year.
]]>The Tour De France, the grandest race in professional cycling, started today. Across three weeks, 176 cyclists will ride 3328 kilometres (2068 miles) winding through France, Denmark, Belgium, and Switzerland, including the Alps and Pyrenees. As a keen cyclist and avid Tour watcher myself, I'm excited. So in celebration, over the coming weeks I'll be gabbing about the Tour De France, cycling, and bikes in a wide variety of video games with my own Tour De Jeux, from big-budget open-world extravaganzas to cute wee indie adventures. Let's start in the obvious place: the official Tour De France video game.
]]>Last week, our mission resumed after a wee hiatus and you decided that parody in-game brands are better than photo modes. Or are less bad? Some of you have a lot of pent-up frustration because you lack the dexterity to keep your fingers from fumbling photo buttons. But it is decided, and we must move on. This week, it's a question of love versus a battlefield. What's better: romance, or iconic Counter-Strike map de_dust2?
]]>One of the coolest mod ideas is GTBike V, which basically lets you turn Grand Theft Auto V into Zwift, pedalling a bike in the real world to ride a virtual bike around Los Santos. Now a new version has added multiplayer, letting you trundle around the same city independently or join up for group rides. It almost makes me want to get the kit to hook my bike up.
]]>AMD have revealed more about FSR 2.0, the major overhaul of its FidelityFX Super Resolution upscaling tech, after a detail-light announcement last week. FSR 2.0 will represent a switch from simple spatial upscaling to more closely match the advanced temporal upscaling techniques of its rival, Nvidia DLSS – and while it won’t use DLSS-style machine learning, AMD say the trick to FSR 2.0’s improved performance is down to some good-old-fashioned human brainpower.
]]>Much has been made of how long games take to complete this week. After Dying Light 2 developers Techland boasted that it would take 500 hours to fully complete the game over the weekend, the internet's collective groan over the revelation was reportedly heard from the far reaches of space. Personally, I think it's a preposterous figure for a single-player game, but as someone who also maintains an active spreadsheet of all my various playtime stats (yes, really), it also got me thinking. Is 500 hours really so nonsensical in the grand scheme of things? I asked the team what their most played game on Steam is to find out.
And as it turns out, Dying Light 2's 500 hour completion time ain't got nothing on some of our favourite time hogs...
]]>In a serious of coordinated raids, Turkish police have detained 40 people suspected of involvement with a money laundering ring which allegedly used Twitch for money laundering. Supposedly they were using stolen credit card info to buy Bits (Twitch's virtuacurrency), which they would then donate to Twitch streamers who had agreed to give money in return in exchange for keeping a portion for themselves. This first came to light following Twitch's big data leak last year.
]]>After dropping the ball with Solitaire merch, Microsoft have now done right by Minesweeper with an "ugly" Christmas jumper turning one of the most iconic PC games of all time into a blocky Christmas tree. For £58 (plus shipping), you can tell all your festive friends how little work you actually did on your PC in the 1990s. It's not bad!
]]>Posse up, Red Dead Redemption 2 players. The results are in and science says that if you know your sturgeon from your steelhead trout you may have Rockstar's surprisingly detailed cowboy 'em up to thank for it. A published research study has found that RDR2 players, especially those who've played recently, are more likely to be able to visually identify 15 different species of animals that appear in the game. The statistical results are interesting on their own, but what's almost cooler are the anecdotes players shared during the study about things they believed they'd learned from all of RDR2's simulated wildlife.
]]>The folks behind Broforce have a new game on the horizon that is not at all about running, gunning, or blowing stuff up. Quite the opposite, Terra Nil is what they're calling a "reverse city-builder" about rehabilitating an environment that's been completely decimated. You'll turn it green again with the power of irrigation and renewable energy sources to fix the climate and the wildlife. It looks quite lovely and chill in this new trailer and even has a free demo coming up this month if you'd like to try out your planetary green thumb.
]]>Today is World Bicycle Day, so allow me to say: more bikes in video games, please. The ones we have are nice, but more would be grand, ta. I'll take more games about cycling. I'll take more bikes in games not about cycling. I'll take hot stunts and I'll take gentle transport. And what I truly crave is more crap bikes in games.
]]>Gather round, farmlife-sim likers. Another swell-looking indie game is planning a move to the village. The Garden Path is a laid-back slice-of-life sim with shades of Animal Crossing in its little painted world. You can spot it's lovely art style and sweet cute villagers down here in its new announcement trailer. We'll be able to dig in later this year when it launches.
]]>What is better than battles between giant bears? Obviously it's battles between giant bears that I have bred specifically to shoot giant plasma beams out of their giant mouths. Also the bear is my bestie because this is Monster Hunter series spinoff Monster Hunter Stories 2 where mega deadly creatures are also my best pals. Ahead of its launch in July, MonStories 2 has shown off some of its monstie gene splicing and (obviously) I am psyched for bears.
]]>Kislev and Khorne are going head to head in the newest Total War: Warhammer 3 trailer that just landed today. The next part of Creative Assembly's series is giving some serious love to the snowy folks of fantasy Russia with cavalry bears, magical bears, and other pretty cool looking icy units. You can spot the lot in the new cinematic trailer right here ahead of the gameplay reveal that's still scheduled for tomorrow.
]]>Greetings, Commanders. Here's your regular status report on the Elite Dangerous: Odyssey alpha. After gradually expanding the capabilitties of alpha players from their initial walkabouts to some FPS games, Frontier Developments are now sending players off to explore new planets again. The latest alpha phase, focused on exploration, turns players into exobiologists with genetic scanners.
]]>There's a Vulture circling overhead. Not a scavenger bird, but the somewhat larger Core Dynamics Vulture. Its engine reverbs across the moon's surface as it boosts off into orbit, ignoring me. I'm not worth the hassle. My Sidewinder, the trash-tier space banger of Elite Dangerous, is parked quiet and unoccupied on the edge of a huge meteor crater. I'm out for a walk, you see, with the long-awaited space legs of the upcoming Odyssey expansion. Not everything is smooth and picturesque in this ongoing public alpha. Despite that, it's gratifying to boot up your favourite space-trucking game and find not just a walking simulator inside, but a moon-walking simulator.
]]>Larian Studios have introduced the next big update for their big early access D&D RPG Baldur's Gate 3. This one calls up the Druid class and their eight animals forms for you to play around with along with other game changes and improvements. Larian have just shown off lots of details about Druids in their second Panel From Hell event.
Update: Larian CEO Swen Vincke declared pretty emphatically at the start of the livestream that Patch 4 is "releasing today" though I've since gotten word from Larian that "he goofed." Patch 4 is actually arriving "soon, when it's ready."
]]>Cat cafe simulation Calico has come out of the oven right on time. I was starting to fear that it would roll over into the new year without hitting its expected 2020 release window. Never fear though, Calico has scooted out here in the last weeks of the year, so you can jump in to decorate cakes, collect animal friends, and assemble your cafe right now.
]]>If you happened to miss it in the flurry of summer showcases, there's a new battle royale on the block. Spellbreak ditches firearms in favor of spellcasting mages who can all dual wield magical gauntlets that blend the elements in colorful combos. The battlemage royale launched a duos mode today to go along with its current solos or squads of three options. Proletariat also participated in a PAX panel over the weekend digging into the history of the game's development from melee viking royale to the explosive mage battleground. Forewarning: there be bears.
]]>Throw in the towels, game developers. Someone's already making the perfect game. Bear And Breakfast is an upcoming management game where you're a teenage bear just trying to run a successful B&B in the woods. It's due out in 2021, so you've got until then to release any other games you're working on before I just call off gaming for good.
]]>The Elder Scrolls Online's player homes are instanced areas where you can decorate to your heart's desire. I've been working on my daunting snowglobe house for years it feels like—slowly chucking in more curtains and little candles and whatnot. Even for a snowglobe though, my homestead feels a bit lifeless. I've housed my bear steeds (obviously I have multiple) in the stable outside and my little thief follower to the main hall inside. They don't do anything other than stand in place and run their idle animation though. Now though, Zenimax Online Studios are adding tools to create routines for NPCs in your home, turning your homestead into a living diorama.
]]>Spooky deck-builder Inscryption has drawn and played another trailer to tease you into its weird mashup of card, critters, escape rooms, and like five other genres probably. Brewing up a genre stew is apparently something of a thing for developer Daniel Mullins Games who you may know from past games Pony Island and The Hex. A new trailer for Inscryption lets on that it'll be just as wild a ride when it launches in 2021.
]]>You know when you see a game and just know "oh yes, that is for me"? I knew just from a screenshot of As Far As The Eye that it would be my wheelhouse. Hexagonal tiles, turn numbers, and resource counts tell me it's a turn-based strategy game while the vibrant colors and giant, fluffy creatures give me that tingly feeling in my heart. Fortunately, you and I won't have to wait long to try it out. As Far As The Eye will launch on September 10th according to its new gameplay video.
]]>In any situation where you can choose to have animals on your team you should definitely pick bears, which is part of what looks lovely about turn-based deck-building game Banners Of Ruin. You assemble a team of six grim-faced animal warriors, presumably meaning that I could pick six bears if I were so inclined—and oh am I ever inclined. Banners Of Ruin is now out in early access, so you can pick your own squad of furry fighters. Obviously I recommend the bears.
]]>If you've already hacked and slashed and tumbled your way through Minecraft Dungeons' campaign, you can grab your enchanted boots for another spelunking. The first DLC for Minecraft-but-Diablo is out now. The Jungle Awakens DLC sends you into the overgrowth to battle the Jungle Abomination. Even if you don't grab the DLC, a free update including a new secret mission has been added for all players.
]]>Magical girl cat cafe simulator Calico has lots of cats—orange cats and black cats and calico cats and cats big enough to ride like horses. Thanks to this new trailer in the Guerilla Collective showcase, I have now learned that it also has bears. I like cats, sure, but I really, really like bears. I cannot ride them or pick them up like stuffed animals in real life but I will definitely do both in Calico.
]]>A while back politicians in the UK identified the environment as a key battleground to fight over, and all started riding around on those tiny bikes you can fold up and carry around London to prove they cared about trees. Not to be outdone, EA have, ten years later, released their latest expansion to blockbuster tiny-person life simulation series The Sims 4 along a green theme. Eco Lifestyle adds a new world with three neighbourhoods, a bunch of new Create-a-Sim and build items, and the requisite personality traits, aspirations and skills to go along with being an eco-warrior. The bits that are there are very fun - possibly the most fun I've had with The Sims for a while - but it also feels like parts are missing.
]]>You know you're onto a winner when your heart swells ten times its normal size out of pure excitement from the boot-up sequence for the remaster of a game you never played. I was far too young to even comprehend Command & Conquer when it first came out in 1995, and to my great shame it's never been something I've sought out in the intervening years. But watching Command & Conquer Remastered Collection's newly re-tooled EVA opening sequence had me pumping my fists and bellowing with excitement like I'd been down there in the fan trenches all along.
]]>Upcoming Celtic-inspired RPG The Waylanders has announced some new members of the party. Ranger class characters will have the ability to choose between a total of twelve possible animal partners. Predictable RPG choices like wolves and bears are joined by a few less-obvious friends like jay birds and rabbits. I don't know if I'd rely on a bunny during a battle, personally, but go off, Gato Studio.
]]>Last year, second-hand games marketplace G2A made a bet: If any developers or publishers could prove that stolen keys were being sold on G2A, the storefront would pay back the money lost on chargebacks tenfold. Only one studio offered to take them up on the offer, Factorio developers Wube Software. Turns out, Wube were right to suspect stolen sales - and now G2A's gamble has cost the storefront $39,600 (roughly £32,360).
]]>The weirdest thing about Lumberjack's Dynasty – in a very long list of strange things – are the overheard snippets of conversation as you approach the game’s various NPCs. As you round the crest of a hill you might eavesdrop on a neighbour muttering something about how “everyone is talking about it”. Stroll up the drive of your aunt’s house and she’ll be whispering “yes, it will all be out in the open soon” to your uncle, before they both stop mid-conversation and slowly rotate on the spot like a pair of rotisserie chickens to face you.
]]>I wrote a different introduction to this one. One about how odd it is that Titan Quest should be a game I so frequently return to given its being the antithesis of much of why I play games. But while I'll get to that, I need to begin with the real introduction:
I'm really struggling. This situation, this lockdown, it's triggering my mental health issues in so many directions, and I'm really having trouble holding it together. I feel like I'm a really weakly version of Spider-Man in that moment where he's trying to hold a collapsing building with webs in all directions, as gravity tries to tear it down around me. And that's why I returned to Titan Quest. Because it felt like it was going to be a familiar, simple place. And it turns out it's just what I needed.
]]>The Overwatch League casters, hosts and players alike are all holed up at home for the time being, with matches taking place online while the world waits for the Covid-19 pandemic to run its course. It seems like cabin fever is starting to set in though, as this week they've adopted a cat into the analyst's panel to decide on the hero pools.
It went about as well as you can imagine.
]]>Back in the before times, before the fires and the disease came, you could feed bread to ducks without being cancelled by the bird police. Just grab a sliced pan of wholewheat Warburtons and hurl it into a lake, then watch as every duck, swan and anaemic-looking goose in the postcode descended upon it in a feathery gale, quacking and honking and feasting in a sordid maelstrom of avian debauchery. Now, say the bird police, it is only appropriate to feed fresh organic frozen peas to the ducks, otherwise their insides will turn to slime and their beaks will go soft and drop off.
]]>Remember Roller Champions? It was, by far, one of the coolest games announced at E3 last year, and now Ubisoft have organised a closed alpha on PC starting next Wednesday to give players a chance to check it out. Roller Champions is basically a 3v3 roller derby with some basketball thrown in, and it looks so colourful and different to a lot of the other stuff Ubisoft are trying to sell us, I personally can't wait to give it a go.
]]>New York needs saving again, and it's your job to do it when The Division 2's Warlords Of New York expansion drops on March 3rd. The DLC will bring back the big bad from the first Division, and lo' and behold he's got another strain of the nasty virus that caused the world to go to shambles in the first place. This expansion kicks off Year 2 of the game's content, and Ubisoft say it's "an encapsulated narrative experience from the start".
]]>A French Sea Of Thieves outfit called L'Arche Du Grog eschewed the call of booty to host the first major fashion event of the season earlier this week.
Players joined together to showcase their outfits, but in terms of style and personality rather than price tag. They "had to walk and emote creatively according to the themes", as you can see in the below video.
]]>Some of you love building a PC. You’re well into hardware trends and technical innovations and model numbers and all of that. This is fine and valid. But a lot of players are just not interested. They love games on the PC, but the machinery itself is irrelevant. I am one of those people.
I’m not totally clueless. I know some basics. I can put a machine together, given the parts. But once it’s working, I jettison all hardware knowledge so I can make brainspace for more Dessa lyrics or oblique Due South references. This becomes a problem when I can’t put off buying or upgrading my PC any longer. Such as now.
To that end, I have cornered RPS Hardware Empress Katharine to ask for her advice. If you’re looking to upgrade your ageing PC funbox but don’t want to study every hardware development of the last ten years, here's everything you need to know about buying a new PC in 2020.
]]>Ask anyone what Minecraft is missing and they’ll all tell you the same thing: an impending sense of climate doom, the pervasive fear of a warming globe that haunts the modern psyche like a crap ghost who keeps showing you scary looking graphs. Eco is an open world co-operative survival game that manages to do just that, incorporating that now-familiar sense of creeping dread which perches in our collective subconscious, and in our quietest moments reminds us that the planet is dying and that one day this hot, wet little space rock will boil over and turn back into mud, dissolving us all in the acidic stew that was once our oceans. So that’s nice.
]]>January. Hell month. My powerful brain – usually a throbbing, high-performance organ capable of doing several sums per minute – has atrophied to a wet walnut, a sodden grey scrap of cauterised flesh that ricochets around inside my skull like a horrible slug. The excesses of the holiday season have left my wretched body brittle and hollow. My eyes are sunken into my cadaverous face, like somebody launched two bad grapes as hard as they could at some uncooked bread. There is only one reprieve from this cursed month, and that is to become a lumberjack. Don’t try and stop me.
]]>Planet Zoo already got Rock Paper Shotgun's "bestest best" stamp when it released in November. If possible, it is now even bestier than before with its first DLC which adds arctic animals to your zoo's list of potential inhabitants. There are two new scenarios, new buildings, foliage, and—most importantly—polar bears.
]]>For reasons unclear to me, detective work seems to be a popular choice for enterprising animals keen to enter the gig economy. Indeed, creatures of all kinds have been sleuthing it up recently - just this year we had the pleasure of meeting a Goat Detective, a Frog Detective and a Raccoon Detective, and we heard about the arrival of the Chicken Police. And now it's time for Blacksad, a gruff detective cat who's hopped from his noir comic series to the PC screen, courtesy of Runaway developers Pendulo Studios.
]]>People, I face a dilemma. (Great cars, them Dilemmas. - Ed) This week Destiny 2 takes up an astonishing five out of ten spaces on the Charts. So what's a professional games journalist of 20 years experience to do? Write ten octopus facts in less detail but with more jokes, or six more involved entries perhaps better celebrating our cephalopod friends? I've opted for the latter, and I hope you'll endorse me in this decision rather than join the inevitable social media backlash.
]]>Key-reseller marketplace G2A should probably consider digging up, after a recent series of PR gaffes culminated in an apparent attempt to have media outlets publish undisclosed promotion. Thomas Faust of Indie Games Plus blew the lid off this one, sharing via Twitter an email he had received earlier today. In it, G2A push to have an "unbiased" piece that they had written be published, explicitly without mentioning that it was by them. G2A have since responded, confirming the email is authentic, but claiming that it was "sent by our employee without authorization".
]]>Infocom text adventures were some of the first PC games I ever played. I was too young to properly wrap my head around them at the time, but they still mean a lot to me. Thus, I'm happy to report that archivist Jason Scott of textfiles.com has uploaded the original source code for all of them to GitHub this week. Digital historians and aspiring coders alike can poke through the bones of these videogame dinosaurs, and hopefully learn a few things about the do's and do not's of text parser interfaces. You can find the code here in the Historical Source section of the site.
]]>Deep Silver have cancelled a load of Metro Exodus Steam keys sold through key resellers after discovering, they say, the keys had been stolen from the factory making boxed copies. Metro Exodus switched to Epic Games Store exclusivity late enough in development that they produced physical PC copies set up for Steam, then swapped out the Steam keys for Epic keys and stuck Epic stickers over the Steam logo. Apparently some scoundrel scooped those abandoned Steam keys to sell on, Deep Silver found out, and they've now cancelled those keys, removing the game from the Steam libraries of players who bought them.
]]>**This week's Priceless Play is NSFW!!!**
Sex in games is certainly nothing new. There are, of course, the various moral panics -- GTA's famed "hot coffee," for instance -- to countless articles about the sex lives in SecondLife. Our Very Own Kieron Gillen wrote a primer on Sporn (that's "Spore porn," for the uninitiated) eleven years ago. Cara Ellison had a column, called S.EXE, here at RPS from 2014-2015. And now, for a brief second, this piece will be the very latest in adding to the conversation on sex in games. It certainly won't be the last.
Look. Sex is complicated. For those who have it, it's a melange of vulnerability and tenderness and pleasure -- or perhaps sex has become rote muscle memory. Maybe it is, instead, consensually brutal. Sometimes there are genitals involved in sex. Sometimes there are facsimile genitals. Maybe there's an orgasm, or two, or four, or five, or zero. Two people, four people, more people, one people. Sex is a wildly complicated interconnected series of questions, conversations, yesses, maybes, nos, agreements, disagreements, and (crucially) respect. Or consensual disrespect. Ultimately, one hopes, despite all of this, sex is as easy as breathing.
Here are some games which consider sex from all sorts of angles.
]]>We easily take the stars for granted. The starry sky is something we can see every night, and while the starscape changes with the seasons, an untrained eye wouldn’t know the difference. While we think nothing of looking up at the stars and the moon at night, in another reality it would be impossible.
In Planetarian: The Reverie Of A Little Planet, Earth is plunged into a global war that kills most of humanity. Dangerous man-made ‘Gods of Death’ still roam the land, killing anyone that stumbles into their path. A corrosive acid rain falls across the planet, drowning plants, rusting metal, and hiding the sky. The scant few remains of humanity struggle to survive the aftermath of a war they didn’t start.
]]>Every three months, Grinding Gear Games adds a new league to its excellent action RPG, Path of Exile. Each league adds a new spin on its core monster-slaying action for a few weeks until the next is added, and the latest is Delve, which launched at the end of August.
Delve presents you with an infinite and pitch-dark mine to dig into, a sprint into the black of the unknown that’s almost a metaphor for its production as its makers raced to find an idea and make it fun in time for release. But as they found rather too late, the real challenge was preventing Delve’s players from avoiding the fun they were meant to be having.
]]>The folks of Playerunknown's Battlegrounds have made one of the most significant adjustments to how the game is played, via the Weapons Balance Update (Patch 12), which re-balanced everything from damage to scope reticle to movement speeds while certain weapons are equipped. It's such an intricate and deep re-alignment of the entire game that Plunkbat players are encouraged to take part in a new survey in order to make sure PUBG Corporation haven't, you know, completely ruined the game. In exchange, there is a lottery system for survey participant rewards.
Also, if you're still not on board with Plunkbat, please read about Plunkbat's creator agreeing with you. You're wrong, though, and so is he.
]]>Far Cry 5 has a bad story in the same way that the bubonic plague has a bad bacterium. It is, by a considerable stretch, the most abysmally written narrative in AAA gaming. Not just in how it so idiotically interrupts you in the middle of other scripted missions to force you to play through hideously badly written enforced semi-playable cutscenes, but in every word uttered by every character from start to finish. And wow, does it reach its subterranean nadir when it comes to the finish. It is time to drape yourself in spoiler warnings and embrace the volcano of awful that is Far Cry 5's ending.
]]>I have very much enjoyed the Far Cry series, most often despite itself. Far Cries 3, 4 and Primal (why is everyone forgetting poor old Primal?) have all occupied me for countless hours, provided enormous amounts of entertainment in their kleptomania-inducing maps, and always done so despite everything it thinks is so compelling about itself. Far Cry's self-belief in its own abysmal stories is always so grossly apparent, like a strutting buffoon bursting into the bar and looking around, confused, when every man, woman and animal doesn't immediately throw themselves at his feet. So then he starts loudly demanding people throw themselves at his feet. And when they don't, runs around putting his feet as near to people as he can and declares to the room that this counts. Oh Far Cry.
Unfortunately, this time out things have gotten a lot worse. Far Cry 5 - to run with the previous analogy - barges up to you, grabs you by the collar, and throws you down onto the ground by its shoes, screaming "MY FEET! WORSHIP MY BLOODY FEET!" Which is to say, engaging with its godawful cutscenes has become less optional. Far Cry 5 has the most egregiously bad imposition of its story.
]]>GameFront (also known as FileFront and originally FileLeech) was shut down nearly two years ago, and in the process, nearly 20 years of history was lost. The site, which offered demos and mods for gamesfolk all over the world, went down in 2016 after being an internet mainstay. Guess who is back?
]]>The Far Cry 5 map editor will include bits and pieces from other Ubisoft games, Ubi announced today, which should let players create places far beyond rural America - and the modern day. A number of assets from Watch Dogs, Far Cry 4, the prehistoric Far Cry Primal, Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag (the pirate one), and Assassin's Creed Unity (the French one) will be thrown in. I'm so up for building a Virtuaparis monster truck obstacle course. It sounds like Ubisoft are planning to make a real go of player-made maps, building around them something they call the Far Cry Arcade.
]]>The Binding Of Isaac: Rebirth (plus Afterbirth add-ons) is very much my jam right now. It's been in my life for a while, but December (and now January) was when I fully committed to it. By which I mean 'it took over almost my entire life.' I've seen so much, I've killed so much, and I've been killed by so much. I have a degree of skill at the game I never believed possible (and which, clearly, pales into insignificance against that of longer-term players), but even so, there are certain enemies that always, always give me grief, even as I am able to face down far great horrors.
I say enemies. I mean dicks. Absolute, total dicks who have humiliatingly cost me victory on more occasions than I could ever admit to. These are those dicks.
]]>Assassin’s Creed clothes are some of the best clothes in all games. Those layers, all those flowing, flapping, swinging layers: cloth and leather and swords and knives and pouches and harnesses. I often idly wonder, as I watch an Assassin’s Creed loading screen, how many people - how many studios! - produce Assassin’s Creed’s clothes? They’re a wonder of code and art coming together, of layers of beautiful fabric flapping just right. And Ubisoft knocked Assassin’s Creed Origins’ clothes out of the goddamn park.
]]>The random death of a cat might be the most shocking moment I can remember in a game.
I'm playing Divinity: Original Sin 2 [official site], and it's my first experience of the series as a whole. Not knowing what to expect, but knowing the game to offer unexpected moments, I was simply pootling around the island on which magic-laden beings were being held captive. And at a certain point a black cat started following us about. A very welcome black cat, causing no trouble, a little too meowy but nothing offensive beyond that. It seemed to have an odd look in its eyes, and I was intrigued to learn if there might be more to this mog than met the eye.
]]>The makers of Darkwood [official site] have uploaded a full version of their wonderfully dreadful new horror game to a torrent site. Acid Wizard Studio say it's for people who want to play Darkwood but don't have enough money to buy it, giving them a "safe" version to download. They also hope that this will dissuade people buying the game from key resellers, who they call a "cancer that is leeching off this industry". Blimey.
]]>There's always a risk in putting out a feature-incomplete early alpha. Will it leave potential purchasers coming away with the impression that it doesn't yet meet their hopes, or will it inspire people to imagine where it could go? That's the gamble developers Mighty Morgan are taking with Police Stories [Steam page] - a top-down police tactics shooter that wants you to think, albeit for a split second, before you shoot.
]]>Bulletstormers Gearbox have dropped out of a deal to sell their remastered shooter on G2A.com, following a spat over the key reseller’s business practices. They were selling Bulletstorm: Full Clip [official site] and its expensive, statue-sporting collector’s editions through the site but following complaints and a backlash focusing on the reseller’s less-than-wholesome history of complaints, that has fallen apart.
Last week we saw that Gearbox seemed to listen to those complaints and had openly given G2A a list of demands, including better protection against fraud for both developers and customers. Gearbox have since decided those demands were not met and have now cut ties with the reseller completely, taking their game off the shelf. Obviously, it’s more complex than all this. If you really want to dive into this slurry pit of videogame distribution, come with me and I’ll try my best to explain.
]]>Days after launching an exclusive physical 'Collector's Edition' of Bulletstorm: Full Clip Edition [official site] on key reseller marketplace G2A, Gearbox Software have reeled and demanded that the controversial store change its practises. Gearbox's list of demands for G2A includes stopping selling fraud protection as an extra, and letting developers find and remove fraudulently-bought keys on G2A. If not, Gearbox will... do something. The demands sound sensible, given that G2A have long been accused of enabling shady shenanigans. However, even the briefest of Googlings before launching a high-price exclusive edition -- costing around £226 -- with G2A would have uncovered all of those complaints. None of these problems are secrets.
]]>Gosh, we’re living in brilliant times for interesting games. It seems barely a month goes by now without something novel and fascinating appearing, pushing at the edges, upcycling old ideas for new minds, and messing with our brains. The latest that fits all these categories is the really very splendid Stories Untold [entirely pointless official site], ostensibly a collection of four novella-like adventures linked by an opaque theme. It’s part parser-based text adventure, part horror peculiarity, part 80s TV show... It’s unlike anything you’ve played before, despite being built from the half-remembered remains of a childhood of gaming.
So a familiar caveat to accompany such a review: if you trust me, if you want to experience the game with as little information as possible so everything’s a surprise, then take the above paragraph as everything you need and spend £6 on this. If you want more details (wonderfully written and spoiler-free), then read on.
]]>Christine Love, creator of Digital: A Love Story and Analogue: A Hate Story, has released her latest visual novel. Ladykiller in a Bind [official site] is just a touch sexier than those, as will become perfectly clear when I tell you the game's extended name: My Twin Brother Made Me Crossdress As Him And Now I Have To Deal With A Geeky Stalker And A Domme Beauty Who Want Me In A Bind!!
We've all been there.
]]>The games they are a-changin'. A beholder used to be "a floating orb of flesh with a large mouth, single central eye, and many smaller eyestalks on top with deadly magical powers". You'd find them in dungeons, hovering about and making a nuisance of themselves. 2016's Beholder [official site] is a man called Carl and he's a whole lot creepier than a floating testocular monster:
"As Carl, the landlord of an apartment house employed to serve the state...your daily routine is simply to make the property attractive to its tenants. Little do they know that you have ulterior motives and will use any means available to observe, whether it's spying, eavesdropping or wiretapping as you build tenant profiles..."
Papers, Please meets The Lives of Others? There's a demo available now.
]]>Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.
Many years ago, there was a truly terrible IF game called "Detective". But that's not really what's important. What matters is what happened next. Inspired by the wonderful TV series Mystery Science Theatre 3000, currently returning to us via Kickstarter, another player set about first reimplementing the whole cursed thing... and then ripping the piss out of it, courtesy of TV's Mike, Crow and Tom Servo.
]]>Oh my God, the Ladyvikings are awesome.
]]>There's a really interesting post over on Gamasutra about proportion and scale when making game characters. I feel like that still sound a bit dry given I'm trying to tell you how interesting it is, but essentially it takes a look at how different head sizes and body proportions make you see game characters differently as well as affecting tone and mood.
]]>Last week G2A, a sort of eBay but for video games keys, and tinyBuild, the publishers of Speedrunners and others, had a bit of a tussle after tinyBuild accused G2A of facilitating the sale of $450,000 worth of fraudulent game keys. Both sides exchanged demands, and today G2A seems to have pulled back on their stance and is now rolling out a program that will, in part, offer developers and publishers up to 10 percent royalties on each sale of their game. But is that going to be enough?
]]>What was I expecting when I set out on this driving-sim adventure? I’m not sure, but it wasn’t this. If the logistical complexities of doing driving sims properly caught me out a little, the initial experience is completely off the map. But I’m finally up and running thanks to the arrival of a Playseat seatpod thingie and I’ve had something akin to my own Matrix moment…
]]>Every Monday, and this Tuesday, Rob Zacny settles down with his game library in search of the next great Early Access game. This week, an adaptation of Rudyard Kipling's Kim.
An adventure game based on Rudyard Kipling's novel Kim [official site] is almost as strange and difficult to assess as the book itself. Like its source material, it's full of contradiction and complication, a work at once in conflict with its goals and yet more enticing because of it. It shouldn't work, and in some ways it very much doesn't… but then you get caught up in it and those objections are forgotten. At least for a time.
]]>Over and above its management and strategy groundings, Big Pharma [official site] shines a light on the billion dollar, often unscrupulous, pharmaceutical industry. While Alec enjoyed his hands-on time with Twice Circled's medicine manufacturing sim last year, he noted it didn't "go for pharmaceutical industry’s jugular". Its first expansion - Marketing and Malpractice - takes a distinguished step towards doing exactly that by introducing dodgy tactics and the ability to manually set medicine prices.
]]>I had a play of Aer [official site] last year and, while very early in its development, it was already a really rather attractive and endearing thing. Lots of lovely flying, which is inexplicably rare in gaming. A year on, a new trailer has emerged, and gosh, it's still looking like something rather ace. And hopefully coming out this autumn.
]]>When Big Pharma [official site] appeared last year, Alec approved but pointed out it perhaps went a little easy on a severely dodgy target. Today's announced expansion, Marketing And Malpractice, looks like it might add a few more teeth to the management satire. With your drug developed, you now need to ensure doctors think it's the right one for their patients. "Take them to dinner, buy them some drinks, maybe a new set of golf clubs? It's no biggie! Everyone does it."
]]>Every Monday, Rob Zacny braces himself for the chilly wastes of Early Access and attempts to find warmth by the side of a worthy in-progress game.
From its opening on a park-bench at a roadside rest stop in northern Quebec, Kona tantalized me with a combination of period detail and immersive-sim mechanics. Before my character, private detective Carl Faubert, even finished his cigarette, I'd made sure to stash his extra smokes, Instamatic camera, and map in my inventory. Then it was time to hop into a carefully recreated '65 Chevy pickup and drive up a narrow ribbon of backcountry highway, while a gentle snowfall turned into a blizzard outside my windows.
Kona is a wonderfully atmospheric game, though atmosphere isn't hard to come by when you've turned the blizzard effects up to 11 and marooned the player in the wastes of northern Canada. With nothing but howling winter winds and a mysteriously deserted village for company, it's easy to get caught up in the setting and its feeling of menacing isolation.
]]>I like games. I like driving. But driving games? Not so much. Not since I could actually drive, at least. But in the name of natural science and fortnightly deadlines, I'm having another crack at it. As is my remit, I'm going heavy with the hardware. With the Laird Gaming Dungeon™ now operational, a top-notch driving-sim setup should provide for empirical exposition. Before that, however, please allow me to bother you with a broader theory of games that explains why driving sims have failed to fire my pleasure neurons in adulthood...
]]>Each week Marsh Davies descends like a hungry urban gull upon the reeking heap of Early Access, hoping to yank free a tasty treat without choking on a crinkled Space Raiders packet. This week, he’s been stuck in Garbage Day, a game that is nominally about replaying the same looping time period, again and again, until you piece together the mystery and escape your temporal prison. In its current form, however, it’s no more than a colourful but cramped chaos sandbox, in which you can kill and maim cartoonish inhabitants of a highly-smashable town in the knowledge that any consequences will be reset as soon as the clock strikes midnight. But does its eternal present suggest a plan for reaching a less frivolous future?
]]>It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas a game. Maybe not a lot, actually, but certainly a little. Star Citizen [official site] 2.0, as the latest alpha update calls itself, is out now and tries to expand the scope of the long-in-the-making, $100 million space game in addition to improving its core fight'n'flight aspect. So the big question is: is now the time to give Chris Robert's record-breaking comeback a try if you're not someone who's already backed it?
Trion Worlds have been churning out MMOs for so very long now that one seems to blur into the next. Their latest to appear on Steam, a translation of the South Korean free-to-play original, is Devilian [official site]. It said it was a Diablo-ish action RPG, so I thought - HMMMM? IS IT THOUGH? And took a look. Well, it sort of is. And it's sort of an afternoon nap in gaming form. Here are my impressions from a few hours of somnambulistic slashing.
]]>If you haven't been paying attention to Klei Entertainment's creations for the past few years, you're missing out on some of the best games in the world. This year's Invisible, Inc. [official site], recently expanded in fine style, might be the best turn-based game I've discovered since I joined the Chess Club all those years ago, and Mark of the Ninja is a completely different but almost equally brilliant rewrite of the stealth genre. All of the studio's games are free to play on Steam this weekend, starting right now, with discounts should you wish to buy them after having a taste.
]]>The latest series of The Great British Bake Off has come to an end, causing those of us hooked by its cream-filled buns, end-of-the-pier puns, and oddly sincere celebration of the human spirit, to feel as empty inside as an incompletely prepared batch of jam donuts. After a few days spent facing a future free from sugar, gluten, and the strange tension between Paul Hollywood and hosts Mel & Sue, I decided to do something about it. I emailed some game designers and asked them a question: if you were charged with making a computer game of The Great British Bake Off, how would you do it?
The answers are below.
]]>I've hardly moved from behind my desk this week, but I just cannot get enough of flying. To my delight this afternoon ushers in more of the same courtesy of Just Cause 3 [official site] as it propels us head-first into its latest trailer, dubbed 'On A Mission', in all its wingsuit-wearing, parachute-popping, South-American dictator-detracting glory. There's tanks, flash cars, ridiculous physics, and about a gazillion 'splosions. Business as usual, then.
Duck inside to see Rico in standard death-defying action.
]]>Following last week's rather extensive update, ARK: Survival Evolved [official site] has welcomed a new species of dinosaur to its shores - a "massive flying battleship" creature identified as Quetzalcoatlus that goes by the synonym Quetz.
Although I'd have to question the physical plausibility of this particular beast - something we've put to experts in the past - hopping aboard a Quetz and taking to the skies does look like fun, if the trailer below is anything to go by.
]]>Minecraft [official site] will let you live out your childhood Peter Pan-inspired dreams when it adds magic flying capes to its 1.9 update. Last night, developer Jens Bergensten took to social media to namedrop a new "dramatic feature" for the forthcoming update, before parting with some work-in-progress screens. Nip inside for pics and gifs galore.
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