Windows is full of phone-based surprises, lately. For example, Windows 11 natively supports Android apps. It also turns out both Windows 10 and Windows 11 can be installed on phones with ARM and Snapdragon chipsets. And we're not talking about the old Windows Phone OS, either. This is proper, desktop Windows. That’s a route that eventually leads down a certain path. A question asked of all PCs since the mid-2000s, and now one we must ask of modern phones: “But can it run Crysis?”
The answer the OnePlus 6T cockily spits back is, “A bit.”
]]>Hitman: Codename 47 was released 20 years ago today. In all that time, IO Interactive have crafted an entertaining seven-game series (not including spin-offs), with the eighth aiming for the heart in January 2021. The subject matter might be grim, but from the very first game, IO Interactive were always happy to fold information and easter eggs into their immersive sim (don't @ me) to a ridiculous degree. The games all have murderdeathkills, but they also have hauntings, mythical creatures, and real-world actors as targets.
I've had a blast digging up some forgotten facts and 47's more bizarre moments (this does mean this list contains some spoilers, so beware). There are so many that this could have been 200 facts for 20 years, but I stuck with 20. It seemed right. Enjoy!
]]>The first time I pushed someone downstairs in Hitman: Blood Money, I felt faintly guilty. Not because I'd just killed a person, but because The Agency, my bar-coded assassin's employers, had gone to the trouble of providing me with a wealth of lethal equipment. Yet here I was, sending people to their deaths without touching a single item. Was I putting someone out of a job?
Five minutes later, my concerns had vanished, replaced by a sense of malevolent joy as I explored the lethal potential of Agent 47's "shove" ability, a feature that's strangely absent from subsequent Hitman games.
]]>In the best possible way, the Hitman series is ridiculous. Its protagonist, Agent 47, is the single most conspicuous person in any crowd. He’s big and bald and white with a bar code prominently tattooed to the back of his head, and not once does this fact deter him from his preferred method of infiltration: wearing a disguise.
These aren’t disguises in the elaborate, Mission: Impossible, we’ll give you an entire fake head sense. No, 47 simply throws on the clothes of whatever guard or unfortunate bystander he’s subdued. And this actually works. In the franchise’s fiction, he’s considered one of the most dangerous people in the entire world, the best of the best. This imposing figure who scarcely bothers to alter his body language, let alone his voice, is a master of disguise. Like its 2016 predecessor, Hitman 2 is quite aware that this concept is absolute nonsense.
]]>Any time a new Hitman [official site] game rolls around, I need to know the answer to one question: can I royally screw basically everything up and get away with it? Not for me the Silent Assassin, but more a series of pratfalls, murders performed inadvertently in plain sight, panicked costume changes and awkward scuffles, inevitably culminating in a desperate sprint to the exit with a chain of armed and extremely angry guards pursuing me. So I am delighted to discover that the new Hitman game supports this kind of rolling disaster.
I even managed to complete a mission which began with me choking a man unconscious in front of roughly 200 people who I somehow hadn't realised were watching me.
]]>After Hitman: Absolution, Agent 47 is in need of another subtitle. Redemption, perhaps, or Contrition. His upcoming adventure has already made headlines thanks to its now-confirmed episodic release schedule but it also seemed to be a game made with the awareness that the previous hadn't given fans of the series quite what they wanted. I was eager to get my hands on it after seeing a promising demo at Gamescom last year and now that I have, I'm in two minds.
Hitman [official site] contains just about everything I want from the series but all of the ingredients have become a little muddled.
]]>Below you will find the 25 best stealth games ever released on PC. There are sneaking missions, grand thefts, assassinations, escapes and infiltrations. Stay low, keep quiet and we'll make it to the end.
]]>Alice is on holiday, leaving it to me to ask us and you that timeless question: whatcha playin' there buddy?
]]>Absolution might be a fitting tag for what looks like a return to form and a casting off of the sins of the past, but since that subtitle's already taken, I'm hoping I'll be able to justify referring to this one as Hitman: Redemption [official site]. So far, the signs are good. I spent some time in the company of IO Interactive's studio head, Hannes Seifert, as he played through a mission set at a Paris fashion show. As he manipulated NPCs behaviour and demonstrated some emergent possibilities, Seifert said all the right things about recovering the best of the series' past. The game - this portion of it at least - backs him up convincingly. It's looking good.
]]>We have Opinions about Absolution, the most recent Hitman game, 'round these parts. Opinions which not everybody shares, but everybody should because famously we're always 100% Objectively Correct in all things. Despite some grasping at greatness, it seemed a disservice to Hitman as we knew it. Meanwhile, in Mobileland, whispers spread that there was, in fact, a pretty great latter-day Hitman. Its name was Hitman GO, it looked lovely, and it was a sort of stealth-themed sliding block puzzle which looked like a miniatures wargame. Though mechanically very different to any Hitman game, as I understand it Go nonethless conjures up a lot of their spirit - perhaps more so than 2012's Absolution was. It was also acclaimed as something of an original. Sadly, it was banished to portables. Until now: suddenly, it's on PC. There is, alas, a catch.
]]>Although winners have yet to be announced in the recent Make Arma Not War competition, the judges have published the shortlisted finalists. As a result a series of levels inspired by Hitman: Blood Money - far and away the best game in the Hitman series - have been brought to our attention. You can download 'em over here.
There are eight Arma III [official site] levels in all, each inspired by one of Blood Money's intricate scenarios.
]]>Have You Played? is an endless stream of game recommendations. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.
This one's regularly cited as a cult classic that didn't quite get the acclaim it deserved at the time, but it bears repeating: Blood Money is io's stealth game at the peak of its powers.
]]>And then suddenly Hitman: Blood Money was free to play in a web browser.
Core Online, Square Enix's foray into the world of online gaming, is a system that lets you play ad-supported HD games in your browser, where you earn gaming time by watching ads. And they're launching it with one of the more loved Hitman games, Blood Money, along with Mini Ninjas. I have taken a look, and it's safe to say the system is in something of a mess at the moment. But it remains an interesting idea.
]]>Agent Griliopoulos was dispatched to see the game formerly known as Hitman: Subtitle for us. He returned bathed in blood, dressed as a sailor, and bearing these words. Update: now with brand new screenshots!
Oh, we are skeptical souls at RPS. Though we loved Hitman: Blood Money, we have been somewhat wary of Hitman: Absolution. Partially, because there are mild changes to something we loved (like when the X-Files replaced Mulder with T-1000) and partially because Kane & Lynch left us colder than Captain Oates. The new level we saw yesterday had the chance to allay our fears though, set as it was in a lovely orphanage. What can go wrong in a lovely orphanage?
Jumping back from the lovely orphanage for a second, we were given a quick rundown of the game’s backstory before Agent 47 got to meet all those lovely nuns.
]]>Somehow, this is the first official in-game footage of Hitman: Subtitle which has been released to the hungry eyes of the public. Feast, feast!
As Adam worried in his preview t'other week, old 47 doesn't appear to be quite so silent an assassin as he once was, but it's good to see he's still playing fancy dress in between punching people and shooting people and throwing people and choking people.
]]>Edit- The trailer is no more. For now, anyway. Sorta-explanation below.
We're still agonisingly denied a look at Hitman 5, aka Hitman: Absolution, aka Hitman: Subtitle in as-it-plays action, but at least we've got some raaaawk-soundtracked, stylised pre-rendered kill sequences and scene-setting to stare at. It also features a sort-of naked lady, but you can't really see anything, but if you're reading this in a place where an image of a sort-of naked lady but of whom you can't really see anything would cause you trouble, like a nunnery or on a projector in a primary school classroom, you probably shouldn't carry on.
]]>Morning, giggles. How's every little thing? To start you off for the new week, let's have a good old belly-laugh at leaked marketing materials for the mysterious Hitman: Absolution. Or, as these presumably work in progress box covers (via Kotaku) claim it's called, "Hitman: Subtitle." Y'know what, I'd have bought extra copies if it really was called that. There's an honesty to it. "The bit after the colon doesn't mean anything but people expect it - just put any old melodramatic guff in there." So Hitman: Subtitle it must officially remain on RPS, forever. Coming up next - Red Faction: Sequel.
]]>Following a distinctly unrevaltory teaser trailer earlier today, the slow dribble from the promotional teat for IO's just-announced fifth Hitman is now running a little faster - we now have a few early details on the game's theme and the tech behind it. "Never before seen", "familiar but significantly different..." Uh-oh. Change - the internet's least favourite thing. Prepare the twin engines of excitement and rage, faithful pseudo-asssassins....
]]>Here we go... After a flurry of rumour and ARG-based teasing, a comeback for the murderous man with the marvelous pate is now officially confirmed. We have a name - as has been series tradition since the third game, there'll be no number in the title. This is not Hitman 5, but instead Hitman Absolution. But what will our stern Agent 47 be absolving himself of? Forgetting to put the bins out on time for the sixth week running, is my guess. Maybe it'll be something to do with assassionation, though. Anyway! The first trailer, all 27 bloody seconds of it, is below. No in-game footage, of course (we never get that until the eleventh hour these days, it seems) but we do get some mood-setting music and some glove-porn.
]]>And so begins the long, long road to actual information. Game marketing in the second decade of the 21st century is all about the drawn-out tease - we already knew Hitman 5 was in on the act due to news of an apparent alternate reality game associated with sharp-suited baldieman Agent 47, and now we have the results of said ARG. Screenshots! Screenshots of gloves!
]]>This is a revised version of a piece I wrote last year for PC Gamer UK.
There's something on my mind. This being a Hitman retrospective you might think that thing would be murder, but actually it's the nature of puzzles. You see, it seems to me that each level of a Hitman game isn't merely a set of rooms full of enemies to be killed or out-sneaked, but rather a kind of multi-solution puzzle. Hitman is more like "Rubik's Murder Sim" than it is like part of the linear of dude-shooting action games. If a puzzle is “a toy, problem, or other contrivance designed to amuse by presenting difficulties to be solved by ingenuity or patient effort”, as my dictionary claims, then Hitman's missions truly are nothing more than puzzles. You don't need railgun twitch skills to feel supremely confident about your Hitman abilities.
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