I'm a sucker for a good first-person runabout. I don't need to shoot, but it's sometimes nice to get a sword, or a big whip. As long as I get to be immersed in an adventure. I think that's the big theme of my selection box: being grounded within my player character. I want to feel what it's like to hike through canyons with too much sellable loot in my backpack. I want to park my soul in the head of a scared Scotsman way out of his depth, hundreds of miles from shore. The closer I can comfortably fit in my character's shoes, the more I seem to buy into the world they inhabit. Even if that world is constantly glowing a magnificent crimson.
]]>Indiana Jones and the Great Circle isn’t just good. It’s excellent. If you’re excited about playing the game on launch day (or beyond) and want to get the best deal possible, then look no further.
]]>It's not just because he's a Nazi. It's because he's a smartass Nazi. As the main antagonist in Indiana Jones And The Great Circle, Emmerich Voss vacates the archetypal armchair usually reserved for secondary fascist goons, so that he can goosestep straight into the big boy seat himself. He smiles with all the sleaze of right-hand-man Major Toht, the grubby gestapo who gets that right hand burned in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Yet he also engages in the pseudo-intellectual trash talk of the main archaeological rivals to Jones, like Rene Belloq or Walter Donovan. He is a hideous grab bag of all the things that make an instantly detestable villain in the series. But there's something else. Voss is so immediately and gutturally hateable because he resembles a type of racist encountered not in the 1930s, but one you've probably met today: the asshole you meet on the internet.
Warning: Here be spoilers.
]]>If you’d told me last year that face of all-out, GPU venerating, fully ray-traced PC game visual excess would be that of a de-aged Harrison Ford, I’d have asked which exact colour of paint you’d been eating. And yet here we are, with Indiana Jones and the Great Circle loving its ray tracing so much that the effects can’t ever be fully switched off.
]]>Every fascist in this game has a cold. The Hitlerites and blackshirts of Indiana Jones And The Great Circle sneeze and cough as they patrol the dig sites of Gizeh, or the marble corridors of the Vatican. Although this is the Machine Games' clever way of letting you know where your enemies are at all times, it is also mildly funny, as if all the Nazis have been secretly kissing each other, spreading the same rhinovirus from Italy to Egypt to Nepal and beyond. More than that, it's a stubborn reminder that, despite the many hours of perfectly motion-captured cinematics that accompany all this, you are still playing a video game. A snotty tissue that separates the Indy of taut two-hour cinema and the Indy of a sweeping first-person punch 'em up that will take days to complete. All this is to say, you will notice the difference. But that might not matter; they're both still Indiana Jones.
]]>Indiana Jones And The Great Circle arrives soon, which will be exciting to many of you who like the guy who runs from large boulders and occasionally cracks a whip. It may be worth holding back that excitement, though, until you've had a glance at the just-released PC requirements. If you want to run it so Indy's hands are rendered at the recommended spec, you'll need quite the beefy rig. If you want his hands ray traced, you'll need something even juicier.
]]>The line between escapist entertainment and Problematic fantasy can be thin, but I think Indiana Jones's dislike for the German National Socialist Party of the 1930s and 1940s is fairly clearcut. "Nazis - I hate these guys!" he says in Raiders Of The Lost Ark. Let's play Devil's Advocate and try to Lionel Hutz that quote: "Nazis? I hate these guys!" [pointing at some Communists]. Yeah, I'm not really feeling it.
I guess Indiana did sleep with a Nazi once, but only by accident, and yes he did once cosplay as an SS officer and get Hitler's autograph, but again, only by accident. Aww, he's such a ditz! I think his political stance is abundantly obvious in Indiana Jones And The Great Circle - the new Wolfenslike from MachineGames, in which you will blast and bludgeon literally hundreds of Shitlerites in unambiguously one-sided first-person view. So it's amusing, if not wholly unexpected, that MachineGames and Bethesda have slapped the game with an explicit disclaimer stating that the game's depictions of Nazis are not, in fact, Nazi propaganda.
]]>Going by three hours with a preview build last month, the Indiana Jones of Indiana Jones And The Great Circle has the hungriest hands this side of Thief 2014. They're always surging into view, reaching restlessly toward objects as you explore, for there is ever so much to touch: photos and letters; pipes, frying pans, and other blunt implements; relics that translate into "Adventure Points", used to "unlock" books of skills; camouflaged levers and other chunks of fusty comicbook exotica that harbour clockwork secrets. Sometimes, Indy's magic fingers help you glean an object you need from the game's religiously-sourced piles of Lucasfilm memorabilia. Sometimes, they exhaust you: please, Dr Jones, for the love of George. Stop trying to pick things up. Let me look at "ancient history" for a while.
]]>Oh, and new Indiana Jones And The Great Circle trailer! Great. I’ve been looking forward to a nice, juicy chunk of extended gameplay. You know, something to really convey the flow of the game, rather than the admittedly impressive but nonetheless very fragmented snippets we’ve gotten so far. Now to sit back and…oh, wait. Hang on. It’s just actor Troy Baker telling me about all the great acting he’ll be doing. It is great, by the way. He’s doing a fantastic job. Maybe just, you know, a crumb of acknowledgement or elucidation over the whole ‘interactivity’ part?
Anyway, don’t mind me. I’m just an old fool who likes to press buttons. And, to be fair, it's not like Machinegames don't have a great track record. Anyway, here’s some good news: The game releases December 9th this year. Have a release date trailer.
]]>MachineGames have made a decent living as the creators of satirical alternate histories in which you messily murder Nazis using mighty double-handfuls of shotgun. There are Nazis to fight in Indiana Jones And The Great Circle - a globe-trotting, tomb-robbing adventure featuring a Lost Ark-era Harrison Ford - but as you'd expect from a Lucasfilm adaptation, there's rather less of the bloodshed.
]]>Indiana Jones And The Great Circle, Indy’s upcoming FPS adventure game, has a new ‘Official Showcase Reveal’ trailer, officially showcasing and revealing basically nothing about the game except that it features some pretty and decently acted cutscenes, which we already knew from the previous reveal. It does have snow nazis in however, possibly the rarest flavour of Nazi after Cookies n’ Cream and Original. You’ll find the trailer below. Be careful: it’s official. Also, it’s mainly just one very long cutscene, so if you want to save that stuff for when the game’s out, maybe don’t bother.
]]>Indiana Jones And The Great Circle was announced at this week's Xbox Deveoper Direct. It looks good! There has been much discussion of its decision to make its tomb raiding first-person (with some third-person traversal and cutscenes), however.
In an interview with Lucasfilm.com, game director Jerk Gustafsson said first-person was "part of MachineGames' DNA", and that the perspective "separates our game from many other action-adventure titles."
]]>The leaks were right. Machine Games' next Nazi-biffer is called Indiana Jones And The Great Circle. It was shown for the first time during this evening's Xbox Developer Direct, where we got to see first-person punching and whipping, some tomb raiding, and plenty of Indy's face in cutscenes.
We also got a release window: 2024.
]]>Today's Xbox Developer Direct stream offered updates on some of 2024's biggest Microsoft games, including MachineGames' Indiana Jones And The Great Circle, Obsidian's Avowed and Ninja Theory's Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2. If you missed the stream and want a quick roundup of all the news, games, release dates and trailers featured, we've gathered it all together in this post.
]]>Today's the day of Xbox Developer Direct 2024, a select showcase of forthcoming Microsoft-published games, from sorcerous RPGs to intricate strategy games, which begins at 12pm PT, 3pm ET and 8pm UK. Wait, stop! Come back here, you silly goose. You don't need to go anywhere. I've embedded the livestream below, together with the key things you need to know about the games in question.
]]>Indiana Jones And The Great Circle appears to be the title of Bethesda and Lucasfilm's new Indiana Jones game created by Wolfenstein developers MachineGames, if a recent brace of domain registrations are any indication.
]]>On January 18th, the Xbox Developer Direct will offer updates on games from some of the studios the behemoth have swallowed over the past several years. Most excitingly, that'll include an update from MachineGames on their in-development Indiana Jones game.
]]>Earlier today publisher Bethesda Softowrks announced that MachineGames, the developers of the recent Wolfenstein games, were working on a new Indiana Jones game. There's not much more known about the game other than that it is quite a ways off, and so I am here to beg the developers now: please let Indy fall down a lot.
]]>Elder Scrolls and Fallout publishers Bethesda Softworks today announced an Indiana Jones game, of all things. It's being made by MachineGames, the studio who revived Wolfenstein starting with The New Order. They say the mystery game will have an original story, so don't expect a direct adaptation of the Harrison Ford adventure films. Beyond that, it's a mystery. And apparently not due out for a while. For now, come watch the teeny teaser trailer.
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