Someone deep in the bowels of the internet once betwittered that Dark Souls was "the My Summer Car of RPGs". The joke stuck with me enough to try the car mechanic sim when it was released into early access back in 2016. I didn't know it would take another nine years to bring this ambitiously hostile Finnish life simulator to a full release. But here it is. If you want a deeply confounding game about putting an old banger together piece by excruciating piece, while periodically sweating the grime off your body in a cramped sauna, then I can think of no better time waster. My Summer Car 1.0 came out yesterday, and a new trailer came with it.
]]>From an early age, humans know that if they want to be taken seriously, they must learn how to deliver a convincing car noise. Vrrrrummm, they might say. Or perhaps: brrrrrr-bp-brrr. These are the nascent efforts of the budding speed freak, and they must be respected. But once again the realm of videogames encroaches upon the germinal life of the human with pitiless velocity. Car games put a stop to make-believe noise, and introduce fully realised cars on a screen, ready for the racing, shiny bonnets and vrrrrummm noises included. Thus, the imagination dies, and these, the 10 best cars in PC games, are born. Beep beep.
]]>Wow. Look at that summer sun slapping the face of the planet, like a big 12-hour camera flash. So hot, so clear-skied. A blessed day of walks in the park, trips to the beach, picnics by the litter bins. What a glorious day for wasps it is out there. Let’s all go to the...
Oh right. Forget I said anything. Go back inside, lock the doors, and consider some of these perfect virtual holiday destinations. Please, trust us with your fake vacation. After all, what is a games journalist but a sort of really dodgy travel agent?
]]>Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day, perhaps for all time.
My Summer Car has excellent patch notes. Here are some examples:
- Player can now drown when too drunk
- Adjusted targeting of piss
- Sleeping with cigarette can start a fire
- You can now drink from jail cell WC bowl
- Added moped (do not try to drive moped inside another vehicle, YOU WILL DIE)
What do you mean there's a whole month of 2017 left? Well, the disembodied mouths of the RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show, are tired of waiting. This week the team look at some of the most exciting upcoming games of 2018. Adam is looking forward to smashing big robots with other, bigger robots in Battletech. Matt wants to make trousers from dinosaur skin in Monster Hunter World. And Brendan forgot all about how much he's excited by surreal isometric detective game No Truce With The Furies.
We've also got some chat about Viking strategy game Northgard and yet more love for FTL follow-up Into The Breach. Plus, our Patch Adam quiz is back!
]]>I finally completed Dark Souls III [official site] last week, a world that I have been dipping in and out of between bouts of listlessness since its release in April last year. It didn’t grip me like the first revered Dark Souls, but it still made me sad to know it was all over. Where could I go now for my Souls fix? The answer, it turns out, is loads of places. The games industry is quietly reverberating with the series’ influence. From small games boasting “souls-like” combat, to bigger games doing weird things with death and player messages. Meanwhile, our PlayStation brethren got Nioh, which took the “pocket full o’ souls” idea and simply renamed them “Amrita”. There is a popular complaint that everything in the industry is now being compared to Dark Souls, and it's easy to forget that games embraced difficulty and strangeness long before the Bed of Chaos made you weep with frustration. Nevertheless, the mechanics and the tone of Miyazaki’s magnum opus is leaking into games everywhere.
That there's an influx of Soulsian disciples out there isn’t a problem to me. My problem is that they are learning all the wrong lessons. At least, they are neglecting the most important one. But first let’s look at what sly tricks are being lifted from the series, and who is lifting them.
]]>Every Monday we abandon Brendan in an empty shack in the countryside with only disassembled bits and pieces of an early access game to entertain himself with. This week, the brake lights and hubcaps of My Summer Car [official site].
I’ve woken up in the toilet again. It’s pitch black outside and I am almost starving. I fumble around in the dark of the house, looking for the light switches and hoping that they work. Nothing in this game is reliable. Thankfully, they light up. I wobble outside and find the light in the garage. Pieces of metal are strewn on the floor, arranged randomly around a half-assembled engine. I have no idea what I am doing. I am so, so hungry. I slouch back into the house, into the kitchen, and open the fridge. It is completely barren. I suddenly remember that I have already eaten my only packet of sausages.
]]>An altogether healthier chart than we've had over the last few weeks, even if the usual ghosts continue to haunt it. That was a spooky halloween reference. It's probably still Halloween in Tazmania or something. Even if it's not, there's definitely a hungover guy in a vomit-smeared David S. Pumpkins costume shambling down a street somewhere.
]]>My Summer Car [official site], the drunk cousin of Jalopy, is coming to Steam Early Access next week. It's a driving game and life simulator about building, fixing, and driving your own car, while also larking about and trying not to die in Finnish countryside of 1995. So sure, you can take your car apart and fine-tune it to win races, and you can also find a job to pay for beer then get smashed and die drunk in a ditch. That's the full spectrum of '90s Finnish rural life as I understand it.
]]>I've spent a lot of time playing east German bus driving game OMSI and wishing it had a little more personality beneath its evocative world and sound effects. My Summer Car [official site] looks like it might scratch that itch: a Finnish driving game set in 1995 about fixing up an old banger, chopping wood, and picking up your drunk neighbours for rides through the countryside. It's now on Steam Greenlight with a new trailer below.
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