I’m not saying that Jake Gyllenhaal killed someone then Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot met him in the woods on a winter’s night with a shovel and a hacksaw to help bury the body – that would be libel. However, you tell me how you think Ubi got the Prince of Persia> star into another movie based on a video game. Ubi today formally announced a film adaptation of The Division [official site], see, and Jakeo is signed up to star alongside Jessica Chastain (the sister in Crimson Peak>, and Murph in Interstellar>).

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The notes I took while playing Muv-Luv [official site], a 2003 adult visual novel that s just been released in English, tell a story. They start out bemused. Despite knowing a chunk about the game beforehand, it s clear I m not entirely> sure what I m getting into, and the notes continue in that vein for a while as the story unfolds. For a while it s clear that I m being carried along, in a sense, by what s happening. And then, bullet point by bullet point, they start getting shorter, sharper. Reading back through them, there is a very specific note at which everything goes downhill, and it just reads ugghhhhhhh .

Muv-Luv is gigantic. It s sprawling. It s full of surprises. It s not very good at all.

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SNIKT! That’s the sound of Telltale cutting the ribbon to formally launch the first part of their episodic pants-over-trousers ’em up Batman: The Telltale Series [official site]. THWIP! That’s the sound of someone in spandex sitting down in a leather chair to play another adventure story game in the typical Walking Dead-ish, Wolfamongus-y Telltale way. BAMF! That’s me.

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This week on RPS: Where Are They Now? we revisit Jim Rossignol. You might remember Rosso co-founded RPS in 1873 but couldn’t resist the bright lights of Game Development City. Packing his bindle and hitting the road, he co-founded Big Robot, the studio we last saw with survive-o-shooter Sir, You Are Being Hunted. But where has Rossignol been since then? What happened to Big Robot? Did the bright lights lure another innocent soul to ruin on the technorocks?

Nah mate, they’ve been quietly working on The Signal From T lva [official site], a first-person explore-o-shooter about robots on an alien planet.

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We Happy Few [official site] is a singleplayer, first-person survival game, set in an alt-history, 1960s-esque England in which the well-to-do all scoff ‘Joy’ pills to ensure an ordered society, while the less fortunate ‘Downers’ are locked out and left to live in squalor and madness. You play as Arthur, a clerk off his pills and starting to glimpse the stark truth of things, and cast out among the Downers as a result. There, you must craft and fight to say alive, and find a way to some presumed better place.

Strange timing. There am I thinking, “hey, We Happy Few owes quite a bit to Sir, You Are Being Hunted,” and then Big Robot (headed by Jim Rossignol, formerly of this parish) only go and announce their new game. The cosmic ballet continues.

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Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.>

Have you played the Quake II mod CrateDM? If so, please tell me all about it. It’s a simple but oh so wonderful idea, which is best explained in its readme file: “CrateDM pits opponents against each other in a room full of crates, and the players are crates.” That’s it. All-crates Quake 2 deathmatch. Before Old Man Murray even created their Crate Review System, CrateDM was at the cutting edge of crate culture.

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Now I’m no Tricky Dicky Dawkins – I’ve never watched dogs 69ing, for starters – but I do know the definition of, and delineation between, species is hazy. Consider the case of Ark: Survival of the Fittest [official site]. The multiplayer Battle Royale ’em up started as a mode for crafty survival sandbox Ark: Survival Evolved. A subspecies, right? Then it was spun off into a standalone free-to-play game. Separate species? Not quite: Survival of the Fittest is now merged back into Survival Evolved so it can use the Development Kit mod tools. Mutation merging to spawn new mutations? I don’t know, man. 6,000 years old and this Earth is still full of surprises.

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Abz [official site] is a beautiful underwater game which is, by turns, delightful and then very good at getting in its own way. I’ve played it twice now so follow me beneath the waves as I tell you Wot I Think:

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Warhammer strategy games are thick on the ground, and my current favourites cover both the Fantasy and 40k settings. In Fantasyland we have Total Warhammer and in the grimdark future, there’s Armageddon, the hexy wargame from publishers Slitherine. Dawn of War III brings RTS to the 41st millennium again soon, but Slitherine have just announced that they’ll be returning to the eternal war as well. Warhammer 40,000: Sanctus Reach [Steam page], running on the company’s new 3d Archon engine, looks like it might be the closest thing to a digital version of the tabletop game we’ve seen yet.

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We’re well past the halfway point of 2016 now, and there are several games which have been in the Steam top ten for almost every week of the year so far. I feel a bit ill thinking about all the money involved. This week’s – or rather last week’s, this chart reflecting sales up until Sunday just gone – is a bit of a remix by recent standards, at least.

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