“From the day she was born, Patricia Wagon has dreamed of becoming a police officer,” reads the premise for Mighty Switch Force! Academy, a jaunty rags to riches story that follows poor Ms. Wagon in her pursuit for a job in justice.

Sound faintly familiar? Ah, good call! Mighty Switch Force! Academy is in fact a spin-off of a game named simply Mighty Switch Force! – a shooter/puzzle hybrid from the same developer which saw a Steam release just last month following its initial 2011 release on 3DS.

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Sundays are for laying face down on the ground, thanking the carpet fibres that the following day is a bank holiday and you don’t have to move anytime soon. Good thing you gathered the week’s best games writing at some earlier, unspecified point of the week, eh?

• Over at Gamasutra, Alex Wawro writes about the ways in which working on “gross, violent games” can affect developers. We featured this article in its own post earlier this week, but it’s worth flagging again.

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Guild Wars 2 is going free. That’s free, not free-to-play. “We re not using the words free-to-play with Guild Wars 2,” says ArenaNet president and co-founder Mike O’Brien when I talk to him about the changes via email. “We believe in buy to play, and we know that when people describe something as free-to-play that comes with expectations.” Those expectations are that free-to-play games require heavy microtransactions, but O’Brien say that Guild Wars 2 will remain the same as it always was – and the expansion, Heart of Thorns, will still have an entry fee when it releases later this year.

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Seeping out from the D&D fantasy maw from whence all RPGs come is Sword Coast Legends [official site], a new action role-playing slashy-slashy project which expands on D&D’s famed Forgotten Realms setting. You may remember me mentioning it earlier in the month when news arrived that its PC release would be delayed until September 28th. Here I am again, this time a harbinger of happier news – and there’s 40 minutes of game footage below.

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Digital Dreams Entertainment has come out with early pre-alpha footage for a little game called Mutant Football League [official site]. Remember Mutant Football League? Memories of it are likely to be lingering way back in the dusty recesses of your brain. It originally released on the Mega Drive in the early ’90s and has had a couple iterations over the years, although never on PC. This latest version of Mutant League is currently being built in Unity for both PC and consoles and the first video is below.

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The weekend is here, the weekend is here! And it’s a long one here in England, giving some of us time to scale that extra large mountain, complete that extra large jigsaw puzzle, or drink that extra large glass of refreshing alcohol. Perhaps it might even give you enough time to finally play some of those extra large videogames. Here’s what Team RPS are playing this week. Leave your own plans in the comments below.

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ARK: Survival Evolved [official site] features a brontosaurus wearing a giant riding saddle. For that reason alone, it seems like good news that from now until Sunday, the open-world nude dinosaur fighting game is free on Steam

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This is the third of 6 talks I m doing for Videobrains walking with game designers and thinking about how the landscape of their lives affects their game design. If you enjoy this series, please back me at patreon.com/hannahnicklin. This week, developer Kerry Turner, creator of indie gem Heartwood.

We re going to Brighton, the long way round.

Around 12,000 years ago the ice left Yorkshire. As the glaciers passed by they scraped away earth and vegetation to reveal the limestone below, a flat bare surface. Limestone is slightly soluble and as rain hit it over and over and over joints and cracks in the limestone wore away into tiny streams, drainage to the earth below. The dialect word for those fissures is grykes , the paving-slab like regular stone they divide: clints . In modern terms it s a limestone pavement. Malham Cove is one of these rare formations, not far from a ravine called Gordale Scar, a few miles or so out of Malham, North Yorkshire.>

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A new phenomenon of modern games criticism is playing a game for a bit, then stopping to double-check if you missed its being in early access. That’s certainly something I did when playing Corpse Of Discovery [official site]. (The punning title rendered even more clumsy when a character pronounces its near-homograph with a hard ‘ps’.) But no, despite a growing certainty as I started playing, this is entirely released. That might not be for the best.

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A message, beamed into the RPS mobile base from an unknown source:

“Hello, Commander. In light of our desire to ensure that the upcoming extraterrestrial reign of terror is a significant improvement on the gloriously successful incursions of 2012, this council of developers has convened to approve the activation of the XCOM 2 Delay Project. You have been chosen to spread word of this initiative. To oversee our first… and last* change to the release date. You may believe that releasing this year would have made all of your planet’s dreams come true but we are looking to the future. We urge you to keep that in mind as you proceed.”

Actually, I spotted the news on Twitter. XCOM 2 [official site] won’t be with us until February 5, 2016.

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