While we’re all curled up in our shared Christmas hibernation cocoon over the holidays, the site gets a little quieter. But fear not, for each day of the ho-ho-holidays there’s a Christmas cracker to pull! Oh, and of course, if you’re after more posts you might have missed, why not join our Supporter Program, and unlock dozens of new posts from the last year!

Meanwhile, you provide your own party hat, and we’ll provide the groaner of a gag.>

Q: What’s the name of EA’s Charles Dickens adaptation? (more…)

It’s been a good long while since Ice-Pick Lodge turned to Kickstarter to fund a remake of Pathologic, their award-winning survival adventure, but it seems that 2017 has been a busy year for the studio. It’s now being developed under the title of Pathologic 2 and the developers have opened their doors to give us one last peek at the game before the year’s end.

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Sometimes, a single job posting can tell you a lot about the future of a studio. In the case of CCP’s latest position listing, it’s quite explicit. They’re looking to hire an experienced lead designer to head up production in London on an as-yet-announced MMO. While thin on fine details, we can at least infer some interesting details about the Eve Online studio’s short-term plans, and it paints an interesting picture.

According to the job posting, CCP hope to establish a ‘small, tight-knit’ team in London, headed up by someone with extensive industry experience, including ‘fantastic knowledge’ of MMOs both classic and contemporary.

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We’ve previously covered Quake mega-mod Arcane Dimensions, which has become a cornerstone of modern Quake mapping thanks to its slew of new gameplay features, enemy types and weapons going a long way to refresh the formula of Id’s cyber-gothic classic without diluting its breakneck pacing and drum-tight combat loops.

Xmas Jam: 1024^3 is the latest group project to come from the quietly industrious func_msgboard mapping community. Built using Arcane Dimensions’ bag of tricks, it offers 11 new levels from 11 different creators, all adhering to a single restriction: the level must fit (roughly) within a tiny space, 1024 Quake map units cubed, approximately three seconds travel time across.

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We asked a handful of our contributors to put together a list of their three favourite games from 2017. Their picks are running across the week while the rest of RPS slumbers.>

I think I would have lost my mind if it wasn t for the many incredible digital holidays I ve taken in 2017. It s been a bit overwhelming to play so many great but also massive games in a single year, however. New Year s resolution: squeeze more brief games into my life. (more…)

Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus is a shooter that often feels at odds with its own protagonist, the worn-out vanilla action hero who is somehow the heart of a neurodiverse, multi-ethnic cast of socialist firebrands, civil rights campaigners, pacifists, lapsed jazz maestros and rabid UFO chasers. At first glance, it has a lot to say in spite of BJ Blazkowicz rather than through him, its levels and intermissions thick with references to feminist activism and race rights movements that risk being swallowed up in the bloodshed. Many of the allusions are very timely, for all the retro silliness of Wolfenstein s Nazis – it s hard not to draw a line between in-game propaganda about the cancerous press and Donald Trump s frequent denunciations of the US media, for example.

MachineGames has downplayed these parallels in conversation, but Bethesda s marketing teams have latched onto them rather opportunistically, going so far as to parody Trump s infamous #MakeAmericaGreatAgain slogan on social media and subtweet his defence of rightwing marchers following the murder of Heather Heyer. Ultimately, however, The New Colossus offers no straightforward rejection of the bigotry Trump and his followers have tacitly and not-so-tacitly endorsed. Rather, the game’s achievement is to show how BJ’s story of white heroism risks echoing that chauvinism, and how it and toxic social archetypes at large may become instruments of resistance. With spoilers right up to the final moments, let s look at how all that holds together.

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While we’re all curled up in our shared Christmas hibernation cocoon over the holidays, the site gets a little quieter. But fear not, for each day of the ho-ho-holidays there’s a Christmas cracker to pull! Oh, and of course, if you’re after more posts you might have missed, why not join our Supporter Program, and unlock dozens of new posts from the last year!

Meanwhile, you provide your own party hat, and we’ll provide the groaner of a gag.>

Q: Did you hear about the Ubisoft employee who worked for the London Underground? (more…)

We’ve previously covered Lost Alpha, a massive labor-of-love project to rebuild the original Shadow of Chernobyl from the ground up, reinstating concepts and content that never quite made the final cut. While the first release of Lost Alpha suffered nearly as badly from a messy development cycle as the original game, the updates have continued, and the massive patch released this week makes it a far more tempting prospect, whether or not you’ve played a S.T.A.L.K.E.R. game before.

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We asked a handful of our contributors to put together a list of their three favourite games from 2017. Their picks are running across the week while the rest of RPS slumbers.>

2017 has been a stunning year. Partially in the ears-ringing, shellshocked way, partly in the Wow, I m making a living writing about games style, and consistently in the Nobody has time for even half these amazing games sense. Of the scant handful of games I did manage to see through to the end, here are my picks from 2017, although if I had time and column inches to spare, I could sing the praises of another dozen more. (more…)

Despite reports of a brewing legal struggle between Star Citizen studio Cloud Imperium Games and one-time engine partners Crytek, the enormously crowdfunded studio have released another big chunk of gameplay footage, this time focused solely on Squadron 42, the story-driven singleplayer campaign mode. It’s a broad mix of gameplay styles, showing off everything from dialogue to dogfighting, some zero-G EVA exploration and a chunk of planetary on-foot stealthy action.

If nothing else, it features an eerily accurate digital recreation of Liam Cunningham – the tip of a star-studded iceberg – looking a little less crispy around the edges than he did in Game of Thrones, although no less world-weary.

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