Happy this week all! Good news, James has returned from India and appears none the worse for his voyages. I was hoping he'd come back with a top-to-bottom report on Indian game development, but no, it turns out the smirking jackanapes was merely "on holiday". Still, we welcome him back with open arms and in the Maw's case, orifices, because it's another stuffed week for PC game releases. Here are a few that seem noteworthy.
Screenshots for Bluepoint's cancelled live service God Of War game appear to have slipped through the titan fingers of publishers Sony. Assuming they aren't a dream woven by Morpheus (via his earthly emissaries at MP1st), they reveal a few work-in-progress environments from the abandoned project, which Sony reportedly cancelled earlier this year alongside a new game from Days Gone devs Sony Bend.
Sundays are for rediscovering the joy of bouncing a tennis ball off your bedroom wall. When's the last time you bounced a ball? I recommend it. Sometimes I play a game with myself where I say "if I bounce and catch this ball 10 times in a row, I will win a million pounds". Then I get to five and hit myself in the face. Every time. If you are able to accomplish this seemingly impossible feat, please let me know your secret after reading the below collection of interesting articles and fiction.
Somewhere south of Paris, a bunch of carpenters, painters, blacksmiths, basket weavers, historians, and archaeologists have spent almost 30 years building a castle, the way people built castles in Olden Times. Ben O'Donnell has written it all up for Archaeology Magazine, with some sexy fortification photography. I know there are medieval masonry nerds in the RPS readership. Get in there and set 'em straight. I'm sure you could have had that castle up in six months, with enough cash left over to declare war on Belgium.
MMOs are a strange facilitation of games because they are, ostensibly, dead on arrival. Not dead in the sense of "lol dead game," that exact comment you see littered in the comments of articles, videos etc. about literally any online game, no matter how popular it is. Dead in the sense that it will die, as all things do, because one day the servers will go down and there will be no (legal) way to play it anymore. I put the legal in brackets there because there are many a fan effort that allow you to play a range of "officially" dead MMOs, but what would a game about a Frankensteinian revival of such a thing look like? Probably, Gorgon's Garden.
You know, with the original Paranormal Activity steadily approaching two decades of existence, it's becoming harder and harder to recognise what it actually was and is as opposed to the cultural consensus around it. First and foremost you probably think of it as a cheap, jump-scare-filled kind of horror movie, when in actuality the first entry in the series is a slow, tense window into the world of gaslighting and, obviously, the paranormal. Being as removed as we are from this means one thing: IP expansion, which we're viewing today in the form of the first proper trailer for Paranormal Activity: Threshold, the video game adaptation from the developer behind The Mortuary Assistant.