Jun 10, 2019

Fall Guys is a multiplayer obstacle course of Takeshi's Castle foolishness

Fall Guys - contact@rockpapershotgun.com (Alice O'Connor)

Get one hundred people together in a wasteland their natural inclination will be to find guns and murder each other to pieces, the ongoing glut of battle royale shooters would have you believe. It wasn’t always this way. Television gameshows like It’s A Knockout, Wipeout, and especially Takeshi’s Castle once showed us that dozens of competitors can come together to fanny about in weird minigames, no murder necessary. We can get back there. Devolver Digital last night announced Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout, a hundred-player rumble where the path to victory is a long and foolish obstacle course.

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Jun 10, 2019

Devolver's bootlegging its own games and making a $5k arcade light gun machine

CARRION

The annual Devolver E3 conference-slash-shortfilm aired late last night and was wonderfully anarchic and grotesque, as always. This time it rounded on Nintendo Direct broadcasts as we ventured inside the maniacal mind of barely-saved-from-the-dead character Nina Struthers (brought to charismatic life by actor Mahria Zook).

But amid the brutal satire were announcements too, and some outlandishly trendy ones - very on-brand for Devolver - at that. An actual, $5000, Enter the Gungeon: House of the Gundead light gun arcade machine, for instance, shipping early 2020; and Devolver Bootleg, an 8-in-1 collection of self-rip-off games on Steam right now for 4. Among the rip-offs, Hotline: Milwaukee, Enter the Gun Dungeon, and more.

There were more traditional game announcements as well. Two things caught my eye. The first was a very colourful and entertaining-looking 100-person online multiplayer romp called Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout. It's a bit like Takeshi's Castle or Total Wipeout, whereby 100 people go through round after round of obstacle challenges in the hope of being the last one standing - the winner.