Can I lodge a complaint with the Advertising Standards Authority about how the PS4 version of Fishing Planet [official site] got a trailer that was approx one billion times better than the PC trailer? I am FURIOUS right now. We get moody water shots and easy listening and theirs is all TENSION AND FISH AND HYPE AND EXCITING RIFFS AND YES YOU’D BETTER BELIEVE THERE ARE MORE THAN 70 SPECIES OF FISH AND OBVIOUSLY COMPLEX FISH AI IS HAPPENING AND ARE YOU READY FOR THIS BECAUSE I DO NOT THINK YOU ARE READY FOR THIS. (more…)

Ultimate General: Civil War has travelled a fair-old distance since I Early Accessed it late last year. Game-Labs’ spectacular sprite slaughterhouse is now bigger, better, and even more approachable. I like it a lot, but not quite enough to pin a prestigious RPS Recommended rosette on its breast. (more…)

Back in 2014, the RPS treehouse shook with everyone thundering around pretending to be trucks stuck in squelching mud. Such was the captivating magic of Spintires, a serious simulation of simply trying to drive across rough Russian terrain. But ongoing development got bogged down by a drawn-out spat between developer Pavel Zagrebelny and publishers Oovee Game Studio, and Spintires seemed to be left to rust in the cybermud. Well! In a surprising and confusing twist, Spintires is back with a new edition coming from another studio and a different publisher (update: with Zagrebelny still leading it)>. Focus Home Interactive today announced Spintires: MudRunner [official site], an enhanced and expanded edition of Spintires coming in October. (more…)

As the song goes, in space no-one can hear you party like it’s one-hundred-and-ninety-nine. Which is a shame given update 199 for Astroneer [official site] contains a whole bundle of things. It’s not content-heavy/content-at-all-y which I know is a source of frustration for people who are playing it through Early Access. For people like me who pop back in every few months it’s fun to see how the development process is moving, though.

In this instance it sounds like developers System Era are making some meaningful changes on the engineering and stability side which is good. If you’d prefer to know about future content stuff skip down to the part about Prototyping, otherwise join me as I get excited about the ability to change the colours of beacons – no longer will I roam the land assuming I’m going in one direction and then realising I confused one identical beacon with another…

(more…)

It’s the end of another week and what a week it has been. I think we’re all ready for a little old fashioned video game escapism, and what better way to get cracking on that than with a look at some of the best gaming and techy type deals of the past week. As always, we’ve got deals that ll work in the UK, deals that ll work in the US and some deals that will work in both the UK and US, as well as presumably many other places. Let s get started.

(more…)

I was already ‘jazzed’, ‘stoked’, and ‘ziffed’ for the launch of open-world fighting game Absolver [official site] later this month, and now the weeks beyond that are sounding good too. New fighting styles and moves will arrive in free content updates after launch, developers Sloclap and publishers Devolver Digital announced yesterday, as well as features like a 3v3 mode and spectating. In a game where every player builds their own fighting style from different stances and attacks, I’d certainly like to safely watch other people’s technique. (more…)

There are many unresolved questions about the state of the world in 2017, but one of them is how we ended up in a situation whereby films about talking CGI apes riding horses are considered a high watermark of modern mainstream cinema. Sure, the recent Planet of the Apes films are fine> as contemporary action movies go, but they are also films about talking CGI apes riding horses>, and somehow our brains stop laughing at that after a few minutes of desaturated colour palettes and sad Serkis eyes.

Can a videogame spin off, set between the second and third movies, hope to maintain the same illusion? Or: can it instead embrace the inherent silliness and go monkeycrazy? (more…)

It s all kicking off at AMD, peeps. The new Vega graphics chip is now more than merely a press release and has finally been released into the wild. Meanwhile, the insane ThreadRipper CPU with 16 cores and 32 threads has also landed. It s all a far cry from just a few months ago when AMD was soldiering on with an elderly graphics product and a deadbeat CPU line up. Time to catch up with AMD s latest hardware awesomeness. (more…)

With the development saga of Shenmue 3 [official site] now creeping up on sixteen years, hey, here’s another little bit of good news. After getting the ball rolling with crowdfunding, the RPG has now secured a publisher. Developers Ys net today announced that they’ve signed up with Deep Silver, the folks who publish such series as Saints Row and Metro. Having the technical and financial support of a publisher will surely be helpful for such a big life-sim-o-fight-a-RPG, especially considering the crowdfunding has only raised a fraction of the amount the first game reportedly cost – supposedly it was, in its day, the most expensive game ever made. (more…)

After telling stories about shapes then even a teenager, the fella behind Thomas Was Alone and Volume has taken another step up the consciousness scale for his next story with a game about robots. Bithell’s studio today both announced and launched Subsurface Circular [official site], a short text adventure starring a robot detective investigating missing robots. It’s a text-based story-o-puzzler where you gather new words rather than items, an expanded vocabulary opening new opportunities. While it’s all wordy-like, it does have some nice pictures to go along with it. (more…)