For the uninitiated: Genital Jousting is a party game about inserting cartoon penises into cartoon buttholes (on the cartoon penises) and occasionally some other things. With that out of the way, onto the news: Genital Jousting is leaving Steam Early Access and officially launching on Thursday, January 18, publisher Devolver Digital announced today. 

While the game's Steam page still says "there are no current plans to change the price" after Early Access, Devolver Digital confirmed in their tweet that "the price will go up." At the time of writing, Genital Jousting is $5.  

We got our first look at Genital Jousting in late 2016 when Tim, Bo and Tom gave its party mode the old college try and found it surprisingly involved. (Genital Jousting developer Free Lives also made the fabulous Broforce, for the record. They know their camp.) It's received significant updates since then, like the Date Night modes released last year, which added the option to walk a wiener dog as a wiener. 

Evidently, the full game will include "a new narrative story mode," according to Devolver Digital. I shudder to think. 

Jake Birkett of Grey Alien Games has been making casual games for over a decade but it was his first collaboration with his wife, science editor and writer Helen Carmichael, that gave Grey Alien a crossover success. They mixed solitaire with the design sense of a historical costume drama to create Regency Solitaire, which met with critical acclaim after being released on Steam. However, this year's follow-up Shadowhand, a solitaire RPG about a highwaywoman that adds card-based combat, had a different sensibility. 

I had a chance to speak with the husband-and-wife team about setting a game in rough-and-tumble 1770s England—and releasing it directly to an audience with a different set of expectations.

Questions and answers have been edited for brevity and clarity.

PC Gamer: Shadowhand is a sequel to your previous game, Regency Solitaire, making it the second bodice-ripper solitaire-based game that I'm aware of. It iterates on your previous game, in story, setting, and... solitaire. What was the first idea you had that led to what would become Shadowhand?

Helen Carmichael: In Regency Solitaire there is an older female character, Lady Fleetwood, who hints that she had an interesting youth. It was just a one-liner, but it sowed the seed: to go back in time 40 years from the Regency period, when Regency Solitaire was set. We wanted to make it a bit more edgy than Regency Solitaire, and also to include a much wider range of characters—not just wealthy aristocrats who attended balls.

Sometimes it's good to include the things you enjoy that are right there. We both love British history and we live in the South West of England. Our stretch of coastline was alive with smugglers and wreckers—people who would be on the shore with strong lamps trying to lure ships in, to make them run aground and cause a shipwreck. I got quite immersed learning about highwaymen, smugglers, and how the law worked [in the 1770s]: no police force, just locally-appointed magistrates and various militias.

We have put a lot of effort into making the details (clothing, weapons, buildings) historically accurate. Yes—the firebomb blunderbuss really did exist! This approach worked well for us in creating a game setting for Regency Solitaire, and we feel it also worked for Shadowhand.

There is an ancient sword in the game forged in Avalon by a trainee blacksmith called Conan. While we were making the game our teen son Conan did actually go to a forge in Avalon (Glastonbury) and forge his first sword. It seemed only fair to include it.

Regency Solitaire was first available on casual game portals like Big Fish Games, and only later launched on Steam. In contrast, Shadowhand went straight to traditional game stores, like Steam, Humble, and GOG. How did that happen?

Jake Birkett: Cliff [Harris, of Shadowhand publisher Positech Games] liked Regency Solitaire, and at the time he was publishing indie games. He actually asked me to pitch a sequel that would be suitable for Steam. Normally indies have to seek out and pitch to multiple publishers.

Helen already had this highwaywoman idea, but the concept needed something else to appeal to a non-casual audience. That's when I had the brainwave to add in turn-based combat. The idea sprung pretty much fully-formed into my head and when I coded it and tried it out, it worked very well! There were tweaks and refinements of course, but it's pretty close to my original "vision".

HC: We already had an automated AI testing system that we had created to check the difficulty of the levels on Regency Solitaire. We already had the theme and ideas about highway robbery and making some kind of more strategic and in-depth game. Our core mechanic was solitaire, so we thought, can we drive turn-based combat using solitaire?

Then followed months of iteration as we gradually worked out how the various different systems in the game would affect the cards—the player actually has a big advantage over the AI of being human (automatically makes smarter and more strategic moves) and also of all the various gear, training and attributes they acquire through the game that end up giving quite a major advantage over the AI enemies.

JB: Games like Bookworm Adventures and Puzzle Quest were an influence. I had also played the Early Access version of Darkest Dungeon not long before, and I really liked the way the characters came together when one hit the other. So I attempted to kind of emulate that with the characters on cards in Shadowhand. It's only a really simple two frame animation but it works, especially with the addition of great sound effects from [Vancouver-based subcontractor] Powerup Audio. 

HC: Shadowhand was targeting a core gaming audience on Steam, whereas Regency Solitaire was aimed primarily at the casual market. So we have both put a lot of thought into our audience and that has influenced the design of both games considerably.

How did the different audience affect Shadowhand?

HC: Solitaire is quite a tough and strategic game, as many card players recognize. We already had something there we felt we could work with. The issue was how to message it to appeal both to card players and also perhaps to those in the core audience who may not have played this type of game before.

Some of the decisions were about how we message things visually: Regency Solitaire uses large buttons and has a fairly deliberate feminine-styled UI. We based [it] on women's jewelery from the Regency period. The pink and gold color scheme was fashionable for both men and women, and was also common in interior decor then. We love it but we also couldn't see that resonating with the core audience.

JB: The first iteration of the UI the artists sent us for Shadowhand was too casual (too big, too purple), so we sent them more references and eventually ended up with a look we are very happy with.

HC: [For Shadowhand], we have a lot more information on display and didn't hold back from "complexity". There are many layers of strategy in Shadowhand and you do have to deploy them to win. We have tried to message this to the players, and added a number of systems—mainly to do with inventory management and character stats, so that they can manage their loadout.

We still introduce the various layers and systems gradually over the first few hands. The difficulty is in showing a new player just how much there is going on and how many choices they can make, but not overwhelming them with all of that immediately. It's a fine balancing act.

JB: I think some people still probably look at the theme and art style of Shadowhand and think it looks too casual and maybe skip it. Though those who give it a chance soon discover the gameplay is anything but casual: it's quite hard in normal mode. There's a lot of depth that emerges after the first few chapters.

Regency had no "traditional" RPG elements. Just a ballroom you upgraded which affected the gameplay in some ways. However, Shadowhand has the inventory (weapons, outfit, consumables, special abilities), and character states plus of course the whole turn-based combat system, so that's why we call it an RPG.

What you describe as the core audience are often conditioned to expect an inexorable upward power curve and a "fairness" where there's always a right answer to avoid failure. Casual games, on the other hand, are often harder and less "fair" in that way—there may be no right play to clear the entire table in solitaire with a given draw. Failure isn't as punishing in a casual game, though, because win or lose, you're simply going to play again with a new shuffle. 

How did you tackle the challenge of satisfying the need to feel like there was a right way to win, when solitaire often doesn't have a right, winning answer?

HC: Casual gamers are often dismissed somewhat, and this fails to recognize the skill that is required to beat many casual games.

JB: Agreed. Regency Solitaire on hard mode was hard. The chapter goals were intense and required a lot of skill at playing the cards and using the abilities, and of course retries! At its heart, Shadowhand is a solitaire-style game, and thus involves plenty of RNG and tries.

We gave the players lots of tools to influence the outcome. You can still lose due to bad luck or win easily with good luck, but in a close match—and there are lots of those due to the balancing we did—players can swing it their way by using skill and abilities, and those are the most exciting and rewarding situations.

[Some players] want to always win, as you have identified. There seems to be a contingent of players who want to play something on hard mode and get the accolade of beating it but not without the pain of losing and having to retry. We decided to rename "hard" to "very hard" in the hope that people will take it more seriously.

Plenty of other people love it though. We have to accept that it's not a game for everyone, but for those that do accept the nature of the game, it's great fun. Something like Darkest Dungeon is brutal and pure [randomness], and they got flak from people. But, ultimately it sold tons, so we knew we'd still be OK.

HC: In card games, the cards are dealt. It's a game of chance, to some degree. We give the player many opportunities to be "luckier" through their choices—but we also don't want to patronize them.

JB: I can understand why people don't like losing due to bad luck. But if you accept that losing and retrying is part of the core premise of Shadowhand, then you can focus on choosing the right equipment for the job and playing the hand to the best of your abilities. That's how we empower players, in the choices they can make on the micro level (with the card play) and the macro level (with their loadouts and stat upgrades).

Solitaire players expect a random shuffle and to lose sometime, but that can come as a shock to players new to the genre. There may be merit in making a different game with a fixed layout that applies all kinds of background tricks to give the player a different experience for sure, but it's too late to apply that to Shadowhand. 

Jake mentioned in a GDC 2016 talk that only 14% of your revenue on Regency Solitaire at the time was from Steam; the rest was from casual game portals. Now Shadowhand is only on Steam and its competitors. Are you done with the casual game market?

HC: Not necessarily. We need a few weeks for the dust to settle after launching Shadowhand to decide our next move.

JB: We were discussing what game to make next last night. And we have some casual game ideas, and some game ideas more like Shadowhand.

HC: The good news for us is that we have quite a few options. I think it's possible you would see both core and casual games from us in the future. Being at the crossover is an interesting place to be. There are definitely design values from casual that can inform a core game. 

Over the holiday break, I did a bad thing. Instead of starting a long-ass PC game from the past year that I should probably have an opinion on by now, like Divinity: Original Sin 2, I just played Rocket League for hours and hours. This is a familiar problem at this point. I blame Psyonix's car football game for much of my current pile of shame, because it's too damned fun and easy to jump into. 

This comes after an extended, 18-month break from the game. The secondary factor that keeps bringing me back to Rocket League, beyond the satisfaction of scoring a goal or making a great assist, is the behaviour of the other players. Its quick chat options ('Nice shot!', 'Siiick!', 'What a save!' and so on) feel like they're used sarcastically as much as they are used sincerely, and this is both awful and wonderful. Combined with an individual's play style, this helps me build up a more vivid picture of my opponents and teammates than I would typically get from a multiplayer game. This, it turns out, is fundamental to my enjoyment of Rocket League. I could turn text chat off, and I'd probably focus more on the match. But I can't. 

Two-and-a-half years later, then, plenty of people are still irritating, and I'm delighted about that. It wouldn't be the same game without the personalities that surface in each match. Here are the annoying things that Rocket League players will never stop doing. Not all of them, obviously. Just some. 

1. Teammates not going for the ball at kickoff when they're the closest to it

More and more people are buying Rocket League all the time—because it's one of the best multiplayer games ever made, obviously—and it means irritating habits from the earliest days of the game will never die. There's always a new generation of players willing to carry on the mistakes of their predecessors, and that includes knowing when to go for the ball at kickoff. How is this still confusing? Have a quick look around. If the only other player on your team is behind you, guarding the goal, maybe you should go for the first touch instead of reversing into your teammate, ramming them back into your goal, then watching helplessly as the ball sails into the right-hand corner. 

It's particularly irritating when you see Semi Pro or Pro-level players doing this. Haven't you learned how the hell this game works by now? 

2. Being bad in the air

I've never gotten close to mastering wall jumping and boost to play effectively in the air, but I've made my peace with that. I feel it's far more offensive to make other players watch while you play in the air badly, however. Maybe these players are just practicing, but can't you do that with bots instead of doing it on my time? Watching a player dribble up the wall, then try and double tap the ball into the goal, only to flop off the side of the arena and land upside down is just the worst, because the whole ordeal feels like it takes forever. Everyone else is just parked, looking up, (probably) thinking, 'when's this arse going to finish dicking about and get on with it?' 

If you're actually good in the air, I just look up in impressed disappointment, like a doomed species that suddenly realises it's about to be replaced by a superior one. 

3. Congratulating their own goals/passes because you didn't

There are some needy teammates out there in Rocket League, who demand validation for every little thing they do. Is it not enough to make a good assist, setting up an amazing goal? Sometimes, it isn't, and these players need to congratulate themselves in quick chat as if to suggest you should've been doing it anyway. 'Great pass! Nice shot!' they tell themselves. It's not like you've given me a kidney, pal. I owe you nothing. Everyone wants a medal for turning up, these days. 

4. Not skipping replays

I don't care how good a goal is in Rocket League, whether you're on my team or the opposing team—almost three years later, I don't need to watch it again. Alright, unless it's the winner. Or unless it's such a crazy fluke that all of us find it funny, as evidenced by the reaction in the group chat. Some people still make you watch replays to try and get you to quit early in Rocket League, and perhaps foolishly, I thought the community might eventually grow out of doing that. 

Then, when you score a goal, you feel obliged to make them watch your entire replay in retaliation, savouring it as they immediately skip. Then they make you watch their replay again. Then you make them watch yours, because hey, they started it! And on this goes, until the game is over, and everyone's faith in humanity is slightly damaged. 

5. Going off to fetch boost from miles away when the ball and all the opposing players are in our half, stupid 

When you've conceded a goal from a decent play in Rocket League, you often wonder, what the hell happened to my teammate(s) during that sequence of events? In the replay, you spin the camera around and learn that they were in the other half of the pitch, casually collecting boost at 30mph while you were the only one defending. Yesterday, I played a game where at kickoff, both players on the opposing team drove to the nearest corners to collect boost while I nudged the ball straight into the net on first touch. It didn't take long for one of them to quit.

You can't run from your poor decisions in Rocket League, pal. They'll catch up to you eventually. 

This month, people signed up to the PC Gamer Club's Legendary tier get a Violet Cycle Steam keysent to their inbox. The game launched in December on Early Access, and if you enjoyed the likes Hyper Light Drifter, it's likely to be your sort of thing—check out the trailer above. 

Violet Cycle is a hack-and-slash game with a dashing element, but with a restriction on how many actions you can perform before you begin to overheat. You can find new weapons and rigs that give you passive abilities throughout the game's levels, so it's a fusion of a bunch of elements from different games. The enemies are procedurally generated from various components, too, so each run feels different from the last. 

If you've grabbed the game in the PC Gamer Club, developer Weckr Industries is keenly looking for feedback here to refine the game. Below, creator Marek Budik tells us about its creation. 

Violet Cycle feels like an interesting fusion of different games—an action game, a roguelike, it takes place on an isometric grid. What were your influences on the game?

In a way, I started on the 2D precursor to VC after playing Super Crate Box, which prompted me to finally download GameMaker. Sometime after that, I fell in love with the first videos of Supergiant's Transistor and enjoyed Bastion. Finally, Hyper Light Drifter remains one of my favourite games, it matches my taste in visuals/audio/game design almost perfectly, I guess it does for a lot of people. Around that time Nuclear Throne was out too, a pinnacle of the roguelite genre for me so far, I think. 

Can you talk about the tile-based environments in Violet Cycle? What are the different effects of tiles on the player?

There are four different tile sets, and each has a special tile type. The starting tile set has water tiles that tie into the game's heat system. Then there are obligatory slippery ice tiles. The last two are self-explanatory—conveyor belt tiles and speed-boost tiles. With the exception of the water ones, all the tile types mess with movement, which really is what most of the game is about.

How do you keep the enemy types interesting in the game? You've got a procedurally generated element to them—how do you balance this, and how does this alter the challenge presented to the player?

They are generated from different pre-made parts, and they mostly provide different behaviours to the enemy. The leg parts define how the enemy moves around idly i.e. ones walk in straight line over the ground, others float around the edge.

On top of that goes a head, and that defines the attack path that an enemy takes. Every enemy has the ability to attack the player by bumping into him, going with the whole game's focus on melee and movement. So one head will charge you directly, another goes at you from the side making an arc, another will jump at you and so on.

In addition to this, enemies can wield a melee or ranged weapon that has its own independent attack. Or it can have a big ol' spike sticking out its side, so you'll want to attack it from another direction.

The final layer is the enemy colour, which adds perks such as giving an enemy a dodge move, enabling it to reflect projectiles, immunity to knockback, stuff like that.

I scale this for the player just by using basic leg/head combinations at first, then I add weapons, then colours, then weapons and colours at the same time—you get the idea.

How did you settle on the game's art style? 

If I needed to concept something before modelling it, it was mostly ballpoint on paper. I haven't really done any serious concept pieces or mock-ups. I just drew/modelled the first thing that came naturally and then iterated on that. 

Although, some things stem from practical stuff. I have a little experience with 2D animation, and I learned to hate redrawing the same stuff quickly. So the game had to be 3D, sprites weren't an option. Second thing was, I had no experience in lighting real-time 3D scenes, had zero interest in learning to do so, and it would be another thing to worry about. Also, doing elaborate texturing—and especially unwrapping—was something I wanted to avoid. Hence the flat colours look without lighting.

You've developed this game almost completely by yourself, right? Can you talk about the challenges of doing that?

I have had good help from my publisher, Digerati, Quentin Leonetti for audio and Dubmood for music work. But yeah, the code, visuals and design is me. The challenges. Well…

From technical things, such as when stuff suddenly breaks before deadline and you have no idea why, to learning how to work by yourself in your room for two years without going insane and actually being productive. Or when you can't get the game to be fun for months and are totally lost, and you still take it to an event with hopes of being inspired and people are nice but you can see it's a train wreck.

Honestly, I took on way more than I could chew fresh from college. I don't regret it for a second, but as is now well known and understood, making videogames is kinda hard. Like just putting out a reasonably functional product is now an achievement for me, let alone making it any kind of success.

Can you talk about the different headrigs in the game, how they work, and what effect they have on the game?

Oh yes, the hats. They don't like it when I call them hats. Well they have a passive effect. There's one for speed, for damage, and so on. But, once you unlock the gun ability, the hat you have defines how you shoot. Like shotgun hat, machine gun hat, and so on.

You're in Early Access right now—how useful is that to your creative process? What are you working on right now?

I've been lucky enough to have a few nice people give really good feedback, and that's always very useful. So I've already managed to make some pretty significant changes, like adding a very simple inventory/consumable system. Of course, I've made some bug fixes too. And added a Vsync option. People love to Sync their V's. It also pushes you a lot to know people paid for your game. You want to make the purchase worth it for them.

Right now, I think the most pressing things have been addressed. I'm at a crossroad of polishing and testing further, or trying to add a major thing or two. Adding things is always scary and you don't even know if it will benefit the game as a whole—and during development I've thrown away so much work that didn't do that. I really want to keep the EA period as short as possible. Also, Violet Cycle feels mostly complete to me, there is nothing extra sticking out, it’s nice and tight right now.

As an indie developer, what are the challenges of launching a game right now? 

In a commercial sense, basically it seems to me that if you have one or some combination of these: a cult hit on your hands (you don't really know this in advance), following from previous successes, a reasonable marketing budget, or maybe you serve a very specific niche, and a good game (hard in itself) as a baseline, then you can do well with some certainty I guess. Otherwise, you can just do your best and pray to eldritch gods, no guarantees. So much to play, and more coming in every day. But you know that.

In a technical sense, you need to do many of those annoying little things such as go over menu functionality, Steam integration, achievements, controls remapping, things like that. I was surprised that I actually enjoyed some of that work, after the super nebulous and vague art of game design programming, solving simple coding problems which have clear "it works now" results was nice.

As a personal experience, I feel like I am so detached now by working and failing on this thing for a few years, I don't really feel much. Maybe after the full release? I don't know, the full weight of life events happening always comes at me slowly and delayed. Right now I'm just looking forward to wrap this up in the best way possible. Then maybe try to live The Reasonable Life(TM) for a change. I give it a few months before it utterly bores the shit out of me and I get onto project two. There already are some files in that directory.

Following last month's Vlandians reveal, Mount & Blade 2: Banner has announced its latest faction: the Aserai. Based on the tribes that thrived prior to the Arab Conquests of the seventh and eighth century, a typically comprehensive blog post from developer TaleWorlds details their history, lore and combat capabilities. 

Within, we learn that the Aserai are comprised of minor factions, much like all Bannerlord cultures. Their scale and institutions don't necessarily fit Bannerlord's political system, we're told, which ultimately means their southern desert homelands are "hard to rule and dangerous to traverse."

As I discovered at Gamescom last year, planning goes a long way in Bannerlord—which I imagine will be especially true here. As for how they approach confrontation, TaleWorlds explains the importance of mounts in the Aserai's offence.  

Mideastern armies are popularly associated with horse archers, but in fact those only became prevalent about two centuries after the founding of Islam with the influx of Turks. The Arabs fought with short sword, long spear, and foot bow. Warriors prided themselves on their flexibility, fighting as light mounted lancers or heavy foot, in formed ranks or as individual champions. Javelins, a favourite weapon of the Berbers, made their appearance in Islamic armies fairly early, and we have the Aserai use them as well. All in all it's a mix of good troops, pretty well balanced across cavalry and infantry. 

The Arabs were famously proud of their horses, and the Aserai breeds - produced by pastures in Aserai lands—will have unique characteristics. Middle Eastern warriors wore a mix of armours, often under richly embroidered textiles. Bannerlord's physics model gives us new options in bringing the pageantry of these armies to life, with banners, horsetails and robes fluttering in the desert breeze. 

Check out the full rundown of the Aserai via this Steam Community post. Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord is as yet without a hard release date.

Austin reported earlier this week that Celeste, a new action platformer by the creators of Towerfall Ascension, would release in January. At the time, it was anyone's guess when in January, but during today's Nintendo Direct presentation a release date of January 25 was confirmed (and yes, naturally, that includes the PC version).

The game is a challenging, action-oriented platformer with over 600 screens of twitch-oriented play. You'll play as Madeleine, who must (or wants to, anyway) scale Celeste Mountain for some no doubt consequential reason. What matters is that the art style is gorgeous, and the below gameplay video (via IGN) has escalated my enthusiasm tenfold.

In June of last year, Housemarque launched an arcade shooter named Nex Machina. After years of Sony exclusives like Resogun, Nex Machina gave PC players their first taste of Housemarque's style of refined twin-stick shooter since The Reap came out in 1997. Even more tantalisingly for genre connoisseurs, Eugene Jarvis—designer of Robotron: 2084 and Smash TV—came on board as a consultant. Nex Machina was a spiritual successor to those games, and was widely praised as an exemplar of the form. Our own review called it a "a breathless modern arcade classic that delivers more thrills per minute than almost anything else out there."

However, several months after Nex Machina's launch, Housemarque took to its blog and burst the bubble. "ARCADE IS DEAD," the headline declared. "Despite critical success and numerous awards, our games just haven’t sold in significant numbers. … Lackluster sales of Nex Machina have led us to the thinking that it is time to bring our longstanding commitment to the arcade genre to an end."

That commitment, spanning more than 20 years, can hardly be questioned. And yet Housemarque found itself announcing to the world that it is now "exploring something totally different than what you might expect of us." It had made possibly its finest arcade shooter yet, and still saw no viable road ahead.

What could Housemarque conclude, then, other than that the genre is dead? 

The statement caused ripples among the other game developers working on arcade-style shooters. "Housemarque is a very influential developer and we've run into them a couple of times, so it was a big blow for us to hear that," says Tim Dawson of Assault Android Cactus developer Witch Beam. "Kind of demoralizing."

"A big part of development is trying to guess a lot about what the market's doing and trying to answer unanswerable questions like that," he says. "So it's scary when someone you think of as a peer says the genre's dead." 

But while there was disappointment among Witch Beam's three-strong team, there was little surprise. The team had fielded enough questions about its choice of genre during the promotion phase of Assault Android Cactus to get "a sense that that market is not as big as other genres."

"People's perception of the genre is that it's a kind of lower tier," adds Dawson. "It's distractionware, it's not like a serious or significant game. Which is a problem when you're trying to convince people that your game is worth their time and their money."

Witch Beam was adamant that Assault Android Cactus was "priced appropriately, or even too low," yet continued to receive messages calling for the game to be discounted to $5 or lower. Dawson also recalls Jamestown developer Final Form Games sharing similar concerns when they met at an expo, reporting that players were positive about it after deep discounts or its inclusion in bundles but were largely reluctant to pay full price. Final Form has written that "Jamestown has been downloaded illegally countless times." 

For Dawson, historical associations have a part to play in skewing perceptions of value for arcade-style games. They're seen as dated throwbacks, he says, saddled with undeserved baggage in much the same way that indie games featuring pixel art have been accused of lazy bandwagon-jumping. In fact, a keenness to steer clear of these stereotypes led to Assault Android Cactus avoiding the lo-fi, abstract look in favor of a more complex style. It's an even greater consideration now, with Witch Beam prototyping ideas for new games.

"Thinking about ways to make a game read as richer or more complicated has actually been a huge part of our internal prototyping method," says Dawson. “We're deliberately considering games that will look more impressive, more like 'bigger' genres, but still manage to keep that arcade feel at their heart because it's something we love and are good at."

Witch Beam's stance is not quite 'arcade is dead', then, but part of its approach is an acceptance that the genre is not particularly marketable. Puppy Games, an indie developer of 'neo-retro arcade games', came to the same conclusion four years ago. "Nobody actually buys these kinds of games anymore, and specifically nobody buys them on Steam," states Puppy Games co-founder Caspian Prince.

So he was hardly shocked by Housemarque's big statement. "I was so totally unsurprised that I could have even put a fiver on it," he says. The key issue, Prince argues, is one of scale. While Puppy Games has a core team of just two people, working from home and with relatively little overhead, Housemarque's Helsinki studio houses more than 20 employees. 

"They have actually sold, relatively, a metric shit-ton of games," he says. "If you look at the sales for Nex Machina, it's sold 100,000 copies or something. It's done fantastically well by anyone's standards. To make a game that sells that many on Steam these days, you're not even in the 1%—you're in the 0.1%."

Those are sales numbers would delight Puppy Games, who "scratched away in the dirt for years and never really made any coin," according to Prince, and Witch Beam, who "definitely didn't find a huge audience" with Assault Android Cactus. But these small teams have found something sustainable on a smaller scale, and this is where the future of the genre seems to lie.

Prince points to the recently released Son of Scoregasm, "which is just amazing and was made by a bloke called Charlie in his bedroom. It's a perfect example of the genre, and it's cost him peanuts to make." 

Dawson echoes the point. "I don't disbelieve that Housemarque's decision was right for them," he considers. "I imagine they have all the numbers, have followed the trends, and that sounds like what would be a correct call for them. But I don't think it's right for everyone."

And as long as that's the case, as long as there are passionate individuals operating at a small enough scale that not every game needs to be a smash hit, it won't truly be the end of the arcade shooter.

The Rainbow Six Siege patch 4.2, also known as the Operation White Noise Mid-Season Reinforcements, is now live on the technical test server. The update nerfs Ela, with reductions to her SMG magazine size from 50 rounds to 40 and also to the effects of her concussive mines, which will still reduce the movement speed of enemies caught in their impact zone but will no longer disable sprinting. 

"Ela overpowers her competition. Players select her almost every round, and for a good reason. All of the data we have on her (such as win ratio, K/D ratio, and Kills per round) shows that she needs to be nerfed. We have found this to be primarily because of her SMG and to a lesser extent her concussion mines," Ubisoft wrote in the patch notes. 

The SMG was nerfed slightly in a previous update, but it wasn't enough to achieve the desired effect. "For now, we’re trying to balance her while keeping her SMG’s uniqueness, which lets her fight several opponents at a time better than other defenders. We will consider other ways of nerfing this weapon if this is not enough." 

Concussive effects are being reduced across the board and so will affect Zofia as well as Ela, but Ela is the primary target as Zofia also has impact grenades she can chuck around. Concussive effects on sight and hearing will remain unchanged, but the impact on movement and camera speed will be reduced from seven to four seconds. "Compared to other gadgets of this nature, the concussion effect is superior in almost every way: it greatly affects movement speed, massively slows down rotation speed, and also reduces a player’s ability to hear and see," Ubisoft explained. 

Ash's R4-C assault rifle has also been toned down a bit, from 41 damage to 39, while Capitao's Para-308 damage has been boosted from 43 to 48, and the intensity of its recoil has been lessened. Ubisoft said that Capitao will require more long-term solutions to make him a sufficiently attractive choice, but for now "it's clear that his main assault rifle is too weak." 

Twitch, Bandit, and Lesion have also been tweaked, and changes have been made to temporal filtering, the bomb interface, and the caster camera, which should make life better (and more informative) for viewers. The full rundown of changes is up at rainbow6.ubisoft.com.   

US President Donald Trump held a joint news conference with Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg yesterday at the White House. During the event, as reported by the Washington Post (via Vice), he enthused about the delivery of US F-52 fighter jets to Norway, a deal that he said was actually unfolding ahead of schedule.   

"In November we started delivering the first F-52 and F-35 fighter jets. We have a total of 52, and they've delivered a number of them already, a little ahead of schedule," Trump said. "It's a $10 billion order. Norway also invests about one-third of its sovereign wealth fund in American businesses, supporting hundreds of thousands of American jobs. They're very big investors in our stock market, and therefore the Prime Minister thanked me very much."   

There's only one problem with that statement: If you want to know anything about the F-52—speed, armaments, operational ceiling, that sort of thing—you have to hit up the Call of Duty Wiki, because it's not actually a real plane. It only exists in Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, and in the minds of those who have played it. 

Trump appears to be reading directly from a script when he talks about the deal for the non-existent fighter, so it's possible that he misread—although he clearly makes no effort to correct himself—or that the script itself was somehow wrong. I suppose it's also technically possible that the F-52 is such a super-secret new fighter that we've never heard of it before now, although I'm not convinced that Norway would be the number-one market for that kind of tech. Or maybe the claim was drive by something else entirely, perhaps somehow related to his overall competence and suitability for the job. 

That said, he was partly right. Norway has ordered 40 of the much-troubled F-35 fighters and has another 12 lined up, and has so far taken delivery of ten of them. It's purely speculation, but I'd guess that that's the source of the flub: 52 fighters, F-52, they're practically the same thing anyway. Right?

This is what Norway's new fighters would look like in action, if, you know, they actually existed. 

Anyone who has spent time in a battle royale game has found themselves in a situation where you run into a player who's managed to find a weapon before you have one yourself. You can run for it, you can try to punch them before they shoot you, or you can accept your fate and curse the loot spawn gods. 

Stand Out: VR Battle Royale gives you a new option: you can reach out with your virtual hands and snatch their gun away. And it's fucking hilarious.

This exact scenario happened to me today when I was trying Stand Out for the first time, only I was the guy with the gun. I heard another player nearby and was searching the building for him, and found him hiding on all fours under a table. This being VR, this means he was quite literally on all fours on his real floor. Cute.

I crouched down next to the table and pointed my gun at him, but before I could shoot he grabbed it out of my hands. What resulted was a ridiculous VR tussle over the gun as we both grabbed it out of each other's hands a few times. I even pulled the magazine out at one point, which gave us something new to struggle over. And, as this is battle royale, the "gun fight" concluded in the traditional battle royale fashion.

Here's the video of the encounter, but please note there is profanity if your speakers are on. (I didn't have my mic enabled, but other players did):

Stand Out is in Early Access at the moment, and there's more than a few rough edges. The controls aren't great, it's definitely not a good looking game at this point, and it provides the most basic of battle royale experiences. Jump from a plane (which you're not inside of, you're just hovering next to), land on a bland-looking island, search some ugly buildings for a gun and some ammo, and shoot people when you see them.

But I can see the potential for battle royale in VR. It's fun to pick up a weapon in one hand, pick up a mag in the other, and slap it into place. You can stick extra mags right to your body (though you can't see your body) which makes for a better inventory system than opening up a menu. Need a fresh clip? Just look down and grab it off your chest.

It's fun to literally lean your head and shoulders out of a window, and to aim by physically holding the virtual weapon up and peer through the scope. And, despite there being relatively few people out there with a headset and a copy of the game (the peak player count today was 136), I never had to wait for more than a couple of minutes for a match (which has about 30 players in it). The island is pretty small, and the circle closes quickly, so matches don't typically take more than 15 minutes.

Stand Out is definitely very rough and not much to look at at the moment, and it's already priced pretty steeply at $25 for what you get, even if wrestling with someone over a gun makes you laugh so hard you can barely breathe. But, if you own a VR headset and want some battle royale action, it's one of your only options right now—Pavlov, another VR shooter, plans to add battle royale this year as well.