Metro Exodus - contact@rockpapershotgun.com (Katharine Castle)

Nvidia have announced that another three monitors have joined their exclusive G-Sync Compatible fold today, taking the total number of adaptive sync / FreeSync monitors that can officially sort of take advantage of their swish variable refresh rate G-Sync tech to 15. And if that wasn’t enough, Nvidia have also added Metro Exodus to their current RTX graphics card bundle, giving new RTX buyers another ray tracing and DLSS showcase game to make the most of their new graphics card purchase. Full details below.

(more…)

Dawn of Man - contact@rockpapershotgun.com (Alec Meer)

My lowest ebb in out-of-nowhere city-builder hit Dawn of Man was not when raiders slaughtered 18 of my people while they were calmly picking pears, or when three of my guys collapsed in the snow because I’d ordered them to spend the winter hauling a bus-sized rock across a mountain range (I wanted to build a henge, you see).

No, it was the Great Goat Plague. 43 of the buggers succumbed to some fatal goat lurgy, contracted because my braying friends knocked hooves faster than I could possibly build stables to house all the resultant goatlings. Because they consumed hay faster than a half-dozen grain fields could possibly re-grow. The goat-horde was thus shivering and starving when the frosts came, an open door to some terrible infection, centuries before vets were invented.

There was no cure for the goatpocalypse. It ravaged my prehistoric tribe’s trouser-nibbling livestock. Frankly, it was a relief.

(more…)

Rock, Paper, Shotgun - contact@rockpapershotgun.com (Alice O'Connor)

The courtroom drama of Phoenix Wright and pals will finally get a proper PC release with Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy on April 9th, Capcom have announced. Their series of dramatic and funny courtroom visual novels has mostly been confined to Nintendo’s pocket computers, only tentatively dipping its toes into table computing in weird and fleeting ways, so it’s grand to see the first three games coming our way (hopefully more to follow?). Capcom also confirmed the system requirements and yup, this is one you’ll be able to play on pretty much any shonky laptop you’re lugging around.

(more…)

Streets of Rage 2 - contact@rockpapershotgun.com (Dave Irwin)

Streets of Rage 2 was one of the Sega Mega Drive’s most revered games but you can get it on Steam these days. It first came during a period when arcades had a lot of similar beat ’em ups, from those based in cities fighting thugs, to fantasy and futuristic settings. There were licensed games based on cartoons such as The Simpsons and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. But none of those can be called the greatest side-scrolling beat ’em up ever created. And them’s the facts.

(more…)

Rock, Paper, Shotgun - contact@rockpapershotgun.com (Dominic Tarason)

Valve’s lasseiz-faire attitude towards moderation has earned Steam a place in the headlines once again, thanks to the listing of upcoming game Rape Day. First covered by Polygon’s Patricia Hernandez, the less said about the game itself, the better – it’s a pointlessly edgy visual novel filled with awkward, too-shiny 3D character models. Its very place on the store highlights that people are going to keep pushing at boundaries until something breaks. It’s a concern that I brought up last year, as developers were still trying to figure out what Valve would allow – the answer, since then, has been ‘nearly anything’.

(more…)

Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales - contact@rockpapershotgun.com (Dominic Tarason)

Vampires, werewolves, blood moons and all other things best suited to a Belmont than a Witcher will be the first focus of Gwent: The Witcher Card Game‘s first card expansion. Despite other online CCGs making expansions an annual or seasonal thing, Crimson Curse is set to be Gwent’s first. While I feel that CD Projekt Red’s card-slinger never drew the crowds the way Hearthstone or Magic: The Gathering has (its solo expansion, Thronebreaker became its own standalone game), it’s nice to see that the studio haven’t thrown in the towel. See a portentous little teaser trailer below.

(more…)

Act of War: Direct Action - contact@rockpapershotgun.com (Dominic Tarason)

If you believe (incorrectly) that there’s no such thing as bad publicity, you may be impressed that people are still talking about publisher THQ Nordic GmbH. Their ‘Ask Me Anything’ Q&A session on 8chan – an infamous image-board permanently delisted from Google for hosting suspected child porn – got people chattering. Unfortunately it’s the kind of chatter that has brought parent company THQ Nordic AB out of the woodwork to publicly apologise for the incident to “group employees, partners and consumers”, although it’s a predictably rote and half-hearted statement.

(more…)

Rock, Paper, Shotgun - contact@rockpapershotgun.com (Katharine Castle)

There is simply no mistaking a Mad Catz gaming mouse. Just like their wacky console box controllers that were once the sole purview of younger brothers and sisters the world over before they went bankrupt in March 2017, you only need to take one look at their newly resurrected RAT series, such as the Pro S3 here, to realise that, yep, this is definitely a Mad Catz gaming mouse.

With its many plastic wings and angular RGB lighting, Mad Catz’s new top-end clicker looks more like some kind of cyberpunk scarab beetle than a toothy, razor-clawed rodent if you ask me, but if we put aside its enduring crimes against design for a moment, you’ll find a surprisingly flexible mouse with a pretty decent feature set, including an adjustable palm rest, eight programmable buttons and a 7200 DPI Pixart PMW3330 sensor. But is the Pro S3 a true gaming rat king or is it nothing more than a puny little dormouse? Let’s find out.

(more…)

Recompile - contact@rockpapershotgun.com (Dominic Tarason)

Still screenshots don’t do upcoming 3D metroidvania Recompile much justice. You might get a feel for the scale of the Tron-like virtual world developers Phigames have built, but it can’t convey the mad, wibbly glitch effects that fade as the world reassembles itself, Bastion-style. It’s hard to even get a handle on what its protagonist looks like in stills – a humanoid form made from searing hot-looking particles that are lost and restored as they move. So, it’s probably best you look at the debut trailer below, because it’s rather pretty, although sadly not due until next year.

(more…)

Rock, Paper, Shotgun - contact@rockpapershotgun.com (RPS)

It’s a debate that has raged since the dawn of time: what is the best weapon in the whole of PC gaming? Some (i.e: those who are correct) say it’s Doom’s Super Shotgun. Others passionately defend Half-Life 2’s Gravity Gun. However, you’ll also find plenty of people who will go to bat for Portal’s Portal Gun or Quake’s Railgun, while others still might argue that the Hidden Blade from Assassin’s Creed is more deserving of the title, or maybe even Final Fantasy VIII’s Gunblade (because, come on, it’s a sword and> a gun at the same time).

All are excellent choices. But to help settle this question once and for all, come and join us at PAX East 2019 where we’ll be pitting some of our favourite video game weapons against each other to find out which one is truly the bestest best weapon of all time.

(more…)

...