It’s a strange thing, this Gears 5 benchmark. Unlike other in-game benchmarks, which simply play the same scene over and over again, the final third of this one sees our beefcake heroes Kait and Del take on a bunch of Swarm in an icy blizzard – and the variance in their AI-driven shooty tactics means the result of their wintry battle is different every time I run it.

And that has been quite a few times, now, as I’ve been trying to work out how I can get my ancient R9 270 card to run the game at a decent speed. Over the repetitions, I’ve become quite invested in their unending struggle, to the point where I’ve decided to chronicle it with some screenshots. Yes, that’s right: it’s time for another round of ‘Weird Things I Notice While Benchmarking!‘

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The biggest gaming surprise of 2019 has surely been the announcement of Deadly Premonition 2: A Blessing In Disguise, a sequel to one of the most beloved and reviled and wonky and bestest best games. I adore Deadly Premonition. I can hardly believe publishers are funding a sequel. The announcement came last week during a Nintendo Direct presentation and only a mentioned a release on Switch, so I’ve been nudging PR people for an answer to the question which justifies an RPS post: a PC release?

“No other platforms. Coming to Switch in 2020!” a rep tells me. Oh. Well. Oh.

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In Playstyle Royale, I normally head into a battle royale game and try to win my chicken dinner while adhering to arbitrary rules. This time I’m playing Hunt: Showdown, which is merely like> a battle royale game, and the whole point of today’s exercise is to prevent> needless animal death. If only more people knew about the vital role demonic spiders play in our ecosystem, I’d have to shoot fewer of them.

People. I mean I’d have to shoot fewer people.

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For the first three and a half billion years of its history, life on earth was fairly dull. It was, essentially, a load of little blobs mucking around in a great big sea. But then, five hundred million years ago, the Cambrian Explosion happened. Despite its name, it was not a sick wrestling move, but a sudden evolutionary riot, in which life diversified into a bewildering array of new and complex forms. These new creatures competed, and the winners – vertebrates, arthropods, molluscs and a bunch of worms – set the blueprint for every animal that existed thereafter. That s the nature we re familiar with; endless variations, but all on a surprisingly limited set of themes. And it s great. But sometimes, just sometimes, you look at the sea and wonder what would be in it, if a different set of animals had ended up winning that primordial arms race.

Wilmot s Warehouse gives me that feeling. Admittedly, it has absolutely nothing to do with the history of life on earth (although my warehouse does contain both dinosaurs and mammoths). It does>, however, give me the feeling that I m playing something from an alternate universe where the fundamental tenets of videogames evolved very differently indeed. And whatever universe he hails from, Wilmot is a bloody lovely ambassador.

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It s taken me years to realise the first videogame I ever played was a rip-off; a lacklustre, store-brand facsimile of someone else s idea. The game was called Barrels, and it was a janky clone of 1981 s Donkey Kong, made by a company called Spa (apocryphally Software Production Associates) for the RM Nimbus. The Nimbus was the digital workhorse for UK schools in the late 80s, and my mum worked at a school with three> of the buggers. When I was ill or she was in work early, I d get to hang out in her classroom, and I would immediately log on to the Nimbus to smash out a game of Barrels.

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A few months ago I put The Sims 4 back into my gaming rotation in anticipation for the new Realm Of Magic DLC. If you follow my Twitter account at all you might have noticed my predaliction for making Sims based off of 90s sitcom stars, then forcing them down a lucretive career path of non-stop professional gaming. Many die in the process. Jerry Seinfeld died in a house fire one morning after trying to make a grilled cheese sandwich in between streaming sessions. His son George Costanza doesn’t make it either. A casualty of electrocution-while-fixing-a-laptop, George had taken over the family eSports business before being taken by the grim reaper. A commentary on eSports in a post-capitalist society? Perhaps.

But more importantly>, I think wistfully, imagine how much better it would have been if they’d also been wizards. >The Sims 4: Realm Of Magic is out today.

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Hello there! It’s me again, Gera – Rock Paper Shotgun’s official ambassador of Canada. I’ll be your guide this week on the balmy seas of gaming’s evening news. As the sun sets on England, I get to work – slipping on my traditional Canadian Press-Touque, before I press my ear tightly against my monitor and listen for incoming news. Alice isn’t convinced by my methods yet, but I prefer it to the alternative: letting our blood into Kieron’s sacred skull then waiting for a press release to form in its drying curdles. I won’t get into how we watch trailers.

In any case: Ubisoft has now launched its latest in Discovery Tours, this time bringing the educational mode to Ancient Greece in Assassin’s Creed Origins.

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In the words of 60s rock group The Byrds, to everything there is a season. A time of love, a time of hate. A time to dance, a time to mourn. For game developers, this past year has been one long summer of Battle Royale season. Which I guess sort of puts the song into a different perspective considering it less a season than one overwhelming and endless new era. Perhaps fad genres are more like seasons in Game of Thrones, which continue on across generations or until the sweet relief of death.

Anyway, Civilization 6 developers Firaxis have launched a new battle royale mode today called Red Death, and it’s free to anyone who already owns the base game.

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Spiders is a development studio you might know for the painfully average The Technomancer, and I m happy to report that 17th Century empire building RPG GreedFall shows they ve experienced some character progression as a team. GreedFall is better. But there are still more problems with this bargain bucket BioWare RPG than there are hats for me to adorn my badass, rogueish, lesbian sorcerer s head with.

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This crazy dystopian timeline of ours might already be heaving with surreal Subway adverts and ironic Burger King memes, yet I’ve always felt like something is missing.

Today I’ve learned that perhaps the missing ingredient all along was…love>? KFC – that glorious hut of chicken that glistens in my dreams like an oily fried mirage – have decided to get into the gaming business with the I Love You, Colonel Sanders!, a dating sim that uses KFC’s advertising budget to turn the Colonel into a svelte hunk who’s looking for love in all the wrong places.

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