When Warframe set up shop in 2012, it was a simple thing. A few rooms, a few baddies, and a good helping of backflips. But with each update bringing increasingly fanciful new designs, the free-to-play slasher’s oldest hallways are starting to look rather dusty. That’s why the devs are unpacking their toolkits for a little bit of D.I.Y – re-imagining the game’s ancient Corpus environments to meet modern Warframe’s lavish expectations.

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Sundays are for trying not to complain about how lockdown makes writing these intros much harder, because that would be ridiculously callous and self-centred. Here’s the best writing about videogames from the past week.

For his blog, designer Robert Yang distilled the good and the bad from Gears Tactics and Horizon’s Gate into succinct design lessons. There’s some sharp analysis here, even though it’s only written in note form. I hope other devs are listening.

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Second only to Grand Theft Auto, Assassin’s Creed may have left the largest mark on open-world games as we know them. But while we’ve all had our digs at climbable towers and cluttered maps, one Ubisoft developer claims that some of the historical stab ’em up’s most tangential activities weren’t spurred on by the team – but instead crunched out in a five-day haze after failing to excite a chief executive’s kid.

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Pack your brolly away, it’s clear skies for a few months yet. Risk Of Rain 2 developers Hopoo game released a revised forecast for their swarming early access roguelite this week, pushing the game’s 1.0 release back to August this year. After all that time in early access, the devs reckon they’d picked up a little tunnel vision, and are re-thinking their release plans to bring some new and improved features to the colourful bug-hunt at launch.

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My dad isn’t like most dads. There are many things about him which make him unique, but perhaps none so idiosyncratic as this: the man really, really, really loves Calvin Coolidge, 30th President of the United States. I’m not sure how many children have been taken on car trips to Coolidge’s homestead in rural Vermont (where, fun fact, Coolidge was sworn in as president following the death of President Harding), but I bet we’d make for a pretty odd club.

The reason I bring up my dad and Calvin Coolidge at all is that the screen saver for my dad’s computer (or at least, as I last remember it) is a Calvin Coolidge quote about persistence and always has been. The words bounce back and forth on the screen: “Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence.” And so, I find myself thinking a lot about Coolidge’s perspective on persistence lately; that it will be the only thing to carry us through times of uncertainty and hardship. I dunno you guys, but I’m pouring one out for Calvin and my dad this week.

Here are some games about persistence.

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Much as I’d like to believe, I’m no photographer. But damn if Umurangi Generation doesn’t make me feel like a seasoned shutterbug. Released earlier this week, Veselekov’s first-person-photographer is a defiantly indigenous photography sandbox packed with sharp looks, smooth sounds and extradimensional giant squids. Heck, you might even learn how to take a good photograph along the way.

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I’ve just become aware that this is another three-day weekend in the UK so WELL…! We’ll be back in full force on Tuesday, in that case.

What are you playing this weekend? Here’s what we’re clicking on!

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As big sports organisations are wont to do, Manchester United are getting touchy about the use of their name. The English Premier League have filed a complaint against Sega and Sports Interactive for the use of the team’s name in the Football Manager series. They take issue with how the series may “benefit from an association with the club’s winning culture and its brand values” without actually forking over cash to licence the team’s crest.

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Since I’ve ended up incoherently semi-shouting this at several people recently (sorry, Nat), I’ll save myself the time and write it down: Connor Sherlock’s The Migration feels to me like witnessing an apocalyptic event, and it’s great. There you are, wandering around the surface of some desolate world, only bleached bones and warbling synth for company, when the end comes. Or a beginning. Or… a change, definitely. And then the music really kicks in and oh god, this is terrible, this is beautiful, I’m so glad I’m here for it.

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Will the real Medieval History majors please stand up? Ubisoft previously tossed out a tidbit on “viking rap battles” that will make an appearance in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. Creative director Ashraf Ismail has popped up to say a bit more about how these historically-inspired showdowns will take place in Valhalla. Apparently flyting (or fliting), as it was called by anglo-saxon and norse folks, was like, a whole thing. (more…)