Michel Ancel, the co-creator of Rayman and creative director of Beyond Good & Evil, today announced that he’s stopping working on video games. The French designer started at Ubisoft when he was a teenager and, after over 30 years in the industry spent mostly at Ubi, says he wants to focus on his second passion, wildlife. Come for the announcement, stay for the video of a fox stealing brioche.
This is not a post I ever wanted to write. Matthew Castle and Sin Vega are leaving RPS today. Come join me in saying farewell.
Chinese tech conglomerate Tencent have managed to draw the eyes of the US government for their dealings with American companies like Riot and Epic Games. Tencent own the former and have a 40% stake in the latter, not to mention ties with Activision Blizzard, Ubisoft, Discord, and more. Now, a government agency want to know how Tencent are handling the security of Americans’ personal data.
Fine free-to-play action-RPG Path Of Exile today launches its squillionth free expansion, Heist. As the name suggests, we’ll be breaking into secure places to rob them blind. And in true heist tradition, we’ll recruit a crew of rogues with unique skills to bypass security. I’m in.
This update was supposed to also to introduce a Mac version of Path Of Exile, though that has been slightly delayed by last-minute technical problems.
The plan was a simple one. After a fortnight masquerading as Michael Portillo, return to this column’s touchstone, virtual war, without passing Go or collecting £200. It wasn’t my intention to swap driving for driving… bogies for bogeys. I never meant to lose my heart to a ramblewhack sim. (more…)
I’ve never been so called out by a game name. Look, I took a break from driving for like six months because of the pandemic. You try going that long without having to parallel park, yeah? They say the skill comes back quick but it most certainly does not. Thankfully, Happy Volcano’s You Suck At Parking does not actually make you drive a real vehicle. Rather, you’re plonked in a funky little video game car (or van, or lorry, or occasionally steamroller) with a simple end goal: park good.
It’s kinda like a weird racing game. Your objective is to stop, yes, but you must do so very quickly, and often without exploding.
The [cms-block] went on sale yesterday for seemingly all two minutes before it vanished into a puff of broken websites, out of stock stickers and ludicrous Ebay scalpers. Many retailers are still struggling to cope with demand, too – indeed, Newegg have said that they experienced more traffic than the morning of chuffin’ Black Friday yesterday, and that their entire RTX 3080 inventory sold out in five minutes.
But if you’re absolutely desperate to get your hands on Nvidia’s new flagship RTX and don’t care what AMD have in store for their [cms-block] GPUs next month, then help is at hand. As your resident deals herald, I’ve been scouring the web to find exactly where you can buy an RTX 3080 right now, and how long you’re likely going to have to wait before you get one.
The Can You Pet The Dog Twitter account is quite possibly one of the greatest forces for good in the history of games, especially now it’s spawned its own Humble Bundle. The Humble You Can Pet The Dog Bundle runs from now until Thursday October 1st, and contains eight games of dog petting goodness, plus two soundtracks, all for £9 / $12. You also get to experience the warm, fuzzy feeling of supporting three separate animal charities, too. Here’s how it works.
Deckbuilding and dungeon crawlers: two great tastes that go well together. Cards, it turns out, are a great tool for abstracting the collection of vaguely synergistic loot from monster corpses, and then seeing how far the resultant combinations will get you through fast-paced, sudden-death runs through a gauntlet of further monsters. Slay The Spire is arguably the defining masterpiece of the card crawler subgenre, and both I and former staff writer Matt Cox (RPS in peace) were impressed by the multi-storey devil fights of this year’s Monster Train.
But there’s still plenty of room for invention in the format, and the upcoming Ring Of Pain (out on October 15th, and showcased in the ongoing PAX X EGX extravaganza) demonstrates what it was missing all along: massively disconcerting owl people.
