Hallo! With the Easter bank holiday weekend upon us, we'll be gone both Friday and Monday then return on Tuesday. Tradition would dictate we spend the weekend sat in a traffic jam on the motorway, growing increasingly resentful of each other's peccadilloes, but current restrictions thankfully means The RPS Minibus must remain under its tarp. Instead, hey, I guess we're playing video games. What are you playing this weekend?
Elite Dangerous: Odyssey launched the first step of its alpha only a few days ago, and developers Frontier have shared a response to some common complaints from its earliest adopters. Firstly: no, space taxis aren't going to get any faster.
Overfall, a strategy role-playing game released in 2016, has been revoked from some player's Steam libraries due to the developer, they allege, being "scammed" by an unnamed publisher. The issue is that some of those keys ended being sold to players on Fanatical, a legitimate Steam key seller, and some players who bought the game from there have lost access to the game, too.
Discord, the gaming chat platform, has added a new feature called Stage Channels. These are described as "a special type of voice channel... where some people can talk and others can listen as the audience." It's essentially the defining feature of Clubhouse, the invite-only mobile app that briefly attracted media attention earlier this year.
The writing has maybe been on the wall for PUBG Lite for a while. The free-to-play, low spec version of Playerunknown's Battlegrounds ditched its in-game currency in November 2020, becoming completely free. Now a notice from the development team says that the game will close down forever on April 29th.
I find it difficult to get excited about beefcakes hiding behind low walls inside grey metal warehouses, because that's what I spent the mid-noughties doing. (And in games.) The looter shooter Outriders has pedigree behind it however, due to developers People Can Fly, and folks who played the game's demo reported that it was dumb, satisfying fun.
It's out today and I'm tempted to give it a go - although reports of performance issues on PC will probably cause me to hold off for now.
A long bank holiday weekend is a good time to tackle a project. Maybe think about putting up some shelves, organising your drawers, cleaning the tent you'd left festering since summer, or building networks of road, rail, water, and air transport to shunt people and products around the world for fun and profit. Friend, if the last idea tickles your fancy, you're in luck. OpenTTD, the excellent open-source remake of Transport Tycoon Deluxe, is now available free on Steam too.
After what's becoming a chillingly regular meditation on the concept of Matthew extinguishing the lives of astronauts, this week's podcast waded into some staunch reminiscence about classic co-op games on PC. Indeed, with Alice away this week, the boys were really method-acting the theme: two extraorfinarily buff soldiers, grimacing with war-weary determination against a horde of meandering, half-on-topic anecdotes.
Nate got way too excited about his idea for a Dance Dance Revolution mod based on Pacific Rim, Matthew got to show some love for the adorably brutish Gears Of War series, and stern warnings were given on the damage that Overcooked can do to relationships. The Cavern of Lies featured a short and utterly brutal RPG adaptation of the first level of Halo 2.
”Don’t even bother: there are no games out this month. Maybe check in again in May. Honestly, you’d be much better off having a look at any one of the other wonderful articles available here at your favourite PC gaming website, Rock Paper Shotgun.”
Chinese police have reportedly shut down a cheat seller in collaboration with publishers Tencent, arresting 10 people and seizing sports cars in the process. The operation, named Chicken Drumstick, sold subscriptions to cheats for games including Overwatch and Call Of Duty Mobile. The police claim this was the "world's biggest" cheat operation, though that's a tough one to quantify or verify. But hey, another cheatmonger shut down, that's good.