“The fleet does the flying, the marines do the dying,” says CCP boss Hilmar Veigar Pétursson. “I love Starship Troopers.”

Pétursson is hardly the first person to profess an affection for Paul Verhoeven’s cult military satire. But he is one of the few with command of his own company of science fiction game developers. For well over half of Eve Online’s existence, he has led CCP in an effort to create the perfect spin-off shooter - stubbornly chasing the dream of a playable Starship Troopers, even as those brave young prototypes have been cut down by unimpressed players, one after the other.

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The Lego games I'm most familiar with are the licensed property games - yer Lego Indiana Joneses and yer Lego Star Warses where you run around a continuous level smashing things. Lego Bricktales is more akin to last year's extremely cute geometric puzzler Lego Builder's Journey, in that you're exploring detailed, colourful brick dioramas, and solving puzzles by bulding things out of titular hot-property block. In Bricktales, though, it's way more granular. You're whisked away into a separate building screen to construct and stress test things like bridges and beams to support a platform, for example. You have a set number of different shaped and sized bricks to work with.

From playing a preview build of the first level - a jungle, home to some lost explorers - the thing that impresses me most about Bricktales is just how much it's like building things with actual Lego. It sounds stupid to say, but them little bricks are really astonishingly realised. It all looks so much Lego it's sort of surprising that you can't reach through the screen and pick it up. It's amazing. It's the closest thing to Lego you can get outside of actual Lego - which is the problem. It just kind of makes you miss Lego.

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Saber Interactive have launched their cinematic co-op survival horror Evil Dead: The Game today, Friday the 13th. No idea why they chose that date. Must be Bruce Campbell’s birthday or something.

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Hello, gentle listener. I'm afraid it has been a while since we went into the exclusion zone to find an episode or two of The Nate Files, our extra supporter-only podcast. This is entirely my fault; I was incautious while we were in there and accidentally refracted into an eel, and then Nate nearly ate that eel - it was a whole thing*, but I'm right as rain now. That's a-moray! Thank you for sticking with us while we got that admin sorted out. We really do appreciate your support so we can make these podcasts and do other fun things (like pay for my de-sliming). We couldn't do it without you!

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Funcom announced back in 2019 that they planned to make Dune games based on Frank Herbert's sci-fi spice and sandworms novels. They followed through by releasing 4X strategy game Dune: Spice Wars last month, and now it seems they're ramping up development on a new open world survival game set in the Dune universe.

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Alan Wake 2 was announced at the death of last year with promise of a larger reveal to come in summer 2022. This week marks the 12th anniversary since the release of the first game, and to mark the occasion Remedy offered an update on the sequel. The update is: there won't be an update on the sequel this summer after all.

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We're going macro this week, so we're talking about the best writing in video games. This is a very broad topic for discussion, so that means I also get to say 'ludonarrative dissonance' (we also describe 'ludonarrative harmony' as its opposite). Please don't let this put you off, though, because we do talk about some bloody well good games.

The times being what they are, though, results in us having a long discussion of patter theft, because some dreadful American (we assume) stole the "It's me, Blorko!" tweet and then just did a much worse version of it. Hang your head in shame, whoever you are. I also went to a first communion party and ate a lot of cake, and had a run in with a very charismatic toddler who may or may not be evil.

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Bethesda have just announced they're delaying Starfield and Redfall until the first half of 2023. Bethesda's RPG space epic was originally due to arrive on November 11th 2022, with Arkane Austin's first-person vampire survival game Redfall arriving sometime this summer, but now both titles have been shifted back to an unknown time between Janauary and June next year.

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Leave the doormat outside long enough in Age Of Darkness: Final Stand and you might not live to see the morning. If the game’s grimdark aesthetic didn’t warn you, here’s another from me directly: this game is brutal. Be mentally prepared to start over, over and over again. The “one more round” syndrome is strong with this mashup of tower defense and strategy.

The game’s premise is simple: survive. While the standard survival mode is challenging enough to warrant hours of gameplay, Age Of Darkness’s modifiers let you amp up the carnage for a nightmarish good time. See those little creatures all over your screen like bees in an unstable hive? Now picture building a settlement over them.

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In this job, I expend a lot of effort and care on details no one notices. While this is arguably a poor use of my time, I enjoy the process—and technically it is productive. But perhaps you, reader dear, might enjoy hearing about these small things, or at least find them interesting/weird. So let's talk about the work which went into producing one (1) screenshot and 43 seconds of video for last week's post about the Morrowind modder who added the family cat because their kids were afraid of mudcrabs.

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