Six months is a long time. In that half-year you could fully grow a patch of delicious strawberries, plant the seeds, then grow another. Or you could squirm through three and a half successive Liz Truss premierships. Or, as Cities: Skylines 2 developers Colossal Order have done, you could take the technical mess of your long-awaited citybuilding game and reconstruct it into something that performs... okay, not well>, but better>.
Years before she worked on top-drawer point-and-clickers Return To Monkey Island and Thimbleweed Park, Australian game developer Jenn Sandercock was a junior designer on Team Bondi's historical open world game L.A. Noire. Eventually published by Grand Theft Auto developers Rockstar in 2011, L.A. Noire took seven years to make and is an especially notorious example of crunch culture and mismanagement. Sandercock joined in the middle of one such crunch period, and wanted to make life a little easier for her exhausted colleagues. "Everyone looked so miserable after literally years of hard work & crunch," she wrote on Twitter in 2018. "So late one night after work I baked 2 cakes for the office. I sent out a mass email & we all took 30 minutes to eat cake and talk." Sandercock began hosting weekly "Cake Days", baking a fresh batch in her own time to share around the office.
Rockstar were unimpressed, however. They thought Cake Day was evidence of poor productivity and, according to Sandercock, badgered Team Bondi leadership into forcing her to only share cake during official lunch hours. "Apparently the higher ups thought our entire office slacked off ALL the time because we had cake once a week," Sandercock wrote. She herself was told "that I was jeopardising my career". Sandercock hasn't let the demise of Cake Day cramp her creative interest in food, however. In fact, she's found a way to combine baking with game design. Sandercock is now the author of Edible Games, a book of recipes and instructions for concocting games out of food, and food out of games.
If you've been narked about favourite bits of Fallout not yet appearing in Amazon Prime's unexpectedly good live-action show, hold your horses. In an interview, the showrunners have talked about holding back certain "iconic elements" to do them in a hypothetical second season right rather than cram in all the greatest hits—and also so the show didn't "seem like it was written by people who just like spent 10 seconds reading the Wikipedia page for Fallout and didn't bother to like bring in some deeper cuts."
Following a mild-to-moderate outcry, Ubisoft have clarified that queasy worm gangster Jabba The Hutt isn't, in fact, a Star Wars Outlaws special edition or season pass exclusive. The apparently much-beloved star slug will appear in every edition of the game, but if you scrape together the credits for the Gold or Ultimate Editions, you'll get access to a Jabba's Gambit mission as part of the game's season pass.
It's a timely clarification, because I've just checked on Xitter and yes, #Jabbagate has been trending... in reference to unflattering photos of Donald Trump in 2016. And also, Steven Gerrard in 2020. And... Wrestlemania in 2017? Jabba is quite the meme these days, it seems.
Set in 1975 on an oil rig in the Scottish North Sea, horror game Still Wakes The Deep is less about supernatural events, and more about the people who experience them. Here, that’s Scottish electrician Caz McLeary and the crew of the Beira D rig. In bringing the rig to life, The Chinese Room turned to archival footage, oil and gas legislation, blueprints, and photographs. For lead designer Rob McLachlan, though, it was conversations with former platform workers that painted the clearest picture of what life on the rigs was really like.
As a big fan of Ori And The Blind Forest, I am very> excited for Moon Studios' new venture No Rest For The Wicked, an online ARPG which swaps the cutesyness of Ori and that ickle wickle forest for top-down fights against abominations slathered in muck and entrails. A new early access release trailer highlights said fights, alongside the devs saying that there's going to be no microtransactions, no always-online requirement, and no anti-cheat software bundled in. I don't want to speak too soon, but so far, it looks like we're onto something pretty darn good here.
I've been watching this year's ostensible "major" news developments - the launch of a Fallout TV show, the impending release of Elden Ring: Shadow Of The Erdtree, to pick a couple - with a sense of zealous disapproval and weary resignation as to the hubris of human beings. Do these brazen publishers and developers not know that this, the year 2024, is the Year of Shadow the Hedgehog?
Sega said as much only a few days ago. They've announced a series of fan celebrations for Sonic Adventure 2's Ultimate Lifeform, beginning in the traditional style with a Shadow-themed MotoGP bike and an associated LEGO tie-in. And now, the earth quakes underfoot as we learn via The Hollywood Reporter that Keanu Reeves, forgotten star of 90s romantic drama A Walk in the Clouds and also those recent John Wick films, will play Shadow in the forthcoming movie adaptation Sonic 3.
I remain the least qualified person alive to appraise Manor Lords an actual strategy game – my village stewardship is proving inept, even by medieval posho standards – but I have> delayed economic and social ruin long enough to know it runs well on the Steam Deck. Just as it’s smooth low-end performer on desktops, Manor Lords can easily keep its head above 30fps in handheld mode, and that’s usually more like 40-45fps with the right visual settings.
Still, there’s scope for it to become a much more Deck-friendly game, if not by its April 26th release date then hopefully at least during its early access phase. Faster performance would be nice, sure, but what this citybuilder-meets-RTS-battler really needs for optimal portability is a more refined set of controls.
I sort of reject that the Fallout TV show has Easter eggs hidden in it because it, as a whole, is the equivalent of one of those fancy Hotel Chocolat ostrich-sized patisserie collection bastards that cost 40 quid. However. Eagle-eyed viewers of the Fallout show noted that episode 6 gives you a number for Valt-Tec that you can actually get in touch with - 213-25-VAULT (or, 213-258-2858). Charges apply, as well as international codes if you're outside the US, which makes it 001-213-258-2858.
If you text the number you get a reply from Vault-Tec saying "The next available appointment is 33 weeks from now, please stand by!" (handily captured by X user FanaticalGuy cos my response hasn't come through yet). And then the significantly less immersive "Reply Y to get recurring marketing and other texts from FallOut", which is quite funny. There is speculation that this is just a reference to Vault 33, the vault where main character Lucy was born and raised. On the other hand, 33 weeks from now is November, the month when both Fallout 4 and Fallout 76 came out.
Just Cause developers Avalanche have become home to the latest union in the games industry, with over 500 staff at the Swedish studio set to be covered by a new agreement formed with local labour unions.