Rock, Paper, Shotgun
A 3D sequel to the masochistic 2010 platformer Super Meat Boy was announced at the Xbox showcase. It's simply called Super Meat Boy 3D and it basically looks exactly how you'd expect in the trailer below.
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A 3D sequel to the masochistic 2010 platformer Super Meat Boy was announced at the Xbox showcase. It's simply called Super Meat Boy 3D and it basically looks exactly how you'd expect in the trailer below.
Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome back to Booked For The Week - our regular Sunday chat with a selection of cool industry folks about books! No cool industry person this week. Instead, fantastic news: thanks to a new device that identifies trace levels of the arsenic once used to make book covers green, you can go back to laying fat St. Bernards on every sour lime flavoured tome you see, safe in the knowledge that the ones liable to give you the rare nosebleeding condition known as the 'hungry librarian' have been safely quarantined. Huzzah.
Sundays are for playing around with the Nintendo Switch 2, of course. Let's round up some writing from across the week first.
Jon Hicks, the former fifth Beatle of RPS and current co-host of Alice Bell's post-RPS podcast Total Playtime, has launched a newsletter. It's called Screen Grab and he's beginning it with a series of missives about the not-E3 showcases. You should subscribe, because Jonty is smart and funny and I want him to write more.
Partly in the absence of real surprises, and partly because the auditorium bass notes were making me feel queasy and dissociative, I spent a lot of this year’s Summer Games Fest showcase transfixed by Geoff Keighley’s balls. I am, of course, referring to the show’s animated backdrops, in which glutinous, gleaming orbs floated like nitrogen bubbles in a cosmic brain - sometimes tossed upon a tide of marbled petro-vomit, sometimes drifting over a scree of lava lamp effluence, sometimes hovering against sherbety silver Bermudas of arches and plinths. Immersive!
Sometimes, the stoic, ruminant gaze and flowing mane of a himalayan tahr goat is just what we need to get us through the week. Sadly, very few of us can pull off such a look. But we can at least aspire to embody its temperament on the inside. Probably best that way - a Dualshock controller doesn't have the same oomph on a quartet of cloven hooves.
So, fellow ungulates - here's what we're all clicking on this weekend!
Lies Of P: Overture, the first story expansion for soulslike puppet 'em up Lies Of P, is out right now, this very minute, at this exact moment in time, for you to exchange money for on Steam. We got our first trailer for it back in February, and we got our last trailer for it just now, which was probably actually twenty or so minutes ago by the time you're reading this. Here's that first trailer.
Burden Of Command is a lot like me, in that it deserves a lot of love but it's too frustrating and annoying to get it for long.
The concept is promising: tactical battles with a small batch of soldiers, but as a "leadership RPG" instead of a regular wargame. Occasional glimpses kept my hope alive over its long development, perhaps predisposing me to forgive more than usual when it finally arrived last month. I'm glad I did. But wow, did this game get me yelling for a while.
If you caught The Witcher 4's tech demo at yesterday's Unreal showcase, you likely spent an above-average amount of time for a Tuesday being impressed by horse muscles. Still, however excited you were about that horse, I'd wager you weren't quite as happy as Alice Ruppert - consultant on the upcoming Windstorm: The Legend of Khiimori, and owner of the very best website about video game horses on the internet. Ruppert's initial reaction? "Tears of joy in my eyes when they showed the slow mo horse movement".
"I'm a big fan of the of the Witcher books, and so I knew that Ciri has a horse named Kelpie in the books," Ruppert tells me over a call, "so, that's part of it". But it's also the care that's been put in. "Like: here's our gorgeous horse. We care about it, and we know you care about it. And that made me feel very seen. I think that's what brought the tears to my eyes. Of course, I am so profoundly a horse girl that you can, depending on my mood of the day, you can show me a slow mo footage of a horse galloping and I will cry in any case. That's just my horse appreciation brain rot."
It begins as every Japan-set dating sim worth its salt does — with a transfer student.
It's Aya's first day at the ominously-named 'Love-Love All-Girls High School', and they're (understandably) a little nervous. Shy and socially anxious, they hope they'll manage to make a friend or two. Turns out their classmates are eager - perhaps a little too eager - to get acquainted. Aya is set upon by a stampede of besotted young women, but Aya doesn't have romance on the brain themselves. "I Just Want To Be Single!" they yell. Cue chirpy acapella theme music.
I Just Want To Be Single!!: Season One, recently released on Steam in Early Access, is a game you'd be forgiven for overlooking on a Steam Store that today is packed with visual novels from Western indie devs. A handful carry a reverence and understanding of the medium (the excellent VA-11 HALL-A, for example), but many take a mocking, ironic approach, or exist primarily to titillate, such that fans have grown wary. Tsundere Studio's debut, I Just Want To Be Single!! stands out from this crowd.
Billed as 'aromantic, asexual, and nonbinary', I Just Want To Be Single!!'s player protagonist, Aya, is a reflection of its mononymous lead developer 'm.'. "I'm still figuring things out about myself and this game is an extension of that," m. tells me over Discord. "The story in this game is largely about finding yourself and who you want to become."
Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome back to Booked For The Week - our regular Sunday chat with a selection of cool industry folks about books! Did you know that adopting language altered the position of the human larynx, making us more susceptible to choking on food? I learned this because I've finished Blood Meridian, and was reading McCarthy's musings on the evolution of language as a chaser. Proof, then, that the only truly fitting way to leave this world is to die choking on a book. Perhaps this week's guest can recommend a good one?