Happy this week all! Good news, James has returned from India and appears none the worse for his voyages. I was hoping he'd come back with a top-to-bottom report on Indian game development, but no, it turns out the smirking jackanapes was merely "on holiday". Still, we welcome him back with open arms and in the Maw's case, orifices, because it's another stuffed week for PC game releases. Here are a few that seem noteworthy.
Almost half of the 1,448,270 signatures amassed by the Stop Destroying Videogames EU citizens' initiative have now been verified, according to the campaigners' latest update. Meanwhile, the group are working to "secure expert backing" which doesn't rely on "expensive consulting firms" for their effort to push EU lawmakers to look into the issue of publishers rendering online games unplayable when servers are switched off.
Screenshots for Bluepoint's cancelled live service God Of War game appear to have slipped through the titan fingers of publishers Sony. Assuming they aren't a dream woven by Morpheus (via his earthly emissaries at MP1st), they reveal a few work-in-progress environments from the abandoned project, which Sony reportedly cancelled earlier this year alongside a new game from Days Gone devs Sony Bend.
Sundays are for rediscovering the joy of bouncing a tennis ball off your bedroom wall. When's the last time you bounced a ball? I recommend it. Sometimes I play a game with myself where I say "if I bounce and catch this ball 10 times in a row, I will win a million pounds". Then I get to five and hit myself in the face. Every time. If you are able to accomplish this seemingly impossible feat, please let me know your secret after reading the below collection of interesting articles and fiction.
Somewhere south of Paris, a bunch of carpenters, painters, blacksmiths, basket weavers, historians, and archaeologists have spent almost 30 years building a castle, the way people built castles in Olden Times. Ben O'Donnell has written it all up for Archaeology Magazine, with some sexy fortification photography. I know there are medieval masonry nerds in the RPS readership. Get in there and set 'em straight. I'm sure you could have had that castle up in six months, with enough cash left over to declare war on Belgium.
MMOs are a strange facilitation of games because they are, ostensibly, dead on arrival. Not dead in the sense of "lol dead game," that exact comment you see littered in the comments of articles, videos etc. about literally any online game, no matter how popular it is. Dead in the sense that it will die, as all things do, because one day the servers will go down and there will be no (legal) way to play it anymore. I put the legal in brackets there because there are many a fan effort that allow you to play a range of "officially" dead MMOs, but what would a game about a Frankensteinian revival of such a thing look like? Probably, Gorgon's Garden.
A thing I find a lot of joy in is the fact that despite there's technically a new, shinier, perhaps by some people's standards better version of it, Old School RuneScape is still kicking around. Before the Old School was tagged on the front end of it, RuneScape was an MMO I put many hours into (and found little success in) as a youth with too much free time, so the fact practically two decades later it's introducing a brand new skill into the game simultaneously impresses me and strikes existential fear into my heart because of how old this game actually is.
You know, with the original Paranormal Activity steadily approaching two decades of existence, it's becoming harder and harder to recognise what it actually was and is as opposed to the cultural consensus around it. First and foremost you probably think of it as a cheap, jump-scare-filled kind of horror movie, when in actuality the first entry in the series is a slow, tense window into the world of gaslighting and, obviously, the paranormal. Being as removed as we are from this means one thing: IP expansion, which we're viewing today in the form of the first proper trailer for Paranormal Activity: Threshold, the video game adaptation from the developer behind The Mortuary Assistant.
Last month, something a bit surprising, and perhaps concerning, took place in the games industry: a deal was made which saw that a mixture of Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, equity firm Silver Lake, and Donald Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner's Affinity Partners had privately acquired EA. There's a whole host of reasons why this is worrisome, but one reason in particular is the way that it might affect The Sims.
I'm fresh back from my holiday with the family, and I miss my cats already. My partner and I will therefore be beelining to the local cat cafe, and spending hours there meowing at some very unimpressed-looking furry faces. But first, I'd very dearly love to know what everyone else will be getting up to this weekend. Here's what we'll be clicking on!
I blast my way through another hulking dragoon, and run off down a corridor, companions breathlessly in tow. Surrounded by doors, I pick one before the next platoon of goons can descend upon us. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Nirvana. A rare breather from The Outer Worlds 2's rollercoaster of shooting and talking.
For a moment, I just take it in. Breathing deeply, my nostrils fill with the scent of fresh bleach. My mouth waters at the sight of surfaces you could eat your lunch off of. My eyes widen at the brilliance of the gold trim. Somehow, I can hear the fact there mush be a fresh roll in each perfectly-maintained cubicle.