A group of fangame developers have taken it upon themselves to make a new Sonic Rush game for PC, combining the previous Sonic Rush games for Nintendo DS into one "definitive" remastering, with extra stuff and some apparently overdue fixes. Seems bold! I missed the Rush games back in the noughties, but I do like me a Sonic. Here's a trailer for Sonic Rush Rerun.

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Vapourware! We all say we despise it, but everybody loves thinking about games that spend an eternity in limbo, whether due to chronic mismanagement or simply because the developers feel no need to rush. So many teasers to unravel, so many conspiracies to bake from the most ludicrous of breadcrumbs, so much delicious exasperation to wallow in as yet another year goes by without a new trailer. Hollow Knight: Silksong is no longer vapourware, barring some extreme last-minute drama. Announced in 2019, it will finally launch this Thursday 4th September. To mark the occasion, we of the Treehouse have been chatting about our favourite examples of vapourware, if "favourite" is the right word.

Your contributions are very welcome. A question of terminology for the physicists in the comments: what should we call a vapourware game that has actually released? Condensedware? I await your complex mathematical explanations. In the meantime, here's James.

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I should say, up front, that I believe A Storied Life: Tabitha means well. Although it joins a swelling collection of cosy/'wholesome' games that also happen to be about death, it’s more grounded than most, forgoing grand scenery and grander metaphors to simply have you clearing out a deceased loved one’s house while patching up her unfinished memoirs. All perfectly earnest and untoward, it would seem, and yet I walked away from my Gamescom demo last month feeling uneasy – especially about how its puzzle aspect undermines, rather than enables, its posthumous storytelling.

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NetEase have shut down T-Minus Zero Entertainment, a studio founded in 2023 by former BioWare developer and Star Wars: The Old Republic executive producer Rich Vogel.

The studio had been working on an online multiplayer sci-fi action game, with contributions from a number of ex-BioWare and Bethesda staff including Fallout 76 design lead Mark Tucker and senior producer Scott Malone. However, that project and T-Minus Zero Entertainment's on-going existence are not a good fit for "current market conditions".

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No videogame fantasy setting will ever disquiet me as much as an empty business park at night under blue and yellow floodlights. A business park, or the access road down the side of a corrugated steel warehouse, where the alcoves cast by the LEDs look like a procession of hooded figures beneath the fixed, unblinking blackness of the sky.

I can't actually be present in that scene, mind. I don't belong there. No being does, not even the people who come by day to fill the striped lines with cars or raise the shutters on the loading bays. Instead, I have to be travelling past very fast. Preferably, I will be looking out the window of a train that shows the place for only a few seconds. I will feel as though I've glimpsed another planet's scrolling surface in a mirror. Except this isn't right. I will never find the words for it. Nothing written above is adequate. Balls.

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