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Are you ready to… horse around? What? No, that’s not canned laughter, it’s a live studio audience, it’s funny! Anyway, on to the mane event! Which is the early access launch of a singular game (in our case, anyway) called The Legend of Khiimori, a game that sits perfectly in the centre of a venn diagram that reads “horse girls” on one side and “history buffs” on the other.
The original Planet of Lana proposed a science fiction fantasy that appealed on two levels: one, being able to adventure through a wondrously lush exoworld, and two, having a cat who actually listens to you. Planet of Lana 2 is more of the same, on both counts, while adding just enough athleticism to its platforming and depth to its puzzling to feel like a worthwhile sequel.
Since CD Projekt released The Witcher 3‘s REDkit modding tools a couple of years ago, it’s been cool to see location revamps and new quests for the decade-old RPG start to emerge from the woodwork pretty regularly. The latest that’s caught my eye is a substantial overhaul of Gerry and co’s hangout Kaer Morhen, with a veteran modder having taken on the task of fleshing out the area to match its depiction in the first Witcher game.
“As a kid, I’d sometimes go to work with my dad,” Brady Bell tells me. “We’d drive onto the MGM lot, and I’d see coin-op games through the window of one office. ‘That’s Mr Spielberg’s office,’ my dad would say. I remember thinking, ‘Wow – he gets to make movies and play games. That’s the life.”
Years later, Bell found himself sitting in an LA office while the legendary director gave him notes. Modelers around them were working on outrageously expensive workstations, painstakingly creating mockups for Jurassic Park sequels. But there were no dinosaurs on Bell’s screen, not even a tiny Compsognathus or a dinky little Anchiornis. Bell was showing Spielberg a cutscene packed with hellish creatures, occultish symbols, and the tastefully wood-panelled walls of a sprawling gothic manor.
That’s because Bell wasn’t part of DreamWorks Pictures, Spielberg’s movie studio, but DreamWorks Interactive, the game development studio Spielberg founded in 1995. He was the producer on the small team making Clive Barker’s Undying, a first-person horror shooter made in collaboration with the author who created Hellraiser and Candyman.
Last month Clive Barker’s Undying celebrated its 25th anniversary and while its makers would be the first to say it wasn’t a shooter that changed the direction of the games industry, they will tell you that the project was a true labour of love.
They will also tell you that Clive Barker was really quite insistent that they make protagonist Patrick Galloway more fuckable.
While Resident Evil Requiem‘s been hoovering up most of the Resi attention as of late, Capcom have managed to drag the Resident Evil 4 Remake back into the headlines. The game’s just had Enigma DRM quietly pulled from it, following a recent swap to that software from Devuvo DRM which reportedly had an impact on how well the Resi 4 Remake ran.
Death. Taxes. Thomas the Tank Engine quickly being modded into new games. Resident Evil Requiem‘s the latest one to gain the privilege of hosting some steam engine antics, buit this time around it’s not solely for goofs. Capcom are yet to add an arachnophobia mode, so a modder’s stepped in to swap out spiders for my friend and yours Thomas the Tank Engine.
Have you ever noticed your next company-wide meeting’s due and thought the following: ‘Oh, we should post an image prominently featuring a screen from a game rumoured to potentially be getting the remake or remaster treatment’? Well, that appears to have been the case for Iron Galaxy Studios, co-developers of Skyrim‘s Switch port and support studio on Fallout 76. It’s a screen from Fallout: New Vegas to boot.
Welp. The Cities: Skylines series turns 11 years old today, so publishers Paradox have announced a bunch of stuff designed to celebrate that occasion. Look, look, they’ve said, here’s a brand new expansion for the original Cities: Skylines and it’ll launch next week. Oh and, they’ve also said, recently under-new-management sequel Cities: Skylines 2 is getting a couple of creator packs.
Hooded Horse and Mohawk Games have announced a new expansion for their resolutely pre-modern 4X strategy game Old World. It’s called Empires of the Indus, and as you may guess, it concerns the nations and cultures that once flourished along the banks of the river Indus, running through central and south Asia. Nations and cultures like “the mighty Mauryas, who founded one of the greatest Iron Age empires under the rule of Emperor Ashoka” and “the nomadic horse lords of the Yuezhi who transformed the region as the Kushan Empire”.
