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What’s the best video game guide you’ve ever used? There’s an art to it, knowing what information is imperative to include, how to include it, is it a written guide, or a video? Well, how about a 21 track long rap album? I only ask because, I am so delighted to say, someone has done just that for indie classic Metroidvania Cave Story.
I think that genres, particularly in the realm of games, are often more used as marketing tools than signifiers of the contents therewithin. Still! Genre labels are a useful thing to quickly ascertain the thing you’re doing in a game. Take, for example, Arc Raiders and its specific genre of extraction shooter. You know you’ll be shooting, and extracting something, even if it technically isn’t that simple in practice, but you get the gist. However, at one point in time, the genre of the game completely depended on who you asked.
Well, a week out from the gargantuan merging of MMO and RPG bits’ release, we finally know what Crimson Desert is. It’s a game that’s just slurped down some Denuvo DRM (. Yep, the shonky enormity of exploding slippage whose devs reckon they announced it too early has been fed some anti-tamper software at the last minute.
The folks behind PEGI – the age rating system used for games in Europe outside of Germany – have announced plans to update their criteria so that games which feature likes of loot boxes, harbour NFTs or blockchain-related bollocks, or pressurise players into returning via daily quests will automatically be given specific age reccomendations to match.
Former Overwatch director Jeff Kaplan has said his 2021 departure from Blizzard followed an ultimatum about redundancies which “ultimately broke” his resolve and led him towards the exit door. The developer frames that moment as the culmination of a number of tough years working on the hero shooter, which included a 2018 push into esports with the Overwatch League serving as a drain on resources for a team who were also trying to get Overwatch 2 off the ground.
Microsoft have shared some more details about the hardware Xbox’s next-gen console – the PC game-running Project Helix – will be packing. The new box is set to run on AMD-built tech with support for FSR upscaling, and should start to rock up on developers’ desks as of 2027. That last bit means it’ll likely release in 2028 at the very earliest.
In an unusual show of candour, Valve have spoken out publicly against a lawsuit filed in New York, USA that accuses them of “letting children and adults alike illegally gamble” via loot boxes in Counter-Strike 2, Dota 2, and Team Fortress 2.
With the caveat that I am no Atticus Finch-esque legal expert or even a Louis Tully-grade bumbler, I find Valve’s rebuttal to be a mixture of whataboutery and tactical mitigation, with a couple of fair points. It basically sidesteps what I think is the lawsuit’s most important argument – that lootbox mechanics are fundamentally manipulative. You can read the thing in full here, or you can read my slapdash summary-with-notes, below.
Many moons ago, Mewgenics developer Edmund McMillen successfully lured the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals into developing a vegan parody version of Super Meat Boy, Team Meat’s gut-slathered 2D platformer. Team Meat responded by triumphantly adding a spoof vegan character to Super Meat Boy, the puny and crater-eyed Tofu Boy. As McMillen himself recently recalled on MechaMusk.com, “I personally trolled the peta forums for months seeding info about this ‘ground breaking new indie game coming out soon that must be stopped!; I never thought they would actually take the bait but it was amazing to see and a very fun exchange.”
Well, McMillen and PETA are at it again. PETA have just released a video honouring a character in Mewgenics, which very much isn’t a game that promotes the ethical treatment of animals, or of beings in general.
Spectrum48’s Philip Sinclair has spent 15 years rewilding a field, “rewilding” being a process of restoring ecosystems to something like a state of ‘natural’ equilibrium. Now, he’s making a videogame about it. That game is Grow Wild, which is currently accepting playtest sign-ups. It sees you restoring biomes across the globe, touching down on sickly square arcadias like an avenging angel equipped with a trowel, magnifying glass, and probably some tartan-pattern slippers, out of shot.
It makes me think a little of Viva Pinata, but it’s populated by representations of non-digital creatures, flowers and trees with convincing growth cycles. There are some lovely ‘time lapse’ shots in the trailer, below.
Years ago I was lost in the Shaded Woods, a foggy forest full of moaning trees. I didn’t have enough health to fight the invisible backstabbing murder ghosts, and every time I ran away from the spooky sound of their footsteps, I got lost in the fog all over again.
That’s when a hacker invaded and injected me with hundreds of cursed swords, corrupting my save file and dooming Dark Souls 2 to crash over and over.
It was deep magic, more powerful than any game system or lore, overwhelming the code itself. To uncurse myself, I’d have to embrace the darkness and download cheat tools too.
And now I’ve tracked down my hacker, to thank him.
