Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

The Sims is in an odd place right now. In September, it was announced that the game’s publisher EA had been sold to Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, equity firm Silver Lake, and Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners. This unsurprisingly was met with concern from Simmers, particularly in relation to the series’ generally pro-diversity stance, and whether or not it will retain that in the future. And in a recent interview with art director of the original Sims and a lead designer on The Sims 2, Charles London, the developer shared why he felt it was “incredibly important” the games include same sex partnerships.

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I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that a majority of the data that various AI models train themselves on do so without getting any sort of permission to do so. It’s easier to ask for forgiveness than permission, as they say, though in the case of ChatGPT developer OpenAI, they probably shouldn’t have taken that lesson to heart. That’s because Japan’s Content Overseas Distribution Association (CODA) has requested that the AI developer stops using Japanese media to train its text-to-video model Sora.

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Warning: Spoilers for Cyberpunk 2077 lie ahead.

Tabletop wizard and cool glasses-wearer Mike Pondsmith has teased having “ways” to bring Johnny Silverhand back in Cyberpunk 2077‘s sequel. Actor and serial whoa merchant Keanu Reeves hasn’t been shy about being open to reprising the role were the opportunity to crash through his door waving some mantis blades about, but reconciling such a thing with the events of the first game could prove a bit complex.

This isn’t the first time Pondsmith’s let loose potential details about Cyberpunk 2, which developers CD Projekt have otherwise remained pretty tight-lipped about while they work away at it. Back in May, he alluded to having chatted to a dev at the studio about a city which “feels more like Chicago gone wrong” that’s visited during the course of the game.

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Original Saints Row design director Chris Stockman is talking to the hellgods at Embracer Group about making a prequel open world game, possibly set in 1977 and containing absolutely no dildo bats. This comes almost two decades after Stockman left Saints Row development studio Volition, and a couple of years after Embracer closed Volition amid wider cuts.

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We were late to the party with the last big horse game, Umamusume: Pretty Derby (I confess, I avoided it because I’m not that keen on gacha, though I am not above watching Gold Ship/Michael Jackson crossover memes on the toilet), so I’m getting in on the ground floor with Sha Beast Dressage.

It’s sure to be the next global hit. Who doesn’t want to parade around on a horse that looks like it’s made of ancient Egyptian embalming tools? Who doesn’t want to be trapped in “a perpetual cycle of non-consensual reincarnation” by a god of torture, forced to train up hellbeasts for exhibition to earn your freedom? Who doesn’t want to make the Nuckelavee do a croupade?

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November is here. The sunny uplands are far behind us. The great gilded procession of Videogaming trundles and cavorts through the deep forest. The bells of the indie jesters are muffled by fog, and the CEOs peer anxiously from their carriages of scarlet and bronze, instructing their guardsmen to beware the union organisers concealed in the undergrowth. Keep watching the trees. Everytime you glance away, they look a little more like placards. Do you see the moths, idly winking on boughs? They are the Maw’s eyes. Those distant, whistling spirals of pine, somehow immobile behind the foreground trunks, in defiance of the rules of perspective? They are the Maw’s lungs. Those squirrels having shouting matches with magpies? Erm. The Maw’s thrombocytes, maybe.

Listen! The crunch of twigs and leaves under hobnailed boots. Approaching torches. It is a refugee party of freshly released PC games. Let us pick the heartiest or strangest from their ranks to bolster our forces, before the shadows close in for good.

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I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around Arknights: Enfield. It is One Of Those Games, to which there are two versions of. Arknights: Enfield is One Of Those Games, as in an anime gacha game filled with anthro-adjacent women for you to roll for and fight with in flashy, lackluster-in-feeling combat. Arknights: Enfield is also One Of Those Games, a factory sim where you build complex systems to produce, uh, something. This is a combination I cannot fathom, but registration for its next beta test is open, so perhaps I can figure it out.

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I know that with winter on the way, you might be wanting to play some summery games to remind you of what life was like before Jack Frost started nipping at your chestnuts. Put that to the side, perhaps, just for a while, as developer 11 bit studios have revealed the release date for Frostpunk 2’s first bit of DLC, Fractured Utopias.

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How do you follow on from making a game that essentially popularised a whole new genre? I can only imagine that question is one Brendan Greene, aka Player Unknown, i.e. the creator of PUBG, has asked himself a few times. The answer to that question is Prologue: Go Wayback, a game that has been in the works for a little while now, and at long last has an early access release date.

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Things aren’t sounding so hot over at Grand Theft Auto 6 developer Rockstar right now. Yesterday, a report came out from Bloomberg (paywalled) that a number of employees have been allegedly fired, with the UK’s IWGB Game Workers Union claiming it was an act of union busting. Two-Two, Rockstar’s parent company, have denied this allegation.

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