Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

You’re shuffling through the desert scrub, wondering if the clawed beasts just a few yards away have spotted you yet. You’ve made sure to pop a Stealth Boy just to be extra safe, and told Raul that if his knees creak at an inopportune moment, he’s on his own. Then, you realise you brought Rex along, and he’s gotten stuck on a rock several meters behind you. Finally freeing himself, the good boy bounds towards you at full speed. This should be the point in some Fallout New Vegas stealthing that you realise it’s brown trousers time.

It isn’t, because Obsidian weren’t total sadists when they designed the thing. It does take you out of your Mojave roleplay a bit, though. Thankfully, I can report that a modder has taken it upon themselves to ensure that New Vegas now benefits from the finest in sneaking dog technology.

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Reader, I am about to venture into that terrible ninth circle of videogame journalist cringe known as pitching your own game in an article. A while ago, I mused aloud on Xitter that a Batman game (or offbrand spiritual homage) from the perspective of people trying to commit petty crimes in Gotham City would be Interesting and/or Countercultural.

You could portray Batman himself as both a lone vigilante and a pervasive environmental factor – a morbid, hallucinatory tendency of the architecture itself, gradually provoked and intensified by tiny acts of larceny and vandalism. Kind of like the Eye of Sauron, but it’s the Bat Signal, and instead of fighting the urge to wear the Ring, you’re stealing candy bars and writing on toilet walls.

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Sega have gotten just a little bit too good at making Sonic games. Not good as in 10/10 masterpieces, good as in competent, as in mostly jank free, and where there is jank it’s the annoying, not very funny kind. I like it when the blue hedgehog is impossible to control in Sonic Adventure 2 actually! But look, when I go on to tell you about a game that captures that same unruly spirit of Sega’s early 3D games, please ignore that Christmas was a month ago because SantaCorps 4 is a 3D platformer that really does have the messy, gloopy sauce.

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It is inevitable that when a game like Balatro rocks up, is really good, and makes a gazillion dollars, that there will be the odd imitator here and there. Sincerity, flattery, yada, yada, yada, point is, it’s all fine as long as you at least put enough of a twist in there to make it more of an “influenced by” over a “wholesale ripoff” kind of thing. I think Gambonanza, a roguelike deckbuilding chess game, fits into the former quite nicely.

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Good, bad, I don’t bloody know yet the thing’s only been about for five seconds, but we can certainly say one thing now: Highguard is out. Now we can sit and prepare ourselves for more inane and pointless discourse about yet another live service shooter that we’ve probably had several times before. Hooray! But before we get ahead of ourselves, a moment of reflection, courtesy of the devs behind Highguard itself, who have spoken out about all that silence following their Geoffies reveal.

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Hear ye, hear ye! Embark have shared some more concrete details for Arc Raider’s next main update, Headwinds, which is set to be downloaded onto your platform of choice tomorrow, January 7th. Namely, just what that new matchmaking option is, which is, as it seems, one that won’t be for everyone.

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Against the overbearing weight of modernity, Old School RuneScape continues to complete a Sisyphean task of simply existing two and a half decades after it originally launched. It just celebrated that 25th anniversary at the start of the year in fact, and now during a Winter Summit a slew of updates coming to the MMO were shown off in a roadmap from developer Jagex.

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Back in 2022, Winnie The Pooh entered the public domain in the USA, meaning that any denizen of that nation can publish work featuring the OG incarnation of A.A. Milne’s honey-supping woodland bear (the UK copyright expires in 2027). At some point in the future, once the newly founded Poohlike genre has matured, we can surely expect a renaissance of Winnie derivatives, ranging from erasure Pooh-ems through josei anime interpretations to Kaufman-ass Hundred Acre existentialism. Right now, though, it’s mostly about horror, because the logical thing to do when the lawyers finally abandon a beloved children’s character is break out the chainsaws.

The movie folk have already given us Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey and its sequel, both apparently dreadful in a bad way. Now here comes Steven H. Videogames with Winnie’s Hole, out in early access today. In this roguelite from Twice Different, the nectar-chugging teddy has become a rambling cosmic abomination, and your job is to mutate his insides using tetrominoes. Oh botherlyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.

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Baldur’s Gate 3‘s shift from early access to full release came with heap of tweaks and changes as Larian finalised their huge RPG. Naturally, this meant certain bits or plans not making it into the final cut, and if you’ve come to long for any of those after playing them initially or hearing about them, then odds are a new mod is right up your alley. It’s also really cool if you, you know, just want more BG3.

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The Stop Killing Games campaign have revealed the final signature count for their European Citizens’ Initiative, dubbed Stop Destroying Videogames. According to the folks behind the campaign, the European Union have been able to verify that 1,294,188 of the petition’s nearly 1.5 million signatures are the real deal, putting it above the one million signature goal required for EU politicians to look into the issue of server shutdowns rendering online-only games impossible to play.

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