Ghost of Tsushima’s PSN login requirement will stop you playing multiplayer on Steam Deck

We’re just a couple of days away from Ghost of Tsushima’s PC release date, as the former PlayStation exclusive prepares to drop its Director’s Cut – including its expansion and multiplayer DLC – on Steam. Having recently cleared up the question around whether you’ll need to sign in with a PSN account after the Helldivers 2 debacle – yes, if you want to play the co-op mode – developers Nixxes and Sucker Punch have now revealed that the login requirement will mean multiplayer won’t work on Steam Deck.

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Assassin’s Creed Shadows is both a samurai and a ninja game, as it borrows Syndicate’s dual-character story

After being unceremoniously thrown into the spotlight yesterday with a pre-reveal leak, Assassin’s Creed Shadows has been given a proper unveiling via a flashy cinematic trailer, confirming both its leaked November release date and revealing that we’ll be playing as two protagonists for the first time in the series since Syndicate almost a decade ago. One of those heroes will also be the series’ first playable real-life figure: the African samurai Yasuke.

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It’s not just Helldivers 2 – plenty of games owe a lot to the films of Paul Verhoeven

Remember when Control came out and your mate Terry appeared out of nowhere to rant endlessly about how they’ve always loved brutalist architecture? Come on, Terry. No you haven’t. You spend weekends eating custard creams and watching Bake Off. You haven’t thought about brutalism since undergrad, be honest. Anyway, my version of that is Starship Troopers. As in, I’ve been waiting for a videogamey excuse to bang on about it in public for ages. Helldivers 2 is obviously as good an excuse as any, but really, I needn’t have waited so long. Official offerings like strategy game Starship Troopers: Terran Command and FPS Robocop: Rogue City aside, I reckon you can find Paul Verhoeven’s fingerprints all over games.

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I am dissatisfied with the hat selection in Little Kitty, Big City

Graham said he wanted someone to write about Little Kitty, Big City, asked if I liked cats, at which point my soul was possessed by some kind of deep animus. “I really like cats, I just hate the internet UWU nonsense about cats,” I said. “God it’s awful, I can’t stand it, Jesus Christ it’s just an empty and terrible way to talk about cats, cats don’t deserve to be the internet animal-” at which point Graham managed to interrupt and said I was exactly the person who should write about Little Kitty, Big City.

I promise, I approached Little Kitty, Big City with an open heart, because I do really like cats. But given my aversion to their babification by the internet, it may be surprising that my chief complaint about Little Kitty, Big City is that the hats in it are largely not cute enough. This is a bold claim, because there are more than 40 to collect.

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Comedy RPG Athenian Rhapsody is a child of Undertale with GBA visuals in which playthroughs become postcards

I have a couple of takes on Nico Papalia’s new RPG Athenian Rhapsody, which launched on Steam yesterday and still has a demo. The first is that it’s a brighter, glitzier version of Toby Fox’s Undertale that looks like it belongs on Gameboy Advance – a retro parody created in GameMaker whose turn-based combat houses many an inventive minigame, and whose writing doesn’t so much break the fourth wall as moonwalk along the parapet, showering the player in poop, anime tropes and off-colour mental health advice.

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The Sims 4 kicks off the weirdly horny new roadmap with a refresh to base game swimwear

The Sims 4 is nothing if not a teetering jenga tower of updates and add-ons and DLC packs, and the latter half of 2024 will be no exception for EA’s life sim king. Yesterday saw the release of an update to the base game’s swimwear, kicking off the updates teased in the recently-revealed new roadmap, Season Of Love. The roadmap video’s vibe is that it and its partner saw you from across the bar and wondered if you’d be interested in joining them, and it kind of weirds me out.

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Mullet Mad Jack review: a simple and ultra-stylish corridor crash

Mullets aren’t just coming back into fashion, they’re everywhere at the moment, adopted largely by lads who love draft beer and The Football. And seemingly by Mullet Mad Jack, the protagonist of a single-player roguelike FPS who would shove draft beers into the skull of a billionaire robot, then shoot him in the gonads. What I’m trying to say is, Mullet Mad Jack is fashionable and no-nonsense, which makes for a great hang if you’d like to burn some aggression once in a while.

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EA are thinking about inserting adverts into games – but don’t worry, it’ll be “very thoughtful”

The last few weeks I’ve been watching quite a few YouTube videos (thanks, Evo Japan), and noticing that adverts during videos a) seem to pop up every 30 seconds or so and b) then last for an unskippable 30 to 60 seconds. My frustration with being bombarded by YouTube ads in videos for which I pay nothing to watch – meaning that I understand the necessity for ads of some kind to support creators and pay server bills – came to mind as I read about EA’s plans to explore inserting advertising into games, which I pay up to £70 a pop to play.

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PC classics Ultima, SimCity and Myst have been added to the World Video Game Hall of Fame

Deep in my heart I know that Hall of Fame-type accolades are largely just a way of dressing up a way of marketing your awards show/museum/whatever, but I also like to occasionally cast away the cynic in me and imagine a world in which this industry’s most important games and creators are rightly recognised, celebrated and preserved rather than being locked away in the vault of billion-dollar companies and left to rot. Imagine!

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