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Pure Rock Crawling is about steering off road vehicles across rocky terrain. It’s about pumping the gas pedal and wrenching the steering wheel just so, such that you lurch forward and over the obstacles, rather than tumbling backwards. It’s MudRunner without the mud, with a knockabout simplicity presumably as a result of its apparently one-man development team. It launched last October but I hadn’t heard of it until today, when a new map was added, and now I want to play it.
Minecraft is the best PC game, according to me and the RPS staff who dare not cross me. I played it for three hours today and, among the many build challenges and adventures, a small story formed around a baby pig. We named him Porky, we caged him as our pet, and in an unfortunate accident, we watched as he fell to his death from the sky island that was our home. RPS in peace, Porky.
How many befriended pigs like Porky have there been across the last several hundred hours of play? I’m not sure – dozens, hundreds – but soon such pigs might have a new form. After 15 years, Mojang are adding new types of pig to Minecraft.
Marvel Rivals received a patch earlier this week which made Hulk less hulky and paved the way for the launch of its first season. It also did something else: disabled the mods players had been using to add custom skins to the game.
Slavic Magic and Hooded Horse have released a new Manor Lords update, adding a couple of maps, the ability to construct bridges, and a bevy of smaller features to an already quite robust medieval city builder.
Factions. Here are the factions: the aggressive conquest Klingon guys. The evil insectoid hive mind who build stuff and/or have loads of cheap soldiers. The researchers who are probably robots and you usually pick because they can be competitive at anything. The diplomacy/espionage ones (humans, or The Greys).
You know what I’m talking about. You may well have thought of a recent exception too, since we’ve had a fair few 4Xeses experimenting with some of the standard formulae these last few years. It’s been a while though since I read through every word of every faction’s description and wanted to play all of them. Zephon captured my interest immediately.
As a few of you might know, each Sunday at 4pm GMT I run Booked For The Week – a regular chat with a selection of cool industry folks about what they’re reading, what they’re hoping to read next, and what books they recommend. The very secret goal of the column is for the guests to name every book ever written. It’s a task every single one has failed miserably at with two notable exceptions. One was Dan Griliopoulos, who listed 400 books in a document before he got bored and gave up – a heroic, if ultimately futile effort. The other was Warren Spector back in November, who not only gave me the longest and most detailed reply I’d had before or since, but also followed up several times to add more books to the list.
“Oh, and one last thing…” teased the narration for yesterday’s Like A Dragon Direct showcase on Like A Dragon: Pirate Yakuza In Hawaii, before announcing that the RPG will be getting New Game+ mode as part of a free post-launch update. It then cut to Majima and his crew making celebratory noises on deck. This follows last year’s Infinite Wealth catching some backlash for the decision to lock the mode behind a £15/€15/$15 edition upgrade.
Unrelated, but I’ve decided to stop putting angry spiders through your letterbox every morning. I know, I know. Come on now. Hero is such a strong word.
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Ubisoft are delaying Assassin’s Creed Shadows again, but this time, not just out of concern about the quality of Assassin’s Creed Shadows. The French publisher are pushing back release of the new samurai-era open worlder from 14th February to 20th March 2025 while they look into “various transformational strategic and capitalistic options to extract the best value for stakeholders”, with news of a possible major “transaction” to follow.
The first time I died in Beyond Citadel, the game treated to me a close-up shot of my character’s scantily clad, bisected body lying in a pool of guts and ripped underwear. It turns out you can turn off a lot of the gore and nudity. You can also swaddle yourself in some nice, sturdy, PG-13 body armor. But you’re seemingly stuck with a certain base percentage of bulging, softcore gratuitousness in both the character portrait on bottom left, and in the mildly boobulent background art of the world. I’m not sure I can put up with all that, which is a shame, because Beyond Citadel is otherwise a promising, eerie FPS that mixes ideas from 90s shooters in pretty appealing ways.
“I sometimes joke about it, but it’s like I need a war to start a new game,” Rasheed Abu-Eideh tells me over a call. “The specific thing that made me make Liyla And The Shadows Of War is the attacks on Gaza in 2014, and the specific thing that made me make Dreams On A Pillow is the attacks on Gaza in 2023.”
Dreams On A Pillow is a stealth adventure that tells the story of a young mother during the Nakba – the 1948 ethnic cleansing, displacement, and cultural suppression of Palestinian Arabs by Israel. As its funding campaign puts it, it’s a game about “a land full of people being made into a people without land.”
