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Friendly skateboarding game OlliOlli World and its rollerskating gun friend Rollerdrome have been delisted on Steam for unknown reasons. If you go to the store page for OlliOlli World, you’ll currently see the classic delisted message: “Notice: OlliOlli World is no longer available on the Steam store.” The same thing appears on the Rollerdrome page. No, we’re not sure why.
As rumoured, The Sims 1 and The Sims 2 have returned to (official) PC stores. Kindly Uncle EA has taken a break from his busy layoff schedule to rustle up a pair of Legacy collections that include a bunch of DLC. It’s the very first time the original Sims has graced a digital retail platform, I believe – it was first released in 2000, back when people used to access the internet using smoke signals and semaphore. Anyway, here’s the reveal trailer.
Warner Bros’ licensed free-to-play fighting game MultiVersus – aka, the one where Velma Dinkley and Arya Stark can team up to kick Superman’s face in – will no longer be playable online as of 30th May. It’ll be pulled from Steam, the Epic Games Store and the PlayStation and Xbox stores at the end of its next season, though you’ll still be able to get your fill of Bugs Bunny bashing offline against either friends or bots.
The creator of frying pan simulator Arctic Eggs is working on a fishing game that I am certain will replicate the act of angling in an entirely ordinary and accurate fashion. Its approach to hooks, lines, and sinkers will combine the fishing from Animal Crossing, Sega Bass Fishing, and Webfishing, says developer The Water Museum in a post on Bluesky. It may have a splash of Dredge when it comes to inventory management too. Oh, also, a strange man might imply you are “disappointing someone”. Nothing to worry about. And the ocean may or may not turn completely red. These decisions have not been finalised. Everything is okay. It is possible the fish are safe to eat.
Mandragora: Whispers Of The Witch Tree is a 2.5D Soulsvania from Primal Game Studio, in which you electrify, bisect or incinerate handsome, ravening night creatures in a world of heaped skulls and burning spires. Yes, I’m well aware that “2.5D” and “Soulsvania” are nonsense words, woven by pestilent market forces. Samuel Johnson is turning in his grave, I expect. He has risen from his grave and equipped himself with an ironbound dictionary and is even now making his way through the layers of the English language, hellbent on slaughtering every ‘vania yet coined.
But never mind Samuel. Oversized rodents and spiders aside, Mandragora is notable for being written by Brian Mitsoda, writer of the original Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines and the former narrative lead for its sequel at Hardsuit Labs, which lives on in the hands of The Chinese Room. Primal have just announced a release date – 17th April. Here’s a trailer.
Don’t get too comfortable. As an RPG that puts you in the synthetic boots of an escaped robo-person, Citizen Sleeper 2 often has you on the run. It’s a crunchy, dicey machine of vibrant world-building that sometimes forgets itself in wandering prose. A compelling universe to sail through, with more habitats and hovels than its predecessor, more stations and stellar gateways. It can’t – for me – escape the dense gravity of the first game’s compact storytelling and novel character building, no matter how often it funnels you from one space caper to the next. But it has a good time trying.
Bioware released a statement yesterday. It talked of “turning towards the future”. It dreamed of “a more agile, focused studio”. Nowhere in the post did the word “layoffs” appear. But this is what the post was actually about. The closest it got to addressing the facts of what happened to an unspecified number of workers is the phrase: “we don’t require support from the full studio.”
It’s one of the most disingenuous announcements of job cuts in a recent and plentiful history of job cuts. A weirdly impressive feat from BioWare, considering the last two or three years have seen some spectacular verbal gymnastics from games companies when it comes to shitcanning people. Let’s take a look at some of our “favourite” mealy-mouthed press releases in which people have their jobs poetically “sunsetted” rather than, say, dropkicked out the window.
The last Minesweeperalike I wrote up was a sparkling slurry of mind-altering pop-ups and resinous AI cleavage. It was David Cronenberg’s Minesweeper: The Substance Edition, and I was sincerely worried that I’d put you all off Minesweeper for life. But before you mop your last munition and turn in your index finger for good, give Dragonsweeper a try. It’s Minesweeper with an altogether less atrocious twist which you can hopefully deduce from the name.
The layoff train has come for BioWare. A number of Dragon Age: The Veilguard staff are leaving the celebrated RPG company in the course of plans to become “a more agile, focused studio”, as BioWare move ahead with the next Mass Effect game. Posting on Bluesky, senior systems designer Michelle Flamm, producer Jen Cheverie, editor Karin West-Weekes, lead writer Trick Weekes and narrative designer Ryan Cormier have all announced that they’re looking for work.
All of which feels like it warrants a mention in general manager George McKay’s recent blog about BioWare’s future, but he comments only that they’re “taking the opportunity to reimagine” how BioWare operate between projects, and “have worked diligently over the past few months to match many of our colleagues with other teams at EA that had open roles that were a strong fit.” Which is a very slippery way to say that you’re making a load of people redundant.
Mere hours before it’s January 30th release – wait, that’s today! – Sony have finally spilled the beans on system requirements for Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, as well as the eye-blistering, GPU-rending special features that more powerful rigs can support. Happily, all these ray tracing and frame generation accoutrements seemingly won’t preclude Spidey 2 from working on older, slower PCs as well, as the minimum specs are surprisingly reasonable.
Granted, they’re only rated for 30fps at a lowly 720p, and you’ll still need to find a honking 140GB of SSD space, but the basic GPU and CPU requirements aren’t too lofty at all. The likes of an RTX 3060 for 60fps/1080p are quite reasonable as well, though you’re staring down the barrel of Nvidia’s pricey RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 cards for high-rez ray tracing.
