Fancy taking the piss out of video games? Here you go, a fun little tool you can run in your browser easily lets you rewrite famous game quotes. The Death Generator offers a gallery full of (mostly) retro games and a simple text box that will replicate the exact font used by those games, all so you can make the little shopkeeper in Zelda say rude words, or entirely rewrite the pre-mission dossiers of Goldeneye 007. There’s a lot more than that though. I’ve done a bunch, come see what I mean and have a go yourself.
The big question a Tekken player always wants to know is: which DLC character is coming next? Well, you’ll know by the end of the week, as the studio is planning to reveal this at Geoff Keighley’s winter festival of expensive advertising, the Game Awards. However, there may already be some clues in a trailer they’ve just released, which suggests some sisterful slapping is overdue. The trailer also promises new moves for all characters in a Season 2 update next spring, along with some minor presents in a winter update due sooner than that. But yes, come see for yourself.
There’s an awful lot behind this door, lemme tell ya. Hours of adventure, of tension, of action, of sci-fi strangeness. It’ll be great. Unfortunately the door itself is bugged out so you’ll need to reload a quicksave or something to get it open.
It’s not just because he’s a Nazi. It’s because he’s a smartass Nazi. As the main antagonist in Indiana Jones And The Great Circle, Emmerich Voss vacates the archetypal armchair usually reserved for secondary fascist goons, so that he can goosestep straight into the big boy seat himself. He smiles with all the sleaze of right-hand-man Major Toht, the grubby gestapo who gets that right hand burned in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Yet he also engages in the pseudo-intellectual trash talk of the main archaeological rivals to Jones, like Rene Belloq or Walter Donovan. He is a hideous grab bag of all the things that make an instantly detestable villain in the series. But there’s something else. Voss is so immediately and gutturally hateable because he resembles a type of racist encountered not in the 1930s, but one you’ve probably met today: the asshole you meet on the internet.
Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome back to Booked For The Week – our regular Sunday chat with a selection of cool industry folks about books! Everyone knows about ‘hardback’ and ‘softback’ books, but have you heard of the quickly discontinued ‘rice puddingback’? While hiring so many rice grain artists to transpose the blurbs in beautiful calligraphy made for an impressive spectacle, they were eventually banned after several fatal train slippage and/or smellage incidents. Ah well! This week, it’s Charlene Putney, who’s been writing for games for over ten years, including bits for Divinity: Original Sin 2, Baldur’s Gate 3, NUTS, and Saltsea Chronicles! Cheers Charlene! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?
Today’s door is shimmering and promises dark magics within. It’s an unlikely marriage of big budget publisher and a genre beloved most by smaller development teams. What mastery will unlock the door and expose the vast arenas within? Why, clicking to read more, of course.
There’s no perfect time to release a video game, but if I were deciding when to release one, do you know when I’d do it? Alongside the largest blockbusters of the year, at a time when everyone is broke from buying presents, and on the same day as a huge awards show is distracting the industry’s media.
Ballionaire apparently shares my thinking. The pachinko-inspired roguelike is launching on December 10th.
This happened on Thursday, but we were busy with other, less interesting news. Late or not, I can’t let it pass unremarked upon: Caves Of Qud, the vast, weird roguelike which has been in development for 17 years, hit version 1.0. It brings multiple endings to the game, a revised UI, improved tutorials and much more.
You could open today’s door, sure. You could also blow it up with an explosive, though. Or shoulder-barge your way through the wall beside it. Or plant some C4 on the ceiling and go up and over. Or I think that’s a load-bearing pillar over there – may as well just bring down the entire advent calendar to find out what’s behind today’s door.
The protagonists of two of my all time favourite RPGs share something in common. Both (the best Final Fantasy game) Final Fantasy 8’s Squall and The Witcher 3’s Geralt simply cannot get enough of leaving their friends and the entire world in mortal peril while they sneak in a quick round of cards, and I love them for it. Way back when the Wild Hunt released, there was a special edition kicking about that gave you a few decks for Gwent – the fleshed-out, playable card distraction that ended up being responsible for some of the game’s best moments. I pined for those decks, but I never acquired them. Now, Hatchette Board Games is putting out a full physical edition of Gwent next year.
The set contains “over 400 cards and a playmat” for £44/$39.99. I’m still recovering from various Fantasy Flight LCGs, so my value sense for this stuff might be a bit skewed, but that strikes me as incredibly reasonable. A good Gwent deck consists of only about 25 cards. They’re not bad cards, either! I’ve got a real pet hate for tabletop versions of videogames that just use in-engine screenshots for the cards, but these ones look to have the proper artwork from the game on them: