What’s on your bookshelf?: why have you put pumpkin spice in my grandfather’s ashes edition

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! Once again, the dastardly autumn breezes have blown my schedule all out of whack, so no cool industry person this week. Instead, here is a short excerpt from another weird story I starting writing, also containing poultry for some reason.

Read more

Like A Dragon: Pirate Yakuza In Hawaii has been announced and is coming for you, Skull And Bones

It’s a pirate’s life for me, and it’s a pirate’s life for Goro Majima, recurring eyepatched anti-hero of the used-to-be-called-Yakuza series. He’s the star of the just-announced Like A Dragon: Pirate Yakuza In Hawaii, a game I can only applaud for the brazen straightforwardness of its title. Whatever Sega were drinking when they signed off on Metaphor: ReFantazio, they were not drinking when they signed off on this. They were definitely drinking something, though. Here’s the reveal trailer.

Read more

From Blizzard to Bethesda, game unions are sweeping the industry – here’s how the CWA helps make them happen

“We have been sold this myth for a very long time that unions have to be for blue collar workers in an industrial setting in the early 1900s,” Autumn Mitchell tells me. “The very simple definition of a union is just you and your co-workers coming together and forming a collective body. You can do that anywhere.”

A QA tester with Zenimax currently on union leave, Mitchell joined the Communication Workers Of America (CWA) as a full-time organiser after she and her colleagues formed what was, at the time, the biggest union in videogames ZeniMax Workers United. Now she helps the CWA do what they did for her and her colleagues at Zenimax: provide support, training, resources and guidance for workers in the videogame industry who have decided, for whatever reason, that they want to unionise.

Read more

Final Fantasy 16 review: if it were half as big it’d be twice as good

I’m reasonably sure Final Fantasy 16 isn’t the longest Final Fantasy I’ve ever played, but it feels that way, for a multitude of reasons. The major one is that a lot of its quests exist to create distance between places and plot beats. They are overwritten errands such as bringing people lunch or fetching herbs or carrying letters – dessicated, MMO-ish fare, thrust into a moderately enjoyable single-character action-RPG for the sake of incremental worldbuilding and scale.

Read more

Rain World’s new slugcat will explore icy wastes and desert sands as The Watcher DLC gets a release date

The post-apocalyptic wastelands of Rain World are stunning, brutal, and full of strange creatures that would like to eat your kittenish face. It’s a landscape of wonder and pain, and it’s about to get a little more wonderful and painful. The upcoming Watcher expansion, which adds new places to visit and a new type of slugcat to play as, will be coming out early next year, say the developers. There’s a trailer to say so. Look at this slippery gastropodal feline, standing calmly in the rain, as if the torrential and lethal weight of the water will not crush that little fuzzy head. The gall!

Read more

Store these system requirements in your head compartment before Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 takes off

Me, I’m a simple sort. All I want from my flight simulators is an unerringly accurate recreation of dozens of aircraft, a perfect physics model that includes the spectacle of relevant weather events, and a complete, photorealistic and 1:1 scale depiction of the entire planet earth.

You, you might be one of those fancy types, you might want to be able to get a job in your flight simulator, like crop duster or fire waterer. That’s what Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is adding to the package when it launches in November. We now know its system requirements.

Read more

Two Point Museum will open its doors to visitors in March 2025

If I took my kid to a dinosaur museum and the gift shop and hallways were full of Sonic merchandise, I think I’d be kind of confused. I think that makes the inclusion of such items as pre-order bonuses for Two Point Museum – alongside Knuckles staff costumes and Sonic-themed interactive exhibits – a pretty strong extra incentive not to pre-order.

But hey, at least the next management game in the growing 2.universe now has a release date: March 4th, 2025.

Read more