Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Efforts to render Mars commuter-friendly proceed apace as Mars First Logistics embraces the magic of trains. The latest update for the physics-based open world build-a-car game introduces a mountable theodolite, which lets you stitch together monorail networks you can then ride about on.

If monorails strike you as frivolous, don’t worry. It’s more of a Shelbyville idea. And in any case, the theodolite also lets you construct networks of pipes, power lines and rail-less tarmac roads – the ready-salted crisp of the road family. It’s a chonky expansion that, in the words of lead developer Ian MacLarty, has only “scratched the surface of where this new system could go”. I am predicting an eventual pivot into either themepark management or factory simulator.

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I am lost in my own factory. From every direction, every angle, conveyor belts and smelters and assemblers obscure my senses and envelop my being. Twenty hours ago I placed my first manufacturer somewhere around here. Back then it represented the state of the art, hatching me a pristine batch of 1.25 computers every minute – now I’ve forgotten where I put the damn thing, after delving into my factory’s guts to hook that piddly yet still useful batch of old relics up to my main production line. I’m building supercomputers now, and the many manufacturers that make those are hungry.

Something is always hungry in Satisfactory, and that hunger pulls you from task to task in a near-seamless and frankly beautiful daze of ever-escalating industry. It is mesmerising and it is fearsome, and after five years of early access it’s finally complete.

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Goichi ‘Suda51’ Suda – of No More Heroes and Killer7 fame – reckons a focus on Metacritic scores is bad for creativity. Speaking to GI.biz recently alongside survival horror genre maker-upper Shinji Mikami, Suda expressed his frustrations with the review aggregator platform’s cultural cache.

“Everybody pays too much attention to and cares too much about Metacritic scores. It’s gotten to the point where there’s almost a set formula – if you want to get a high Metacritic score, this is how you make the game,” Suda51 told Gi.biz.

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For all the nightmarish enshittification modern life throws at us, we can at least feel warm and fulfilled about the resurgence of demos. Bountifully they await on Steam, like a friendly worker offering you toothpick-skewered cheese chunks at your local supermarket. And, oh, would you look at that: this cheese has some guns in it. Deeply customisable guns! SULFUR is a shooty roguelike with some excellent goblins and a deep RPG equipment system. And, if the Steam reviews are to be believed, some players are squeezing out dozens of hours from the demo alone.

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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! This week, it’s writer on Marvel’s Midnight Suns, Hindsight, Life is Strange Season 2 and more, Emma Kidwell! Cheers Emma! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?

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Back in June, Edwin covered One Million Checkboxes, a website with one million checkboxes that players could check or uncheck, with any change visible to all other visitors of the site. It became an obsession for some in the two weeks the website was online, as players fought to fill all the boxes, or undo the work of their peers.

The fight was far more complicated than it seemed, as the developer recently explained, with some players finding ways to encode hidden messages in the checkboxes.

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Tales Of The Shire: A The Lord Of The Rings Game has been delayed into early 2025. The cosy life sim set in the home of the hobbits had initially been aiming for a late 2024 release, but developers Weta Workshop Game Studio announced they need more time.

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In V Rising, you’re a fledgling vampire on a mission to become absolute bossferatu of a Gothic open world. You get a Diablo-ish combat system, the ability to shapeshift into a spider, and a whole castle to prance around in, crooning at the moon. I like this premise almost as much as I dislike the fact that V Rising is also a survival game, in which you must fell trees and master a crafting system like a common turnip farmer.

What do we hope for when our interest in a game is almost perfectly balanced by our disinterest? We hope that the developers will treat us to a free-to-play weekend, in which our perhaps-unfounded reservations might be strategically offset by the endorphin rush of not having paid any goddamn money. This, V Rising creators Stunlock have now done. The game is free to download and play on Steam from right now until Monday, 16th September at 5pm UK or 10am PST.

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After PowerWash Simulator’s jet to success, it was inevitable, really. Whitethorn Games and North Star Video Games have only come out with a rival: Spray Paint Simulator. In it, you get out your spray painter and “shshshshshs” different colours of paint onto various surfaces. For whatever reason, the universe this takes place in doesn’t seem to value brushes or those rolly mops. “No”, it says, kicking your brush into the sun. “Spray or nay”.

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I could have described the multiplayer racing game Faaast Penguin a lot of ways. It is Fall Guys meets Snowboard Kids. It is Diddy Kong Racing but all the courses are water slides. It’s Cool Runnings but there are 40 penguins instead of four Jamaicans. Okay, that last one is a bit of a stretch. But basically, yes, this brightly coloured free-to-play knockout racer feels like that one Super Mario 64 level where you race the big penguin down a slide, only this time there are a ton of other players trying to beat you to the secret shortcut. It’s coming out next week.

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