Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

How long do you tend to spend creating a character in a video game? The correct answer is three hours. Four hours if it’s a Bethesda game, because creating a character in a Bethesda game is like rewinding the Raiders Of The Lost Ark face-melting scene while shooting at your TV with Homer Simpson’s Make-Up Gun. It takes patience to extract beauty or even just plain inoffensiveness from the Creation Engine’s sticky coils.

Hang on, why am I being mean to Bethesda? I should be directing my snide remarks at Capcom. It turns out the scalliwags want you to pay a small fee to edit your Monster Hunter Wilds character’s voice, face and body structure more than once – so if you’re buying today, you might want to spend a few more hours perfecting that Hunter physique at start-up.

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AMD have finally confirmed pricing, dating, and specs-ing for their first RDNA 4 graphics cards. The Radeon RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT will be out on March 6th, and start from $549 and $599 respectively. While these are still relatively fat stacks o’ cash, AMD say they’ll compete with Nvidia’s RTX 5070 and RTX 5070 Ti – and considering the latter is supposed to start at $749, with most models currently going for above $800, that could make for a tasty undercutting.

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In hindsight, we probably should have taken Monster Hunter Wilds’ earlier benchmark tool release as more of a warning. The actual game is every bit the graphics card torture device that standalone tool suggested it might be, and while it doesn’t make DLSS 3/FSR 3 frame generation mandatory per se, it clearly intends to misappropriate these features, forcing them to act as performance crutches they were never designed as.

What makes this particularly headshakey is that Wilds’ PC version is, initially, quite sympathetic to the format: besides a full set of DLSS/FSR/XeSS upscalers, an unlocked framerate option, Nvidia Reflex support and the like, its thirty-odd individual quality options hint at the finest of fine-tuning possibilities. Yet these, too, aren’t really fit for purpose, with only minor differences in how the highest and lowest settings perform.

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The dust on the yesterday’s horizon has become today’s stampede. Monster Hunter Wilds has launched and we are all choking on up-kicked sand. So far the action game has hit a peak of 987,000 players on Steam and all my news feeds are nothing but Rathalos screams. This is what we call a “big ‘un”.

But what trembling critters are eking out an existence in the disturbed ground beneath Capcom’s feet? Other games still exist, and some are just unlucky enough to step out of their bolthole the same moment a much scarier freak is on the prowl. Here are 4 games that just released which may be worth a look if you have no time for big beasties.

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Years ago I wrote a piece about what I presumptuously defined as the “emerging” subgenre of city games that respond to the climate crisis, with its attendant catastrophes of unchecked capitalism and resurgent fascism. Today, it feels dangerously like that subgenre is “sub” no longer.

We are engulfed in strategy sims where society is the rind between the formless terrors without and the only-human abusers within. The geography is clogged by Last Cities and Final Bastions Of Humanity, all of them awkwardly avoiding eye contact, like the prophets that line the alleyways of Life Of Brian. I guess it’s in keeping with the “unchecked capitalism” bit that apocalypse fantasies have become a thriving business. I hope that’s not my fault. On the brighter side, roguelike deckbuilder As We Descend is quite fun, combining moderately baroque turn-based combat with tales of Vernian dystopia. Here’s Wot I Think of the demo.

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Brevity soul’d or no, wit can also be the enemy of honesty; a fundamentally performative pin brooch with an artificial sheen. When I go back over my notes after playing a game, at least two-thirds of them will routinely be useless and powerfully crap jokes I’ve written in lieu of practical points because – even in a document no-one but me will ever read – I cannot bear to cease reminding myself that I’m an implausibly clever sausage.

Occasionally I do remember to just jot down an unadorned factoid. “Cards wot do two things (Gloomhaven)” says my notes on this puzzle game. I’ve had my eye on it for a while, mainly because making your game star a ghost with an axe and calling it Axe Ghost is some premium Nic Reuben bait, especially if the ghost also has normal human arms for some reason.

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Nic: Life, the absolute bastard, has kept me away from the Monst. Let me experience it through you. What’s the best Monst so far?

Brendan: I am fond of the squiddy critters that slop about. The Nu Udra is a giant gloopy octopus that feels like a stand-out fight partly because of its many, many arms, but also because of the environment you fight it in. It’s horrible (in a fun way) to wade about in the oil of this region, and try to avoid the flames that inevitably start to spread. Another later squid-like beast has some horrible knifey hands at the end of its tentacles, but I’ll let the readers discover the rest of that creep’s tactics by themselves.

Ollie: I’m partial to the Yian Kut-Ku myself. It was the very first monster I ever fought in any Monster Hunter, back in the days of Monster Hunter Freedom on my PSP. And all these years later, I still recognised all its moves, and it made the whole act of beating up the big fire-breathing chicken even more enjoyable and satisfying than it already was.

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EA have restored and released the full source code for several antique Command & Conquer games under the GPL license, in a red letter day for series modders. The games in question are the original Command & Conquer (aka Tiberian Dawn), Command & Conquer: Red Alert, Command & Conquer Renegade and Command & Conquer Generals, plus the latter’s Zero Hour expansion. That’s a lot of refurbishable strategy game to get your head around.

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I’ve never played 2001’s Gothic, developed by Piranha Bytes, but Sin has an article from 2016 about why it is “more believable than modern RPGs”. In that piece, she paints an absorbing picture of a magically quarantined penal colony, where three factions of prisoners enjoy an uneasy truce. In this crammed ocean vent of a setting, fights generally end in defeat rather than death, reputation isn’t just a points gauge, and the player character’s centrality is an accident. It sounds pretty thrilling.

I am still searching for this RPG in the Steam prologue demo for Alkimia Interactive’s Gothic reboot. There are certainly some intrigues afoot, and I’m quite enjoying the desolate quarry scenery, but I’m distracted by aspects of the presentation, not least the fact that the prologue character looks like a Funko Pop incarnation of Highlander’s Christopher Lambert.

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I’m sorry to announce that I am yet again going to speak highly of a game about going up and down hills, real quickly like. Haste: Broken Worlds, from Clustertruck and Totally Accurate Battlegrounds devs Landfall, is very much about the haste first and the broken worlds second, sending you hurtling across the inclines of its cartoon gauntlets at what Chris Morris would call terrifying legspeeds.

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