Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Riot Games are cutting more jobs at their studios, the company announced today. This is the second time in a year the League of Legends developer has laid off workers. Chairman and co-founder of Riot, Marc Merrill, made the announcement yesterday, claiming that by cutting these jobs the company was “evolving League” and “investing heavily in solving today’s challenges”. A total of 32 people have lost their jobs, mostly workers on League of Legends, according to a figure the developer gave to our sister site Eurogamer.

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You might have caught this one during Day Of The Devs earlier this year. It’s stuck with me since because the developer Tanat seemed like a rad dude, and also because there’s nothing I cherish more than taking a bad pun and just absolutely going to town on it, marrow and all. Building Relationships is about buildings forming relationships in a Love Islandy scenario, though without the reality TV framing you might find in say, Crush House. But the real gag here is the commitment to the bit. Besides that, it’s just a really charming and fun N64-style 3D platformer.

It also features the sort wonky physics that definitely wouldn’t get Ninty’s seal of quality, but work brilliantly here, especially since your character consists largely of angles but still insists on, you know, performing motions.

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In the grim darkness of the far future, you will not have to worry about getting preyed upon by rival Space Marine chapters whilst duffing up the Tyranids, for there are no plans to add a PvPvE mode to Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2. That’s according to game director Dmitry Grigorenko, who observes that enjoyable PvPvE is the “holy grail” of game design, much-sought and seldom claimed. Balancing shooters in which players fight both each other and the bots is tricky, especially in a game as prone to dousing the screen in giblets as Space Marine 2.

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If you’ve read any of my stuff by now, you’d know that I am a simple man who enjoys violence in his games. No story? Absolutely fine by me – cuts the faff. This is why I like the demo for first-person shooter Cop Bastard a lot. It’s set in early 90s Japan, where you’ll smoke fools with guns in straightforward homage to 90s action movies. And it has an updated demo – not officially part of the latest Steam Next Fest – out right now.

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Last October, Paradox Interactive announced that they and development studio Harebrained Schemes were breaking up, following underwhelming sales of Harebrained’s 1930s-set XCOMlike, The Lamplighters League. The publishers had already made layoffs at Harebrained in the run-up to release, implying that preorder numbers were low; ultimately, Paradox wrote it off as a $22 million flop. At the time of the “parting of ways”, Paradox chief operational officer Charlotta Nilsson washed her hands of XCOMlikes entirely, commenting that “a new project or sequel in the same genre was not in line with our portfolio plans”.

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The developer of Full Fathom describes it as a “thalassophobia sim”. You are the lone engineer on a rustbucket submarine exploring the dangerous waters of a submerged country in an alternate reality 1990s. The warning lights on the control panel are flashing, a buzzer is spluttering like a dying bluebottle, and your robotic assistant is about as useful as an umbrella in the Mariana Trench. Things could not get any worse. And then you see it. Something in the green haze outside. Something with a tail.

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How do official Bethesda bug compilation videos coinciding with a game’s launch sound? Or at least, a proper list of known bugs on day one, to preempt any compilations created by vengeful players? Skyrim Lead Designer and Starfield Systems Designer Bruce Nesmith has spoken a little about the “interesting problem” of how open developers should be about technical issues on day one, given the expectation some players have that every game should be “flawless”.

When asked by Videogamer if lists of known bugs (Nesmith throws out ‘700’ as an example for Skyrim) should be shared with fans on launch “to temper expectations,” he responded:

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My earliest memory of the Commandos series of tactical stealth games was my dad bringing home a box copy of the original. “The missions take months. Months!” his mate had told him. Get less shit mates, thought I, for I had already played it elsewhere, and knew that the missions took mere minutes if you put the game on easy then rushed your objectives, bonking nazis along the way. I did not rush the new Steam demo for Kalypso’s revival, Commandos: Origins, but it’s still doable inside half an hour. I had expected a little more, but what’s here has certainly given me some optimism that the full game might well be worth sinking – if not months – at least more time than it takes to wildly lunge at a few nazis en route to your objective.

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Looking for a new gaming monitor? I don’t mean to tempt you, but this is one hell of a deal. Beating its most recent Black Friday pricing ($1179) by over $200, the Samsung 49″ Odyssey G93SC Series OLED Curved Gaming Monitor is now down to $949 at Amazon. That’s $650 off its original list price, and one of the best deals of the year so far.

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Cast your mind back ten years. Done? Good, you survived the hideous form of time travel known as long-term memory. Now, do you see a horrendous first-person shooter anywhere back there, full of memes and intentionally terrible font choices? Congratulations, you may have remembered 420BlazeIt, a freakish eyesore of a game developed during a 7-day game jam by one of the people behind Crossy Road, of all things. It briefly did the YouTuber rounds, back when YouTube was not yet the anxiety-inducing ad factory it is today.

Now I’m going to ask you to come back to the present. But prepare for a bit of a shock – there’s a sequel coming to that bong huffing shooter. 420BlazeIt 2 has been announced for some months, but now there’s a demo you can play too.

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