Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

The last time I wrote about Sonic fangame, I innocently and absent-mindedly described it as “SNES-style”. This led to a social media dog-pile of an intensity typically reserved for major international banks accidentally tweeting rule34, a howl of derision that washed over me again and again while I rolled around on the floor beneath my desk, caterwauling at Graham to please please delete the whole internet, I want to start all over again.

Let’s see if we fare better this time round: Sonic Galactic is an absurdly accomplished Sonic fangame from Starteam that, broadly, imagines how the Mega Drive and Genesis platformers might have looked and felt had they been made for the Sega Saturn. There’s a new demo, if you fancy trying it for yourself. Please find it here on Itch.io. Perhaps if I’d put the download link higher up the page in the other article, people would have got distracted and refrained from dunking on me so awfully.

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An upcoming life sim which claims to be a competitor to Grand Theft Auto VI is continuing to amass followers and wishlists on Steam, despite the game being unmasked as a vehicle for a dodgy cryptocurrency. Paradise is marketed as a third-person game set in a sunny modern city, where you can speak to any NPC via microphone on the street and get stilted responses powered by artificial intelligence. You will supposedly drive sports cars, shoot guns at people, and accrue in-game cash. But its more outlandish claims attracted immediate scrutiny from video creators who found countless inconsistencies in the marketing material. The game has since been removed from the Epic Games Store, presumably for breaking many of the store’s rules. But it’s still on Steam, and somehow clambering steadily up the wishlist ladder in defiance of its many red flags.

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Original Fallout designer Tim Cain, also known for co-directing The Outer Worlds at Obsidian, has published a video responding to a player’s question about why violence is the “default” path in so many big budget RPGs. That’s specifically RPGs with “AAA” budgets, whatever AAA means these days. Cain is, of course, well aware that there are many RPGs from smaller teams that “evolve past the paradigm of violence being the default way in which the player interacts with the world”, and that there are plenty of puzzle games, adventure games and the like in which there is no violence at all.

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The baggiest thing about PS1-harkening soulslike Tyrant’s Realm is the ratty pair of prisoner pants you start out with. Everything else is pleasingly austere. It is, like Dark Souls, a game about equipment and stamina management, but it finds most success as a soulslike in the sensation that you are alone somewhere bad, not able to do very much except hit horrible things in the space between them trying to hit you. It also offers notable moments of lonely, loud footsteps rebounding off cold stone tiles in the seconds after felling some giant man-bastard – one of the subgenre’s greatest un-joys.

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Last June, Valve’s trading card game Artifact Classic peaked at 78 players. November was a little rosier for the abandoned multiplayer game, with a monthly peak of 1,028. Then, on New Year’s Day, that number jumped to 11,900 players on Steam – its second highest concurrent besides launch. Soon after, they vanished. Who were these mysterious shufflers, flocking to the deserted, echoing halls of Valve’s disastrous flop like your mate who uses the word ‘liminal’ too much to a dead shopping center? Forbes, who first reported on the phenomena, don’t know. No one knows. Somebody might actually know but writing ‘no one knows’ makes it more dramatic. Let’s dig in.

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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! The longest novel ever written is generally agreed to be Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past – a coward’s pick, since it’s actually 13 different volumes. Don’t let Proust’s despicable lies sully the joy of literature for you, though. He did have a good quality moustache – a far more important literary trait than actually doing any writing, imo.

This week, it’s ITU Copenhagen Games Professor and Broken Rules co-founder, Martin Pichlmair! Cheers Martin! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?

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Steam Deck, Mac, and other Linux-based enjoyers of superhero shooter hit Marvel Rivals can once again play without fear of being pulped under an unlawfully swung banhammer. Developers NetEase had recently doled out bans of up to 100 years to players they suspected of cheating, but in their eagerness, failed to distinguish between legitimate compatibility layers – the software that non-Windows operating systems, like the Steam Deck’s SteamOS, use to run native Windows games – and actual hacks. Per IGN, NetEase have now apologised to the affected players, and lifted the bans.

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The yearly speedrunning superstream Awesome Games Done Quick is starting this weekend, and it’s set to be a musical one. The events will include a player who will beat a set of Elden Ring boss battles using a saxophone as a controller, and 16 minutes of Crazy Taxi with a live backing band rocking out as the driver collects their fares. Other notable events will see two players storming through The Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild while sharing a single joypad, and an amorous attempt to clear “all romances” in Fallout: New Vegas within 30 minutes – wait, there are romance options in New Vegas?

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How would a younger me react to the concept of game seasons? “Leave me alone, please. I’m busy replaying The Suffering 2 for the sixth time to see a new 15 second cutscene that recognises which combination of morally aligned beginnings and endings I’ve picked. It reads your save from the first game and everything!”. Say ‘memory card’ to a youthful, broccoli-maned Fortnite enjoyer nowadays. Go on, I dare you. You’ll be in a home before you know it.

Still, having new toys at regular intervals is one real upshot of our new live-service barrage of ephemeral novelty, perpetually flung at my dizzy eyeballs like gleaming carnival daggers at exhausted spinning wheels. Especially if they’re for the exquisite strategy of Mechabellum. Season 2 released yesterday alongside patch 1.2, bringing with it a new unit and specialist, some reworks, and lots of cosmetic bits I pretend not to care about but then get excited when I unlock a new one.

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I come and go with the work of Ken Levine, celebrated auteurman and reported burnout-inducing manager, but I’m interested to see more of Judas, his current project at Ghost Story Games. The concept for Judas is that you’re trapped in a computer-run society housed aboard a colony ship, the Mayflower. The titular Judas has managed to break free of the AI-groomed status quo, and is out to start a revolution. “Bioshock Infinite in space”, we called it, back in 2022, but Levine says it’s more open-ended than either of his Bioshock endeavours, with a greater emphasis on other characters remembering and responding to your actions over time.

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