Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Monica Harrington isn’t one of Valve’s official co-founders, but she was heavily involved in its formation and initial success – working by day as a marketing manager at Microsoft with responsibility for the games division, while helping her partner, Mike Harrington, and Gabe Newell get the Half-Life studio off the ground. In a lengthy post on Medium – which Nic has already covered in the most recent Sunday Papers, but which I think deserves a piece of its own – Harrington takes us through those heady early days.

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When Warner Bros released a fairly abysmal trailer for the Minecraft Movie last week, there could be only one possible result: the game’s legions of fan filmmakers, modders, texture pack creators, and garden-variety players would attempt to upstage it. That process begins with the speedy release of several fan reworkings of the trailer that use something like vanilla Minecraft graphics, rather than the original, unholy fusion of LB Photo Realism and Jack Black. This’ll teach Johnny Hollywood to run his grubby hands all over our beloved Creepers, eh.

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Well, if this isn’t a vastly impressive little gem I’m not sure what is. Qanga is a space exploration game set in a loading screen-less solar system. It features ship travel, combat, trade, and base building, and you can do all of it alone or with space mates. It’s got a demo, but it’s also on the cheaper end if you fancy buying into early access. Considering the pricing, I’d say it’s a real looker, too.

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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! I am ill, so no guest this week. To tide you over, here is a short excerpt from a story I started once about the redemptive power of forgiveness:

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Industrial Annihilation is a mashup Planetary Annihilation (big robot armies do battle on a planet) with factory management such as Factorio (conveyor belts conveyor belts conveyor belts). When we last checked in with it back in January, it was funding via StartEngine with an ambitious eye towards a spring Early Access release.

Now it’s September and it’s just got done being successfully funded via Kickstarter, with a probably-still-ambitious eye towards an Early Access release before the end of 2024.

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Shinji Mikami, founder of Tango Gameworks, thought the studio would be “safe as long as they continued to make Hi-Fi Rush games.” Mikami was asked about the studio’s closure by Microsoft earlier this year, and its revival under new owners Krafton at Gamescom last month.

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After watching the announcement trailer for Whispers of the Eyeless, I have one request: please, do not have that voiceover in the full game. It is hammier than a hamster eating a ham sandwich in Hamburg during a performance of Hamlet. It starts with “The Whispers [of the Eyeless] call to me!!!” and does not improve from there. Beyond that, colour me fairly enthused.

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I’ll admit it, I downloaded the free prologue for horror game Baby Blues Nightmares mostly because I couldn’t stop giggling at the offer to “utilize the unique abilities of a toddler”, encompassing “stealth gameplay”, “survival elements” and “upgradeable abilities”. It’s as though a toddler were actually an undersung class of special operator from a Tom Clancy shooter, rather than a wailing, hyperactive ball of tears and poop. Then again, I imagine Sam Fisher was a toddler once. Perhaps this is how he got started: escaping a smashed-up house full of roaming demon toys.

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In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only widescreen. No ultrawide for the moment, sadly. As and when they add support for ultrawide monitors, perhaps they should call it “ultramarinewide”. Ha ha! Ha. Anyway, here’s what’s coming in the first round of Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 patches.

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Not too long ago, Arrowhead dropped a vague list of improvements coming to Helldivers 2, as they admitted “inconsistencies” in their “approach to game balance and direction”. They’ve now published another blog post that torches the vagueness of the previous post with the righteously democratic flames of specificity. Overhauls to enemies are on the way, less-loved guns will be more effective, reworks to armor penetration and health values are on the boil, and they’re taking inspiration from “player fantasies” for certain weapons and stratagems. All of these tweaks are set to go live on the 17th September, so not long to wait.

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