Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

In Crisol: Theater of Idols, you fire bullets of your own blood at frenzied wooden puppets while exploring an island saturated with unpleasant Spanish folklore. As elevator pitches go, I like the immediacy of this one’s trade-offs. Blood? But I need that stuff inside my body to convey oxygen and vital nutrients to my trigger fingers. Surely there are other fluids I can fill the bullets with. I get that it would prompt the less sexy kind of revulsion, but Norman Reedus did get away with lobbing cannisters of piss and dribble in Death Stranding.

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Another group of workers at Microsoft-owned Blizzard have voted to form a union, with the Communications Workers of America (CWA) set to represent them. The CWA say that this union will be made up of “nearly 400” workers across Blizzard’s platform and technology department.

Their action follows the formation of a number of other unions at Blizzard over the past couple of years, with developers on World of Warcraft, Overwatch, and Diablo all having recently secured representation.

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The future of GZDoom, the community-updated engine behind many thousands of brilliant Doom mods, is in doubt following a bust-up over the lead developer’s use of generative AI to create code. The fracas has seen a number of GZDoom developers announce plans to splinter off and maintain their own engine, UZDoom.

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That psychic shockwave you just felt was my brain registering the words “Yes, G-Police was definitely an inspiration” in the Steam forums for G-Rebels, an upcoming cyberpunk flight combat simulator. You’ve never heard of G-Police? Oh my god. Get in here, you prancing summer child, you daughter of chaos, you strawman son of a gun. Sit the fuck down. Everything is going to be OK now. I am about to tell you of G-Police, the only good videogame ever made.

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I can’t remember the first time I felt “immersed” in a videogame, but I can remember the first time I got stuck under a swimming pool float as a kid, scratching at a scabby foam ceiling roamed by mocking silver jellyfish of air. I can remember the first few times I drowned in videogames, fighting the waterlogged handling in Sonic’s Labyrinth Zone, or operating the agile sarcophagus that is Lara Croft in Aztec print grottos of antiseptic blue.

I find the continuing use of “immersive” to describe believable videogame worlds weird and a bit alarming. Partial immersion would be one thing – the videogame as nice hot bath at the end of the day, the videogame as splashing around in a stream of thought, the videogame as a kind of apple-bobbing. The “immersion” of the “immersive sim” is a different matter entirely: it’s a box of clockwork you’re invited to tease apart, not some hyperreal enclosure. But the “full” or “total” sensory immersion repeatedly offered by big-budget, photoreal 3D games seems a lot like suffocation.

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The best thing about the ROG Xbox Ally X is that it finally acknowledges the truth – a truth that, despite continued denials by device after device, at least partly accounts for why the little old Steam Deck still rules the world of handheld PCs despite being slower and lower-rez than almost everything that followed it. You know it, I know it, and at last, Microsoft know it: Windows 11 just isn’t that good as a handheld OS.

Thus, the biggest upgrade that the ROG Xbox Ally X – and its little brother, the ROG Xbox Ally – makes is not to its hardware, but the software. Instead of booting straight into the Windows 11 desktop, a miserable experience when your only navigational tools are thumbsticks and a touchscreen, it defaults to a far more gamepad-optimised (and specifically gaming-focused) ‘Xbox’ mode that provides quick, D-paddable access to your choice of launchers and the games installed within. Yes. Great. Cool. Big fan. I still wouldn’t buy one.

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Ubisoft have opened up the pandora’s box of mid-2000s shooters and deployed Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow onto Steam, rendering its PC version easy to grab for the first time in ages. It’s not a remaster, so don’t get too excited, as you might still have fun getting things to run as smoothly as your covert ops.

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Misbehaving bullets, your hour of reckoning is nigh. A Battlefield 6 hotfix has been deployed with the goal of stopping you from refusing to register hit damage when you embed yourselves in virtual flesh. Bouncy ladders, your time will likely come soon, as EA’s Battlefield Studios are busy trying to work out the arcane secrets of your rubbery rungs.

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Given how quickly older games can be delisted or end up near impossible to run properly without tinkering nowadays, efforts like GOG.com’s preservation program are always nice to see. There’s obviously a money-making motive behind it for the storefront, but keeping retro works in working order’s a noble way to earn that cash. As it turns out, though, the folks behind the CD Projekt-owned site underestimated just how difficult an undertaking the program would be.

That’s not to suggest they’re giving up though, just that they’ve had to re-evaluate some of their ambitious early goals.

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Soon, I will eat more than one moon. But for now, both you and I can eat a single moon as a demo starter for the main course Skate Story‘ll ollie into our lives when it releases in December. It’ll have to do, washed down with a glass skater making a stone philosopher feel some type of way by busting out sick combos.

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