Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Do you remember the days when we didn’t need to talk about generative AI? Whatever side of the pro or anti fence you sit on, or even indeed if your buttocks are firmly planted on those white picket panels, you may be tired of hearing about which games do or don’t feature AI-created artworks. Even the US supreme court seems done with the whole business, as they recently refused to take a case about copyrighting AI art.

I wish, instead, developers would avoid the whole kerfuffle and do what Slay The Spire 2’s developers Mega Crit Games have done: just bodge it in Paint.

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Yesterday, Julian wrote about the possibility of changing inheritance laws in Total War: Medieval 3, and thereby revealed to me that Creative Assembly have been sneakily talking in depth about the forthcoming strategy game on their forums. The audacity of those people! In other posts, we learn about their plans for standing armies, which I think are probably what interests me most about TwarMed3, in that each campaign will be an exercise in getting to the point where standing armies are a thing.

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Bungie’s Marathon reboot released yesterday, but you might not get that impression from the developer’s coverage embargo guidelines, which request that critics delay their “full review and impressions” until the launch of a “pinnacle endgame zone and experience” later in March.

It’s a “request/suggestion”, not a demand, but it rubs me up the wrong way regardless. The Marathon reboot is not an early access launch that is marketed to buyers as unfinished.

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The entanglement of war with simulation continues with the discovery that a video of a US battleship shooting down an Iranian fighter jet is very likely a clip from videogame War Thunder, depicting ordnance from the World War 2 era. The clip in question has circulated on social media to the tune of millions of views. It has also been shared around by at least one sitting US Republican statesman, Texas governor Greg Abbott, who reposted it with the caption “Bye bye”. The tweet in question has since been deleted.

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Somehow, Pragmata was announced almost six whole years ago. Where did those years go? I certainly didn’t allow them to go anywhere! Originally slated for release in 2022, it was eventually delayed into 2023, then indefinitely, before Capcom finally locked in a 2026 release date. Which it will not be making, technically, as while it was originally slated to launch on April 24th, it’ll no longer be doing so… because it’s coming out earlier. Teehee, I fooled you, what a little trickster I am!

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Not all that long off the heels of releasing parkour boomer shooter Metal Eden, developer Reikon Games have now announced that they’ll be returning to their cyberpunk world Ruiner in the form of… well, it’s just called Ruiner 2. And it’s a sequel that sure, looks like more of the same, but the immediately noticeable difference in this one will be that you can play it with a couple of your buddies.

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Hear ye, hear ye! It is time to play your hand, for the day of prophecy has come: Slay the Spire 2 has, finally, launched into early access. I know, I know, there’s some game about running a marathon or something by a team of folks that run a bungee jumping business out today too. Forget that! Running is difficult, deckbuilding is… also difficult, but, I don’t like running, so there.

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There is no greater source of tepid rage than when I see a game, I buy it, I proceed to download it, and it tells me it needs to take up one billion gigabytes of my hard drive space (NB: one billion is an exaggeration). It fills every corner of my being with a potent darkness, and I would like it to stop. This is a feeling many had with Helldivers and its ludicrously large 154GB install size, leading to a test build of the game to be released by Arrowhead last year knocking it way down to only 23GB in size. And now, after some testing, this build will be available to everyone!

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What is a Control game? It’s a fairly reasonable question to ask, as the only follow-up there’s been to the original 2019 game in the intervening years (apart from some DLC) was FBC: Firebreak, a live service FPS spin-off that… well, you know. And then last year Remedy revealed what was long dubbed to be Control 2 is actually Control Resonant, and that we won’t be playing as Jesse this time around, oh and also, it’s a Devil May Cry-esque action game. So with all these shifts, in a new interview some of the leads behind the sequel have shared their perspective on what a Control game actually is.

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I hope you’ve got some decent trainers and plenty of bottled water on hand. The time to run a Marathon is nigh, with Bungie’s shooter set to burst out of the blocks today, March 5th. Ahead of the starting gun going off the Destiny 2 developers have shared a bit more info on how Marathon‘s in-game currency and seasonal pass rewards work.

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