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The folks behind the Stop Killing Games campaign aiming to push lawmakers into taking action to stop publishers shutting down the servers of online games in a fashion that leaves them unplayable have hosted a livestream from the EU Parliament building itself following their latest meeting with the European Commission. The group say that meeting went “fine”, and used the stream to emphasise the bipartisan support their cause has amassed among MEPs so far.
Let me slash the tendons of that strutting headline with some immediate caveats. Most obviously, you will not like Cicamadata” if you have an overpowering hatred of feisty punctuation in game titles. You will not like it if you’re averse to abstract and ostentatiously computerised, ‘product design’ art direction that is somehow both bright and foggy, crisp and distorted.
You won’t like it if you really dislike artisanal glitches and general HUD palaver – cockroach text scuttling across the view; boxy white velocity lines; an oversized Doomguy-style character model to indicate health; damage and state changes that cause the screen to blink and reset, as though you’d jolted a cable.
Not long after changing their project’s name from Fallout: Revelation Blues to Fallout: The New West, the developers behind a New Vegas mod remaking a cancelled Fallout game have settled on a release date for their second demo. The second publicly playable taste of this attempt to resurrect Van Buren – the version of Fallout 3 which was in development at Black Isle Studios before being cancelled in 2003 – is slated to arrive late next week.
In case you missed it, Friday saw news arrive of a substantial corporate reshuffle at the top of Microsoft’s gaming division. CEO Phil Spencer was revealed to be retiring at the same time Xbox president Sarah Bond was revealed to have resigned, leaving new boss and former president of Microsoft CoreAI Asha Sharma to don the crown of green plastic.
A report from The Verge has now offered a bit more detail as to how all this chair-switching went down, and unsurprisingly, it reads like an account from a struggling kingdom whose ruler’s just announced plans to abdicate.
Helix: Descent N Ascent sounds like it should be a mascot platformer starring a jaunty DNA molecule with floating Rayman hands, whose special power is making stuff go up and down. Up and down the evolutionary ladder, even! A platform game in which you can evolve and devolve your character at will, to solve different puzzles? Good lord, we’ll make one million dollars out of this! Somebody get me the CEO of Midway.
Alas for my career prospects, Midway is no more. And Helix is not a mascot platformer, probably to its benefit. As revealed by the new Steam demo, it’s a slow and atmospheric puzzler in which you investigate a fallen civilisation, while chasing your doppelganger. You being a lanky Area-51-looking lad, who acquires paranormal powers and must weave them into solutions for terrain puzzles of the Pressure Plate N Lever variety.
Earlier this month, Epic Games Store shyly announced that their free game giveaways are having “a measurable halo effect across the broader PC ecosystem”, increasing the sales of those games on Steam during the offer period. New Blood Interactive’s Dave Oshry has made the same argument a bit less sympathetically: boosting the profile of games already on Steam is the only reason to release anything on the Epic Games Store, even given Epic’s more generous developer revenue share, because EGS sucks.
Sometimes you get a note through the door, nestled among the bills and flyers for local takeaways. Oi, it says, some priest’s been murdered, and we need you to track down the folks on a list of Nazis he smuggled out of Germany after the war. Ok, you reply, it’s the 1970s and I’ve got nothing better to do.
That’s the setup for Owlskip Games’ The Ratline, the Steam Next Fest demo of which has just put my beleaguered Monday brain to the test.
Happy this week all! It’s time for another Steam Next Fest. A time to stock up on unfinished business. A time to litter your desktop with dead-ends. A time to install 30 game demos and play exactly three of them – unless you are RPS supporter Mr_B, who I think accounts for the majority of Valve’s downloads traffic these days.
We’re not doing the whole Wishlisted thing this year due to a chronic shortage of wishfulness brought on by our collective advancing age, but we’ll be writing up the hottest demos as they arrive, in a dramatic departure from our regular news coverage of… writing up the hottest demos as they arrive. It’s not all demos, mind: a few developers have scandalous plans to unleash complete games into the storm of prototypes and playtests. Here are the ones we’re thinking about feeding to the Maw.
Make sure the dildos are flying at half mast. Saints Row 1 design director Chris Stockman has said he believes the series is “dead”, following conversations with Embracer Group about his pitch for a prequel. According to the developer, who currently heads VR studio Bit Planet Games, that chatter about a potential Saints Rowssurection post Embracer’s closing of Volition has ended in the publishers ghosting Stockman.
