Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Remember when Control came out and your mate Terry appeared out of nowhere to rant endlessly about how they’ve always loved brutalist architecture? Come on, Terry. No you haven’t. You spend weekends eating custard creams and watching Bake Off. You haven’t thought about brutalism since undergrad, be honest. Anyway, my version of that is Starship Troopers. As in, I’ve been waiting for a videogamey excuse to bang on about it in public for ages. Helldivers 2 is obviously as good an excuse as any, but really, I needn’t have waited so long. Official offerings like strategy game Starship Troopers: Terran Command and FPS Robocop: Rogue City aside, I reckon you can find Paul Verhoeven’s fingerprints all over games.

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Graham said he wanted someone to write about Little Kitty, Big City, asked if I liked cats, at which point my soul was possessed by some kind of deep animus. “I really like cats, I just hate the internet UWU nonsense about cats,” I said. “God it’s awful, I can’t stand it, Jesus Christ it’s just an empty and terrible way to talk about cats, cats don’t deserve to be the internet animal-” at which point Graham managed to interrupt and said I was exactly the person who should write about Little Kitty, Big City.

I promise, I approached Little Kitty, Big City with an open heart, because I do really like cats. But given my aversion to their babification by the internet, it may be surprising that my chief complaint about Little Kitty, Big City is that the hats in it are largely not cute enough. This is a bold claim, because there are more than 40 to collect.

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I have a couple of takes on Nico Papalia’s new RPG Athenian Rhapsody, which launched on Steam yesterday and still has a demo. The first is that it’s a brighter, glitzier version of Toby Fox’s Undertale that looks like it belongs on Gameboy Advance – a retro parody created in GameMaker whose turn-based combat houses many an inventive minigame, and whose writing doesn’t so much break the fourth wall as moonwalk along the parapet, showering the player in poop, anime tropes and off-colour mental health advice.

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The Sims 4 is nothing if not a teetering jenga tower of updates and add-ons and DLC packs, and the latter half of 2024 will be no exception for EA’s life sim king. Yesterday saw the release of an update to the base game’s swimwear, kicking off the updates teased in the recently-revealed new roadmap, Season Of Love. The roadmap video’s vibe is that it and its partner saw you from across the bar and wondered if you’d be interested in joining them, and it kind of weirds me out.

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Mullets aren’t just coming back into fashion, they’re everywhere at the moment, adopted largely by lads who love draft beer and The Football. And seemingly by Mullet Mad Jack, the protagonist of a single-player roguelike FPS who would shove draft beers into the skull of a billionaire robot, then shoot him in the gonads. What I’m trying to say is, Mullet Mad Jack is fashionable and no-nonsense, which makes for a great hang if you’d like to burn some aggression once in a while.

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Almost 14 years to the day after Rockstar’s cowboy epic Red Dead Redemption released on consoles, and coming up on five years after its sequel beat it to PC, it looks like the original Red Dead might finally get a PC release.

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The last few weeks I’ve been watching quite a few YouTube videos (thanks, Evo Japan), and noticing that adverts during videos a) seem to pop up every 30 seconds or so and b) then last for an unskippable 30 to 60 seconds. My frustration with being bombarded by YouTube ads in videos for which I pay nothing to watch – meaning that I understand the necessity for ads of some kind to support creators and pay server bills – came to mind as I read about EA’s plans to explore inserting advertising into games, which I pay up to £70 a pop to play.

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Deep in my heart I know that Hall of Fame-type accolades are largely just a way of dressing up a way of marketing your awards show/museum/whatever, but I also like to occasionally cast away the cynic in me and imagine a world in which this industry’s most important games and creators are rightly recognised, celebrated and preserved rather than being locked away in the vault of billion-dollar companies and left to rot. Imagine!

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The story of Manor Lords’ soundtrack begins, as all inspiring tales do, with hunched-over late-night doom scrolling. It was pre-covid, and Pressure Cooker Studios’ composer Daniel Caleb was flicking through reddit posts when a trailer cut through the glare. He’d never heard of Manor Lords before. It looked like a new IP, but already had a huge Reddit following. Caleb loved what he saw. At that point, Pressure Cooker mainly worked on film scores, but both Caleb and fellow composer Elben Schutte had always wanted to eventually move on to bringing their storytelling from cinema to games. Even more so than film, games were the passion. Manor Lords would be perfect for them.

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The former lead writer of charming super-fascist simulator Helldivers 2 is working on a strategy and tactics RPG in the vein of Nintendo and Intelligent System’s Fire Emblem games, which aren’t available on PC and as such, are a complete mystery to you, a lifelong desktop warrior who would sooner cut their hand off than suffer it to brush against one of those filthy Nintendo witches, I mean Switches.

To fill you in, Fire Emblem is known and sort of celebrated for being a rich ensemble fantasy story with character permadeath. Helldivers 2, meanwhile, is a game in which people are as expendable as bullets, and the storytelling is deliberately brittle because it consists largely of clownish propaganda. Put the two sets of inspirations together, and what do you get? You get a headline, that’s what. Beyond that, we can only dream.

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