Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

It’s been a billion years since I played a proper new Front Mission game, and I’m depressed to learn that Square Enix cancelled one in 2022. Titled Front Mission 2089: Borderscape and developed by BlackJack Studio, it was announced for release on iOS and Android but, who knows, might have clanked and rumbled onto PC, the place all good mobile games go when they die. Alas, Square Enix shut the project down a few months after reveal. Now, they’re suing BlackJack for releasing a new game that allegedly makes use of leftover parts from the Front Mission contract.

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The Communications Workers of America (CWA) are set to launch an industry-wide union of video game workers in the U.S. and Canada at this year’s GDC. The United Videogame Workers-CWA (UVW-CWA) will bring together “video game artists, writers, designers, QA testers, programmers, freelancers and beyond to build worker power irrespective of studio and current job status”.

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Forthcoming life sim InZoi – the plucky (genAI-ridden) David to The Sims 4‘s Goliath – will cost $40 at its early access launch, the developers have announced. What’s more, “all updates and DLCs will be provided for free” until the game hits 1.0, according to translated commentary from game director Hyungjun Kim.

This is being styled as a gift unto the gamers, and another way of tempting them from the clutches of The Sims, whose DLC packs commonly sell for full-game prices. The other way of looking at it is that of course early access “updates and DLC” should be free. The point of early access is that you’re paying for an unfinished game with the expectation that it’ll eventually be worth the money. Also, what’s the difference between an update and a DLC? My my, Inzoi, what a can of worms you have opened.

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What’s the pettiest reason you began to distance yourself from an old friend? I once casually suggested to a mate that I found toast more filling than bread, which prompted them to bang on for far too long about how I was actually wrong, since the act of toasting necessarily diminishes the structure of bread or somesuch. I’m not sure whether that’s true and I don’t care. I was speaking my truth about toast and you undermined it. Jog on, toast denier.

Fallout 76‘s new Ghoul Within update is 18.9 GB, which may well conclusively prove that searing ghoulification actually ends up with the victim weighing more than they did previously. I wish I’d known this at the time of my yeasty bust-up, because I’d have probably tried to make the same argument about toast. We might have stayed mates then. Maybe we could have played Fallout 76 together? Why, that’s the subject of this very Steam blog! Incredible.

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You’ve crossbred Pokénots in Palworld, now get ready to crossbreed… players! Pocketpair have taken a break from their packed schedule of saloon brawls with Mario’s lawyers to update their monster-catching survival game with a new Crossplay mode, together with new storage options, a Photo Mode, a cosmetic armour system, and a new Drafting Table feature. That and a multitude of smaller tweaks and fixes.

Witness the crossplaying in the below trailer, in which a base-vandalising Astegon gets its bell rung by a group of visitors presumably running foreign hardware. That’ll learn ’em to step on my Lamballs.

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It’s been four months since Stalker 2 was released, starting life as a really great shooter that had more tech issues than you can shake a stick at, but GSC Game World have kept themselves busy with some hefty patches. The first one alone had almost 2000 fixes, with the second one following that up with more than 1700. As of today, patch 1.3 is here, this time bringing in over 1200 changes, fixes, and improvements. Obviously quite a bit less than the previous two main patches, but a sizable figure nonetheless, and hopefully a sign that the game is getting to a healthy point.

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I like a good puzzle game, but to be honest I don’t play them all that often. Not because I’m bad at them, thanks for assuming I’m a numpty, it’s more just that I prefer games with a really good hook to them – think Portal as the prime example of such a game. Clean, knows exactly what it is, and uses its concept in increasingly interesting ways without overstaying its welcome. I have no idea if Chromatic Conundrum will manage that or not, but I’ve never seen a game use light as part of its puzzles in quite the same way before.

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There are two shooters that I imagine will never die, because they just seem to hang on despite being incredibly old and plenty of other games coming out in the mean-time: Team Fortress 2, and Counter-Strike (both Valve games, funnily enough – they’ve clearly got the Source (sorry)). Counter-Strike 2, which came out back in 2023, is the most played shooter of all time on Steam in fact, but even now the original game is still pretty popular. There’s literally more than 16,000 people playing it right now. And though it might not be official, a group of modders have come together to remake the 1.6 version of the game.

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I don’t usually get this excited about a CPU, but the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D is something special. It has been impossible to find for weeks, and now it’s back for $479 at Amazon (and at Amazon UK). That’s the official launch price, which is great because I refuse to pay a penny over it.

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Rise of the Ronin is just not having a very good time on PC. The game only launched on Steam just last week, where it was quickly discovered that, oh dear, there are a lot of issues. Just a quick look at the game’s reviews will let you in on its myriad of problems, but one of the biggest ones that’s cropped up is an issue where save files are being completely wiped, obviously quite an annoying bug especially if you’ve put a lot of time into the game.

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