Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

It’s been a lifetime since I read George Orwell’s 1984 – a tale of mass surveillance, indoctrination and repression nowadays invoked to describe everything from Trump’s Twitter ban to Pizza Express telling you that jelly-beans aren’t a topping – but I will always remember how it combined role-playing with adventure gaming and brought the “detail of Riven into the real-time world of Quake“. Oh, forgive me, I’m actually remembering Big Brother, a video game sequel to Orwell’s book, which I have never played, because it never made it to shelves.

Online sleuths have just dug up and published an ancient E3 demo for this mysterious game. Here it be, and here be some footage for any unpersons concerned that downloading the files might get them shipped off to a joycamp by thinkpol.

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Grand Theft Auto 5 on PC has been updated with a new Enhanced version, bundling in a range of tune-ups such as ray-traced graphics and support for AMD FSR and NVIDIA DLSS, new features for GTA Online, and a heaping helping of swankmobiles for your fleet of GTA cars. Existing GTA 5 story mode and GTA Online progress will carry over, and it’s all free to people who own the old version of GTA 5, which is now known as the Legacy version on Steam.

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The GeForce RTX 5070 is out today, at least on paper. Yet despite having already slipped from its original February release plan, the RTX 5070 looks set to launch directly into the same stock shortage problems that have been causing frowny faces all around the rest of the RTX 50 series graphics cards – and, while you’ll still be able to try your luck with most of the GPU’s board partner variants, the one version you definitely won’t be buying today is Nvidia’s own Founders Edition.

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A healthy pinch of my motivation for writing about waiter simulation plate em’ up The Way Of The Tray is so I can read your hospitality job horror stories in the comments, but I do love the energy here. It’s a breathless, colourful (actual) plate-spinner that has you serve mythical dishes in the daily grind for tips from Yokai customers. You’ll then invest those tips back into waiter skills and restaurant upgrades, or at least whatever petty cash is left over from paying rent.

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Suikoden I & II HD Remaster is out tomorrow. I’ll have a review up soon, but I wanted to post some quick thoughts on the new translation.

“For the original games, the size of the dialogue box was quite small and there wasn’t a lot that we could fit in there,” producer Yasuo Daikai told IGN back in 2022. “Japanese is a language that can say a lot in a very short amount of space, but for English and other languages, you need a lot of space to say the same thing usually. So in this game we have expanded the size of those dialogue boxes, and that has let us retool and work on the localization to get us more in tune with the Japanese script,”

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Every now and then we publish a round-up of game or demo recommendations, and all you regular readers dutifully fill the comments with recommendations of your own. FOOLS. Our round-ups are, of course, a devious trap for your curiosity and connoisseurship, designed to save us the labour of discovering good games for ourselves. You know in Batman Forever when Jim Carrey uses Riddler TV to steal everybody’s IQs? Well picture me doing that, except that I am not wearing tight green pyjamas (unless you want to picture me that way – no offence taken) and I am actually filling my skull with everything you ever knew about, in Moadra‘s case, manky Super Metroid clones.

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Monolith Productions co-founder Jace Hall has expressed a strong interest in remaking rancid horror game Condemned: Criminal Origins and its sequel, Condemned 2: Bloodshot. It’s not entirely clear how he’d do this, given that Monolith no longer exists even as a brand name, following cuts at parent company Warner Bros Interactive Entertainment, and that Hall himself doesn’t seem to be directly involved with game development or publishing these days. That said, he is the sole current owner of the Condemned intellectual property. So if a remake is going to happen, it’ll need to happen through him.

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Brendan: Hello, Nic.

Nic: Brendy! Why are you here, in my review? What is this, some kind of Split Fiction? Some kind of co-op adventure by Hazelight? Fine, since you’re here: what’s the best bit of Split Fiction, Brendy?

Brendan: We were escaping sci-fi gunships on the back of a stolen motorcycle. You must have felt cool steering us between missiles and gunfire. I could see none of that. I was too focused on clicking the “accept” box on a Terms and Conditions screen. Our ill-gotten bike’s futuristic security had kicked in, you see, and it was my job to disable its self-destruct protocol by phone. You were driving fast and jumping between skyscrapers while I was wrestling with captcha after captcha to stop us from exploding. I laughed the whole time.

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When you die in Absolom, you are literally reborn from the glowing womb of a giant pregnant lady. This is not how beat ’em ups normally go. The newly announced left-to-right puncher from the developers of Streets Of Rage 4 plans to inject a bunch of roguelike fungus into the bulging musculature of the classic arcade brawler, then dress it in a big fantasy frog suit that’s been handcrafted by a traditional animation studio. It’s a tight squeeze, but having played an hour of a preview build, it certainly looks the part. Although I order you never to use the term “rogue ’em up” to describe it, an explosively upsetting term publisher Dotemu has cheekily tried to invent.

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The developers of workplace comedy Say No! More and anti-establishment roguelike Reignbreaker are closing down, and the news comes just two weeks before their final punky action game is due to come out. Studio Fizbin has been struck by ongoing cuts at their parent company Thunderful, they say, and despite pitching follow-up projects to work on after Reignbreaker’s release, none of those will go ahead. Which means they’ll be winding down at the exact moment you’d hope they’d be celebrating a payoff from years of work.

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