Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Arc System Works are a developer who more likely than not, you’ll think of as a fighting game studio. I wouldn’t blame you, they’re the folks behind Guilty Gear, BlazBlue, Persona 4 Arena, all really beloved fighting games. That doesn’t paint a full picture though, and in a showcase held yesterday, they showed off a bunch of upcoming games, some of which they made themselves, others they’re serving as publisher for. And not one fighting game in sight! Which plenty of people made comments about, but I think those people maybe need to play anything other than a fighting game for once.

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Back in April, Stray Gods: A Roleplaying Musical developer Summerfall Studios launched their Kickstarter for Malys, a roguelike deckbuilder where you play as a “former priest turned demon-hunter” that certainly looked quite atmospheric. This is the same studio co-founded by Dragon Age writer David Gaider, so it’s not like they came out of nowhere. However, it fell a bit short of meeting its goal, something that quite often guarantees that death of a game. Except it just launched into early access this week. Go figure!

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Right now, I can’t really tell you much of what A Short Hike developer adamgryu is working on. He shared a little look at whatever is next last week, and it certainly looks adjacent to A Short Hike vibes wise – we’ll come back to this one with the tiniest of details in a bit. At the very least, I can certainly tell you what he’s not working on: a game called Untitled Paper RPG.

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Steam’s Summer Sale is legendary, but it doesn’t always mean you’re getting the lowest price. As much as we all love watching our wishlist light up with discounts, some of the best deals are actually happening off-site. Fanatical and Green Man Gaming have been busy undercutting Valve’s storefront with bigger savings on the exact same Steam keys.

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A quick one to end the day. While Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has done a fair-to-miraculous job of reviving enthusiasm for the despised QTE, players remain suspicious of minigame-style mechanics in combat systems – and when I say players I mean you, the people who fretted in the comments for my recent article on Pragmata.

Capcom’s upcoming space-me-daddo-shooty-doo has a debuff mechanic whereby the android girl riding on your back hacks the robots you’re fighting – a process of moving a cursor around a grid of glyphs to deactivate shields and so forth.

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Riot Games are going to let their top League Of Legends and Valorant esports teams receive sponsorship from gambling companies, in a bid to snaffle up some of the billion dollar unofficial sports betting scene that surrounds both games.

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It’s here. No, not the end of the world as we know it, but Helldivers 2‘s long-awaited review bomb cape.

Arrowhead had been teasing adding said cape, dubbed “Pillars of Freedom”, to the game as an inside joke since that whole PSN controversy last year, when HD2 got so many negative reviews from folks angry at account linking being made mandatory that its Steam graph’s red lines were long enough inspire amateur fashion designers. The developers and Sony have since restored access to the game in a bunch of countries the PSN change rendered it unpurchasable in, paving the way for this gear gag.

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You’d think there’d be more video games that are explicitly about clearing away corpses, given how many corpses players produce. Getting rid of bodies is a routine problem for developers, with a variety of crafty or cursory solutions. Horror projects such as Resident Evil sometimes resort to accelerated decomposition, with felled zombies dissolving to maggots in seconds, but in most shooters, it’s a question of despawning the victims when you look away. Stealth sims mandate a certain level of respectfulness, albeit by accident: stray cadavers must be carefully interred in random dumpsters or closets before they trigger an alarm.

As with a lot of things in games, there are technological concerns here that form a curious warping of practicalities in the world beyond the vidbox. Dead bodies in games absorb computing resources that are needed for the next enemies along. Bodies of actual flesh and bone are a weight, if not a burden upon the dead person’s loved ones. The memory has to be freed up, so that it can be used for something else.

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Congrats, Andrew! You’re almost certainly not reading this, but regardless, it’s only polite for me to offer you a big well done, Mr Wilson. After all, you, EA’s CEO, were paid $30.5 million (around £22 million) in the financial year just gone, nearly $5 million (around £3.6 million) than you were the one before that.

Meanwhile, the company’s full-time workers only took home $117,000 (around £85k) on average, down from $149,000 (around £108k) in 2024, and the lowest since 2022, which saw EA employees earn $116,000 (around £84.5k) according to the average EA used. In order to illustrate just how huge the gulf between the cash given to Wilson per year and the median pay of the people under him who actually do the work, Game File‘s Stephen Totilo has made a hugely stretched graph that’s well worth checking out if you want a good laugh followed by a big sigh.

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There used to be – and might still be – a tradition at the UK’s Reading music festival where you’d be lying in your sleeping bag at night and you’d suddenly hear a low rumbling in the distance, which would then become indecipherable shouting, which you’d soon realise was rows of campers shouting the word ‘bollocks’ from their tents in a sort of Mexican wave, getting louder and closer as you waited in fizzy anticipation for your turn to shout. You’d then listen to the whole thing play out in reverse as the bollocktide receded into the pleasant autumn twilight.

I thought about this as I read multiple headlines referring to the Windows blue screen of death as ‘iconic’ this morning. Extreme annoyance elevated to the status of folk legend. Mythologising a shared experience of catastrophe. The whole world shouting ‘bollocks’ together.

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