Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

If I’m interpreting the press materials for Gossamer Matrix correctly, this is an FPS in which you might accidentally stuff a chocolate bar into your AK47 while trying to reload. The result will not be a fusillade of chocodrops. Instead, you will be gunned down like the miserable office slob you absolutely are. So keep your workspace tidy, chief.

I’m looking at my desk as I type these words. It contains: a piece of paper with “gel” written on it, purpose unknown; a stolen Cafe Nero mug, never cleaned; Vikram Chandra’s memoir Geek Sublime; and a bag of raisins. I do not own a gun, because this is the UK and one of the UK’s few advantages is that the vast majority of people don’t own guns, but if I did own a six-shooter and were lured into a gunfight right now, I guarantee I’d be stuffing raisins into the chamber while choking to death on my own bullets.

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EA and DICE have decided to let players choose between locking weapons to classes in the forthcoming Battlefield 6, or being able to equip any weapon to any class. It might sound like a throwaway technicality, next to the existential terror of reports that EA want the new shooter to find a following of 100 million players. In practice, the decision to give players the option of locking weapons to classes is Serious Business. it’s the latest manifestation of a debate that goes back to Battlefield’s formative squabbles with rival FPS Call Of Duty in the noughties.

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The Stop Destroying Videogames citizens’ initiative, the EU petition that’s part of the Stop Killing Games campaign, has had an anonymous transparency complaint filed against it.

That’s according to Ross Scott, the YouTuber who’s become the figurehead of Stop Killing Games, which in case you’re out of the loop aims to stop publishers rendering online games unplayable when official support ends. Instead, the movement wants companies to be required to put concrete end-of-life plans in place if they elect to do things like turn servers off.

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Valve recently changed Steam’s rules and regulations to give banks, payment processors, and internet service providers some control over the definition of acceptable “adult content” on Steam, in line with their own respective policies. As Valve suggested to RPS in a statement, it was either that or risk a credit card firm or bank blocking Steam purchases at large. Alongside all this, Valve also delisted a bunch of sexually explicit games, including a number of games that depict incest.

Valve have yet to specify which games they’ve delisted as a direct result of the policy change, or which particular institutions prompted them to make this rather momentous shift. But it looks increasingly like the result of an anti-violent pornography game campaign directed at Valve, Mastercard, Paypal, Visa, Paysafe Limited, Discover and the Japan Credit Bureau in early July, carried out by Australian pressure group Collective Shout. This is the conclusion offered by Collective Shout themselves, anyway – they’ve described the Steam delistings as a “victory for child safety campaigners”, while commenting that they are now being sent misogynistic abuse and threats by players in retaliation.

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Greedfall 2 developers Spiders are going ahead with a layoff plan that’ll see “most” of their animating and rigging team affected, according to a post from a lead animator at the Nacon-owned studio.

This LinkedIn post by Erwan Perrin, whose profile cites him as having been a permanent Spiders staffer since 2021, has been reposted by at least four other workers at the the studio.

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Ubisoft boss Yves Guillemot has responded to a shareholder question about the Stop Killing Games campaign – and in a very newsworthy corporate question and answer session, revealed that a new Ghost Recon game’s in the works.

To quickly recap, Stop Killing Games aim to stop publishers rendering online games unplayable after the cessation of official support. They were inspired to take action by Ubisoft themselves ‘sunsetting’ online racer The Crew.

Ubisoft’s response to their campaign comes around the time the group’s petition to the EU to take action against the mass extinction of online games hits 1.4 million signatures. Despite some doubts about potential signature spoofing, the petition’s recently attracted support from EU politicians and industry trade bodies, so it’s no surprise Guillemot’s fielding questions about it from moneyfolk.

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$2,699.99 (was $2,949.99)

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There are lots of games in the same way there are lots of crisps. Many of those games are good, in the same way that many crisps are shaped a bit like Jesus. But even a crisp shaped like Jesus ceases to delight after you’ve seen a few. Great, you think. Another bloody Jesus Dorito. Hurl it on the pile. You crave something transcendent. Like a Möbius strip Wotsit. Or a Salt ‘n Vinegar Disco inscribed with the Corpus Hermeticum. Something that changes the way you look at crisps forever.

Anyway, Hell Clock is not that, but it does has a wicked sick knife spin attack, so carefree in its centrifugal flesh mangling that I resented every screenshot I had to take for making me move my finger off the funny spin button.

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I’ve had Le Mans Ultimate on my radar of things that let you drive around in realistic circles for the past couple of years, but I’d never dived into its early access. Part of that was being utterly spoilt for choice in terms of existing options when it came to getting my GT racing on, with the likes of Automobilista 2, Assetto Corsa Competizione, and even slightly older sims like Raceroom competing for pole position in the racing bit of my Steam library. Add in the behind-the-scenes turmoil that’s frequently surrounded publisher Motorsport Games over the past half-decade, and you get ample reason to take a wait-and-see approach with their latest offering.

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A few of the UK’s fanciest former indie developers are going indie again… with help from venture capital. Still Wakes The Deep and Dear Esther creators The Chinese Room have slipped the surly bonds of former parent company Sumo Digital in the course of a management buyout, with “facilitation” from Hiro Capital. Now “fully independent”, they’re focussing on the creation of original games, with two unannounced projects in the offing once they’ve finished developing Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2.

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