Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

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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There comes a time in every cat owner’s life where they must ask themselves: how large would this creature need to be before it attempted to bat me around like a catnip mouse? I suspect the answer is “only as large as it needed to be”, so it’s fortunate that Monster Hunter Wilds‘ Palicoes are apparently bred for helpfulness. Is installing a mod to the action game that makes them tall as humans a form of gene splicing? Don’t worry, hunter. Gene splicing is how nature heals itself.

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Another Steam Next Fest is drawing to a close, having had to compete with Monster Hunter Wilds for PC-beholding eyeballs – yet losing none of its knack for highlighting interesting and offbeat games set for future release. A quick dangle of our indie demo astrolabe indicates we’re a few months off the next Next Fest, though at the time of posting, there are still a couple of precious hours to download and try out the best samplers that this wintery showcase has to offer. Here are our favourites from the past week, and if you’ve played something you think deserves some more attention, why not share it in the comments?

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Monster Hunter Wilds has been racking up the skulls, attracting well over a million simultaneous Steam players this weekend despite a mixed player reaction, with particular scorn reserved for its technical performance.

Now begins the process of patching the behemoth to address some player-reported problems with certain quests. Patching is sort of like slaughtering a Monster in reverse: sewing on horns and tails rather than chopping them off, re-embowelling the shackled form of the creature so that it can gallop across the plains, monstrous and free.

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Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 developers Saber Interactive are pushing back on player calls to add an even-harder difficulty mode, following the introduction of an Absolute difficulty setting this spring via game update.

Apparently, some of you muscleheads have been finding Absolute “a bit easy”, or at least, not enough of a shake-up from the preceding Lethal difficulty. Saber are open to suggestions, here, but game director Dmitriy Grigorenko also reckons that “we are almost at our limit in terms of how we can make the game harder without making it unfair and not fun”.

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Lubricate your brain with some pure Omega-3 oils, a new puzzle game from the makers of Opus Magnum and Eliza has been announced. Kaizen: A Factory Story will be an “open-ended puzzle automation game from the original Zachtronics team, set in 1980s Japan” in which you’ll build toy robots, computers, TVs, and… katsu curry? Well, why not. Although the studio behind this engineer ’em up is technically new, the main designers – Zach Barth and Matthew Seiji Burns – are the same folks who brought you Exapunks, TIS-100, and Shenzhen I/O. This, my friends, is very good news.

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Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome back to Booked For The Week – our regular Sunday chat with a selection of cool industry folks about books! “Nic, you selfless paragon. You champion of the people. You prince among men. I can’t believe you put your favourite column on pause for several weeks to let me finish my book!”. Please. I’m sure you would have done the same, were you also a dashing genius with a moustache powerful enough to crack the pyramids.

To ring in the resurrection with style, it’s The Norwood Suite, Betrayal At Club Low, and Moves Of The Diamond Hand‘s Cosmo D! Cheers Cosmo! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?

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