Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

The enemies of survival shooter Stalker 2 have a funny habit of showing up right behind you, like a panto villain with an AK-47. Far from being a premeditated ambush by intelligent AI-controlled soldiers, this is just a result of the game’s janky spawns. Those botched encounters are unlike previous games, where roaming bands of factional murderfolk would patrol the radioactive wastes, seemingly according to their own whims. Back in the day, this wandering baddies feature was dubbed “A-life” by developers GSC Game World – basically a jargon word for the simulation of enemies that would lead to “emergent” moments of violence and conflict. It was promised as a feature in Stalker 2 but many players have noticed it seems to be absent. Over the weekend, GSC insisted the simulation is technically present in the sequel. It’s just broken.

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Manor Lords developer Greg Styczeń, aka Slavic Magic, has emerged from his keep with news of a forthcoming patch for the medieval city builder. It’ll add new maps, building upgrades and reworks for various economic systems.

The announcement post is mostly image-based, in keeping with the classic saying that “a picture is worth a thousand words, as long as the words in question are mostly synonyms for ‘hut’, ‘mud’, ‘tree’ and ‘mountain'”. Fortunately, Styczeń threw in a few captions to light the way.

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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! This week, it’s Looking Glass Studios’ legend, Deus Ex director, and Otherside’s Warren Spector – who I suspect might have realised the very secret goal of this column. Cheers Warren! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?

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If you want to bump up the storage for your Switch or Steam Deck, then Black Friday is going to be a fantastic time to do just that.

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A little teaser story to end the week, care of Maw reader MiniMatt. Factorio devs Wube Software have dropped the vaguest of hints about their next game project, or at least, shared one of their current inspirations: World Of Warcraft.

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That there are more than 100 entire PC games is a revelation as shocking as it is disturbing, but despite recently spending days translating Horace’s sonorous yawps into the list that eventually became our RPS 100, a chill silence recently befell the treehouse when we realised that some of our personal favourites had somehow been excluded. Determined to right this most heinous of wrongs, and armed with the conviction that no subjectivity be allowed to exist on the internet without at least one supplementary article of caveats, we’ve all put forth a single game that absolutely should have made the list. Consider the matter closed, then, at least until we all realise we’d actually like to do a 102nd pick each.

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The mutant enemies in Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl are very hungry. Hungry not only for your flesh, but also all the bullets in your AK-47. It can take entire clips of ammo to take down some of these tough beasts, and you get nothing back for killing this wildlife except the hollow satisfaction of pest control. Alongside the bugs and performance issues, it’s a common enough complaint to players of the first-person survival shooter that it’s already been addressed by a modder, who has created a tweak to lower the health of various dogs, boars, and bloodsuckers.

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Long before Hideo Kojima made the first triple-A walking simulator, he was trying to spin sunlight into bullets. The game in question, Boktai: The Sun Is In Your Hand, is a Game Boy Advance title from 2003, in which you play a vampire-slaying gunslinger. The gun you’re slinging is a “solar-powered” pistol, which you could charge up using a cartridge-mounted photometric sensor by physically standing in sunshine. This was 13 years before the launch of Pokemon Go. Sadly, Boktai’s debut didn’t result in city parks or rooftops being flooded by crowds of GBA-wielding undead killers. But it was a fun gimmick and the game itself is good enough to carry it – an isometric dungeon-crawler in which you have to find a vamp’s coffin and drag it to the surface for purgation.

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Upon some serious soul searching following a little time with the early access build of open world game Vivat Slovakia, I have unfortunately had to admit to myself that it is probably not the GTA 6 killer I was hoping for. This upsets me slightly, because I find Rockstar’s constant self-assured bloviating to be quite irritating, even though I’m sure I’ll play their game for a billion hours. What Vivat Slovakia is, then, is a very ambitious homage to the Grand Theft Auto series that isn’t shy about it, right down to the font choices. I’m not sure if you should play it, but I do feel enriched for learning of its existence. Here’s a trailer.

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The Hobbit movies are a mixed Baggins indeed – at once thunderous and thin, like butter scraped over too much bread – but one sequence I love from The Desolation of Smaug is Bilbo searching Khazad-dûm for the Arkenstone, while trying not to rouse the titular dragon from his slumber. Don’t Wake The Beast is sort of that sequence plus Spelunkified procgen levels and Thief-esque stealth mechanics.

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