Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

We enter week one of RPS Post-Graham. The office Slack echoes like the Great Hall of Durin after a Balrog teaparty. Horace coils about the foot of the Treehouse like a sullen Viking serpent. The Maw seems peevish and incontinent, spurning any news we offer it. The wifi network keeps changing its name to “Execute Order 66”.

It is time to smash the emergency glass and bust out a few favourites from my personal collection of morale-boosting videogame intros. Here’s Red Alert, to put some spring in your step; Okami to let the light in; Colony Wars for the WRAAAOW noise at the end. And here are this week’s most interesting new PC games.

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Financial service giants Mastercard have denied accusations that they sought to influence the recent removal of adult/NSFW games from Steam and Itch.io, claiming that they have “not evaluated any game or required restrictions of any activity on game creator sites and platforms,” and that they allow all lawful transactions. It’s a brief and unequivocal statement, but Valve themselves have since suggested it might not be entirely accurate, telling PC Gamer that Steam’s payment processors objected to the availability of law-abiding adult games by citing one of Mastercard’s specific rules.

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If you’re looking for a new PC that’s packing a recently-released NVIDIA 5070 GPU, then Lenovo’s new ‘Doorbuster’ deal might be just the thing.

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Dell’s back-to-school deals have a whole host of laptop savings, but look a little deeper and there’s another Alienware deal.

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Beware minor spoilers for Chairbound in this piece. I think they’re minor. I have no idea what’s truly significant in this dreary purgatory of flourescent lights and rippled glass facades. Only one thing seems guaranteed: I have to get out of here in 10 minutes or I’m doomed.

I met the weird little girl again. She was loitering in the shadow of a pillar on the eighth floor. I found her goblin-esque during our first meeting, but up close she seems relatively ordinary, a pale 10-year-old in a nightie with shoulder-length hair. At least, until she burbles distorted sounds at me and runs away into the darkness. I gather she is looking for her “toy”. I don’t think it’s the rubber duck I’m holding.

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Battlefield 6 releases on October 10th with the unenviable task of being both a quality combined arms FPS, and a successful apology letter to those burned by the series’ previous missteps. To try out its multiplayer ahead of yesterday’s big reveal event, I had to pass through two separate metal detectors at the venue’s doors, which I can only assume were there to prevent infiltration by disgruntled Battlefield 2042 players armed with tins of orange paint.

Still, try it out I did, with most signs pointing towards BF6 being genuine about its promised return to Battlefield staples. The classic four classes instead of specialists. Destruction that has a point beyond spectacle. And most importantly, large-scale multivehicular warfare that isn’t nearly as organised and cinematic as the choreographed trailer.

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We have all known the profound sorrow of getting two hours into an RPG and deciding that actually, Mum, I don’t want to be an elven druid anymore. Being an elven druid sucks ass. There’s barely any plantlife in the opening dungeon, so half my support skills are useless, and the only animal companion I’m qualified to conjure right now is a cranky squirrel. I’d much rather be a rogue. Look at all these elevated paths and pickable locks hereabouts! Look at all these shadows I could be skulking in, these precarious chandeliers directly opposite crawlspaces with rusty grills! Ugh, if only I weren’t a stupid diluted floral wizard!

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Between fifty game releases a day, and among them official successors and open source remakes, most 90s games your grandma bangs on about have some modern equivalent that somewhat fills the gap.

But not The Settlers. There hasn’t been a Settlers game since 1996. Whether they were good or not, its many sequels, as early as 3, started missing the point of the design. It’s the roads, man. The roads!

This isn’t about iconography for its own sake. It’s a design thing, an ethos. The heart of The Settlers was that your towns lived or died based largely on how well you designed your transport logistics. It was all about the roads. It doesn’t even fit into a genre really, let alone the lopsided RTS the sequels collapsed into. It sounds like a typical town builder, especially today when there’s a wealth of games about placing a woodcutter and a farm, but I’m tempted to say it’s not even about gathering resources.

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Right, so. It’s supposed to go as follows: Yakuza 0, Yakuza Kiwami, Yakuza Kiwami 2, Yakuza 3 Remastered, Yakuza 4 Remastered, Yakuza 5 Remastered, Yakuza 6: The Song Of Life, Yakuza: Like A Dragon, then off into full-blown Like A Dragon land, and on to Like A Dragon: Pirate Yakuza. Easy. Except right now in my Steam library, it’s not. The Kiwamis are cheekily lurking behind Yakuza 6, and the LADs are before all of their more Japanese gangsterly-named siblings.

It’s chaos and anarchy. I can’t live like this. The good news is that thanks to the update Steam’s Client Beta has just gotten, it looks like I’ll no longer have to.

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EA have given us our first proper look at Battlefield 6‘s multiplayer, after revealing the game with a single player trailer last week. They’ve also confirmed the new shooter‘s release date – 10th October 2025 – and announced dates for a series of beta weekends in August.

The game they’re pitching is a return to the contemporary warring of Battlefield 3 and Battlefield 4, after the mildly futuristic disappointments of Battlefield 2042. It’s got four familiar classes, the old Battlefield mode trinity of conquest, breakthrough and rush, and maps that incline towards close quarters combat or wide-open vehicular blasting or some blasphemous hybrid of the twain. It seems fine. And loud.

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