Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Last June, Valve’s trading card game Artifact Classic peaked at 78 players. November was a little rosier for the abandoned multiplayer game, with a monthly peak of 1,028. Then, on New Year’s Day, that number jumped to 11,900 players on Steam – its second highest concurrent besides launch. Soon after, they vanished. Who were these mysterious shufflers, flocking to the deserted, echoing halls of Valve’s disastrous flop like your mate who uses the word ‘liminal’ too much to a dead shopping center? Forbes, who first reported on the phenomena, don’t know. No one knows. Somebody might actually know but writing ‘no one knows’ makes it more dramatic. Let’s dig in.

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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! The longest novel ever written is generally agreed to be Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past – a coward’s pick, since it’s actually 13 different volumes. Don’t let Proust’s despicable lies sully the joy of literature for you, though. He did have a good quality moustache – a far more important literary trait than actually doing any writing, imo.

This week, it’s ITU Copenhagen Games Professor and Broken Rules co-founder, Martin Pichlmair! Cheers Martin! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?

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Steam Deck, Mac, and other Linux-based enjoyers of superhero shooter hit Marvel Rivals can once again play without fear of being pulped under an unlawfully swung banhammer. Developers NetEase had recently doled out bans of up to 100 years to players they suspected of cheating, but in their eagerness, failed to distinguish between legitimate compatibility layers – the software that non-Windows operating systems, like the Steam Deck’s SteamOS, use to run native Windows games – and actual hacks. Per IGN, NetEase have now apologised to the affected players, and lifted the bans.

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The yearly speedrunning superstream Awesome Games Done Quick is starting this weekend, and it’s set to be a musical one. The events will include a player who will beat a set of Elden Ring boss battles using a saxophone as a controller, and 16 minutes of Crazy Taxi with a live backing band rocking out as the driver collects their fares. Other notable events will see two players storming through The Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild while sharing a single joypad, and an amorous attempt to clear “all romances” in Fallout: New Vegas within 30 minutes – wait, there are romance options in New Vegas?

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How would a younger me react to the concept of game seasons? “Leave me alone, please. I’m busy replaying The Suffering 2 for the sixth time to see a new 15 second cutscene that recognises which combination of morally aligned beginnings and endings I’ve picked. It reads your save from the first game and everything!”. Say ‘memory card’ to a youthful, broccoli-maned Fortnite enjoyer nowadays. Go on, I dare you. You’ll be in a home before you know it.

Still, having new toys at regular intervals is one real upshot of our new live-service barrage of ephemeral novelty, perpetually flung at my dizzy eyeballs like gleaming carnival daggers at exhausted spinning wheels. Especially if they’re for the exquisite strategy of Mechabellum. Season 2 released yesterday alongside patch 1.2, bringing with it a new unit and specialist, some reworks, and lots of cosmetic bits I pretend not to care about but then get excited when I unlock a new one.

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I come and go with the work of Ken Levine, celebrated auteurman and reported burnout-inducing manager, but I’m interested to see more of Judas, his current project at Ghost Story Games. The concept for Judas is that you’re trapped in a computer-run society housed aboard a colony ship, the Mayflower. The titular Judas has managed to break free of the AI-groomed status quo, and is out to start a revolution. “Bioshock Infinite in space”, we called it, back in 2022, but Levine says it’s more open-ended than either of his Bioshock endeavours, with a greater emphasis on other characters remembering and responding to your actions over time.

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I think the last time I read an actual, original Garfield comic was in 1998. Since then, my experience of the character has been one long litany of Gar-memes and in particular, Gorefield memes. For those blissfully unaware, Gorefield is a version of Jim Davis’s otiose, lasagne-loving housecat who has broken his comic strip shackles and become a cosmic abomination. Gorefield’s manifestations are many: centipede Gorefields, arachnid Gorefields, Gorefields that extend serpentine necks of unfleshed bone towards a cowering Jon Arbuckle, demanding to be fed in a voice that sounds nothing like Bill Murray, a voice as deep and velvety as the eternal Monday before the Big Bang.

In Gar-Type, a free Gorefield fangame from Youtuber and pixel artist LumpyTouch, Garfield has become a planet. The good news is that, unlike many other Gore-variants, this Gorefield is vulnerable to bullets. It falls to ace pilot Jon Starbuckle and his prototype starfighter, Gar-Type D, to save the Earth from lasagnnihilation.

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Indiana Jones is a man with hands. Deny this at your own peril. ‘Write what you know’ they say. Indiana Jones And The Great Circle’s writers knew about having hands. They’d picked up a thing or two. Turned the odd key. Raised the occasional entire lemon to their lips and devoured it whole. Clicked a camera button. Placed an object upon a table. They had touched things, and beyond this, they had felt them. They knew that the player could never truly be Indiana Jones, but they could be allowed to make a pretend man who sounded at least 83% like Indiana Jones do things with his hands that very much resemble the sort of things Indiana Jones might do.

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Brendan Greene, the modder-turned-millionaire who designed battle royale game PUBG: Battlegrounds, wants to make his studio’s next game a “metaverse”, although he says he’s wary of using the term. The project is called “Artemis” (at least for now) and you won’t be seeing it any time soon. That’s because the studio is still working on the tech behind it all, and plans to release two other games before it. Meaning it’ll be 10-15 years before it actually comes out.

Greene describes Artemis as an internet-like platform where users create and share things, but doesn’t say specifically what those things might be. He doesn’t know how his user-led “multiverse of worlds” will be moderated, or how it will prevent copyright infringement, or what makes this idea distinct from, say, Roblox. He is nonetheless “full of confidence”.

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It’s frightfully early in the year to be bustling, but I can’t get enough of the crowded streets of ancient “Chinese-style” RPG The Bustling World. The latest trailer is a series of sweeping yet intimate, colourful urban cross-sections, showing dozens of NPCs selling fish, shaking hands on balconies, shouldering barrels, dancing with fans, honing their feng shui, and various other pursuits that allegedly form part of full NPC life simulations. It’s like scrutinising a Hitman level from above, except that all of these people have evolving relationships and sleeping patterns and they might hunt you down if you murder any of their relatives. Me, I just want to play Where’s Wally.

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