Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

The demo for SNØ: Ultimate Freeriding isn’t that new. It actually came out in September, but I’m filing it under the secret best unspoken RPS site category of “News (To Me)”, a whizcrack piece of web 3.0 technology that allows us to travel back in time and ‘announce’ things that don’t seem any less noteworthy for their advancing age.

If you think that’s a desperately cavalier and confusing way to run a news section, I can only suggest that you email a complaint to our news editor. Spoilers: our news editor is me, and I have already thrown your complaint in the bin. Mate, I don’t tell you how to do your job, but I’d be more than happy to, if you let me know what it is. Anyway, what were we talking about. Oh yeah, skiiing!

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Among my last-resort tactics for generating precious PC gaming news is to go on holiday – for as sure as toast lands buttered side down while cats always land on their feet, as sure as the number 13 breeds calamity and Star Citizen committing to a release date guarantees a delay, myself going on holiday will always, somehow, conjure a big story from the crevices. It’s basic physics. In this case, I was on holiday from Friday through Monday, and this fact and this fact alone appears to have coaxed some toy manufacturer into taking the internet’s most cherished indie gaming platform offline by means of a “bogus” phishing report, sent by “AI-powered” brand protection software.

The situation has now been resolved, thankfully, and you can access Itch.io as normal, but I will never pass up the opportunity to cast shade on Funko Pop, whose NFT-garlanded bobbleheads I hate as I do veruccas and forest fires. So here’s a quick recap if you, too, missed the drama.

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Goblin-hitting bonanza Path Of Exile 2 launched into early access last weekend and the devs Grinding Gear Games have dropped some big patch notes that outline some things they’ve updated already, or things they plan on updating in a future patch. Things like dodge-rolling, checkpoints, items, currencies, and other stuff I can’t list here because the intro to this article would expand and pop into a flurry of common rarity boots and bones, maybe with the odd purple rarity sword mixed in.

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I’ve got a strange relationship with the stealth sandbox murderbox that is Hitman: World of Assassination. If you were to ask me to list my favourite games, the latest Hitman trilogy would be in the top five, no question. And yet, I must have gotten intimidated at some point with the amount of new updates and all the spiffy unlockable suits I was missing out on, and just haven’t touched it in a couple of years now. Is the appearance of Jean-Claude Van Damme as the game’s newest elusive target enough to reel me back in? I’m not sure, but I will say that I doubt Sean Bean can stretch his legs like that, even with the legendary flexibility offered by O2’s famously variable plans. Here’s a trailer.

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I’m quite smitten by the Nintendo DS stylings and traditional roguelike charms of Shiren the Wanderer: The Mystery Dungeon Of Serpentcoil Island, but I’m having real trouble summoning up the motivation to repeatedly grind through its opening levels to get to the interesting stuff. Early stages soon lose any real sense of surprise, and later ones can feel low on real agency. I want a new roguelike run to feel vital and verdant; heady with grand plans and plan-shattering twists. But by having randomness influence each run so significantly, Mystery Dungeon feels fickle instead of emergent – less than the sum of some incredibly novel and creative parts.

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Indiana Jones and the Great Circle isn’t just good. It’s excellent. If you’re excited about playing the game on launch day (or beyond) and want to get the best deal possible, then look no further.

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Fancy taking the piss out of video games? Here you go, a fun little tool you can run in your browser easily lets you rewrite famous game quotes. The Death Generator offers a gallery full of (mostly) retro games and a simple text box that will replicate the exact font used by those games, all so you can make the little shopkeeper in Zelda say rude words, or entirely rewrite the pre-mission dossiers of Goldeneye 007. There’s a lot more than that though. I’ve done a bunch, come see what I mean and have a go yourself.

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The big question a Tekken player always wants to know is: which DLC character is coming next? Well, you’ll know by the end of the week, as the studio is planning to reveal this at Geoff Keighley’s winter festival of expensive advertising, the Game Awards. However, there may already be some clues in a trailer they’ve just released, which suggests some sisterful slapping is overdue. The trailer also promises new moves for all characters in a Season 2 update next spring, along with some minor presents in a winter update due sooner than that. But yes, come see for yourself.

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There’s an awful lot behind this door, lemme tell ya. Hours of adventure, of tension, of action, of sci-fi strangeness. It’ll be great. Unfortunately the door itself is bugged out so you’ll need to reload a quicksave or something to get it open.

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It’s not just because he’s a Nazi. It’s because he’s a smartass Nazi. As the main antagonist in Indiana Jones And The Great Circle, Emmerich Voss vacates the archetypal armchair usually reserved for secondary fascist goons, so that he can goosestep straight into the big boy seat himself. He smiles with all the sleaze of right-hand-man Major Toht, the grubby gestapo who gets that right hand burned in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Yet he also engages in the pseudo-intellectual trash talk of the main archaeological rivals to Jones, like Rene Belloq or Walter Donovan. He is a hideous grab bag of all the things that make an instantly detestable villain in the series. But there’s something else. Voss is so immediately and gutturally hateable because he resembles a type of racist encountered not in the 1930s, but one you’ve probably met today: the asshole you meet on the internet.

Warning: Here be spoilers.

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