Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

EEK3 is the alternative showcase of small horror game creators that amalgamates every year like a shell of flies around the corpse of E3. It’s a lot of fun for people who enjoy ye olde PS1 aesthetics and foggy throwback horror. The 2024 showcase was supposed to happen in time for Halloween, the night when the spirits of old platformer mascots rise from their graves to gift polygons to small children. But it was postponed due to technical problems. Only now has the 2-hour showcase of game trailers emerged, culminating in a new Haunted PS1 demo disc packed with upcoming games. “The curse,” say the organisers, “is lifted.”

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Dynasty Warriors: Origins. Finally, a game brave enough to ask: “what if everything cool that went down in Romance Of The Three Kingdoms was thanks to you, a magical, beautiful boy that no-one’s ever heard of?”.

It’s a great premise, honestly. The slate wiped clean, what if you got to be mates with everyone from all sides in this grand ensemble tale of warring states? A battle might take eight minutes. The three consecutive bonding cutscenes before the next might take ten. Origins is just as much about fighting thousands at a time as it is about eating lunch with Zhang Fei or discussing the meaning of heroism with Zhou Yu. There’s a parallel story about your character and his role in a magical order of destiny godlings I didn’t find the least bit interesting, but the rest is thrilling because Romance is already thrilling. The parts that Origins bogs down with its wordier take on already wordy source material are enlivened again by anime vibrance, hijinks, and melodrama.

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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! I once read in a book that you shouldn’t really believe anything you read in a book until you’ve checked at least two other books. Unfortunately, those two books both said the same thing, meaning I had to check four more. If anyone knows what every book ever written says on the subject, do let me know. I’m trapped now.

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Pure Rock Crawling is about steering off road vehicles across rocky terrain. It’s about pumping the gas pedal and wrenching the steering wheel just so, such that you lurch forward and over the obstacles, rather than tumbling backwards. It’s MudRunner without the mud, with a knockabout simplicity presumably as a result of its apparently one-man development team. It launched last October but I hadn’t heard of it until today, when a new map was added, and now I want to play it.

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Minecraft is the best PC game, according to me and the RPS staff who dare not cross me. I played it for three hours today and, among the many build challenges and adventures, a small story formed around a baby pig. We named him Porky, we caged him as our pet, and in an unfortunate accident, we watched as he fell to his death from the sky island that was our home. RPS in peace, Porky.

How many befriended pigs like Porky have there been across the last several hundred hours of play? I’m not sure – dozens, hundreds – but soon such pigs might have a new form. After 15 years, Mojang are adding new types of pig to Minecraft.

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Marvel Rivals received a patch earlier this week which made Hulk less hulky and paved the way for the launch of its first season. It also did something else: disabled the mods players had been using to add custom skins to the game.

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Slavic Magic and Hooded Horse have released a new Manor Lords update, adding a couple of maps, the ability to construct bridges, and a bevy of smaller features to an already quite robust medieval city builder.

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Factions. Here are the factions: the aggressive conquest Klingon guys. The evil insectoid hive mind who build stuff and/or have loads of cheap soldiers. The researchers who are probably robots and you usually pick because they can be competitive at anything. The diplomacy/espionage ones (humans, or The Greys).

You know what I’m talking about. You may well have thought of a recent exception too, since we’ve had a fair few 4Xeses experimenting with some of the standard formulae these last few years. It’s been a while though since I read through every word of every faction’s description and wanted to play all of them. Zephon captured my interest immediately.

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As a few of you might know, each Sunday at 4pm GMT I run Booked For The Week – a regular chat with a selection of cool industry folks about what they’re reading, what they’re hoping to read next, and what books they recommend. The very secret goal of the column is for the guests to name every book ever written. It’s a task every single one has failed miserably at with two notable exceptions. One was Dan Griliopoulos, who listed 400 books in a document before he got bored and gave up – a heroic, if ultimately futile effort. The other was Warren Spector back in November, who not only gave me the longest and most detailed reply I’d had before or since, but also followed up several times to add more books to the list.

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“Oh, and one last thing…” teased the narration for yesterday’s Like A Dragon Direct showcase on Like A Dragon: Pirate Yakuza In Hawaii, before announcing that the RPG will be getting New Game+ mode as part of a free post-launch update. It then cut to Majima and his crew making celebratory noises on deck. This follows last year’s Infinite Wealth catching some backlash for the decision to lock the mode behind a £15/€15/$15 edition upgrade.

Unrelated, but I’ve decided to stop putting angry spiders through your letterbox every morning. I know, I know. Come on now. Hero is such a strong word.

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