Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Last week, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot sent a letter to all staff in which he asked employees to "give it [their] all" and to be "as efficient and lean as possible." French union Solidaires Informatique have written their own letter today, arguing that Guillemot's "words mean something: overtime, managerial pressure, burnout, etc."

In response, they're calling for Ubisoft Paris employees to strike from 2 to 6pm on Friday, January 27th, with demands that include an "immediate 10% increase for all salaries" and the "implementation of a 4-day week."

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As someone whose only experience with the Persona series lay with Persona 5, I dove into Persona 3 Portable's PC re-release with one expectation: it will be old and therefore quite bad. Looking back, was I naïve? Yes. And was I wrong? I'm delighted to report that I was catastrophically wrong.

From what I've played so far of Persona 3, I reckon it's well worth a whirl if you're a newcomer, or a Persona 5 fan who's concerned that a game from 2009 won't be all that good. Not only does it stand on its own as a fun high school mystery with an alarmingly dark undertone, it almost acts as a fun history lesson too.

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According to the definitely legit authority of Dangerousroads(dot)Org (and maybe also the Guinness Book Of Records), the actual longest road on Earth is the Pan-American Highway, measuring 30,000km long, and spanning several different countries as it wends its way from the bottom of South America to top of Alaska. I can't even imagine how long it would take you to do a full journey across it all, but it will definitely take you longer than the two hours you'll spend in the company of Brainwash Gang's loosely connected anthology story game The Longest Road On Earth. But cor, what a lovely, wistful two hours those are all the same.

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Sci-fi grand strategy Stellaris will take a step back from the stars and concentrate on pre-FTL civilisations with its upcoming First Contact story pack DLC. Paradox announced the DLC today after details, screenshots and a trailer leaked ahead of the reveal through SteamDB. YouTuber Aspec also uploaded a video detailing the leak and revealing the DLC’s trailer, which has since been made private. You can watch the official trailer below.

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What’s the purpose of creative tools such as Halo Infinite’s Forge beta if you can’t use them to stuff things from other, completely unrelated games into your timesink of choice? Well, Hinfinite map makers LudoHT and Its L0L0 have done exactly that, crafting a surprisingly authentic version of Mario Kart’s DK Mountain track. It sounds like there’ll be more tracks to slide your Mongoose around too, as they’ve also gone and made a Mario Kart race gametype for Halo Infinite.

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We had a discussion in our Monday meeting that got louder than things normally do, because The Last Of Us TV show came up, and we found ourselves divided into two camps. Well, three. Camp one was excited for the TV show and camp two posited that there's no point making an adaptation of something if your adaptation is just the same thing. (The third camp was "eh, I might check it out" and watched the other two camps duking it out). I was in camp two. If you're adapting something, adapt! Make changes! Otherwise I might as well just consume the original thing again! The Last Of Us has already been released, what, three times?

This was made funnier by the fact that nobody on staff had seen the TV show, so we were just arguing about tweets we'd seen that describe the show, the worst way to conduct a discussion outside of e.g. scrawling insults on the side of Teslas and self-driving them into each other's front doors. But it got me to thinking about adaptations, because there have been loads of adaptations of things that aren't games into video games. What goes wrong in the other direction?

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While Dan Douglas captures English culture in a Duke Nukem 3D level, another mapper has been diligently recreating corners of Scotland in Far Cry 5. Since 2019, YouTuber "Mojo Swoptops" has rebuilt a wide and weird range of Edinburgh sights inside Far Cry 5's level editor, from the big tourist landmarks like the castle and Forth Bridge to perfectly mundane places such as blocks of flats and nightclubs at chucking-out time. As an Edinburgh resident, it's great fun to see, and a very pleasing contrast to the gleaming miniature reimagination seen in Forza Horizon 4.

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HBO’s TV adaptation of fungal post-apocalyptic funfest The Last Of Us debuted on streaming services on both sides of the Atlantic over the past few days, and now a follow-up trailer shows what’s coming for the rest of the show’s first season. It has plenty of cordyceps-infected baddies, gritty human drama, and Pedro Pascal being Pedro Pascal. You can watch the Weeks Ahead trailer below, and wonder where The Mandalorian’s left his helmet again.

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A leaked screenshot showing menus from the upcoming co-op supervillain ‘em up Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League has revealed the game will feature a battle pass and a store. The image was originally posted to 4Chan, but made its way onto Reddit and Twitter. An unnamed development source has since confirmed to VGC that the Suicide Squad image is legit, and shows the menus in a recent test build of the third-person shooter.

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Survival MMO The Day Before may have slipped out of its top spot on Steam’s most wanted games list, but it’s still the second most anticipated game on Valve’s storefront. Up to now, devs Fntastic haven’t shared unedited footage of the game in the lead up to its planned release on March 1st, but they say that’s about to change with a showcase of features at some point in January. You can watch the most recent, very short clip of edited ray-traced footage from The Day Before from this month’s CES show below.

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I've played around four hours of soviet-punk FPS Atomic Heart, which took me from the story's opening moments to plenty of the game's earliest bits. The final hour or so was split into two parts, thanks to a lovely dev who time-skipped me forwards and into the game's open world, before warping me through a gate and into an early boss's lair. There was a lot to take in, from robo-gloves, to sex-dom vending machines, to grannies with bazookas.

I went in with expectations that it might be a little like BioShock, all steely and serious in its delivery of some vaguely philosophical truth. But I emerged with a totally different impression. Far from polished seriousness, Atomic Heart seems a little disjointed in its ambition, with a main character who almost immediately kills any atmosphere when he opens his mouth.

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Mum, get the camera! It's finally happened - a 1TB PCIe 4.0 SSD is selling for less than £50. The winner of this impromptu contest is Kingston's NV2, an expectedly budget drive that still manages to deliver some fairly impressive performance according to independent reviews. To squeak in under the £50 mark, you'll need to use code JAN10 at the checkout at Ebay.

• Get the 1TB Kingston NV2 PCIe 4.0 SSD for £49 (was £55)

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OK, this isn't fair. A week ago, I was genuinely excited that the Ryzen 7 5800X3D was down to £348 at Amazon. Now though, thanks to a rogue 10% off deal at Ebay, you can pick up the same processor from Ebuyer's Ebay store for £306.

£306! That's a tiny price for a CPU that launched last year at an official RRP of £429 and a real-life asking price of £530. To get this reduced price, use code JAN10 at the checkout.

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My dog is undeniably a good boy, but he's never saved my life in a videogame. He could learn a trick or two from MissMikaa's dog, who apparently knows when to step in and move her Elden Ring character away from a fiery death.

MissMikaa is the streamer who last week simultaneously beat Elden Ring with a controller and a dance mat, which should give you some clue as to how he rendered canine assistance.

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Bloodborne was great, but it didn't have any lightning gorilla robocops. This is a problem the upcoming Lies of P hopes to fix, as revealed in a new gameplay trailer designed to show off how nice it looks on a Radeon RX 7900 XTX. I will likely never own a Radeon RX 7900 XTX, but it's looking increasingly likely that I will buy Lies of P.

It's a Soulslike that plonks you into an alternate Victorian London where people got real good at inventing creepy automata. You play as the big P himself, Pinocchio.

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Shang-Chi is a card in Marvel Snap that destroys any and all opposing cards in his lane with a power of 9 or above. He feels great to play, and miserable to play against. He is also, apparently, quite bad - at least according to project lead Ben Brode, who's consulted his big statistics bank to discover that he appears in more losing decks than anyone else.

Huh. I suppose I can stop agonising over whether he has a place in my latest Patriot deck.

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The mists of the Mistlands have settled, so viking survive 'em up Valheim developers Iron Gate have decided it's time to start cracking on their next biome update. They're now chiselling away at the Ashlands, a volcanic "land of the dead" packed with skeletal horrors.

It'll be a while before all the horrors are ready, but a smaller update with clothes and haircuts is on the way soon.

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I did not expect the next game from The Lion's Song devs Mi'pu'mi Games to be a turn-based tactical folktale, but cor, Howl sure does tick a heck of a lot of boxes for me. Due out later this year, you play a deaf hero in search of a cure to a sinister 'howling plague' that's devastated the land around you and turned all its inhabitants into blood-thirsty beasts - and having played its first chapter last week, its combination of tight planning, grid-based shoving and limited ammo a la Into The Breach is very, very moreish indeed. Definitely one to watch for strategy game fans.

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At a time when LucasArts was cheerfully mocking rival developer Sierra's fondness for punishing players with game overs you could trigger at the drop of a hat, Sierra themselves seemed intent to double down. In Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers, not only can the titular protagonist suffer a variety of gruesome fates if you so much as put a foot wrong, but there's a point where you can soft-lock the entire game by failing to pick up an easily missable single snake scale from a busy crime scene — and you won't even know you did anything wrong for several in-game days. I'm not 100% sure this wasn't an oversight on the part of the developers, but at the same time, that's exactly the sort of shit that Sierra liked to pull.

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Minecraft players are a creative bunch, that’s undeniable, but someone decided to spend more than three months planning out the whole of Toto’s 1982 classic song Africa using the game’s note and command blocks. Stacinator has shared their efforts on YouTube and the Minecraft subreddit for all to see. I'd encourage you to have a watch of the full Minecraft Africa video, and wonder why Toto’s only other famous tune is Rosanna.

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It’s not every day you see a developer announce their game’s release window by showing a stop-motion bunny building a new PC to play it, but that’s exactly what the team behind upcoming soulslike Black Myth: Wukong have done. A new short film themed around Chinese New Year that's been shared by devs Game Science Studio sees a young lagomorphic enthusiast scuppered by their out of date computer, and also shows a wee bit of Black Myth: Wukong in action too. You can watch the l’il rabbit growing increasingly frustrated below.

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The US Federal Trade Commision has already committed to blocking Microsoft's $69 billion Activision-Blizzard buyout, so now it's the EU's turn to kick up a fuss. The EU's antitrust watchdog is nearing the end of a 90-day probe into whether Microsoft's buyout violates antitrust laws, and they're reportedly about to serve up a charge sheet that lays out all their beef. As with those of the FTC and other regulators, their objections are likely to centre on the likelihood of Microsoft saddling Call Of Duty with Xbox or Gamepass exclusivity.

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Have you ever been in a relationship with somebody who surprised you in all the right ways at the beginning, but eventually frustrated and disappointed you so deeply that it all ended in a messy breakup? Farlanders is my messy breakup.

It's a space colony city builder with a puzzle game mentality - and set on Mars to make things even more enticing. The best part of Farlanders is its story, and while it’s not quite a full-blown commentary on colonialism, it examines what you’re doing and why you’re doing it with a self-awareness that I did not expect at all. That being said, annoying difficulty curves, awkward terraforming, and frustrating progression systems stop this space colony sim from really taking off. A graph charting my enjoyment over time would look like a child’s drawing of a mountain.

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Free to play fantasy MMO RPG Lost Ark got a bit too happy with its banhammer over the weekend, with lapsed players taking to the game’s Steam page to complain that they’d been banned for no reason other than inactivity. Players, or at least former players, of Lost Ark left more than 1300 negative reviews of the game on Saturday, and more than 1000 on Sunday. They claimed they’d received bans that appeared on their Steam profile without actually logging into the game recently.

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HBO's The Last Of Us TV adaptation is finally out on UK tellyboxes via Sky/Now TV today, and judging by early critic reviews, it's meant to be pretty all right! You know, as video game TV shows go. I've yet to sit down and watch it myself, but I'll probably be doing so this evening to see what's what.

A question I've been pondering in the run-up to The Last Of Us' TV debut, however, is this: if I watch the TV show now, will I really be bothered to actually sit down and play Part 1 when it finally comes to Steam at the beginning of March? 'Cause I sure don't have time (or the inclination) to do both. I think that might be too much The Last Of Us... But what about you, readers? Will you be tuning in, or waiting to play it on PC? Or both! Tell us in the comments below.

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Every weekend, indie devs show off current work on Twitter's #screenshotsaturday tag. And every Monday, I bring you a selection of these snaps and clips. This week, my eye has been caught by a pleasing assortment of zippy and dramatic movements—hoverboards, airdashes, grappling hooks—but also some cute, weird, interesting, and uh I guess hypothetically erotic indies games. Come have a look!

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The team of modders working to bring The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion into Skyrim has updated us with a new trailer, announcing that they’re targeting 2025 to launch the Skyblivion project. By that point, volunteers will have been hammering away on Skyblivion for 13 years. If you remember what you were doing 13 years ago then you’ve got a better memory than I do. Watch the latest and rather snazzy trailer for Skyblivion below, and wonder whether Emperor Uriel Septim VII sounds more like Patrick Stewart or Sean Connery.

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Wintry speedrunning festival Awesome Games Done Quick 2023 finished yesterday, with runners managing to land $2,642,493 (£2,162,774) of donations in aid of Prevent Cancer. GDQ announced the $2.6 million figure on Twitter after the event concluded, and thanked all the runners and those who’d donated.

A number of speedruns throughout the week-long event smashed world records for their respective games and categories too, including PC runs of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge and my own personal GOTY from 2022, PowerWash Simulator. You can watch the AGDQ 2023’s record-setting No Soap PowerWash Simulator run below, and weep into your coffee at the sheer cleaning ability on display.

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Sundays are for angling your umbrella so the wind doesn't turn it inside out. Before you duck, let's read this week's best writing about games (and game related things).

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When it was released on January 14th 2003, SimCity 4 had its problems. Its huge cities would chug on even decent PCs, for one, and its traffic simulation seemed outright broken.

Twenty years later - thanks to faster PCs, the Rush Hour expansion, and a huge modding community - SimCity 4 is the best of all SimCity games. If what you care about is simulation, scale, variety, and the beauty of urban sprawl, it's also the best citybuilder.

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Against The Storm provided some of the most fun I had playing a citybuilder last year. That was in part because, despite being set in a dark fantasy world in which you must satisfy an unyielding Queen, and despite being in early access, it's remarkably graspable. It's the kind of citybuilder where, if you place a building in the wrong place, it simply lets you pick it up and move it at no cost.

As of its latest update, there's now a new customisable game mode that lets you make your expeditions even more relaxed - or much harder.

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Google and Nvidia have both provided the US Federal Trade Commission with objections to Microsoft's attempted acquisition of Activision Blizzard, Bloomberg report. The FTC opted last month to sue Microsoft to block the acquisition, arguing that the deal would suppress competition.

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Google Stadia will close its doors on January 18th. As a parting gift, Google have released the game they built to test the streaming service before the streaming service launched. "Worm Game" is a version of Snake with plenty of levels and modes to try and, of course, it's playable within your browser.

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The weekend is here. Let's give it a cheer! In the thread of WAWAPTWs we're ready to start chatting with you. So what are you playing this weekend? Here's what we're clicking on!

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AMD's cheapest eight-core Ryzen 5000 processor has hit a new price low at Amazon UK, making it a great time to grab the Ryzen 7 5700X to upgrade your machine from an older Ryzen model - or build a shiny new one. The CPU is now £185, a 44% drop from its £329 RRP and even cheaper than it was yesterday.

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Logitech's G435 Lightspeed headset is down to $30 on Amazon, which is an awesome deal for a model that I've tested and recommended at its original price of $80 (over at RPS sister site Eurogamer). To recap, this headset launched in late 2021, comes with 2.4GHz "Lightspeed" wireless and Bluetooth, with a lightweight design and in a range of colours - so $30 is an incredible price.

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It's been 14 years since RPS started writing about Beyond Good & Evil 2, Ubisoft's open world follow up to the cult classic I'm too young to have played. We haven't seen hide nor genetically modified pig tail of it since 2018, but rest assured, it lives.

That's despite the most recent swing of Ubisoft's game-cancelling scythe, which was brought down on three unannounced games last week due to the company's underperforming sales.

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Desktop Dungeons is a morish puzzle game from 2010 that channels conventional dungeoning into fiendish headscratching. Every enemy sits still, waiting for you to come and whack it. Whack willy-nilly, though, and they'll kill you in no time - so you have to tactically explore parts of each level to heal, while targeting foes in an order that lets you survive long enough to level up and take on the big bads.

Desktop Dungeons: Rewind is an upcoming "modern remastering" of the original, with 3D graphics and the ability to rewind time rather than start each level from the very beginning. It's got a demo you can play right now, and it's adding free daily challenges with a sharable leaderboard later this month. I am hyped.

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Make no bones about it: Ubisoft's perennially delayed Skull & Bones is still coming. A new developer video proves that, offering a fresh look at some sumptuous seas during a hunt for an Ungwanan renegade. The most interesting part of Skull & Bones is still its tortured history, with a recent sixth delay pushing it even further back from the original 2018 release date - but oh, maybe I do want to be a boat after all. At least for a bit.

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When The Anacrusis launched into early access in January 2022, its retrofuturist take on the co-op FPS instantly delivered on funky sci-fi fun. Yet it was also tempered fun: a brutal AI Director could easily tip manageable chaos into a fatiguing onslaught of fishy alien minibosses, and I still remember my will to persevere being sapped by connectivity issues and a general lack of weight to the otherwise enticing pew-pew gunplay.

Happily, following a year of tweaks and additions, The Anacrusis is in a much better place. Even if that place is still turtleneck-deep in extraterrestrial viscera. Ahead of the game’s first anniversary, I poked developers Stray Bombay for a chat on how their early access approach is working out, the impact of long-awaited mod tools, and what’s next for this most stylish of space shooters.

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