Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Sheesh, what a week. Microsoft buying Activision Blizzard for $69 billion is so weird that it's easy to lose your head and forget to say "Nice." Alice Bee has considered some of the implications while I'm also groaning hard about nostalgic navel-gazing reviving old Activision series. But it was nice to close out the week with news that Raven QA are unionising. Sheesh! Settle down, Actiblizz. Tell me gang, what are you playing this weekend?

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Capcom have released a new Monster Hunter Rise patch aimed at fixing a frustrating bug with save files which stopped some would-be players from playing at all. Thankfully, a week and change later, that seems to be fixed—though a little extra fiddling is required if you did suffer this bug.

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What a ridiculous week. Activision Blizzard came in on Monday dragging a trail of lawsuits and scandal with allegations of widespread discrimination and harassment, on Tuesday were being bought by Microsoft for $69 billion (£50 billion), and now on Friday they've grown a union. 34 quality assurance testers at the Activision Blizzard studio Raven Software, who currently maintain Call Of Duty: Warzone, are forming a union named the Game Workers Alliance. They're seeking better working conditions in the wake of Raven QA layoffs.

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I’ve always entertained the idea of an apocalypse. I mean, zombies are definitely scary, but it’d be a cool fantasy to play out. Over the years, I’ve even formed my own little plan. Loot some local houses and then set up a base in the fire station on my street. They’ve got electric gates and metal fences to guard the perimeter, a renewable power source thanks to a wind turbine on the roof, and a really handy watchtower. I thought 11 years of The Walking Dead would’ve prepared me fairly well and I fancied my chances. So, I made myself in Project Zomboid. It turns out, everything I learned from The Walking Dead was useless.

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Pupperazzi is a game about taking pictures of dogs. They are, as is traditional, very cute dogs. You go around several areas that increase in complexity and dog saturation, completing photo challenges and unlocking more and more complex areas. An extreme sports dog wants a picture of a dog riding a scooter. The old sea-dog at the beach would like a photo of any dog, as long as the lighthouse is in the background. In return for this you get golden bones as a form of currency to buy different kinds of film, or weird lenses, to kick your photography into the next gear.

It's cute. It's a really nice playground that facilitates the player's own creativity. You can pet dogs to make them happy, or find toys to make them do different things: turn on a radio and any furry pals nearby bust out some truly astonishing moves; throw a stick to initiate a huge game of fetch. You post your photos to a kind of dog-centric Instagram for likes and comments (possibly from dogs; possibly from humans). The colourful, chunky art, combined with deliberately stiff animation where nobody can move their joints, really reminds me of Playmobil toys. Despite this carefree, playful tone, I also find it unaccountably sinister.

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If I ever achieve immortality, there might be time to sit down and work out exactly why some building games grab me and some don't. I fear I am too often left with a page of notes that are just variations on the word "vibes".

Perhaps some taxonomy would help. Moons Of Ardan is a space colony building game that's mostly about balancing production rates by placing buildings. Less dryly, you're making a new home for mildly cute little space people on semi-cartoony worlds, where nothing ever really goes wrong and... the vibes. It's the vibes, you see.

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Early access is a mixed bag. Sometimes it's an exciting early glimpse, sometimes it feels like supporting a developer or game you care about, and sometimes it can feel more like paying to beta test. That last one won't be a concern with Blood Bowl 3, not anymore. The latest adaptation of Games Workshop's tabletop fantasy bloodsport was headed to early access but now, naw. The developers are focusing on closed beta testing instead, and will simply launch the game in full once it's done.

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Of the many possibilities that Microsoft buying Activision Blizzard might enable, only one seems really clear: that Microsoft will put Actiblizz games on Game Pass. Beyond that, it's all mights and maybes. Here's another maybe: Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer says they're hoping to dig into Actiblizz's "franchises that I love from my childhood," raising the likes of Hexen and King's Quest. What better use for $69 billion than wallowing in nostalgia?

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Valve are gearing up for the first batch of Steam Decks to be shipped to players next month. Part of the preparation is rolling out their compatibility review program, which will let you know which games on Steam work best with Valve's handheld PC. The verification status of the first set of games can now be found via SteamDB, though not yet the Steam interface itself.

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I missed the announcement in 2020 that among the many game-to-anime adaptations coming our way was Shenmue. Now there's a proper trailer for what's creatively titled Shenmue The Animation, which just like the original game sets Ryo on his path to avenging his father's death.

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Which came first, the founding of Siemens or the reconstruction of the Palace Of Westminster? And was Finland established as an independent state before or after the birth of Mexican film actress Dolores del Rio?

The answers are "Siemens" and "after", respectively. These are things I have learned today while playing WikiTrivia, a free browser game by Tom Watson which pulls historical dates from WikiData and challenges you to put them in the correct order.

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Hear the name Pupperazzi and you can probably guess what it's about. Dogs, yes. Taking photos of dogs. Perfect, no? It's out now on Steam and Xbox Game Pass.

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Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga has been in development for five years and suffered multiple delays, but it now has a new release date. The latest Lego spin on Star Wars, which covers all nine main films, will release on April 5th.

At the same time as Warner Bros. announced the release date however, Polygon published a lengthy report on extensive crunch suffered by employees working on the game at developers TT Games.

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Amplitude Studios today released the first proper paid DLC for Humankind, adding new African cultures. Perhaps more importantly than that, they released another patch. A Civilization-esque strategy game from the makers of Endless Space and Endless Legend sounded great but some found it suffered issues with bugs, balance, and general polish. So sure, expanding the game with DLC, sure sure, tell me about making what's already there better. Amplitude laid out some of their plans on that front, too.

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Panic. Panic at the museum reception desk, as the astronaut suit I have belatedly possessed is set upon by a four-strong team of ghost busters. We’re in the opening seconds of the round and only 20 minutes into my Midnight Ghost Hunt hands-on preview, which means I’ve yet to figure out important concepts like ‘where the hunters spawn in’, or nuances like ‘this button lets me hide in props’ as opposed to ‘this button telekinetically waggles props about like ectoplasmic dinner bells’. As ghosts we’re supposed to mostly stay schtum for the five minutes it takes to reach midnight, at which point we get to both metaphorically and literally flip the tables on the living. Instead: panic.

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There was a small recording blip at the start of this week's podcast, but apart from the opening banter we've got a great episode this week. We open an estate agent to appraise the houses in games that would actually be good to live in. It turns out there aren't that many. Not a lot of them would be convenient.

There's an excellent Cavern Of Lies this week, in which Nate hosts a game-themed episode of Through The Keyhole in character as Lloyd Grossman/a robot version of Matt Berry. We also have some great diversions and some opening chat about the time my friend was a real life suspect in a murder for a few days. Plus: Matthew had an unpleasant experience watching House Of Gucci.

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Through the benevolence of Horace and his assorted tech wizards, the RPS Treehouse now has another writing tool at our disposal: liveblogs! Today, we're testing it out with the help of RPS supporters to make sure everything's running nice and smoothly. To ask us a question, post a comment over on the right there and we'll respond in real-time. Give it a try!

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Dunno if you’ve noticed, but there’s been a whole lot of news lately. Too much news in fact. Growing up, we barely had any news. There was just one bit of news that we’d all have to share. A man would drive around our village with the news in the back of his van, and we’d all come out of our houses to watch as he slid open the doors and pointed at it, saying “well, here is the news”. And it was the same news, every day. The news about the hole in the ozone layer. And it was all the news we needed.

Not For Broadcast puts you in charge of all of the news. Set in an alternate timeline 1980s Britain in which an authoritarian far-left party has swept to power on a wave of populist policies, it casts the player as the lens through which the nation will view its new government. Seated in front of a bank of glowing screens, sliders and controls, you have the enviable power to switch between four live camera feeds, bleep out naughty words (and later subversive opinion), choose which ads to run during the break, and select which images are highlighted on screen during each news story.

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Ah, to be good with plants. Apparently it was a thing, wasn't it, that my generation all got into house plants, especially during lockdown. A friend of mine has a positively ebullient front room full of lush, green darlings that have names like Hercules. My brother-in-law, absent any real space, has mounted glass spheres of water on his wall and grows little flowers and trailing vines from them. I, on the other hand, am a plant killer. Apart from in Strange Horticulture, when I run a spooky and ethereal plant shop in a town called Undermere, in an alternate-universe version of The Lake District. There, my plants are happy and weird, and with them I can save the world.

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It's a big day for splendid sandbox stealth stabber Hitman 3, now entering its second year of content and support. The developers, Io Interactive are going hard out the gate by adding the new Elusive Target Arcade mode and bringing VR support to PC. It's also ending Epic exclusivity today, hitting not only Steam but Game Pass too, with the full trilogy coming to Microsoft's subscription service. Busy busy.

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Strategy games set in space are almost innately ambitious. The very concept of doing anything meaningful in an infinite void, let alone making it playable and entertaining, is a challenging one, and for every game that reaches for the stars there are countless kinds of... spiraling chaos orbitals.

Between its design flaws and unique ideas with semi-brilliant execution, the 2010 4X/wargame/economic/management simulation Distant Worlds: Universe has straddled those two experiences for a decade. It's needed a sequel for a long time. Distant Worlds 2 is that sequel, and it's almost upon us. Last week I attended a live demo and Q&A session with its producer and co-designer Erik Rutins. With only a hands-off demo to go on I obviously can't say for sure how it plays yet, but it's already looking very promising.

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A small group of former Firaxis developers who worked on the XCOM games, led by the series' art director, have opened a new studio dedicated to making turn-based tactics games. Bit Reactor is their name, and turn-based tactics really is their only type of game. They haven't announced any specific game yet but say they have several titles in development.

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Dice are continuing their efforts to fix up Battlefield 2042, with today bringing a patch fixing issues including some wonky hit registration, some crashes, and a bit of rubberbanding. Looking ahead, they've also revealed the much-requested new scoreboard which will arrive in February. After a few months, maybe the game will get to the state it should have been in when it launch in November.

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We’re in a bit of a “love letter” media period right now. Some old things come back with new things to say, like The Matrix Resurrections, and some old things come back simply to enjoy themselves, and remind yesteryear fans what they loved about the original in the first place, like Scream.

Windjammers 2 falls firmly into the latter category. After successfully resurrecting Streets Of Rage for another bout in 2020, developer Dotemu are up to the same old tricks, bringing Windjammers all the way back from 1994 (before I was even born) with a fresh coat of paint and some brand new ultimate frisbee-style action in this sequel.

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Microsoft swallowed up all of Tuesday's attention with their plan to buy Activision Blizzard for $69 billion, drowning out even good news of their own. Along with surprise, concern, and bafflement, yesterday brought Game Pass news. Yes yes they do plan to add Actiblizz games to Game Pass while they can, but there's more: 1) the service now has over 25 million subscribers across PC and Xbox; 2) cult classic Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc is now on Game Pass. You know, the one with the weird bear and the murdergames.

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Hello folks. I would say Happy New Year, but it's already the 19th January and we've had two of the biggest news stories of the year in the space of a week, so I think that means it's officially too late to keep banging the old New Year drum, isn't it? The sentiment remains, of course, even if I do now feel a thousand years old in the process.

Rather than reaching for the annual reset button, though, today I wanted to talk about some of the new and exciting things that are coming up on RPS this year. For starters, our tech team's just handed us a brand-new liveblogging feature, and we'd like you, our RPS supporters, to help us test it out tomorrow at 4pm GMT.

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Announced at last year’s The Game Awards, Have A Nice Death is a roguelike platformer developed by Magic Design Studios where you play as Death, CEO of the underworld. Your employees have gone berserk and thrown your vacation plans into disarray, so must wield your trusty scythe and travel into the depths of your company to hack them all back to their stations. It looks good! And it’s coming to Steam early access in March.

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If you're after a way to make your magic system seem cutesy yet different at the same time, music is a good one to go for. Sure, it's been done before, but it feels inherently charming. At least, it does in the trailer for newly-revealed Songs Of Glimmerwick, a new game from Eastshade Studios that promises to blend RPG, adventure, and gardening.

No specific release date is confirmed, aside from "next year". I have to give them credit for the name Songs Of Glimmerwick, which immediately lets you know that this will be about music and magic, and probably have an amount of tweeness. Specific tweeness levels unconfirmed but they're looking good from the trailer, where you can also clap eyes on some pretty cool-looking gardening, a tree telling you to stfu, and a man earnestly giving you a wooden flute as you head off to magic university.

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Sometimes you have no choice but to admire hard graft, even if it's illegal graft. In this case, it's a Russian bootleg copy of The Simpsons Hit & Run which we're admiring, mainly because the bootlegger has dubbed every character in every cutscene. The result is magnificent and just really funny, to be honest.

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When I held that monkey's paw and wished for more games to appear on Game Pass, I didn't mean like this! I don't know if anyone has been brave enough to come out and say this, but Microsoft buying Activision Blizzard is... problematic. Even before you consider the serious and unresolved allegations of workplace misconduct at ActiBlizz, there's no easy "this is good, actually" point of view to have here.

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Of all the uncertainty, rumour, speculation, claims, hopes, and business fanfic surrounding Microsoft's $69 billion purchase of Activision Blizzard, here's my favourite bit. The Wall Street Journal claim someone told them that Actiblizz CEO Bobby Kotick wanted to 'change the narrative' around the company following many allegations of discrimination and harassment, and he thought that one way to do that was buying some of the video games media, such as Kotaku or cheery RPS fanzine PC Gamer. Oh that would change the narrative alright!

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The first time I wrote about Total War: Warhammer, Ed Milliband had just lost a general election because of a sandwich. There’s a joke there about him stepping down but the Chaos having remained, but I can’t figure it out. Anyway, what I’m trying to say is this: it’s been almost seven years since then. SEVEN! And I’m still head over heels in love with these games even now. Somehow, impossibly, that seems to be holding true for Warhammer 3 as well.

In a recent hands-on event, I was able to play something like eight hours worth of this final game in the trilogy from the comfort of my own spare room. Having not done a “digital preview” before now, this was something of a revelation to me. Wearing my comfortable clothes and with a steady supply of big mugs of tea, I booted up the game, hit ‘New Campaign’ and was greeted with the following screen.

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Microsoft yesterday announced plans to buy Activision Blizzard for $69 billion (£50 billion), a staggering and un-nice quantity of money for the video games company behind Call Of Duty and Warcraft. They're buying the company at a troubled time, with multiple lawsuits alleging widespread sexual discrimination and harassment, an ongoing strike over QA layoffs, and employees publicly calling for the removal of the CEO, Bobby Kotick. A campaign group of employees known as the ABK Workers Alliance say the acquisition doesn't change their goals and there's still work to do.

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It turns out Rainbow Six Extraction is more cerebral and stealthy than the co-op shooters I’m used to; the other day I accompanied Hayden and Ed on a few missions for the latter’s review, and spent most of them either accidentally summoning hordes of parasite monsters or being hauled to medevac while encased in protective foam. Between my cocoon-muffled cries for help, however, I did manage to get a good look into how Extraction runs on PC, as well as the best settings to tweak if you want better performance.

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Rainbow Six Extraction is a spin-off from Rainbow Six Siege's popular Outbreak mode, which saw Tom Clancy's operators fending off aliens instead of each other. Well, Extraction is a tactical FPS that builds on what made Outbreak great by repurposing Siege's PvP prowess into a moreish Left 4 Dead-like. Unpicking an alien hivemind with your mates is a real thrill, as is simply coming back from a mission alive. While it doesn't do anything to blow you away, it does more than enough to keep you coming back for a quick alien-busting session here and there.

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I just think the whole situation sucks ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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The PC version of Ys IX: Monstrum Nox now supports cooperative multiplayer, a tidy little post-launch bonus for Nihon Falcom's action-RPG. Nadia Oxford told us last year that for fans of the genre, "the Ys series is a must-play, and Ys IX is as good a place to start as any." Co-op makes it an even nicer place to start because friends are nice, aren't they?

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I used to think that big, intricate character customisation systems were pretty much mandatory for decent CRPGs. As I saw it, the ability to conjure up a hideous goblin man with a chin curving back up into his face, if you wanted to, was a sign that you were playing something in the big leagues. Now, however, I am not so sure.

Expeditions: Rome, a historical CRPG blending turn-based combat, strategic army management, and lots of dialogue, has a pretty rubbish character creation system. There’s bugger all you can really do to customise your Roman. and after the mammoth character forge of Pathfinder: Wrath Of The Righteous, for example, it all just feels very sparse and shoestringy. And that is a damned shame, because when it gets down to business, this is a seriously good - and lovingly detailed - romp through centurion times.

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In the wake of scandal and lawsuits alleging a culture of discrimination and harrassment at Activision Blizzard, Microsoft today announced they're buying the company. Wait, hang on. What. That's not what I expected when Xbox head Phil Spencer told staff he was "evaluating all aspects of [Xbox's] relationship" with Activision Blizzard. Microsoft plan to pay $68.7 billion (£50 billion) for the company, which will nab them games including Warcraft, Call Of Duty, and Overwatch. Jesus.

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To perform an ollie is to commune with gods. Or maybe just look cool. OlliOlli World is shaping up to be a good-spirited renovation of the 2D skateboarding series that has traditionally been quite punishing. This one's got a flashy third dimension, moon-faced cartoon characters, and a plucky story to match. We're told of Skate Godz who once appointed a human representative on earth. But she's about to retire and needs a prodigy to step forward to fill her Vans. The player is that potential new conduit between holy half-pipers and humanity. In other words, this is a quest to become Skate Pope. Caliph of kickflips. Dalai Slama. Having both popped and shoved-it through a heap of levels in preview, I'm happy to report you can all sit down. I'm the chosen one. It's me.

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