Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Last week while I was away from my desk, Pete Hines showed that the Starfield hype train is an unstoppable perpetual motion engine, and he certainly won't pull the emergency break for something as normie as a federal court. While his comments were part of the ongoing Actiblizz acquisition malarkey (the point seemingly being "it's so big it'd be too hard to optimise for PS5"), hearing him pitch Bethesda's upcoming grey-rocks-but-in-space-this-time RPG as "irresponsibly large" made me want to go full Reggie Perrin.

Every time I bring my reviews of giant games to the altar of the industry, I weep tears of blood and beg that games be shorter. And every time the golden idol with the face of Phil Spencer opens its maw to spit a new £80 disc out and says: "Bigger than ever before. A million pointless collectibles. A feast of zero-calorie content. Lol. Lmao."

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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 an android demon (not to be confused with that hellish Android mascot), chill snowboarding, a golf game played on an actual physical pop-up book, and more. Check out all these attractive and interesting indie games!

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June has been a feverishly hectic month between the NotE3 season, big games relentlessly releasing back-to-back, and this infernal heat wave we’ve been stuck in. Amidst all the madness though, one indie has been able to blast through the noise to become a smash hit on Steam - only sitting behind CS:GO on the sales charts - and potentially one of this year’s biggest shooters. That impressive feat goes to BattleBit Remastered, a 254-player FPS that mixes Battlefield’s large-scale skirmishes, Roblox’s low-poly aesthetics, and some wild destructible environments.

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Over the weekend, DDoS attacks on Blizzard caused a bunch of issues for Diablo IV and other Battle.net games such as Overwatch 2. The cyber attacks prevented many players from logging into Diablo IV, and the hack-and-slashers that managed to log in were at risk of “high latency and disconnections” in the always-online RPG. That tragically forced many gamers to step outside during the hottest weekend in recent memory. Thankfully, Blizzard now states the DDoS attacks have ended, meaning everything should be working as normal.

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Sundays are for sticking the fan on. Before you feel the breeze, let's read this week's best writing about games (and game related things).

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My purchase last year of a Steam Deck rekindled my long-dormant love for arcade racers. High quality and modern entries in the genre are few and far between, though.

Enter New Star GP, which looks like it might fill the whole in my heart that's been there since I played F1 Pole Position on the SNES in 1993.

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FlightSimExpo is underway in Houston, Texas, and yesterday Microsoft and Asobo delivered a lot of new detail regarding the recently announced Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, its new aviation activities, and changes to its physics simulation and performance.

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During an appearance on Kinda Funny Xcast, Starfield director Todd Howard was asked whether the upcoming interstellar ball-pit RPG would support the Steam Deck. "We'll talk about that later down the road," said Howard.

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According to testimony delivered by Microsoft's Phil Spencer in court, Elder Scrolls VI is still "five-plus years away."

Spencer had been speaking about what platforms the next Elder Scrolls game might appear on during day two of hearings as the FTC seek an injunction to block Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard.

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Hot one today, huh? And every day at the moment. I'm in the UK for a few days and long for my new/current homeland, where it is also very hot but at least the biscuits and chicken fillet rolls are very good. Still, this weekend I might get a walk-in tattoo and eat some eggy bread, which I am told adults refer to as French toast. I tell you what I probably won't be doing though: playing some video games! I'm away from home and didn't bring any portables with me. Luckily the rest of the team can make up for me.

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Best Way have announced the release date for their WW2 RTS Men Of War 2, and it's coming in one of the busiest months of the year so far for big PC releases. Arriving on September 20th on Steam and the Epic Games Store, Men Of War 2 joins the likes of Lies Of P, Cyberpunk 2077's Phantom Liberty expansion, Pay Day 3, Mortal Kombat 1 and Life By You in the fight for your attention in the wake of Bethesda's epic space RPG Starfield, which launches just two weeks beforehand on September 6th.

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As Steam Next Fests go, I think the one this June has easily been one of the best Next Fests in a little while. Seeing all the great demos this week has made me far more excited about the future of video games than any of the notE3 streams did the other week, and I'm not gonna lie, a large part of my excitement stems from the brilliant Let's! Revolution!, a beautifully animated tile-based roguelite that has a touch of Minesweeper about it. I highlighted it in our big demo rec list at the start of the week, but 150-odd words simply wasn't enough to really get across just how excellent this is. So indulge me a bit while I tell you more about it.

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You know when the look of a game instantly captures your attention, and then you play a demo for it and it's even better? That's the journey I've been on with deckbuilding RPG Cross Blitz this week. I first heard about it last month back when word hit that it was coming to early access this year, and I was instantly taken with its chunky animal character sprites. There was something a bit Advance Wars about the look and style about its burly lion pirate captain, but just, you know, in a high seas card battle kind of setting instead of dealing with sergeants, tanks and air support. But its Steam Next Fest demo has really sunk its teeth into me this week, offering up turn-based card duels that scratch exactly the same kind of itch as Inscryption did for me a couple of years ago.

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I am having an absolute riot playing Killer Frequency. It’s a first-person puzzle horror where you're trying to help folks escape a rampaging murderer. Usually, when I read a game description like that, I’m already grabbing my cushion to hide behind and readying my cute puppy compilation video on a second screen, but Team17 have heavily leaned into the campy side of slasher horror with humour serving as the perfect buffer. No safety cushion or puppies needed here, folks.

Here’s the set-up: You’re playing as Forrest Nash, a big-time radio DJ who has found himself stuck in Small Town, Nowhere, USA. While you're working as the host for the town’s local station, it turns out the police chief has only gone and gotten themselves stabbed by a serial killer. With them out of action, you’re roped into acting as a stand-in 911 operator - and with the murderer still on the loose and ready to strike again, that line is going to be pretty busy.

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Yesterday marked the first day of proceedings in the legal battle between Microsoft and the US Federal Trade Commission as the FTC seeks a preliminary injunction on Microsoft and Activision Blizzard. The injunction would further prevent Microsoft's acquisition deal of Activision Blizzard from going through.

Several of Xbox's high profile figures testified at the first day of trial, including the likes of Sarah Bond, corporate vice president of gaming partnerships and business development at Microsoft, Bethesda head of publishing Pete Hines, and Xbox Game Studios head Matt Booty. They were questioned on a range of things including cloud gaming, Call Of Duty exclusivity, and Bobby Kotick's revenue share demands.

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There are a bunch of reasons I like The Tartarus Key (enough to make it our RPS Game Club pick this month), and one of them is that it's not actually scary. Like, sure, you could attach the horror tag to it on Steam if you wanted, but it's more of a costume for you to enjoy - like the family down the street who are really into Halloween and turn their suburban semi into a haunted house with a movie-quality zombie in the front yard. It's really cool and you like it on its own terms, but being frightened isn't so much the point as it is to remember you have enjoyed being frightened in the past. Also, for some reason the family won't let you out of the living room until you complete a logic puzzle involving maths.

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"Will it or won't it?" has been the big question. That is, will Final Fantasy 16 actually be released on PC or won't it. It's been emotional whiplash for some PC fans. A PC version was specified in the game's announcement trailer, and then FF16 producer Yoshi-P walked it back and said that didn't happen, and then Yoshi-P addressed his previous words and said he'd like to bring the game to PC eventually. Just don't expect it within six months. Or before 2024, actually.

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Activision are shutting down Call of Duty: Warzone Caldera later this year to "focus on future Call Of Duty content including the current Warzone free-to-play experience". Caldera, the new name for the original Warzone, was first released in March 2020, and was later renamed after Warzone 2 launched in November 2022.

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Frequent EGX goers will know that the Rezzed Zone has always been home to the best and most interesting games at the UK’s biggest gaming show, and RPS will be there on the ground this year, highlighting our favourites, bringing you various audio visual delights and more across the course of the weekend.

EGX 2023 runs from October 12th - 15th at London’s Excel this year, and RPS supporters can get 50% off Early Entry tickets (which is on top of the current 10% off discount available until July 7th for everyone else, I might add). Keen to hear more about exactly what we’ll be getting up to? Read on below for all the details.

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Evening Star, a new studio made up of the team that made Sonic Mania, have announced their first game, Penny's Big Breakaway. While Sonic Mania was a 2D platformer, the studio's first game under their new name brings them into the realm of 3D, taking an incredibly vibrant colour palette that would certainly work in any classic Sonic game, and marrying it a world that one could say is mildly reminiscent of the hedgehog's rival Mario.

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When Alice Bee selected thriller-puzzler The Tartarus Key as this month's RPS Game Club pick, I naively signed up for it thinking I'd be fine tackling a game where most puzzles can't be solved with a few trigger pulls. So, I did the smart thing and roped in my pal Ed. Yes, my pal is also called Ed, so parts of this post sound like I'm referring to myself in the third-person. This isn't the case, but if you'd like to imagine that I, in fact, solved the puzzles myself, then please feel free to do so.

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While the bug-squishing autoshooter is itself still in the larva stage, Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor already looks like a worthwhile Vampire Survivors-like. It apparently helps to crib the mining, mineral hoarding, and maladroit approach to industrial safety that makes source material Deep Rock Galactic one of the best FPS games going.

Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor is in the works at Funday Games, not original DRG devs and fellow Danish outfit Ghost Ship Games. But it does fall under the latter’s new publishing arm, Ghost Ship Publishing, and can trace its origins back to a casual meeting between Funday co-founder Anders Leicht Rohde and Ghost Ship CEO Søren Lundgaard – and beyond.

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EA are cutting themselves down the middle, with EA Games and EA Sports now making up two separate units, and the former getting a rebrand. From now on, EA Games will be known as EA Entertainment, which really doesn't have as good a ring to it (no one's going to be quoting "it's in the entertainment," any time soon are they?). The name change does imply a broader expansion into more than just games, but it's obviously a bit of a wait and see kind of situation until EA show off something that isn't a video game.

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Shown off at this year's Summer Game Fest showcase, Sand Land is an upcoming RPG from the folks over at Ilca Inc, the developers of One Piece Odyssey, and the creator of Dragon Ball, Akira Toriyama. It's an adaptation on one of Toriyama's lesser-known mangas, which features a band of misfits who aim to right the wrongs of a king who's hogged the desert's vital water supply. I got to play it for all of 20 minutes, in a demo that was as stripped back as a grated cactus. Still, I got to sample a bit of roaming about in a tank, one brief stop at a town, an opening of one (1) chest, and some fighting. It seemed okay, I guess? But my main worry is whether its desert is interesting enough to hold people's attention.

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Microsoft have announced they're raising the price of Game Pass, but PC players don't need to worry too much about it (for now, at least). As reported by The Verge, come July 6th, Xbox Game Pass will be going up from £8/ $9 a month to £9/ $11, and Game Pass Ultimate will increase from £11/ $15 a month to £13/ $17. If you're just a PC player though, you've got nothing to worry about, as Microsoft hasn't announced any changes for PC Game Pass at this point in time.

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Sega are once again hosting another Sonic Central, promising a look at a suite of Sonic projects currently in the works. The live stream will be airing tomorrow on both the official Sonic the Hedgehog YouTube and Twitch accounts, starting at 4pm BST/ 5pm CEST. "Tune in for a sneak peek of some of our upcoming projects, partnerships and events happening in 2023," reads the announcement post from the official Sonic Twitter account.

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Horses are trotting their way into The Sims 4 as part of the game's next expansion, with leaks sharing some specific details ahead of its full reveal. The official Sims Twitter account did show a short teaser trailer earlier this week of a Sim imagining a life out in the desert, promising a "rootin' tootin' expansion, two bold kits," and a Behind the Sims presentation. You can check out the full trailer for that when it debuts later today, but leaks regarding the expansion were shared on the Sims Community fan site after details and screenshots were mistakenly shared on Steam earlier this week.

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Valve's Index remains one of the very best PC VR headsets for playing games like Half-Life Alyx, Beat Saber or Star Trek: Bridge Crew, but it does cost a fair amount - $999 for the full kit in the US, for example. However, it is possible to get used/refurbished models for much cheaper, including at GameStop where you can now pick up the full kit for just $599, a solid $400 off the usual price.

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A few days back, we spotted a 16GB Corsair Vengeance RAM kit at a low £36 - and today the bottom has dropped out even further with a deal on Adata's XPG Gammix D10 RAM, where a 16GB DDR4-3200 CL16 kit costs just £29.99 plus £1.50 shipping at Ebuyer, versus their previous price of £38.

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Microsoft has done a great job making some truly inventive special edition Xbox Series controllers, and their latest effort is one that uses the 'NASA-punk' aesthetics of upcoming big budget Bethesda RPG Starfield. The controller looks phenomenal, but it does cost a fair bit - so I thought it was worth letting you know that the early adopter tax has been lifted, and the controller is now down to £65.

That's still fairly expensive, but given that this controller seems destined to sell out - as it has done in the US - then I thought it was worth bringing up regardless.

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The world of Diablo 4 is full of misery and sadness. There are flayed corpses everywhere, fathers are haunted by the ghosts of their dead sons, blokes cram flaming eyeballs into their skulls and sometimes a guy turns up at random just to stomp you (and a lot of other people) into fleshy jam on the ground. Given all the abject suffering that the game and its predecessors make their stock and trade, it was an especially nice surprise to see real, genuine positivity emerge out of the literal hellscape of Sanctuary.

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Because nothing is just a joke anymore, EVE Online - CCP’s sprawling starship MMO jokingly nicknamed ‘Spreadsheets in Space’ due to its intense level of complex management - now has an official Microsoft Excel add-in that lets you directly export data to the spreadsheet app.

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Science-fantasy RPG Star Ocean: The Second Story is back with a remake that gives the ‘90s PlayStation game a gorgeous lick of 2.5D paint and its first-ever outing on PC.

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Samsung's 980 SSD is the company's latest mainstream offering, combining PCIe 3.0 speeds with a DRAM-less design and TLC NAND. That makes it a cheaper alternative to their PCIe 4.0 drives with DRAM, but still more than fast enough for PC gaming. Therefore, it's worth knowing that the 1TB 980 is now available for less than £40 at Amazon, a £16 reduction from its usual price and less than half the cost it debuted at back in 2021.

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Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater will see its first-ever release on PC thanks to the upcoming release of the series’ Master Collection, freshly confirmed for a Steam release this autumn.

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"Olivia, get the bowls and chopsticks ready to eat dinner," my mum asks 10 year old me. I do as I'm told, taking them to the dinner table. In childish, whimsical fashion as a childish, whimsical child, I grab my pair of chopsticks and start hitting them together as if I'm a drummer. "Olivia, don't do that," my mum scolds me. "Your grandma always used to tell me off when I did that as a child." Sullenly, I put the chopsticks back down on the table.

Well, 10 year old me, you're in for a treat. If you wait a couple of decades, you'll learn of Nour: Play With Your Food, a game which allows you to bang together chopsticks. The game wants you to. Nour is a physics simulation of a variety of foods, where you can choose the ingredients for the dish and add various "effects" of a non-culinary nature.

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As if you needed more of a reason to while away the hours listening to Vampire Survivors’ strangely entrancing OST while mowing down thousands of skeletons, ghosts and vampires, 2022’s more moreish and BEST game is getting local co-op.

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Prime Gaming is giving away four extra games in June and July to celebrate Prime Day 2023, on top of the June freebies already announced. Prey (2017) is already available to claim on GOG, and the next three games will drop weekly.

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It's no secret that I love Dorfromantik. It opened my eyes to the world of tile-based puzzler strategy games, and I've looked out for similar ones ever since. Thankfully for me, there's been a fair few riffs on Dorformantik's formula recently - a focus on nature, a soothing soundtrack, and some good old puzzling. Growth is one of these, and I'm hooked on the demo that's playable as part of Steam Next Fest. Taking place on a hexagonal grid, the aim is to uncover the map using a range of wildlife, fertilising the land in the process. Each tile you reveal gives you points, and you'll have to navigate around mountains, water, and special landmarks.

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Roblox is launching new regulation in order to allow creators to make content specifically for users aged 17 and above. From what Manuel Bronstein, Roblox's Chief Product Officer, shared in an official blog post yesterday, it seems that it'll be on creators to label their experiences as mature, which "may contain more violence, blood, or crude humour" than usual experiences.

The introduction of age appropriate access is not for safety primarily, as Roblox say they want to "simulate and even go beyond what's possible in the real world". Bronstein also added that, "We want to replicate that dynamic on Roblox," referring to the idea of getting older and legally being allowed to enter places such as nightclubs.

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