Rock, Paper, Shotgun

David Brevik, now the president of Skystone Games, did not expect to encounter a doppelganger when he arrived at Chicago’s Consumer Electronic Show in the summer of 1994. He’d come to the tech expo with Condor, a studio he’d co-founded only a few months prior, to show off Justice League: Task Force. A humble fighting game in the vein of Street Fighter, it was given a small demo booth and placed next to another game that featured a cast of superheroes, a strikingly similar visual style and, much to Brevik’s surprise, the very same name.

Without their knowing, Condor were one of two studios hired to develop the DC Comics tie-in: their Sega Mega Drive/Genesis version set to release alongside a SNES title made by another recently formed team, Silicon & Synapse. “We'd never talked to them,” Brevik says. “We'd never interacted with them. We didn't know there was even another version, and then we show up at the booth and they're side by side, and we're like, this is really weird.” They didn't know it yet, but these Justice League sort-of clones were the first paving stones on the road to the Diablo series.

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The Ukrainian studio working on S.T.A.L.K.E.R 2: Heart Of Chernobyl, GSC Game World, have confirmed that early development materials from the game have been leaked online, following “about a year and a half” worth of attacks from a Russian hacking group. GSC say that the materials aren’t “release-ready,” but looking at the leaked clips may “ruin your experience of exploring the Zone.”

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The Meta Quest 3 is very much real and releasing this autumn, according to apparently of-this-world executive Mark Zuckerberg. The followup to the Oculus/Meta Quest 2, which despite its advanced age is still one of the best VR gaming headsets, is a full-on mixed reality kit, taking advantage of its new all-colour passthrough to enable AR gaming as well as 'traditional' VR play.

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The season of big video game announcements - otherwise known as NotE3 season - is in full swing and Ubisoft have decided to join the trailer festivities by teasing their own showcase. The Ubisoft Forward show will be broadcast live from Los Angeles on June 12th at 6pm BST/10am PDT, with a pre-show starting 15 minutes earlier. The publisher also released a small clip to confirm that AssCreed, Avatar, and The Crew: Motorfest will all make an appearance, alongside a non-descript mystery game. Take a peek below.

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Redfall suffered from a tumultuous development cycle where developers from Arkane Austin hoped that Microsoft would either reboot or cancel the project, according to a new report from Bloomberg. The co-op shooter launched to mostly negative reviews last month, which was uncharacteristic of Arkane’s usually excellent pedigree.

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EPOS make some of the best gaming headsets in the business, so it's great to see a deep discount on one of their best Sennheiser co-creations. The GSP 600 offers extremely good build quality, great audio and incredible noise isolation too.

Its list price is a faintly ridiculous $219, but right now you can pick up a brand new set of these headphones for $54.99 at Woot. That's a solid $15 off the same set on Amazon, and a great price for headphones of this level of quality.

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Intel's mid-range Core i5 processors have long been some of the best choices for gaming PCs, versus Core i7 and Core i9 models that require much more cooling while not providing much more performance in GPU-limited scenarios. Their 13th-gen models are a particular favourite, and today we have a US deal on perhaps the best value gaming CPU in that lineup: the Core i5 13400F is now down to $164.99 at Best Buy following a $50 discount.

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When RPS awarded Kentucky Route Zero the title of Game Of The Year in 2013, only two episodes out of an eventual five had been released. If this sounds like a bland statement of fact, just think about it for a second. I can't recall any other time an episodic adventure game has received GOTY-level praise before it was even concluded, let alone only 40% done.

Episodes three through five arrived sporadically: in spring 2014, summer 2016, and — after what must have been an agonising hiatus — the start of 2020. Having bypassed this wait to play the game for the first time only recently, I feel wistfully as though I'll never share quite the same fond feelings for it as contemporary fans (like our own reviews ranger Rachel, who recently named KRZ one of her all-time favourite indie games). But I'm also quite relieved that I didn't have to exercise that kind of patience. I mean, I'm very good at neglecting to carry on with games for years at a time despite thoroughly enjoying what I've played so far. But I like doing it on my terms, you know?

Somehow we’re already in June, which makes me both cosmically confused about the passage of time and quite happy because it’s now Pride Month. That also means that queer indie developers have once again banded together and organised the third annual Queer Games Bundle on Itch.io, offering over 450 video games, board games, zines, books, soundtracks, and other creative stuff for the price of one AAA game: $60. All proceeds are split between the participating developers, and there’s some very cool stuff included.

“Purchasing the Queer Games Bundle is a direct action that you can take right now to support queer people in a life-changing way,” reads the bundle's description, “and in exchange, you get over 450 amazing, heartfelt, fun, and radical games and artworks.”

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Mere spec sheets? Old news, friend. This Steam Deck vs Asus ROG Ally comparison is new and improved with actual testing results, both hard data (I may even borrow some benchmark graphs from the ROG Ally review) and those of the observational/anecdotal/downright take-y variety. Hopefully, by the end of it, these will give you a far better idea of which handheld gaming PC will suit your travelling needs, performance preferences, or even specific games to play on the go.

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The Lord Of The Rings: Gollum turned out to be a hot mess. Who knew? The Electronic Wireless Show podcast is on hand to do a dramatic reading of the developer apology post, and talk about the reception to the game - plus our favourite Lord Of The Rings Games, and our favourite apologies. In a shocking twist, James turns out to not be a LotR fan. He is useless to me. I will let you know when we discover things he does like.

We've also been playing some video games this week, how about that! Including the click-fest game of the moment, the remake game of the moment, and a whole other thing I hadn't heard of. So actually James does have a use after all. Plus: he finally got hold of a ROG Ally!

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Despite all the fun that could obviously be had unleashing rampaging sphynxs and hippo-headed warriors on the battlefields of Total War: Pharaoh, Creative Assembly Sofia are currently steadfast in keeping their latest historical release firmly in the realm of history, with “absolutely no plans'' to release a similar expansion to Troy’s Mythos, which added magic and minotaurs to the otherwise relatively grounded Aegean setting.

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Despite a name evoking the opulent leaders of one of history's most famous (and, as I’d soon learn, famously misunderstood) civilisations, Total War: Pharaoh's aspirations don’t start and end with ancient Egypt. Moreso, the next mainline historical Total War aims to capture the struggles and instability of a time period for which ancient Egypt simply had the best seat in the house. “We wanted to make a game about the collapse of the Bronze Age,” Creative Assembly Sofia’s Milcho Vasilev, lead battle designer on Total War: Pharaoh, tells me. “There’s a lot of mystery surrounding it, and we wanted to uncover it.”

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Metroidvanias, Metroid-likes, and Castlevania-likes are games that heavily feature non-linear exploration and cool discoveries that open up parts of an interconnected map. Otherwise known as good game design. A new Humble Bundle has now compiled seven great Metroidvanias for the low price of £12/$15, available here from now until June 20th.

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Somehow it's June already, which means it's time for the Indiescovery crew to suppress our existential dread at the fleetingness of existence and take a look at our favourite indie games from the first (almost) half of 2023! Don't worry, we very quickly realise that June has such a slammed line-up we can probably give it a best-games episode all of its own to make up for the fact that we tackled this topic a bit early.

Listen and subscribe via your podcast provider of choice! Find us on RSS feed, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Pocket Casts, Amazon Music, TuneIn, Deezer, and YouTube.

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The widely admired studio behind XCOM and Civilization, Firaxis Games, have undergone a round of layoffs affecting around 30 employees, according to a report from Axios. Publisher 2K Games later confirmed the news and said the job cuts were due to a “sharpening of focus, enhancements of efficiencies, and an alignment of our talent against our highest priorities."

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Arcade racer Hot Wheels Unleashed 2: Turbocharged is speeding our way on October 19th, developer Milestone have announced. Like the first surprisingly great game, you’ll race over 130 toy cars through real-world locations, zooming past dinner tables, out of windows, and across gardens. Seems like more good fun, whether you’re a five-year-old or a five-year-old stuck in an adult's body.

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I put olives in my bolognese. Olives, objectively, do not belong in a bolognese. But without fail, I’ll dunk half a jar of those salty little bad boys into my bubbling wok without hesitation. Peppers? Why not. Carrot? Absolutely. Spinach? Don’t mind if I do. My bolognese is about as authentically Italian as Super Mario, but it doesn’t matter. I’m not trying to make Massimo Bottura cry by reminding him of his nonna’s cooking. It’s a dreary Tuesday night and I’m craving my olive-laden concoction. I’m making this bolognese just for me.

Slayers X: Terminal Aftermath: Vengance of the Slayer reminded me a lot of my bolognese. It’s a game created for particular tastes, a unique proposition that sort of defies conventional thinking. A big, bold swing that - if you have the palate for it - is absolutely brilliant.

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Last time, you decided that a silent protagonist is better than combat style ratings. Not by much! It was a 60/40 split, and I'm surprised/glad it was this close. We are now one decision closer to knowing the best thing. This week, I ask you to choose between a matter concerning movement, and what an enemy does in response to when and how you move. What's better: an enemy which can't see you but can sense you, or it only moves when you're not looking?

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DDR5 RAM used to be expensive - but fast forward a year or two and now it's possible to pick up 16GB for a little more than three of your British tenners. That's right, you can now get a single 16GB stick of DDR5-4800 for £34, or two for £68 - quick maths.

This is by far the best choice when it comes to raw price versus performance, and allows you to build out a DDR5 Intel or AMD system at the absolute minimum cost while still getting a healthy 32GB.

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As AMD's (underwhelming) mid-range RX 7000 graphics cards are being released, we're seeing extremely good discounts on their past-gen offerings, making them significantly better value. Case in point is this deal on the MSI RX 6800, which is a great card for 1440p to 4K gaming and now costs just £430. That's £260 cheaper than the same card cost at the end of April, reflecting a heck of a savings!

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If you woke up in a mysterious mansion, with no memory of how you got there and only a walkie-talkie and a bunch of security cameras for company, how d'you reckon you'd handle it? Personally I know, sure as eggs is eggs, that I would absolutely go to pieces. I'm not hitting the end credits of The Tartarus Key in real life, but fortunately, it's a nails thriller puzzle game that fuses PS1-style retro graphics with Saw-esque murder traps. Plus, you know, it's only about six hours end to end, which isn't bad for a semi-magical kidnap plot.

In this situation I am not me, of course, but Alex Young, and Alex upon escaping a locked study (an easy warm-up puzzle involving postcards) she finds and frees Torres, an ex-cop turned private detective, who sets up a base of operations around the mysterious mansions main fireplace. From there game's rhythm is clearing the different wings of the house by completing increasingly difficult puzzle rooms, each eventually culminating in finding a new person to save from a new death trap - concocting the antidote for poison or following the instructions to get through an electrocuted floor maze.

I feel like claymation has always been a bit creepy, you know? Yeah, sure the Aardman films are whimsical and fun, but have you seen those early Wallace and Gromit shorts? There’s something kind of unsettling about the odd shape of Wallace’s uneven head and I've always deeply hated that you can sometimes see the subtle lines of a thumb imprint on parts of his face, like he’s been smothered inbetween the pads of two giant fingers. It’s so uncomfortable - and don’t even get me started on that monster Morph.

Ever since I first spotted the creepy Twitter gifs of claymation game Elation For The Wonder Box 6000, I’ve felt that same discomfort in the pit of my stomach. It’s not out yet, or even has a confirmed release date, but I just need people to witness this game. Like, just clicking through the screenshots make the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. It’s awful, and wonderful. You can watch the trailer below. The bit where the lumps of clay wriggle inside the gun's bullet chambers goes through me.

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One of my absolute favourite elements of Citizen Sleeper is how you essentially play as a nobody. When we first meet the Sleeper they've had their memories completely erased; the last thing they remember is stuffing themselves into a cargo container and shooting off into the depths of space - a last resort in wanting to escape the clutches of a scary corporation. They now find themselves on a dishevelled space station called Erlin's Eye, desperate and alone. They're essentially an empty shell, and one which you can etch your own story onto.

But it’s not their lack of personal identity that makes the Sleeper a nobody (after all, you essentially forge an identity for them as you make decisions throughout the game). It’s the realisation that, in this vast universe that developer Gareth Damian Martin has written, you’re no one. A single grain of sand in a vast desert. No one knows who you are, no one cares about you, and you’re stuck on a lawless space station, helpless, scared, and dying.

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Ssssh, listen, I know today's the last day of May and I've scheduled this month's RPS Game Club liveblog for a day in June, of all things, but I'm away travelling at the moment and won't be back until late tomorrow. There's a chance I could be back tomorrow afternoon, but my flight was delayed coming out and I want to be absolutely sure I'm near a desk with a solid internet connection rather than trying to chat to you all on my phone, so Friday it is. Anyway! Enough about my travel woes. Come and join us for the next RPS Game Club on Friday June 2nd at 4pm BST / 8am PDT to come and chat all things Citizen Sleeper with us.

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Poly Bridge 3 offers up more puzzles about building bridges with goofy physics, and it's out now. The third entry follows a similar formula to the previous ones, asking you to help vehicles cross gaps from one side of the map to the other, all while constructing normal bridges, loop-de-loop bridges, drawbridges, and bridges that break everything I thought I knew about physics. All sorts of bridges; it’s in the name.

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“Oh yeah, we’ve got the System Shock IP,” said the insurance company. “What do you want to do with it? Do you want to make a sequel?”

It’s a question you could imagine being posed to Ken Levine, or Warren Spector, or several other notable designers who could reasonably lay claim to the legacy of Looking Glass and Irrational’s legendary immersive sims. Instead, it was asked of Stephen Kick - at the time, a recently unemployed videogame artist holidaying in a Guatemalan hostel. Up until that point, Kick had dedicated his life to creative pursuits. He had no business background, and none of the acumen required to understand contracts or negotiate licensing fees. More to the point, he had no more than $5,000 to his name. Hardly the foundation for a follow-up to two of the most acclaimed PC games of all time.

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You didn’t hear it from me, but games look different now to how they did in 1994. Mmm. Nonetheless, Nightdive Studio’s System Shock remake stays resolutely faithful to the Looking Glass original even when giving it a modern 3D makeover, with a retro flourish in its intentionally pixellated textures.

As a snappy little After Eight to the main course of Jeremy Peel’s review and OG System Shock oral history (both great, do go read those first), here’s a look at how the 2023 remake’s visuals compare to the trailblazing immsim’s previous iterations. In other words, the 2015 System Shock: Enhanced Edition, also by Nightdive, and the original. Well, System Shock Classic, which is basically the original except it runs on my PC.

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Xbox’s official social media channels seem to be teasing something to do with Fable. The main Xbox channel posted a clip to Twitter that moves through a house, following a glittery trail from a controller to a monitor displaying the Xbox Games Showcase art. The Fable games used sparkly breadcrumb trails as a waypoint of sorts and the clip also had some jolly fairytale music on top, leading many to guess that the long-dormant series would finally rear its head again.

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Update: Strong Bad's Cool Game For Attractive People has been removed from sale on Steam. Meaning it's now Strong Bad's Cool Game For People Who Bought It Before June 1st.

Original Story: Telltale can “no longer sell” the 2008 episodic comedy Strong Bad’s Cool Game For Attractive People, the developer announced in yesterday’s blog post. The studio have apparently lost the rights to the game and the series may or may not be pulled from storefronts soon, based on the slightly unclear wording of their notice.

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The world of pro wrestling slams into an SNES-era RPG with WrestleQuest, which now has a release date of August 8th. Inspired by the older Final Fantasies and Dragon Questies, you’ll be engaging in turn-based brawls and running around in magical pixel realms. But unlike those games, you’ll climb the wrestling ladder from fresh-faced rookie to world champ - instead of the usual RPG trope where you go from a village’s rat-killer to the universe’s god-killer. Watch WrestleQuest’s latest trailer below:

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Farworld Pioneers has the side-view construction and interplanetary exploration of Starbound, but adds the colony management of RimWorld. That sort of videogame-maths is useful, but in this instance it obscures the ambition of smooshing two huge games together. You should compensate for my shortcut description by watching the trailer below.

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A tweet from the Xbox Australia and New Zealand account might - might! - be teasing Psychonauts 3. That's the conclusion of much of the internet, anyway. The tweet features a picture of a noughts and crosses board (aka tic-tac-toe) in which the letters for PSYCHO are written in pink and interspersed with three green Xs.

Psycho. Noughts and crosses. Three Xs. You can see where they're coming from.

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Action platformer duo Ratchet & Clank have been around for over twenty years, but they're only arriving on PC for the first time on July 26th. That's when Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, the latest game in the series, will leap through the frequently used portal between PlayStation 5 and PC.

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EVGA's Z20 mechanical keyboard has turned up on the RPS Deals Patch a few times, but always in the UK - and now we've finally seen a decent price drop on the US version over at Best Buy. Until June 1st, you can pick up this full-size optical mechanical keyboard for $59.99, a $115 discount from its MSRP and a great deal.

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The Samsung 990 Pro is the fastest gaming SSD we've ever tested, and it's down to £153.99 on Amazon UK for a 2TB model as of today. That's nearly £30 below RRP and a good deal for a drive of this level of performance.

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Hey, fancy doing something unpleasant for the next ten minutes? Download Mannequin for free, a new little horror game. I don't think it's ruining any surprise to tell you that it's one of those games with horrible, horrible mannequins which can move when you're not looking. I hate this type of monster! It's a very good type of monster! And I hate it! And this little game is a decent one of these. So that's a short bit of fun for you.

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Konami and lead developer Genvid have offered a first proper look at Silent Hill: Ascension, their “interactive video streaming experience.” Ascension was the vaguest announcement from Konami’s big Silent Hill blowout from last year, and though details remain foggy, we now have a somewhat clearer picture of what to expect. Take a look below:

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Playing Diablo 4 gave me a real case of the "Have I changed, or have the games changed?", and I think the answer is "yes". For the uninitiated, Diablo forms one of the jewels in Blizzard's crown (maybe a smaller one, just offset to the Warcraft centre stone), an action-RPG series that's like if the kind of 90s metal album cover that has a skeleton on it asked to be turned into a game where you explode many hundreds of near-identical monsters to get incrementally better loot. This is a spoiler-free review of the latest greatest addition, following 2012's Diablo 3, but a Diablo game's story is sort of unspoilable, both because a) paying attention to it is of passing importance to playing, and b) the plot of them is always basically the same anyway.

To wit: Sanctuary, a high-fantasy world with a low-fantasy vibe, where so much as going to the next town over will be a brush with some horrible little goblin rat called a Flesh Thresher, was created as a respite from the eternal battle between heaven and hell. After X number of years of relative peace, one (or many) of the Lords Of Hell is doin' some bad stuff. Usually Diablo, I'll grant you. In this case it's Lilith, a kind of Dante's Lady Dimetrescu, who's making people horny for being stepped on power. Diablo games have always had a Grand Canyon sized gulf between the cinematics (epic; luscious; brutal) and the game in practise (clicking). IV is no different. And you know. It's fine.

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When I previewed an early production sample of the Crucial T700, the theoretically fastest drive in the PCIe 5.0 SSDs vanguard, I said the price must be right for launch. Here was a drive that didn’t really move gaming performance beyond the best SSDs of the PCIe 4.0 generation, but could boot general read and write speeds into the stratosphere. That could be worth upgrading to, if the T700 itself stayed within reach of most PC owners.

Reader, the price is not right.

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