Goodbye, Build the Wall. The Tetris-style game that the US government had stuck on the White House website as a way of promoting the Trump administration's commitment to brutalising and persecuting immigrants in the name of securing borders. After the Tetris Company hinted that they might be eyeing legal action, Build the Wall is gone, replaced by a far more palatable 404 error message.
The latest beefy expansion mod to hit Skyrim is an adventure to the Argonian homeland of Black Marsh, complete with hist trees and humid swamps. Though, its creator seems to be hoping the trip to the southern tip of the mysterious province will do more that just entertain, serving as a reminder that it's still possible for solo modders to make ambitious works happen for free without resorting to using generative AI.
Look, before you say it, I know. Persona 4 Golden is held up by some as one of the best and most important RPGs ever. After all, it was the series' Final Fantasy 7 moment, where many of the mechanical and thematic threads of the earlier games finally knitted together and became something greater than their parts. You step into the shoes of Yu Narukami, a Japanese transfer student freshly arrived in Inaba. There, you use your limited time to make friends, study for your exams, and dive into a metaphysical dimension to turn-based battle the literal manifestations of your friends and rivals' twisted perceptions of themselves. Its story and characters particularly celebrated for their honest and painful looks inward at the parts of ourselves best left unseen. I’m a fraud for not having played it yet, with that sin only compounded by having had it in my Steam family sharing library for years. I have no excuse. I’ll face the shame-filled shadow version of myself, eventually.
Those terrible firebrands at the Tetris Company have publicly rebuked the US government for publishing a Tetris parody game that promotes the Trump administration's brutalising rhetoric about securing the border with Mexico. They've even hinted that they're prepared to sue over it.
The parody game in question is called Build the Wall, and sees you stacking bricks along "the Southern border" in order to repel invading zombies. Unlike in regular Tetris - yes, I've played the Trump game, I'm definitely going to hell now - you aren't trying to clear lines of blocks. Instead, blocks defeat wandering undead of the same colour.
The game appeared last week alongside a swathe of other Trumpist propaganda games, based on the likes of Snake and Flappy Bird. A few of these games include goofy reworkings of Sony, Nintendo and Xbox console logo screens. The three platform holders have yet to comment. But the Tetris Company? They're coming out swinging with a... gently worded appeal to human community.
Civilization 7 is getting a new free update that takes the 4X strategy series into the atomic age, while trying to make nuclear era conflict a little more elaborate than just being first to research the requisite city-killing technology. Add in some new city state proxy war functionality, and you seemingly have everything you need to go full Henry Kissinger.
Sundays are for luxuriating in the chill of the September air and hoping for more of the drenching rain that's ended the summer heat. Though, it's a luxuriating that's quickly pierced by the worry that we've seen the last warm weather of the year. Winter isn't far off and all the gaps around the windows in the living room are going to start making themselves known again.
I can take or leave a majority of Death Stranding's story (BB forever, though), but I gotta give it to Kojima: delivering stuff is fun. There's a genuine complexity to the process of deciding what to pack and how you pack it, making the simple act of delivering something like a pizza legitimately challenging. So I'm quite tickled by the look of Pinetrail, a much less apocalyptic delivery game where you drive a tiny three-wheel rickshaw truck transporting packages across luscious forests and mountains.
