Dienstag, 31. Dezember 2024

The RPS Selection Box: Ed's bonus games of the year 2024

Unlike a lot of the team I'd imagine, my opinion is this: I thought the year was quite middling for games. Or at least, it was middling for my own personal taste, which is quite unsavoury at the best of times. Most of my best picks made it into the calendar proper, but a couple didn't. One I hadn't even played properly until after the vote, and the other? The other is a flawed pick, but one that I couldn't stop thinking about.

Anyway, hope you all have a restful Xmas folks and a cracking new year. I hope Santa bought you some nice warm socks or a chocolate orange so dense, you could tee it off at your local golf club.

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The ninth RPS Christmas Cracker 2024

The fell moons rise, and in their cold glare emerges a parcel from the dirt. Bloat and gangrene, crimped as if by tourniquet. A dark promise wriggles within. Grip the fibrous handles, feel its jagged soul imprint upon your palm. Now pull! Rend the sinew, tear muscle from bone, hatch their fetid gift! The yoke draws near! Take up the slip and read the words upon its face.

Time to enjoy your lovely joke!

Q: What game does Geoff Keighley play now that E3 is gone forever?

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Montag, 30. Dezember 2024

What's on your bookshelf?: Time has no bearing here as we enter the space between the clock hands edition

Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome to The Space Between The Days. Missed the streak? Missed it? Missed the weekly Sunday column? Missed my deadline because I bought a new matress yesterday and spent most of the day lounging, limbs akimbo like a petulant starfish making noises no starfish has or will ever make? Missed the streak? You are simply wrong. Time has no bearing here. Here is the column. I've been reading Mark Forsyth's books on words and this very good New Yorker column about Kanye West smashing up an architectural masterpiece.

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Sonntag, 29. Dezember 2024

The seventh RPS Christmas Cracker 2024

The fell moons rise, and in their cold glare emerges a parcel from the dirt. Bloat and gangrene, crimped as if by tourniquet. A dark promise wriggles within. Grip the fibrous handles, feel its jagged soul imprint upon your palm. Now pull! Rend the sinew, tear muscle from bone, hatch their fetid gift! The yoke draws near! Take up the slip and read the words upon its face.

Time to enjoy your lovely joke!

Q: I want to role play as a singing gastropod! What game should I play?

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Samstag, 28. Dezember 2024

The RPS Selection Box: Brendan's bonus games of the year 2024

I'm a sucker for a good first-person runabout. I don't need to shoot, but it's sometimes nice to get a sword, or a big whip. As long as I get to be immersed in an adventure. I think that's the big theme of my selection box: being grounded within my player character. I want to feel what it's like to hike through canyons with too much sellable loot in my backpack. I want to park my soul in the head of a scared Scotsman way out of his depth, hundreds of miles from shore. The closer I can comfortably fit in my character's shoes, the more I seem to buy into the world they inhabit. Even if that world is constantly glowing a magnificent crimson.

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The sixth RPS Christmas Cracker 2024

The fell moons rise, and in their cold glare emerges a parcel from the dirt. Bloat and gangrene, crimped as if by tourniquet. A dark promise wriggles within. Grip the fibrous handles, feel its jagged soul imprint upon your palm. Now pull! Rend the sinew, tear muscle from bone, hatch their fetid gift! The yoke draws near! Take up the slip and read the words upon its face.

Time to enjoy your lovely joke!

Q: What's the best news you can hear after a trip to the vet?

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Freitag, 27. Dezember 2024

The RPS Selection Box: Nic’s bonus games of the year 2024

If pushed, I’d describe my 2024 gaming habits as eclectic, but that would actually be a lie. All my favourite games for the year are actually very similar: they are all the best. Unfortunately, the realities of sharing website space with several less-correctos means they didn’t all make this year’s advent calender.

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The fifth RPS Christmas Cracker 2024

The fell moons rise, and in their cold glare emerges a parcel from the dirt. Bloat and gangrene, crimped as if by tourniquet. A dark promise wriggles within. Grip the fibrous handles, feel its jagged soul imprint upon your palm. Now pull! Rend the sinew, tear muscle from bone, hatch their fetid gift! The yoke draws near! Take up the slip and read the words upon its face.

Time to enjoy your lovely joke!

Q: What d'you call a pair of komodo dragons making a sand castle?

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Donnerstag, 26. Dezember 2024

The fourth RPS Christmas Cracker 2024

The fell moons rise, and in their cold glare emerges a parcel from the dirt. Bloat and gangrene, crimped as if by tourniquet. A dark promise wriggles within. Grip the fibrous handles, feel its jagged soul imprint upon your palm. Now pull! Rend the sinew, tear muscle from bone, hatch their fetid gift! The yoke draws near! Take up the slip and read the words upon its face.

Time to enjoy your lovely joke!

Q: Why was the grave robber disappointed when he broke into Ubisoft's tomb?

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Mittwoch, 25. Dezember 2024

The third RPS Christmas Cracker 2024

The fell moons rise, and in their cold glare emerges a parcel from the dirt. Bloat and gangrene, crimped as if by tourniquet. A dark promise wriggles within. Grip the fibrous handles, feel its jagged soul imprint upon your palm. Now pull! Rend the sinew, tear muscle from bone, hatch their fetid gift! The yoke draws near! Take up the slip and read the words upon its face.

Time to enjoy your lovely joke!

Q: What's an etiquette teacher's favourite medieval sim?

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Dienstag, 24. Dezember 2024

The RPS Advent Calendar 2024, December 24th

Here we are, the final voyage of 2024. This is the last advent calendar entry of PC gaming website Rock Paper Shotgun. Days elapsed: 24. Writers employed: 8.

I hope this hurts.

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The second RPS Christmas Cracker 2024

The fell moons rise, and in their cold glare emerges a parcel from the dirt. Bloat and gangrene, crimped as if by tourniquet. A dark promise wriggles within. Grip the fibrous handles, feel its jagged soul imprint upon your palm. Now pull! Rend the sinew, tear muscle from bone, hatch their fetid gift! The yoke draws near! Take up the slip and read the words upon its face.

Time to enjoy your lovely joke!

Q: How can you tell a soulslike fan has fallen in love with a giant ape?

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Montag, 23. Dezember 2024

The RPS Advent Calendar 2024, December 23rd

An ancient tale, often re-told - and that's just the story of the development studio that made it.

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The first RPS Christmas Cracker 2024

The fell moons rise, and in their cold glare emerges a parcel from the dirt. Bloat and gangrene, crimped as if by tourniquet. A dark promise wriggles within. Grip the fibrous handles, feel its jagged soul imprint upon your palm. Now pull! Rend the sinew, tear muscle from bone, hatch their fetid gift! The yoke draws near! Take up the slip and read the words upon its face.

Time to enjoy your lovely joke!

Q: Why do oil rig workers only drink sparkling water?

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Sonntag, 22. Dezember 2024

What's on your bookshelf?: I am 90% yule log but I need to keep up the streak edition



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The RPS Advent Calendar 2024, December 22nd

It was a rainy day when she walked into my office, hard rain, like stray stones from a truck on the highway hitting your car bonnet. I lit my cyber-cigarette and put my feet on my desk, I don't know why, I thought it would make me look nonchalant to this strange woman. She wasn't impressed. "Detective," she said, glaring at me with eyes like gorgeous tennis balls, "I want to open today's advent calendar door." I was confused. "Whaddya wanna do that for, missy?" She sat back, relaxed, and pulled a gun from her purse. "I need to stuff a body into it."

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Samstag, 21. Dezember 2024

The RPS Advent Calendar 2024, December 21st

There's a slight breeze and a comforting glow coming from the crack's in today's calendar door, the sound of merriment and many accents from all over the world. Better join in the campfire revelry, because whoever's there won't be staying for long.

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What are we all playing this holiday?

Happy weekend all. Due to the intervention of Dark Powers and also, half the Treehouse already being on holiday, we neglected to do a round-up of staff Xmas plays before signing off for the year. Well, I’m pretty sure nobody did one. I can’t see anything scheduled in the RPS Post-A-Tron, but the RPS Post-A-Tron is an unreliable beast, full of malice and deceit. If I publish this and it turns out we have two, please divide into rival factions and have a comments war over which is the real one. Apologies! Normal service will resume next year.

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Freitag, 20. Dezember 2024

Microsoft Flight Simulator and the quest to replace Earth

Early on in Terry Pratchett's novel The Light Fantastic, a spell is cast to map the world. It begins as a "fireball of occult potentiality," dangling in the Great Hall of the Unseen University, which evolves into a ghostly "embryo universe." The embryo expands "lightly as a thought," with spectral continents "sleeting" through walls and people. It surges across the landscape until the entire population and geography of the Disc is exactly duplicated and enclosed by a shimmering shadow-self of "shining threads that followed every movement."

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Two Epic Games directors step down after US Department of Justice investigate games companies under antitrust laws

Two men on the board of directors for Epic Games have stepped down from their positions after the US Department of Justice investigated the board under antitrust laws. The pair of directors were originally appointed to Epic's board by Tencent (who slurp upon a minority stake in the Unreal Engine company) but the United States government took a look at this and said: ah-ah-ah, you're not allowed to have a director in your boardroom if they're already fingers-deep in the pie of a competing company. Naughty Tencent! Naughty Epic! And, yes, naughty Riot Games!

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Here are 5 snowy games you can get for cheap in the Winter Steam sale

Steam sales aren't the drop-everything-and-grab-yer-wallet events they used to be, according to you lot. The Winter sale that began yesterday is almost identical to the Autumn sale that ended just two weeks ago, for example. But you can still find one or two gifts if you bore deep enough into the ice. Me? I'm only interested in one thing. How many of these games are snowy and chilly enough to induce wonderful hypothermia? I'm on a frostbitten quest to find out. Here are the most winter-iest games you can pick up for cheap.

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Donnerstag, 19. Dezember 2024

Here is a page of insults

Insults are so serious, these days. They're all so insulting, whereas the kinds of insult I cherish are the ones that coax a belly laugh from both the instigator of the roast and the roastee. Here are a few stupid putdowns I've made up specially for Xmas, organised into tiers of savagery.

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The RPS Advent Calendar 2024, December 19th

Huh, it's a little hard to breathe today, don't you think? Like the air's a bit thin. Anyway, I have a job I need to get to and there's this guy who's going to mentor me on my first day. A guy called Mo, who seems nice but isn't particularly talkative. Prefers paper and pencil.

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After much talk of an acquisition, Sony and FromSoftware parent Kadokawa announce "strategic alliance"

It's been rumoured for a while that Sony are about to buy Kadokawa Corporation, a monolithic Japanese media conglomerate that means nothing to the bulk of you unless I append the magic words "parent company of Dark Souls developers FromSoftware" and possibly also, "parent company of Spike Chunsoft". Sony and Kadokawa were reported to be in talks last month, fomenting all sorts of speculation about, say, the PC version of Bloodborne being ritually sacrificed to consecrate the PS6-exclusivity of Dark Souls 4. Now, the pair have emerged from the Cave of Haggling and announced... "a strategic capital and business alliance agreement". What does this mean? Is it safe to scream yet?

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Mittwoch, 18. Dezember 2024

Helldivers 2's first licensed crossover is also Killzone's official debut on PC, sort of

After much teasing, the vicious tyrants of Arrowhead Games and their noxious puppets, the "democratic government" of Super Earth, have announced the very first Helldivers 2 licensed crossover. In yet another hollow display of solidarity in the name of "Liber-tea", they've teamed up with the loathsome fascists of Killzone, the elderly shooter series from Sony and Guerrilla Games.

From today, you'll be able to buy weapons, armour and cosmetics belonging to Killzone's despicable stormtroopers from the Helldivers Superstore, and there's the suggestion of an additional Killzone-themed reward depending on the fortunes of the so-called Galactic War, a xenocidal bloodbath couched as an exercise in bringing "freedom" to the huddled masses of the upstanding socialist Automatons, the blameless wildlife of the Tyranids, and the Wellsian cosplayers of the recently added Illuminate faction.

We here at Rock Paper Shotgun stand against Super Earth and Arrowhead's wanton aggression, which absolutely isn't a big satirical joke based on some Verhoeven film or other. Anyway, those capes. Find an image and further details below.

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Times Of Progress is an elegant, focussed city builder set during the Industrial Revolution

Times Of Progress is a special game for me, because is the first news tip I have ever received from Sin Vega, Prime Minister of Strategy Gaming. Sin once described writing news articles for our former news editor Alice0 (RPS in peace) as like practising backflips in front of the kung fu master. Writing about a new city builder at Sin's suggestion is like being invited to budget the development of Londinium by Julius Caesar.

The terror of screwing it up - together with other, more trivial distractions, like international games industry conferences- has stopped me from writing about Times Of Progress for months. Today I bite the bullet, and emerge from my lodgings to issue a hesitant speech to the masses, hoping like hell that Caesar is too preoccupied with the latest Gaul uprising to notice my errors.

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Dienstag, 17. Dezember 2024

I can't bear to play much of free horror game Toy Box, but I love the concept of pulling talking toys apart

Toy Box sounds like a very Xmassy game, but then you watch a trailer, and realise that it is not very Xmassy at all. It's a free visual novel with a macabre puzzling element. The setup is that you're a toy inspector working for a jovial Grand Toy Maker, his face hidden above the top of the screen. Your job is to disassemble toys - five in all - according to his eldritch written instructions, and either "salvage" them or "sentence" them to the incinerator.

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Gwent returns in The Witcher 4, according to CD Projekt's heavy hints

Quick, the world is in peril, your adopted daughter is under threat, and nearby villagers are being terrorised by monsters. What do you do? Oh, you're sitting down at a cosy table in the local tavern. You're playing a card game with a dude called "Aldert". The wind outside is howling, and so are the nightwraiths, but you're just sitting there. Playing another "cow" card. Okay.

Guess you'll be happy to learn that the Witcher 4 developers have more or less confirmed that Gwent will be making a return in the recently trailered Ciri-led sequel.

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Montag, 16. Dezember 2024

Boomer shooter dev discovers his dogs have been barking on an "unbearable" loop for years

Sometimes dogs are hard to shut up. Over a year and half after releasing Hrot from early access, the developer of the Quake-inspired shooter has fixed the dogs after discovering that a few of the canines have been, for some players, barking in a hideous and endless loop.

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Playing Wreckfest while learning to drive was surprisingly helpful

At 9 years old, in the plastic seats of a Sega Rally arcade machine, I quickly learned that "automatic" is better than "manual" without understanding why. And now I know: changing gears is a fucking chore. This year, in my mid-thirties, I finally learned to drive. And weirdly, a racing game about destroying clapped-out old bangers helped me along. Thank you Wreckfest, for all the bottled road rage you allowed me to unleash.

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The RPS Advent Calendar 2024, December 16th

Today’s door has a big DO NOT ENTER sign, suggesting your immediate opening of it was in fact prohibited. Banned. Taboo, even. Yet it’s hard to see why, as it swings open to reveal a spectacular sunset view, interrupted only by the roar of a mechanical woolly mammoth.

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The Maw: what's new in PC games this week?

Seasons greetings, reader! It's almost time to hang your stocking by the crackling fireplace and post your handwritten letters to Santa up the chimney. If you don't have stockings, a fireplace, or a pen, rest easy. I've had a word with Santa's elves, and they say it's permissible to hang a trash bag by your George Foreman grill or local equivalent, and leave a comment on an RPS article instead. Wot you want for Wintermas, then? Extra trash bags? New George Foreman grill? Whatever it is, Santa will provide. If he doesn't, I'll feed him to the Maw.

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Sonntag, 15. Dezember 2024

What's on your bookshelf?: I am going to sleep for several weeks edition

Can one sleep on a bookshelf? I'm going to find out. See you in the new year. Or, probably next Sunday with another minimum effort column entry. Book for now!

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The RPS Advent Calendar 2024, December 15th

Today’s advent calendar window is a window upon Xmas past. It returns us to the days of LAN parties and dial-up, of demo discs and Fileplanet – a more innocent era, before multiplayer shooters fell under the spell of progression. Not that innocent, maybe. There were plenty of arseholes back then. Some of them now run very large software companies. But at least there was no grinding to ruin your bunnyhopping.

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Samstag, 14. Dezember 2024

The RPS Advent Calendar 2024, December 14th

Squeezing through the advent calendar window into a sodden glade of flower and coral, you spy a curious organism on a ledge in the shadows. It’s a video game of some description, though it looks like a squirrel, with frantic white eyes. What’s it doing? Ah, whoops, you’ve startled it. Better follow it offscreen.

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What are we all playing this weekend?

Most of the population of the RPS treehouse is currently hanging limply off various branches after the ordeal that was "staying up until 6am to cover everything announced at The Game Awards. So let's keep this brief, and no one speak too loudly please, we're sensitive at the moment. Here's what we're all playing this weekend!

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Donnerstag, 12. Dezember 2024

Warren Spector and Thief's game director are making a multiplayer immersive sim called Thick As Thieves

A master thief creeps over cobbles in an early modern metropolis that splits the difference between Edinburgh, Glasgow and Liverpool. Lit by gaslamps that can’t quite dispel the industrial haze, they pass for a civilian - a rough one, admittedly, but not shady enough to cause an itch in the swordarm of any passing guard.

Until, that is, they take to the thieves’ highway - following the trajectory of their grappling hook upward to the rooftops, from which they can see the shape of the city, and the moon beyond. Up here, it’s a parallel world - the trees on street level answered by chimney stacks, and the distant hills echoed by the rise and fall of steep gables. “We’re super proud of these rooftops,” says Greg LoPiccolo. “It’s an amazing landscape that we put a lot of thought and effort into, and it’s a lot of fun to traverse.”

Back in 1998, LoPiccolo was the game director who saw Thief: The Dark Project to completion. Today - after an 18 year detour to Harmonix to lead projects like Guitar Hero and Rock Band, among other adventures - he’s the game director of Thick as Thieves. “It really is an opportunity to do something unique and cool and new, on the shoulders of this stuff that is now well-respected,” he says. “Thief has some legs, right? People still talk about it to some degree.”

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Mafia: The Old Country release date shrinks to summer 2025

Open world fuhgeddaboudit simulator Mafia: The Old Country will release in summer 2025, according to a Youtube trailer that has leaked on social media ahead of tonight's Game Awards. The trailer also treats us to a few snippets of the game's story scenes, shoot-outs and punch-ups. We get to see wise guys swinging knives, riding horses and glowering silently at sun-baked Sicilian countryside.

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A minor tweak to Steam will soon let you change the way you download that monstrous 250GB update

If your PC has ever started randomly roaring, and you check Steam only to find Space Marine 2 is panic-installing a 9 billion gigabyte update, then perhaps Valve's new upcoming feature is for you. For most of us, Steam simply slurps down fresh gigs of installed games automatically when a new update is released (and sometimes schedules the updates according to its own capricious whims). But the platform is testing a new option in the beta client, which lets you set download behaviour to git new gigs only when you actually launch a game. This would be a terrible curse, for reasons I will explain, but it's only going to be an option - not the new default.

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Untitled Goose Game and Thank Goodness You’re Here! publishers are doing a thing and I’m not sure what the thing is but it seems like a cool thing

I have to write at least 250 words for a news post. Rock Paper Shotgun’s CMS (content management system) even has a built-in widget that shouts at me if I don’t write at least 250 words. "Page 1 body content is quite short" it says if I go under. How cute is that "quite"? I love being fooled into getting charmed by automated systems via colloquial British understatement. Anyway, I bring this up because I honestly don’t have anything to add about Blippo+. I just wanted to inform you all of its existence. It's a "casual" "FMV" "Cinematic" "Pixel Graphics" "1980s" digital product from developers also named Blippo+, as well as publishers Panic, who've previously unleashed the horrible goose and Thank Goodness You’re Here! on the world. Have a visual orientation:

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Mittwoch, 11. Dezember 2024

Curiosmos is a galactic playground of planet creation and creature evolution

Infamous evolutionary flop Spore, for all its flaws, still had a lot of magic to it. It was fun to design your weird creatures, to watch them try to walk, and - in principle - to turn your humble creations into a spacefaring species.

Curiosmos is a very different game, but it has a little of the same appeal. It's a galactic playground in which you smash meteors together to make planets, then tinker with the ecosystems of those planets to make life and watch that life evolve. All while a hungry black hole lingers nearby, eager to consume everything you have created. There's an explanatory video below.

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Valve are now selling refurbished Steam Deck OLEDs at up to £110/$130 off – if you can find them in stock

The Steam Deck OLED has joined Valve’s Certified Refurbished programme, offering a much cheaper way of getting your hands on the best handheld PC around. Provided you don’t mind it being in someone else’s first, anyway. As with official refurbs of the original Steam Deck, "certified" Steam Deck OLEDs are formerly-broken models that have been returned to Valve, fixed up and tested in-house, then put back on the market at steep discounts. You’re looking at £389/$439 for the 512GB spec and £459/$519 for 1TB, down from £479/$549 and £569/$649 respectively.

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You can now scan and steal paint jobs from any car in Cyberpunk 2077, plus more customisation with the 2.2 update

While it’s always worth starting a new game of Cyberpunk 2077 just to hear Judy say "his own choomba shot him!" for the thirtieth time, there’s now a slightly more tangible reason to start a new journey into Night City’s open world. Update 2.2 went live yesterday, bringing with it a host of fixes, as well as some deeper customisation options for both your character and vehicles. The base game is also 55% off on Steam until the 18th of December, with the Phantom Liberty expansion at 20% off, or both in a 48% off bundle. Cyberpunk is on sale often enough, although these current discounts line up with the cheapest it's ever been on Steam. Again: worth it for the line.

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Dienstag, 10. Dezember 2024

The RPS Advent Calendar 2024, December 10th

Today’s advent calendar pick is one of 2024’s finest games we missed. It troubles our dreams and waking moments alike. It mushrooms in our peripheral vision and drifts towards us as we batter out advent calendar posts, hoping we can finish writing and beat a tactical withdrawal to the kitchen before the accusatory phantom overwhelms us. It’s a game about sin and projectile patterns and llamas. It’s...

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This is my first time learning of this nearly useless novelty keyboard gift and I am in mourning for all the microseconds I’ve wasted in my life

If we follow Marshall McLuhan’s ideas about technology being an extension of the body, then the copy and paste keyboard shortcuts are my equivalent of a trip to one of Cyberpunk 2077’s ripperdocs. In the writing of this single article, I will use them for links, HTML code, and other ephemera. I even copied McLuhan’s name across from a different tab, which I’m sure he’d appreciate/be horrified by. I love those shortcuts. I need them. They are the wind beneath my wings, and the crud buildup beneath the bottom left of my keyboard.

I cannot say how the first tailor to gaze upon a sewing machine felt, nor the first egg-abacus attendant to behold the sorcerous ticking of the automated egg timer. But I think now that when they saw those things, they were afraid. As I am afraid now.

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Montag, 9. Dezember 2024

Shiren the Wanderer: The Mystery Dungeon Of Serpentcoil Island Review: a traditional roguelite heavy on charm but light on agency

I’m quite smitten by the Nintendo DS stylings and traditional roguelike charms of Shiren the Wanderer: The Mystery Dungeon Of Serpentcoil Island, but I’m having real trouble summoning up the motivation to repeatedly grind through its opening levels to get to the interesting stuff. Early stages soon lose any real sense of surprise, and later ones can feel low on real agency. I want a new roguelike run to feel vital and verdant; heady with grand plans and plan-shattering twists. But by having randomness influence each run so significantly, Mystery Dungeon feels fickle instead of emergent - less than the sum of some incredibly novel and creative parts.

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The demo for Oolo offers up a magical metroidvania with hints of classic Zelda

“Hang on a sec. Haven’t I seen this exact genre of little guy before?” was my reaction upon encountering the yellow-eyed, hat-shrouded mage of isometric adventure Oolo. Some quick internet sleuthing turned up this lovely bit of art featuring Final Fantasy 9’s Vivi, Journey’s Traveller, and He-Man’s Orko. It’s a great feeling to begin your week identifying an archetype of diminutive magician, and I hope it becomes a regular occurrence. Another pleasant discovery was Oolo itself, which you can discover yourself through the shrouded magic of this link to it’s free demo.

(Do I need to keep writing ‘free demo’, by the way? I tend to alternate. It’s obviously redundant but I feel writing ‘free’ gives it a certain gravitas. Free tax rebate. Free sunrise. Free oxygen. It makes things sound better.)

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The Maw: what's new in PC games this week?

Happy this week all! It's almost time to give 2024 the finger, swallow a flagon of mince pie formula and tapdance backwards into the holiday, but the Maw still needs a little feeding and it has no appetite for mince pies. Nor will it eat tinsel, candy canes, mistletoe, snowmen or reindeer, though goodness knows we've tried. So much screaming. No, the Maw's penchant remains for new PC game releases, and thankfully, they are as thick on the ground as reindeer pelts.

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Sonntag, 8. Dezember 2024

The RPS Advent Calendar 2024, December 8th

Today's door is shimmering and promises dark magics within. It's an unlikely marriage of big budget publisher and a genre beloved most by smaller development teams. What mastery will unlock the door and expose the vast arenas within? Why, clicking to read more, of course.

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The Sunday Papers

Sundays are for, I hope, upgrading my PC swiftly and successfully and then getting down to business. Think of all the games I can now play! But I'll probably just play Dune Imperium.

Gail Mackenzie-Smith in Electric Lit wrote a Dear John letter breaking up with Wordle.

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Samstag, 7. Dezember 2024

Escape Simulator 2 announced with promises of Dracula's castle and an improved escape room editor

I had a few merry evenings playing Escape Simulator back in 2022. Of the co-op escape room games I've played, it was the best, both in terms of its relatively neutral framing (with little heavyhanded storytelling) and its pretty solid puzzle design. The game was expanded in the time since with a versus mode and several crossover DLC, and now there comes a sequel.

Escape Simulator 2 will explore "darker escape room themes", looks visually more detailed, and comes with a new editor for those who wish to design their own escape rooms.

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