Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Microsoft have delivered a timely reminder that AI isn’t just effective at injecting ugly, soulless anti-art and nonsense robochat into your games – it also has the power to ruin your entire PC.

MS recently updated a support article explaining the ‘agentic AI’ features they plan to roll out for Windows 11, which involve creating a separate desktop instance and allowing AI ‘agents’ to perform supposedly menial tasks (like file sorting and email sending) within it. All while you kick back on your main workspace, online shopping for the third yacht that the AI revolution has surely enabled you to afford. Unfortunately, among the agents’ capabilities is the risk of installing malware.

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Further down the page there are horrifying phrases like “makes Europa Universalis seem limited” and “every planet and moon and asteroid, all orbiting in real time”, woven through a fascinating account of a game that is sort of XCOM, but you’re organising a whole Earth’s worth of competing countries and factions to repel solar system invaders who may not even materialise for dozens of hours. But of course Hooded Horse are publishing it. This was one of their first signings, I believe. Those sickos.

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Warhammer 40,000: Darktide is getting another new class, revealed last night as the Hive Scum. They’re a suitably skull-adorned outlaw who can dual-wield guns or shivs, while indulging in a cheeky bit of chemical warfare by homebrewing stimulants and lacing their weapons with harmful chems. Basically the opposite of the space-narc Arbites class added this summer, then: they got exploding dogs, the Hive Scum gets exploding drugs.

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Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 creative director Guillaume Broche of Sandfall Interactive would very much like to play a remaster of Lost Odyssey, the mournful 2007-released Xbox 360 RPG from Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi and development studio Mistwalker. He feels the game was cruelly dinged by reviewers of the era for adhering to certain conventions. He also reckons it’d have done better if it had released for hardware other than the Xbox 360, which was trying to make in-roads among Japanese consumers at the time.

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80 Days and A Highland Song developers Inkle once pitched a Doctor Who game to the BBC, narrative director and writer Jon Ingold has revealed in a Bluesky post. While the BBC never responded to their overtures, the pitch became the basis for Inkle’s very excellent and bodacious astral archaeology sim Heaven’s Vault. I consider this a cool thing to know, and so do our friends at Eurogamer. They’ve just published an interview with Ingold, which includes tantalising details of a forthcoming Heaven’s Vault reveal of some kind.

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There’s a bit more excitement than usual, even among veteran car-watchers like me, for next year’s F1 season. You see, the series is bringing in some new rules governing what its cars will look like and how they’ll perform, meaning there’s more potential on paper for serious changes to the established pecking order. Given that, I’m a bit unsure how to feel about EA and Codemasters having announced they’re not making an F1 26, instead skipping ahead to 2027 with a DLC to fill the gap.

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Guild Wars Reforged, a big update to 2005 MMORPG Guild Wars that’s designed to make it a lot more convenient to play on modern hardware, is set to hit Steam on December 3rd. Steam Deck verification, modern controller support, and an interface revamp are among the tweaks developers ArenaNet and 2weeks have made, with the possibility of further “improvements” down the road being teased.

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The word “morsel” comes from the Latin “mordeo”, meaning “I bite”. Every time you play Morsels, you are bitten and eaten by a horrible cat. The beast’s incisors crash shut around the screen, and you tumble slowly down its oesophagus after the game’s squealing mouse protagonist.

I could write a whole article about the bastardly antics of cats – there’s one living next door who’s at that stage of feline youth when she really, really enjoys playing with her food. But the first time I succumbed to those jaws, I thought instead of the plughole in my bathroom sink, a trivial hellmouth full of hair and toothpaste. I thought, too, of the tenacious little flies that keep emerging from that soap-scummed porcelain sphincter, the life that keeps surfacing from a conduit of my filth.

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Battlefield 6‘s latest set of additions, dubbed the California Resistance update, have arrived today, November 18th. Alongside the unboxing of the new suburban skirmish setting that is the Eastwood map and a sabotage mode, the update brings a sizeable patch with tweaks aimed at the likes of ensuring bullets do end up where you intend and making sure mortars are clean enough to eat meals off of.

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I really don’t think it’s appreciated how much of a powerhouse Analgesic Productions are. Comprising just two developers, Melos Han-Tani and Marina Kittaka, their work always manages to present new takes on established genres, or games that have become genres. There’s both Anodyne 1 and 2: Return To Dust, which borrows from various Zeldas in fresh ways, Sephonie, an involved and conscious take on the 3D platformer, and now Angeline Era, a nonlinear action-adventure game inspired by the early Ys games and Irish mythology, which just got a release date.

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