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The advertising bonanza formerly known as E3 continues into its second day with another set of streams. The Wholesome Direct was today’s highlight, in my mind. The yearly collection of games that may or may not be cosy, but which definitely do not involve stabbing men in the neck, always contains some games worth keeping an eye on. This year was no different, and you’ll find the archived stream below.
Computer Artworks’ 2002 videogame adaptation of 1982 movie The Thing was a ghoulish and gripping third-person shooter with some terrific mechanics that weren’t quite fleshed out, flesh being the operative word. For instance: you can enlist surviving soldiers as squadmates, but are they really surviving soldiers, or are they human-shaped warrens of teeth and mandibles waiting to shower you in digestive juices? You have a limited supply of blood tests with which to determine whether any people you rescue are Things in waiting – and even as you’re worrying about them, they’re casting suspicious eyes at you, care of some embryonic “trust” and “fear” systems.
Sadly, much of this acute paranoia could be easily gamed out in practice – back in 2002, I deduced that contact with enemies increased the odds of infection, and adopted a policy of shooting anyone who’d been in my squad for too long. But it’s the kind of system an intelligent remake could pounce upon and have fun with. Sadly, Nightdive are not working on a remake, like their previous System Shock remakes. They’ve just announced that they’re making a remaster, due later this year. Still, I will take a Thing remaster and thus, the opportunity to write more about The Thing, over no remaster at all.
Capcom’s series about big beasts and the clothes you can skin/steal from them continues in Monster Hunter Wilds, which looked as great as ever in its newest trailer from tonight’s Summer Game Fest show. We get new peeks at some lovely dunes, reptile-chicken mounts and bulky weapons. Oh, and some monsters ripe for huntin’, presumably.
Are Tamagotchis a thing now again? I’m getting a sense they might be, but I’ll always associate them with the nineties. Ah, to return to a simpler time, where kids tripped each other up in the school hallways to steal toys , before Pokémon cards came along and everyone leveled up to stabbings. Sorry, Petal Runner devs, for opening a news article about your lovely wholesome game talking about stabbings. This gorgeous, fuschia-splashed, slice-of-life RPG is, if anything, the antidote to stabbings. In terms of game fatigue, anyway. It won’t cure tetanus, at least I don’t think so.
In what is only the third ever piece of videogame-related media to make me weep at my keyboard, Volgar the Viking devs and retro specialists Digital Eclipse have announced a Power Ranger videogame – Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: Rita’s Rewind. It’s a 90s-ass side-scrolling arcade brawler for up to five players, involves “time twisting”, and has mode-7-style arcade shooter bits together with the original TV show’s climactic mecha transformation sequences.
Stare into an abyss for long enough and, as Nietzsche wrote, a mostly naked man will wobble out of the abyss and try to murder you with a mattock. Inasmuch as can be told in the absence of dialogue or a text preamble, the naked man wants to murder you because you, and not he, are in possession of a hat. The hat makes you look like an eraser pencil from Forbidden Planet. It’s the kind of headgear worn by the kind of criminal Batman’s too grown-up to fight anymore. But it has, nonetheless, roused in this under-dressed stranger a sense of Dionysian frenzy. He will do anything for that hat – hewing your arms off, ripping your intestines out, tearing the skin from your ribcage. And you, in turn, will do anything to rob him of that mattock, because by the gods, it looks a lot more dangerous than the candlestick you’re trying to fend him off with.
There are many such lost souls in the bleak, midnight world of the Half Sword demo – all lurking near candle-lit piles of randomly spawned hammers, stools, barrels, axes and lengths of wood, all subject to unforgivably authentic physics and cursor-based attacks that conspire to transform every scuffle into a Monty Python blooper reel.
Sonar Shock is a reminder that some of the best game concepts or settings seem so obvious as soon as you play them.
System Shock on an unreasonably huge submarine on an equally ludicrous trip around the Northeast Passage via Cape Agulhas? With a satirical Soviet setting that isn’t just “lol russia” or “I think Stalker was about machismo and gun attachments”? And a third thing that I’ll get to in a minute because this intro is getting out of control? God yes.
Whether or not they actually amount to anything, rumours of a new Doom have had me diving back into Doom Eternal recently. There’s at least one level in it that feels like essay-bait, so I’m obliging. The centerpiece of Mars Core – the FPS’ best level – is a comically massive superweapon called the BFG-10000. Oh, Chekov. If only you could see what we’ve done with your wisdom. The literary subtlety to gun-big-enough-to-scar-planets pipeline will eventually subsume all of pop culture, and those of us who chose to specialise writing about headshots will alternate between grins and tears from the wreckage.
In my eternal quest to describe games concisely enough that you don’t feel robbed of time you could have just watched a trailer with, I am compelled to use many of the same words and word combinations ad nauseam. So, when a game like horror tower defence Bella Wants Blood comes along and uses some odd nouns, I get all excited. Here, that’s because I get to recklessly spaff out terms like ‘Blood Gutters’, ‘The Rattler’, and your friend and mine, ‘The Stabber’. Barely an atom quivers in Bella Wants Blood that hasn’t been stylised or made odd and alluring in some way.
Back in 2020, fresh out of high school and feeling unstoppable, Charles Maddock and a few friends “decided to code a game about Fish Wizards.” The result was Fishards, Magicka-inspired PVP arena action that has you out-squirt, out-splash, and out-spellcast your mates. It’s a charmer, but after two years of dev, release saw it suffer the same sad fate as many multiplayer-only indies. People would play for half hour, says Maddock, then refund the game because they couldn’t find others to play with.
