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“Most of videogame history is alive and well due to the ability to pirate old video games,” Frank Cifaldi, founder of the Video Game History Foundation, tells me over a call. Last year, the preservation and archival non-profit put out a study revealing that 87% of games made before 2010 are out of print. “There’s no way to access them without either pirating them or buying antiques from vendors. That’s a scary place to be.”
When I innocently went on holiday on Thursday evening, Palworld was that flagrant cash-in survival game where you can make Pokemon – sorry, Pals – shoot guns and work on an assembly line. As of this morning, it’s among the most-played games in the world, one of just six to exceed one million concurrent players on Steam. Right now, it’s doing almost twice the numbers of Steam’s usual chart-topper Counter-Strike 2. We have entered the Pal Age, it seems – but how long will the feeding frenzy last? How much is owing to it releasing during the quiet time of year with a meme-ish premise, while capitalising on pent-up demand for a proper PC version of Nintendo’s monster-catching series? Much will depend, I think, on how quickly developers Pocketpair can update it and stay ahead of the usual early access game avalanche of community requests and complaints.
The latest Steam Deck beta client update is out, and it’s made a pretty neat addition to the quick-access performance menu. A tap of the Y button now brings up a brief explainer for whichever individual setting is currently highlighted, a handy lil’ reference for anyone who wants to customise how their Deck (or Steam Deck OLED) runs without knowing exactly how things like TDP limits and half-rate shading affect performance. Clearly it’s also a brutal attack on the livelihoods of honest hardware editors who write guides to this sort of thing, but whatever, Valve.
As W.H. Auden once wrote: “our apparatniks will continue making / the usual squalid mess called History: / all we can pray for is that Videogame News Writers may still appear to blithe it.” Welcome one and all to another week of addled product journalism care of your ever-salivating host, the Maw, ravenous hype god and certainly not a silly metaphor I’ve come up with to make my job sound grander than it should be.
This week’s menu of new videogame releases: world-jumping squad tactics adaptation Stargate: Timekeepers (23rd Jan); wild-eyed Soviet job sim Trans-Siberian Railway Simulator: Prologue (23rd Jan); Valheim-ish fantasy survival game Enshrouded (24th Jan, early access); fugitive Asgardian town-builder Roots Of Yggdrasil (24th Jan, early access); moody anime fighter Under Night In-Birth II Sys:Celes (24th Jan); rolly-polly shooter Go Mecha Ball (25th Jan); asymmetrical multiplayer dungeon romp Phantom Abyss (25th Jan); finger-jabbing courtroom drama Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney Trilogy (25th Jan); jaunty yakuza RPG Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth (25th Jan); infant witch adventure The Cauldron Kids: The Summoning of Mr. Vermicelli (25th Jan); hand-drawn horror MMORPG Mad World – Age of Darkness (25th Jan); high-kicking octa-quel (is it a word?) Tekken 8 (26th Jan).
During the full Xbox Developer Direct, we saw glimpses of the offices of developer MachineGames. As spotted by eagle-eyed viewers, there was a shot of a whiteboard at one point that appeared to have a Quake logo drawn on it underneath writing that seems to say “Quake 6.”
Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth releases this coming week and takes the series’ best boy protagonists to the new shores of Hawaii. It’s one of our most anticipated games of 2024. There’s a slight snag though: New Game+ mode, a staple of both the genre and the series, is this time locked away within the more expensive Deluxe and Ultimate Editions.
If you’re working on computers, sooner or later you’re going to have to face the facts and pick up a screwdriver set. Sure, that old Phillips screwdriver your dad gave you does the job most of the time, but wouldn’t it be nice to put it somewhere safe and get something a little more adaptable?
Walmart are doing a good deal on a Hyper Tough 77-piece screwdriver set, which is $10 versus its regular $16 – a good deal for a set that includes everything you’d need for PC building and maintenance and has attracted a 4.5/5.0 star average after 245 reviews.
Last Epoch is gunning for the action-RPG crown long held by Diablo (and recently contested by the likes of Path of Exile and Grim Dawn). With the power of time travel – and a flash-looking launch trailer – on its side, the indie hopeful certainly looks set to put up a decent fight when it exits Early Access in just over a month.
Genshin Impact’s next update, version 4.4, will drop on January 31st. As well as bringing back the game’s Lantern Festival with rewards including a new outfit, Vibrant Harriers Aloft in Spring Breeze will bring the usual additions of new characters, quests and a boss. There’ll also be a new area showcased with some shiny new visual tech, that you’ll be able to explore by transforming into a flying fish.
Palworld was obviously destined for success the moment a million games journalists and Twitter users wrote “Pokémon with machine guns”. (Acceptable alternate nicknames include “Eevees with uzis” and “Abras who’ll stab-ya”.) Having finally launched into Early Access on Steam and Game Pass this week, that prophecy has rung true as the monster-catching survival game has caught (ha, ha) so many players that its servers are struggling to handle the load.
