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I’ve been looking forward to Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 since it was announced, but I might wait a while longer before trying to play it. It launched yesterday and currently sits at “overwhelmingly negative” Steam reviews due to long loading times caused by server issues.
Gang Beasts is one of the games I think of when I recall the golden days of video game expos, before Covid rolled up and nuked the business model. It casts you as one of several jellybaby pugilists, fighting for dominance over such locations as Ferris wheels and the tops of speeding vans. All of the characters are 1) seemingly drunk, and 2) subject to real-time physics. Your abilities consist of 1) punching, headbutting or kicking people, perhaps knocking them out for a few seconds, and 2) grabbing people and things and either hoisting them skyward like a wrestler, or hoisting yourself skyward like a toddler climbing onto Mummy’s head. The only way of defeating people is to hurl them off-map.
One of my proudest pictures of a 2018 trip to Croatia wasn’t of me and my pal. No, it wasn’t of the beautiful scenery or the glistening sea either. It was of many cats lying in the sun together outside a little church. I hadn’t seen that volume of cats in my life, nor that volume together in one spot, all hanging out. Now, you too can live this magic: there’s a demo of this upcoming sidescroller called Neko Odyssey on Steam, and it consists of you taking photos of cats for internet clout. It’s nice!
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Shadow Of Chornobyl is out today. As you may have read, it’s on the buggy side. Buggier than a bucketful of locusts. Buggier than Kafka’s Metamorphosis. In our S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Shadow Of Chornobyl review, wasteland wanderer James called it “easily the most borked FPS I’ve played in years”, detailing such issues as HUD elements disappearing, stuttery performance, flashing textures and character mouths not working properly.
Did last week’s paranormal body-swapper Slitterhead leave you cold? Do you consider its brain-jacking of rando cityfolk for monster-hunting purposes a sad waste of potential? Perhaps you’ll prefer RAM: Random Access Mayhem, in which you’re a fugitive AI hopping between warlike robot bodies in top-down view.
Yes, the subtitle involves both a colon and a dad joke, but the demo is entertaining – Nuclear Dawn meets Ctrl Alt Ego, in short. The one major criticism I have after 20 minutes or so is that the flat pixelart perspective makes walls and walkable surfaces look interchangeable, and this feels more like a question of acclimatisation than a real complaint.
On 11th October 2024, three video game studios announced themselves near-simultaneously as the creators of “spiritual successors” to ZA/UM’s mournful Marxist RPG Disco Elysium. First came Longdue, a conspicuously corporate operator who are making an untitled “psychogeographic RPG”. Dark Math Games followed around lunchtime – they’re making a sexy Antarctic ski resort mystery called XXX Nightshift. Finally, there was Summer Eternal, the mouthiest and Marxiest of the lot, who have set themselves up as a workers co-operative and have yet to announce a specific project.
In 2015 a flight by Germanwings carrying 144 passengers and six crew crashed into a mountain in the French Alps. Later, the authorities who investigated the crash judged it was intentional – somebody in the cockpit had purposefully crashed the plane in an act of suicide, killing themselves and everyone on board. Mouthwashing begins with the same premise, albeit in a sci-fi setting. You’re piloting a spaceship with a crew of five, clicking on its various controls to override the safety and turn the ship towards a nearby heap of space rock. You mean to crash. The words that appear moments before this sequence are chilling in their simplicity: “I hope this hurts.”
Remedy’s Control 2 will be an “action RPG“, the developers have announced, and while I have already caved and written it up, I’m not sure this is really news. Wasn’t the first game an action-RPG? True, it was a third-person shooter, but it also had a progression system with unlockable abilities and boosts. Besides, isn’t every action game an action-RPG these days? Levelling-up has become an industry-wide syndrome. Go on, name an action game that doesn’t have RPG-style elements. No wait, don’t actually do that. I was being rhetorical. Read the rest of this post first.
My time with Threshold has been fraught with pain. Five times. Five times I had to restart this psychological horror game because of some game-breaking bug. And yet, I persevered, booting it back up and returning to my government-mandated shift atop a quiet mountain.
Ultimately, I gave Threshold chance after chance because I was totally taken by my shift and my immense desire to find out just what I was actually doing. Anyway, it’s time for me to clock off! I urge you to take over until I’m back. It’s worth it.
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 launches on Steam and the Microsoft Store today. Developed once again by Asobo – otherwise celebrated for their stinking rat hordes – it builds upon the 2020 game by “[taking] advantage of the latest technologies in simulation, cloud, machine learning, graphics and gaming”, in the words of the launch announcement release
We’ve got a review in the works, but code has landed late, so our write-up might take a while. In the shorter term, I thought you might like to know how, exactly, MFS 2024 makes use of “machine learning” technologies, taking into account the energy cost of such wacky gadgetry and the creeping relationship between increased reliance on automated tools and laying people off. More immediately, you might like to know how much of your internet package it’ll devour as you play.
