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Virtual reality-focused developers Wimo Games have joined the ever-expanding list of studios to be hit by layoffs and closure in recent months, as the Battle Bows and Micro Machines: Mini Challenge Mayhem studio confirmed their closure last week.
The Nvidia tools used to create that raytraced Portal mod and other fanciness are now in open beta, inviting all and sundry to jazz up everything from Deus Ex to Garry’s Mod. Nvidia’s RTX Remix tech lets people fancify old games by injecting fancy modern lighting, new models, textures ‘remastered’ by AI, new environmental decoration, and other such fanciness, even if the game doesn’t have mod support. I’ll be curious to see what people make with this, though I am wary of artlessly pumping new tech into old games.
Pocketpair’s monster-collecting survival game Palworld has rekindled the eternal debate over what exactly constitutes a breach of copyright. While the game’s mechanics are more reminiscent of Ark: Survival Evolved and other tree-punching, template-arranging wilderness sims, its monsters owe obvious debts to Nintendo and Game Freaks’ Pokémon games.
The developers have something of a track record on this front, with their older early access release Craftopia freely stirring in nods to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. But what separates copyright infringement from a flagrant, but perfectly legal rip-off? Given that a lot of people are making the case for Palworld being copyright theft online, I thought it might be useful to seek insight from (ominous roll of thunder) an actual lawyer.
The next Cyberpunk game from CD Projekt – currently codenamed “Orion” – might have multiplayer in it, according to co-CEO Michal Nowakowski. Please let it be some kind of deckhead ‘passenger-seat-driver’ mode, where you get to play a crusty celeb uploaded to another character’s brain implants, who strolls around the landscape as a hologram, offering gritty commentary on your Night City-based endeavours. Watch those corners, samurai! Hey, you missed an ammo pack. SAMURAI ARE YOU LISTENING TO ME.
It’ll be a while till we find out for sure: Orion is still in the conceptual phase, with CD Projekt expecting to have about 80 people working on it by the end of this year. The higher priority in 2024, it seems, is the next big steaming helping of The Witcher.
Embracer Group is once again doing sterling work to demonstrate the perils of consolidation. Piranha Bytes, who are one of well over a hundred studios that Embracer bought up in recent years, today posted a statement on Xitter saying “Don’t write us off yet!”. The statement goes on to say that they’re “convinced they will succeed”. Succeed at what, you might ask? Not being shut down by Embracer.
For a series that’s defined by its trials and elaborate murder cases, the greatest crime in Ace Attorney history is arguably one we never get to see or take part in. Okay, maybe crime is too strong a word. Miscarriage of justice is perhaps more appropriate, and specifically that of Apollo Justice, the cover star of this latest trilogy in Capcom’s beloved lawyer ’em up. Except poor old Apollo isn’t really what holds this collection of Ace Attorneys 4, 5 and 6 together at all. Sure, he features in all of them, but at the end of the day, it’s still the series’ original bluffer supreme Phoenix Wright who heads up most of the casework here, relegating his new protegee back to bench-warming duties almost as soon as Apollo’s debut game rolls its credits. What’s more, he quickly has to share that space with Athena Cykes, another new hotshot lawyer that enters the firm in Dual Destinies and continues the scrappy defence trifecta in Spirit Of Justice.
The result is a set of games that feel considerably wobblier than Capcom’s first and more robust Ace Attorney trilogy, and quite a bit more unfocused than the more recent Victorian-era spin-off, The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles. But despite a slightly unsure start, there are still plenty of career highs to be found here for Wright, Cykes and Justice, and Spirit Of Justice in particular remains one of the series’ best entries to date. Those new to Ace Attorney should absolutely begin their journey elsewhere, but for series completionists, the Apollo Justice Trilogy is quite the welcome development.
Every weekend, indie devs show off current work on Twitter’s #screenshotsaturday tag. And every Monday, I bring you a selection of these snaps and clips. This week, my eye was caught by dozens upon dozens of spam accounts hijacking the tag to promote cryptocurrency garbage. Twitter’s journey to uselessness continues. But after reporting dozens of accounts in the vain hope that Twitter might at least knock these particular bots offline (knowing it’ll never actually address the wider problem), I was delighted to admire a great many attractive and interesting indie games. Check out this week’s pick!
“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.
