Gaze down the sights of today’s Advent Calendar window and you’ll find time is a tricksy, malleable concept that’s all slow-motion power slides and extraordinary grenade explosions. Just mind the gibs on the floor there. Wouldn’t want to stain your boots.
I haven’t been keeping up with player reaction to the latest Twar and Twarhammer games, but it seems players are none too pleased with Creative Assembly right now. In a rather dramatic open letter, the company’s vice president Roger Collum has acknowledged that Total War: Warhammer 3’s Shadows of Change add-on and the recent historical strategy outing Total War: Pharaoh did not ship in a desirable state, with complaints ranging from wobbly execution to overpricing. The studio will try to make things right by offering partial refunds to Pharaoh owners and giving away DLC on top of the usual updates.
The first mod I ever downloaded was Skyrim. It replaced NPCs with Shrek. The second was a texture pack for Dark Souls: Remastered. I believe that these two examples form a representative sample of what mods are: quality of life improvements, and Shrek. DOOM’s modding community, known by its file package WAD, is the Ur modding community. Thanks to John Carmack’s lightning-fast engine, creating levels and content for DOOM has been accessible for 30 years. WAD devs have gone on to become fully-fledged gamedesigners, and some WADs have been released commercially. The breadth and depth of this community formed the bedrock of game developers. And yet even with this pedigree, MyHouse.WAD is a miracle.
Ultrawide monitors often come at a premium, but right now you can pick up a 34-inch gaming monitor for just $199 – just in time for the winter holidays where you’ll have a chance to snuggle up and play some video games!
That’s a phenomenally good price for a 3440×1440 LG model with a 100Hz refresh rate and FreeSync/G-Sync Compatible support for gaming. The monitor is even based around an IPS panel that covers 99% of the sRGB gamut with wide viewing angles and good colour accuracy, making it a good choice for content creation too.
505 Games have released a chunky overview trailer for the heavily Suikoden-inspired RPG Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes – which means it’s time once again for me to share that one Suikoden story I have about how I bought Suikoden 2 for PS1 but got bored and traded it in, and now PS1 copies of Suikoden 2 regularly sell for hundreds of pounds, and why, why, didn’t you keep that in your sock drawer, Edwin, instead of your prized vintage copy of V-Rally, current average eBay price £3.99???
Plus which, Suikoden 2 is clearly one of the best RPGs ever made, Edwin, you blundering oaf, you absolute weapon. Arrrrgh. Hopefully Eiyuden Chronicle will ease the agony a little when it goes on sale on 23rd April 2024.
“I was looking up our Wikipedia page to see what happened this year,” says Nightdive Studios’ CEO Stephen Kick as we sit down to chat. That might seem like an odd thing to say about your own company’s activities. But when you look at what Nightdive have done in the last twelve months, it’s less surprising. In March, Nightdive announced they were being acquired by Atari in a deal worth $10 million. In May, they released their long-anticipated remake of System Shock, in development for eight years. July brought Rise Of The Triad: Ludicrous Edition, while August saw the release of Quake 2 Remastered, and a remaster of Turok 3 arrived at the end of November. Nightdive are currently working on an overhaul of Star Wars: Dark Forces, due out in 2024.
In short, it’s been a busy year for the remastering maestros. In the wider context of 2023, which has been simultaneously a banner games and a deeply worrying year for the people making them, I wanted to know how Nightdive view the last twelve months, and what the audience response to these projects means for the studio’s future.
Intel have finally confirmed the full lineup and specs for their 14th gen Meteor Lake CPUs, which for now is comprised entirely of ultrathin laptop chips with the new Core Ultra branding. I appreciate that a PC gaming site might not be the most natural home for this information, considering both that these are not technically gaming CPUs and that that Meteor Lake’s most hyped-up feature is more of a productivity aid: a Neural Processing Unit (NPU) for client-side AI work. However, as the new H-series parts also integrate Intel Arc graphics for the first time, there is some interesting potential for them to transform lightweight ultrabooks into viable gaming laptops.
Video game openings have always been a source of fascination for me. As a player, you’re excited by the prospect of the game to come – the sights you’ll see, the challenges you’ll face – and first impressions can make or break your entire perception of what a game is versus the one you had stored in your head before switching it on. For video game creators, however, a new beginning is often racked with questions. What, exactly, do you choose to show players first? How will you introduce them to something they’ve never seen before? And if that game is successful, how do you keep reinventing that first impression across what could be several decades?
In revisiting every mainline Doom game to celebrate its 30th anniversary this month, it’s clear that even id’s iconic shooter has wrestled with how to answer these question, and the ways it’s tried to reinvent itself over the years paints a captivating portrait of a series trying to move with the times. Nowhere is this more apparent than in its opening levels. Played in close succession, crushing 30 years into not even quite three hours, what emerges isn’t just the evolution of one of the all-time great PC games, but also a potted history of the FPS. So join me as we chart Doom’s rise, fall and rebirth through the lens of its first stages.
We’re over halfway through this year’s RPS Advent Calendar now, and spoilers, but you can’t leave now without seeing it through to the end. We’ve walled up the Treehouse and everything so you can’t escape.
