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Less than a week after The Day Before’s disastrous launch on PC, following multiple delays and becoming the most wishlisted game on Steam, the makers of the zombie-survival shooter have announced their closure.
It’s been a good few months since Final Fantasy 16 was properly confirmed as coming to PC. While we’re yet to get a release date, development of FF16 on PC clearly continues apace, as the game’s producer has teased a few more details – including the fact you’ll need an SSD to play.
Banishers: Ghosts Of New Eden is a game of twos. It has two protagonists and two broad ways of playing, leading to two broad narrative outcomes, and is created by a company who, as Don’t Nod’s lead narrative designer Elise Galmard explained to me at a preview event last month, feel like they make games for two different audiences – fans of noodly narrative intrigues on the one hand, and of fantasy combat games on the other. Among the game’s challenges, of course, is to blend these halves convincingly.
A spiritual (hah) follow-up of sorts to 2018’s fairly well-received Vampyr, it takes place in the alt-historical realm of New Eden, which is kind of 17th century colonial North America through the lens of Dragon Age: Inquisition with a pinch of Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice. The titular Banishers are a ghost-hunting couple, the Scotsman Red MacRaith and the Cuban Antea Duarte. Antea is killed at the very beginning of the game, during a battle with an especially noxious spook, but she soon returns as a spirit, and your overall story objective is to either resurrect her body or help her “Ascend” to the afterlife.
In just over a month’s time, the entire mainline Ace Attorney series will finally be playable on PC with the arrival of the Apollo Justice Trilogy. Launching on January 25th 2024, this collection bundles together the fourth, fifth and sixth games in Capcom’s excellent lawyer ’em up – Apollo Justice, Dual Destinies and Spirit Of Justice – which originally launched on the Nintendo DS and 3DS across a ten year period between 2007 and 2016. It’s been funny revisiting the earlier cases of these games after so much time has passed. Apollo’s name may be the one on the box, but the series’ original cover star Phoenix Wright is never far from the front lines – not only does he get tangled up on the wrong side of the law in Apollo’s own debut outing, but he’s back as a full-time defence attorney on the (w)right side of the legal bench in the other two.
At the time, poor old Apollo always felt like he got the short end of the stick as Capcom tried to figure out what to do with the series, and to some extent, he still does – for he never quite gets out from under Phoenix’s shadow to completely hold court on his own two feet. But now, after 2021’s excellent Great Ace Attorney Chronicles proved that neither time, setting or its lead defence need to be set in stone for the series to carry on, the pressure does feel ever so slightly less intense on a second visit. There’s no denying Apollo still has a bit of an uphill climb on his hands, but if, like me, you’ve been waiting for these games to be freed from their Nintendo-bound prison, this is arguably the best glow-up Capcom’s done to the series to date.
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, like many weeks, my head is full of Metal Gear Rising’s RULES OF NATURE. But unlike most weeks, it feels relevant. This week I saw an indie game where you slow-mo slice weapons and armour off robots in a forest and oh, that’s doubly rules of nature right there. Plenty of other attractive and interesting indie games are about too, come have a look!
This door to the RPS Advent Calendar is chrome-plated with a bright neon trim around the edges. It was all lovely and pristine looking until yesterday, when someone rudely broke out the graffiti cans and sprayed a big “Corpo 4 LIFE” tag on the front.
Doom turns 30 this year, and that’s a cause for celebration. There are many reasons to commemorate id Software’s 1993 jaunt through the demon-infested corridors of Mars, from the fact that you can play it on every device known to man to its undying modding scene that even lets you pet Cacodemons. But I have a personal connection with Doom that’s a bit special. It’s the first game that made me so sick I wanted to puke.
It’s the second to last week before we set down our pickaxes, shoulder our packs and embark on that greatest adventure of all: holiday. The Maw tends to be at low ebb over the Xmas period, because it has a violent allergy to festive cheer. But for the moment, it still clamours for News.
Some game releases we’re pondering this week: squad-based RTS Stargate: Timekeepers (12th Dec), Settlers spiritual follow-up Pioneers of Pagonia (13th Dec, early access), anime chainsaw metroidvania Cookie Cutter (14th Dec), “pixel pulp” visual novel Bahnsen Knights (14th Dec), and multiversal metroidvania Trinity Fusion (15th Dec).
“When people read anything, no matter the source, they will believe it.” So says Doom designer John Romero on the subject of his relationship with John Carmack. Together, the pair built id Software and the FPS genre as we know it – before the cracks started to show during the difficult development of Quake, ending their professional partnership.
Yet any lasting acrimony has now dissipated. That became apparent when Romero’s new autobiography, ‘Doom Guy: Life In First Person’, showed up on shelves with a glowing back cover quote from Carmack. The latter praised Romero’s “remarkable memory”, and waxed wistfully about their shared impact on the gaming medium. “For years, I thought that I had been born too late and missed out on participating in the heroic eras of computing,” Carmack wrote. “Only much later did I realise that Romero and I were at the nexus of a new era – the 3D game hackers.”
