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While Capcom looks to ramp up their presence on mobile with the incoming release of Resident Evil 4 and Village on iPhone, as well as the Pokemon Go-like Monster Hunter Now, the publisher’s president has promised that PC will remain a central focus.
About a third of the way through Mineko’s Night Market, a young boy dressed as a fish says to his octopus-chopping father, “What? I just thought sending the local errand kid on missions was how people acquired stuff on this island.” To many, this will simply be a comic jibe at what you, the aforementioned local errand kid, have been doing for the last eight hours or so. After moving to this rural backwater with your dad in search of a better life, you quickly realise that no one in this town ever gets off their arse to get anything done.
Instead, it’s up to you, Mineko, to fulfil every last one of their desires, whether it’s collecting 50 bits of wood so they can construct a frame for their new house (before asking you for 50 bits of paper to give it some flimsy-looking walls), buying and delivering them a sports drink they could have easily got themselves from the local shop, or crafting a flower box for them because, well, they asked you to. As I said, industry isn’t exactly their strong suit here, and you’d be forgiven for wondering how any of them functioned as human beings before you arrived.
But this line of dialogue also strikes right at the heart of what a joyless experience Mineko’s Night Market is. It reveals the cold, lifeless husk beneath its lovely visuals. It’s nothing but ‘Me, me, me’ and ‘Take, take, take’ in this game, and NPCs offer nothing in return except soul-crushing tedium and a long list of repetitive chores. Animal Crossing this is not, my friends, so don’t be fooled. This is about as far from ‘cosy’ and ‘cute’ as you can possibly get – and that’s despite it having dozens of pet-able cats.
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, enjoy being stalked through the streets by a murderous ice cream van, being killed by a walking shark, flushing yourself down a toilet as fast travel, and many more attractive and interesting sights. Come look at these indie games!
Reworked skill trees and new minigames aside, Cyberpunk 2077‘s 2.0 update includes a Ukrainian localisation of the game’s million-plus-word script. It turns out the Ukrainian version is awash with references to Russia’s on-going invasion of Ukraine, all of it seemingly in support of the latter. The news comes via Zone of Games, who have published a few side-by-side comparisons from the game’s files, underlining differences between the English and Ukrainian translations in various bits of dialogue and menu text.
I asked the organisers of Indie Cup – a Kyiv, Ukraine-based digital festival of games like Pahris Entertainment’s upcoming Space Wreck – to help me double-check the Ukrainian version’s alterations. The Indie Cup team’s Arsenii Tarasov was happy to oblige, and also volunteered a few further examples of more… adventurous localisation from his own research, supported with screenshots.
The conversation/free-for-all around the role of automated “AI”-based game development continues with a few thoughts from Tom Hall, co-founder of id Software and one of the creators of the original DOOM, who says he’s (Commander) keen on the prospect of “ethical” uses for such tools in gamedev, but worries that reliance on them “will homogenize games, sort of like AAA games are now”.
PlatinumGames co-founder Hideki Kamiya is leaving the company to work on new projects. His last day is 12th October 2023. Announcing the move on Xitter, Platinum thanked Kamiya for “his creative ideas, leadership, and contribution to the growth of PlatinumGames from our start-up to this very day”.
It’s happening again. As sure as Square Enix overestimating their sales projections, as sure as John Riccitiello pissing off every available customer, EVE Online developers CCP will try to make a first-person shooter set in the same universe.
This time it’s called EVE Vanguard, a shooter “module” which will sit within the EVE launcher and asychronously connect to EVE Online.
Payday 3 launched earlier this week. As reported back in July, it requires players to connect to a server even if they’re playing solo or with a few friends in a private match.
You can already guess the third sentence: the servers have been a disaster at launch, with players forced to queue for long periods just to play alone, if they can manage to play at all. It currently sits “Mostly Negative” reviews on Steam – that’s 31% positive after almost 19,000 reviews.
The Fractal Design North is one of the most popular recent PC case releases, combining a beautiful wood front panel, leather accents and excellent ventilation with a modern, easy-to-build mid-tower design. The North normally retails for £125 or more, but today you can pick it up for a more reasonable £110 when you buy from Box via Ebay, using code SAVINGS20 before September 28th. That’s the cheapest this case has ever been in the UK!
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Dragon’s Dogma was the action-RPG for people who wanted to play alone, but didn’t want to feel alone. By far its most charming feature was the Pawn system, whereby you’d create an AI-controlled sidekick and hire two others, shared online by other players, to accompany you on your journey through a fantasy wilderness of tumbledown castles and goblin campfires. Pawns make dependable companions in many respects – pinning enemies for you to tag-team kill, healing or resurrecting you, opening chests you’ve missed, and enchanting your weapons at the outset of each skirmish. But what makes them fun to be around is that they’re a bunch of massive buffoons.
Pawns talk without cease as you explore: a steady patter of idle observations about well-wrought staircases and the local fish trade, advice about the bestiary and, in the case of Pawns recruited from other players, quest tips based on time in their own worlds – all of it couched in the game’s quirky faux-medieval dialect. Pawn dialogue is highly context-sensitive, and very often, nonsensical. They’ll climb into fountains and complain that they’re wet, and launch into pithy descriptions of monsters even as they’re set on fire. It ought to be maddening, but somehow, it never is – probably because the Pawns never actually attempt to be witty like ally characters in, say, Xenoblade Chronicles. They’re resolutely straight foils in a realm of lions with snakes for tails, chaotic boulder traps, unpleasantly lusty ogres, and players who push the wrong buttons and make random decisions on the fly. Well, pawns are back in Dragon’s Dogma 2, which I recently played an hour of, and they’re chattier than ever.
