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Action platformer duo Ratchet & Clank have been around for over twenty years, but they’re only arriving on PC for the first time on July 26th. That’s when Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, the latest game in the series, will leap through the frequently used portal between PlayStation 5 and PC.
EVGA’s Z20 mechanical keyboard has turned up on the RPS Deals Patch a few times, but always in the UK – and now we’ve finally seen a decent price drop on the US version over at Best Buy. Until June 1st, you can pick up this full-size optical mechanical keyboard for $59.99, a $115 discount from its MSRP and a great deal.
Playing Diablo IV gave me a real case of the “have I changed, or have the games changed?”, and I think the answer is “yes”. For the uninitiated, Diablo forms one of the jewels in Blizzard’s crown (maybe a smaller one, just offset to the Warfcraft centre stone), an action-RPG series that’s like if the kind of 90s metal album cover that has a skeleton on it asked to be turned into a game where you explode many hundreds of near-identical monsters to get incrementally better loot. This is a spoiler-free review of the latest greatest addition, following 2012’s Diablo III, but a Diablo game’s story is sort of unspoilable, both because a) paying attention to it is of passing importance to playing, and b) the plot of them is always basically the same anyway.
To wit: Sanctuary, a high-fantasy world with a low-fantasy vibe, and where so much as going to the next town over will be a brush with some horrible little goblin rat called a Flesh Thresher, was created as a respite from the eternal battle between heaven and hell. After X number of years of relative peace, one (or many) of the Lords Of Hell is doin’ some bad stuff. Usually Diablo, I’ll grant you. In this case it’s Lilith, a kind of Dante’s Lady Dimetrescu, who’s making people horny for being stepped on power. Diablo games have always had a Grand Canyon sized gulf between the cinematics (epic; luscious; brutal) and the game in practise (clicking). IV is no different. And you know. It’s fine.
When I previewed an early production sample of the Crucial T700, the theoretically fastest drive in the PCIe 5.0 SSDs vanguard, I said the price must be right for launch. Here was a drive that didn’t really move gaming performance beyond the best SSDs of the PCIe 4.0 generation, but could boot general read and write speeds into the stratosphere. That could be worth upgrading to, if the T700 itself stayed within reach of most PC owners.
Reader, the price is not right.
Tetris gobbled up so much of my time during the early years of university, partly because it functioned as a quick break between writing essays. Those quick breaks soon became trances though, as my eyes stayed unblinking and my fingers snapped across the keyboard with a mind of their own. The best game of all time, some might argue. Professional procrastinators can now rejoice as there’s a new way to play the blocky puzzler: Setris, or Tetris with sand.
Developers Iron Gate have been receiving questions about Valheim mods, and “what we as a company approve of – as well as what we don’t approve of.” So the team decided to clear up their stance on mods, and most notably, their stance on paid mods which is what they’ve been asked about the most.
Every weekend, indie devs show off current work on Twitter’s #screenshotsaturday tag. And every week, I bring you a selection of these snaps and clips. We’re running late again because of Monday’s holiday, but the games are still just as good. This week, my eye has been caught by big spaceships, some sort of Looney Tunes logic take on Hitman, and a game about the very real lives of the video games media. Come see!
For a certain sort of PC gaming fan, System Shock is where it all began. 30 years of immersive sim development started here, as Looking Glass escaped the restraints of the RPG genre and embraced thoughtful first-person action. SHODAN broke free, and the world was never the same. Without System Shock, there would be no Thief or Gloomwood, no Prey or Dead Space. Bioshock was conceived as its sequel. The creative figureheads behind Deus Ex and Dishonored were wrapped up in its creation, and forever changed by contact with Looking Glass and its unique philosophy.
Countless studios have used Citadel Station as a star to steer by, measuring their own work against System Shock’s commitment to simulation, dense atmosphere, and method-ish refusal to break character. This was not so much a game as an alternate reality. As one of our interviewees tells us: “We were trying to build the holodeck.”
Here’s the story of how it was made, as told by the people who made it.
Two weeks ago, the up-and-coming farmlife sim Roots Of Pacha was pulled from Steam following a rights dispute between the publisher Crytivo and developer Soda Den. The prehistoric Stardew-like has now returned to storefronts after both parties agreed to “amicably part ways under conditions that are mutually beneficial.”
Back in February 1991, Capcom released Street Fighter 2 to arcades. Unbeknownst to Capcom at the time, Street Fighter 2’s massive success would cause it to become the blueprint for fighting games – a genre the game effectively created upon its release. This blueprint proved to be so influential that even some of Street Fighter 2’s most underwhelming elements are still being parroted in fighting games today. As a result, more than 30 years later, one constant in the fighting game genre has always remained true: the story mode is gonna suck.
There have been some valiant attempts at rectifying this in the last decade, but the core issue has always remained the same; fighting games are inherently designed to be played against other people, and back-to-back fights with AI controlled characters will never be able to properly match the competition of the real thing. Yet, with Street Fighter 6, Capcom have seemingly done the impossible. Street Fighter 6 has the best story mode in any fighting game I’ve played. Admittedly a low bar, but still, Capcom could have easily half-assed the story mode, just as so many other fighting games still choose to do, and still have been widely praised based solely on the strength of its multiplayer. Instead, Capcom are offering fighting game developers a new blueprint to copy – one that prioritises teaching new players above everything else.
