The Electronic Wireless Show podcast S2 Ep 5: remaster? I hardly know her!

Electronic Wireless Show podcast. This week we return to a subject we’ve touched on before, but in more detail. With EA asking if people would like remakes of Dead Spaces 2 and 3, and The Outer Worlds getting a remastered Spacer’s Choice Edition, we’re having a big old thinkeroo about remakes and remasters – including which games we’d most like to see remade.

Read more

Sifu dates its Arenas expansion and Steam release in a reference-filled trailer

Sifu has put a date on its upcoming Arenas expansion and Steam release: March 28th. We’ve known about the free update since last April’s roadmap, but developer Sloclap have finally released a trailer detailing the new modes in the expansion. All very exciting stuff for fans of the kickpunching adventure, although, if you’re my kind of nerd, you likely got a kick out of all the film references in the trailer.

Read more

Half-Life’s raytracing mod is great because it makes the game look old in a new way

Half-Life mod adds raytracing to Valve’s venerable first-person shooter, a shiny slap of 2023 lighting technology in a 1998 game. I normally think such anachronistic upgrades look awful but this one works for me. Rather than just slam fancy modern tech into an old game, the mod wants to change the whole look. And it succeeds in a surprising way: by making the rest of Half-Life look older.

Read more

TellTale’s The Wolf Among Us 2 delayed out of 2023 to avoid crunch

The Wolf Among Us, a neo-noir murder mystery set in the same universe as the Fables graphic novels. It would have been quite poetic to return to the series ten years after its debut, but that’s not going to be paw-sibble, as new TellTale have announced that The Wolf Among Us 2 has been delayed out of 2023. There’s no new release window, but maybe it’ll be ready in 2024. Hopefully.

Read more

Introducing the RPS Game Club’s first game of the month – it’s Hi-Fi Rush!

RPS Game Club, a kind of monthly book club for games where we pick a game to play each month, write some cool things about it, and have a big all liveblog discussion with you lot, our readers, at the end of it. It’s a project I’ve been wanting to get off the ground for some time now, and finally, the Treehouse Game Club doors have been busted open… and there’s some toe-tapping guitar music coming from inside? That’s right, we’re playing Hi-Fi Rush as our first RPS Game Club game, and we hope you’ll join us on this month-long musical journey.

Read more

“The narrative had to be baked into the corridors”: Marc Laidlaw on writing Half-Life

Half-Life writer Marc Laidlaw of his decision to publish the plot of Episode 3 as fanfiction. “I was living on an island, totally cut off from my friends and creative community of the last couple decades, I was completely out of touch and had nobody to talk me out of it. It just seemed like a fun thing to do… until I did it.”

Laidlaw first discovered that community in the mid 90s, in the office of Valve, where Gabe Newell and team were already hard at work on Half-Life. “I’d seen bits and pieces of the levels they were working on, but as soon as I heard the name, I just got this amazing buzz,” Laidlaw says. “I could see the whole world they were aiming at somehow, and I felt it was a collective vision. This is one reason it’s so weird to me when people try to attribute authorship to me that I’ve never felt. It was all there when I got there, in embryo.”

Read more