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Every so often, the fine folk of Resetera take a break from their usual schedule of complaining that video games journalists get all their news from Resetera, and post a Thing Of Beauty. For example: it’s thanks to Resetera member AstralSphere that I know about Alistair Aitcheson’s Magic Box and BizHawk retro emulation tools, which – amongst other things – allow you to play old Sonic the Hedgehog games in giddy parallel, shuffling between them whenever you collect a ring.
The monst! The monst are back! Whoo-hoo! We’re still a while off from the TBC 2025 release date of haute-couture-asaurus RPG Monster Hunter Wilds, and Capcom have finally graced us with some delicious Actual Details, following the previous cinematic trailers. These come in the form of three short videos uploaded today on the official Monster Hunter channel, detailing the basics, focus mode, and the great sword’s moveset.
As reported by Gematsu yesterday, SEGA have filed a trademark in Japan for the term “Yakuza Wars”. This happened on July 26th, and while Gematsu speculate this might be related to the next game in the Yakuza: Like A Dragon series, I have other plans. For the imaginary game. That I have nothing to do with.
One of the neat things about Norland‘s fantasy medievalism is that specialist knowledge is tied to characters. So if there’s only one person in your village who knows how to brew tastier beer, and they die after being freakishly savaged by a passing wolf (it happens), suddenly your village will have no artisanal lager master. The results may be devastating. Luckily, you can share knowledge in a number of ways – by copying books, or having “wise conversations”. The exception to this is child characters, whose pea-sized brains can’t learn specialist knowledge, only soaking up basic attributes like “manners” from the teachers you assign to them. Well, until now. The developers for the Rimworld-meets-Crusader Kings catastrophe simulator have made kids a little smarter. They’ll now learn more important things from their adult teachers.
Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome back to Booked For The Week – our regular Sunday chat with a selection of cool industry folks about books! July has shrivelled up like a freshly laundered sock left on the radiator for too long, and yet, it’s still hot enough that even typing the word radiator makes me want to inject concentrated Solero straight into my bloodstream. With my last remaining un-fugged brain cells, I have wrenched this column back from its hiatus, and who better than to get us into the swing of things once more than Baldur’s Gate 3 lead writer and bloody RPS legend Adam Smith! Cheers Adam! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?
I’ve never learned to drive, but every so often a well-meaning friend tells me I’d be good at it, because ‘look, Edwin, you play all those driving games, surely they’ve taught you the basics’. Friend, here is what driving games have taught me: traffic lights are there for regional flavour; drifting is the same thing as cornering; other cars exist to serve as bumper cushions when overshooting a turn. Certainly, nobody wants a guy whose ideas about automobiles come from 2018’s Wreckfest to be involved in the school run. On which note: THQ Nordic have just announced Wreckfest 2 – a fresh helping of destruction derby with fancified visuals and newly animate drivers who flinch and gesticulate when other drivers smash into them. Witness the carnage in the announcement trailer below.
Bungie have reportedly cancelled Payback, an unannounced project in the Destiny universe from former Destiny 2 game director Luke Smith and project lead Mark Noseworthy. Both Noseworthy and Smith appear to have lost their jobs in the course of Bungie’s brutal cost-cutting this week, but Payback’s cancellation pre-dates the layoffs. Envisaged as a Destiny spin-off, rather than Destiny 3, it was apparently dropped “a while ago”.
Toonsouls, which you can find on Steam here, doesn’t appear to screenshot especially well. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of those perpetually disgruntled ghosts and charming goofskulls, but I might not be writing about the platform game at all if I hadn’t seen it in motion, where the vision comes together a lot more. The Cuphead influence runneth so overly that it feels trite to even point it out, and I do think maybe opting for different music would have served it far better in this case, but you can’t deny that Ghosts n’ Goblins lance throw. Get stuck in.
With Valorant, Riot set out to integrate a bit of hero shooter into the Counter Strike template and made it a little more accessible than CS in the process. Now Mountaintop Studios, a new studio whose ranks include ex-Bungie and Respawn devs, have chucked themselves into the tactical FPS gauntlet with Spectre Divide. Made with input from former CS pro and streamer Shroud, it looks a bit like a mix of CS and Valorant, but has a big gimmick that sets it apart from the two: you can swap between two bodies. I… am cautiously optimistic? I think?
Obsidian’s first-person action-RPG Avowed is one of our 75 most anticipated games of 2024, but according to a report, it’s been booted back into early 2025 to avoid “very busy period” on Microsoft’s Game Pass subscription service. Thanks, Microsoft. Do you know how long it took to cobble together that 2024 list? I still get hand cramps.
The report in question is from The Verge’s Tom Warren – as sturdy a source as they come. Writing on his Notepad blog (paywall), Warren claimed that Avowed is in “good shape”, and that the delay is “more a matter of wanting to give the game breathing room during a very busy period for Xbox Game Pass”.
Obsidian accidentally let slip a 12th November release date for Avowed in June in a developer blog. On Game Pass, that would have put it up against Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 (19th November) and the much-delayed post-apocalyptic shooter Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl (20th November). I’m not convinced that qualifies as a “very busy period”. Outside Game Pass, it would have to reckon with Assassin’s Creed Shadows (15th November) and, perhaps most worryingly for Obsidian, BioWare’s Dragon Age: The Veilguard (not dated yet, but due to land in EA’s third quarter 2024, after 1st October).
