I have rarely hated a bad guy as much as I hate Voss in Indiana Jones And The Great Circle

It’s not just because he’s a Nazi. It’s because he’s a smartass Nazi. As the main antagonist in Indiana Jones And The Great Circle, Emmerich Voss vacates the archetypal armchair usually reserved for secondary fascist goons, so that he can goosestep straight into the big boy seat himself. He smiles with all the sleaze of right-hand-man Major Toht, the grubby gestapo who gets that right hand burned in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Yet he also engages in the pseudo-intellectual trash talk of the main archaeological rivals to Jones, like Rene Belloq or Walter Donovan. He is a hideous grab bag of all the things that make an instantly detestable villain in the series. But there’s something else. Voss is so immediately and gutturally hateable because he resembles a type of racist encountered not in the 1930s, but one you’ve probably met today: the asshole you meet on the internet.

Warning: Here be spoilers.

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What’s on your bookshelf?: Divinity: Original Sin 2, Baldur’s Gate 3, and Saltsea Chronicles’ Charlene Putney

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! Everyone knows about ‘hardback’ and ‘softback’ books, but have you heard of the quickly discontinued ‘rice puddingback’? While hiring so many rice grain artists to transpose the blurbs in beautiful calligraphy made for an impressive spectacle, they were eventually banned after several fatal train slippage and/or smellage incidents. Ah well! This week, it’s Charlene Putney, who’s been writing for games for over ten years, including bits for Divinity: Original Sin 2, Baldur’s Gate 3, NUTS, and Saltsea Chronicles! Cheers Charlene! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?

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Ballionaire, the physics roguelike in which you build pachinko boards, drops on December 10th

There’s no perfect time to release a video game, but if I were deciding when to release one, do you know when I’d do it? Alongside the largest blockbusters of the year, at a time when everyone is broke from buying presents, and on the same day as a huge awards show is distracting the industry’s media.

Ballionaire apparently shares my thinking. The pachinko-inspired roguelike is launching on December 10th.

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The Witcher 3’s Gwent is getting a full physical game next year, so you too can play cards while the world burns

The protagonists of two of my all time favourite RPGs share something in common. Both (the best Final Fantasy game) Final Fantasy 8’s Squall and The Witcher 3’s Geralt simply cannot get enough of leaving their friends and the entire world in mortal peril while they sneak in a quick round of cards, and I love them for it. Way back when the Wild Hunt released, there was a special edition kicking about that gave you a few decks for Gwent – the fleshed-out, playable card distraction that ended up being responsible for some of the game’s best moments. I pined for those decks, but I never acquired them. Now, Hatchette Board Games is putting out a full physical edition of Gwent next year.

The set contains “over 400 cards and a playmat” for £44/$39.99. I’m still recovering from various Fantasy Flight LCGs, so my value sense for this stuff might be a bit skewed, but that strikes me as incredibly reasonable. A good Gwent deck consists of only about 25 cards. They’re not bad cards, either! I’ve got a real pet hate for tabletop versions of videogames that just use in-engine screenshots for the cards, but these ones look to have the proper artwork from the game on them:

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Canine filth-criminal Doronko Wanko is getting some new dog breeds to cause tangible financial damage with

Where were you during the Summer of Doronko Wanko? Why, I remember it like it was March, and not actually Summer, when the delightful free game about a mucky pomeranian was unleashed into the world. Yep, yep. It was definitely March. Roughly translating to ‘covered in mud doggy’, the game set you the task of racking up tangible financial damage to your owner’s house by getting mud everywhere – first by normal dog means, and then with giant mud cannons. You can grab it for free on Steam here.

It stole our hearts, it did. And talking of stealing things and having a good time doing it, it’s also releasing on the Nintendo Switch soon, which means the Steam version of Doronko Wanko is getting some free DLC to celebrate. It isn’t arriving until next Spring, but it’s bringing three new mystery dog breeds with it when it does.

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Mandatory ray tracing makes Indiana Jones and the Great Circle pretty yet brutal, like Indy himself

If you’d told me last year that face of all-out, GPU venerating, fully ray-traced PC game visual excess would be that of a de-aged Harrison Ford, I’d have asked which exact colour of paint you’d been eating. And yet here we are, with Indiana Jones and the Great Circle loving its ray tracing so much that the effects can’t ever be fully switched off.

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