Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

“We have been sold this myth for a very long time that unions have to be for blue collar workers in an industrial setting in the early 1900s,” Autumn Mitchell tells me. “The very simple definition of a union is just you and your co-workers coming together and forming a collective body. You can do that anywhere.”

A QA tester with Zenimax currently on union leave, Mitchell joined the Communication Workers Of America (CWA) as a full-time organiser after she and her colleagues formed what was, at the time, the biggest union in videogames – ZeniMax Workers United. Now she helps the CWA do what they did for her and her colleagues at Zenimax: provide support, training, resources and guidance for workers in the videogame industry who have decided, for whatever reason, that they want to unionise.

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I’m reasonably sure Final Fantasy 16 isn’t the longest Final Fantasy I’ve ever played, but it feels that way, for a multitude of reasons. The major one is that a lot of its quests exist to create distance between places and plot beats. They are overwritten errands such as bringing people lunch or fetching herbs or carrying letters – dessicated, MMO-ish fare, thrust into a moderately enjoyable single-character action-RPG for the sake of incremental worldbuilding and scale.

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The post-apocalyptic wastelands of Rain World are stunning, brutal, and full of strange creatures that would like to eat your kittenish face. It’s a landscape of wonder and pain, and it’s about to get a little more wonderful and painful. The upcoming Watcher expansion, which adds new places to visit and a new type of slugcat to play as, will be coming out early next year, say the developers. There’s a trailer to say so. Look at this slippery gastropodal feline, standing calmly in the rain, as if the torrential and lethal weight of the water will not crush that little fuzzy head. The gall!

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Me, I’m a simple sort. All I want from my flight simulators is an unerringly accurate recreation of dozens of aircraft, a perfect physics model that includes the spectacle of relevant weather events, and a complete, photorealistic and 1:1 scale depiction of the entire planet earth.

You, you might be one of those fancy types, you might want to be able to get a job in your flight simulator, like crop duster or fire waterer. That’s what Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is adding to the package when it launches in November. We now know its system requirements.

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If I took my kid to a dinosaur museum and the gift shop and hallways were full of Sonic merchandise, I think I’d be kind of confused. I think that makes the inclusion of such items as pre-order bonuses for Two Point Museum – alongside Knuckles staff costumes and Sonic-themed interactive exhibits – a pretty strong extra incentive not to pre-order.

But hey, at least the next management game in the growing 2.universe now has a release date: March 4th, 2025.

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GTA Online is no longer officially supported by Steam Deck, thanks to the introduction of some anti-cheat software which can, in fact, be made compatible with Steam Deck. Say what now?

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Fifteen months on from its PS5 release, Final Fantasy XVI – that actiony RPG of emo-fringed hack ‘n’ slashing and disquietingly sexy Ralph Ineson characters – is now on PC. Enough time, you’d think, to do a proper job of rejigging it with Windows spanners, especially after Final Fantasy XV’s port got so much stick for its lack of features and performance issues.

FFVXI does make some improvements, adopting a full set of DLSS and FSR upscalers and frame generators, and its mouse and keyboard integration feels generally slicker than XV. Sadly, it’s still no first-rate adaptation, neglecting numerous PC features and giving low-end systems an even deeper kick in the plums. Cutting the quality settings can help, as per the guide down below, but overall performance is so up-and-down than you’ll likely never achieve a perfectly smooth ride.

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Rather sheepishly, I must admit that my own experience with Armenian art begins and ends with System Of A Down. Cheers then, The Bird Of A Thousand Voices, for showing up in my inbox and giving me a second reference point next to Sugar. This one’s a simple though very striking platformer, inspired by folk legends and scored by composer Tigran Hamasyan. It’s part of a multimedia project based Armenian folk tale Hazaran Blbul (Firebird). It’s completely free, and you can find it here.

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The mad lads at Square Enix have released a demo for their remake of 90s RPG Romancing SaGa 2: Revenge Of The Seven, in which you play a whole dynasty of customisable protagonists fighting vengeful ancient heroes. It’s a turn-based battler with an empire-building component in which you play as several emperors in succession, passing on abilities and knowledge to your heir. In what I consider to be a poetic complimentary flourish, you can also pass on save data from the demo to the full game. Look, this is what counts for “poetic” just before lunch on a Thursday.

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Lethal Company was one of last year’s surprise horror hits. It was a brilliant dystopian scavenging sim in which you searched cellars for bolts while avoiding the attentions of creatures that hate being looked at, or which only move when they’re not being looked at, or which look like your friends, from a distance. The developer’s next game, Welcome To The Dark Place, is more about hearing. It’s an “open-world, auditory text-based adventure” which mostly takes place in pitch blackness.

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