Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Japanese role-playing game enthusiasts are eating good this week, as Square Enix announce a 3D remake for 1993’s Romancing SaGa 2: Revenge Of The Seven. It’s a high fantasy RPG in which you must shore up an empire and defend it from generation to generation against a group of legendary adventurers, who were trapped in another dimension many moons ago and are positively livid that people don’t talk about their sacrifices enough. It’s out 24th October 2024, and springs from the turbulent brains of the team behind 2020’s Trials of Mana remake, which was well-received. I’ve got a trailer’s worth of rabble-rousing orchestral music and sparkly tag-team finishers below.

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American Truck Simulator already has in-development DLCs which will see its 18-wheelers head to Arkansas and Missouri, but SCS Software have also commenced building a third: Iowa.

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Classic RPG Dragon Quest 3 is getting a remake in Square Enix’s now familiar HD-2D style, which blends high-resolution 2D sprites together with 3D worlds. It’ll land on November 14th. “Waitaminute,” you might be saying, “Shouldn’t they remake the first two games beforehand?” No, you numpty, you nyaff, you roaster; within the internal chronology of Dragon Quest, 3 comes first.

Plus, they are remaking 1 and 2 as well, for release sometime in 2025.

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The Ace Attorney Investigations Collection is heading to PC later this year on September 6th. “Waitaminute,” you might be saying, “Didn’t this already come out?” No, you choob, you eejit, you dafty, you’re thinking of one of several other collections of Ace Attorney games.

Ace Attorney Investigations Collection comprises two games: Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth and its sequel, Ace Attorney Investigations 2: Prosecutor’s Gambit. Neither game has been on PC before, and the latter has never been released outside of Japan.

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Battle Aces is billed as “a vision of the future for real-time strategy” but if you glance at a screen, you might think you’re staring into the past: another toonified science fiction world of scuffed, shiny nodules, lanes and arenas, an overly functional colour scheme, and hotkeyed hordes of little and large units that appear devoid of personality, even by top-down generalissimo standards. Let’s start by addressing that last complaint: the units of Battle Aces have immense personality. It just doesn’t come across well in screens.

Each is a mix of bug and robot, with a clutch of finely observed, quirky-but-never-gratuitous animations that immediately had me choosing favourites when I played the game at Summer Game Fest. “Our main unit design concept artist, his father was also an illustrator and nature illustrator at that, so he’s already accomplished with animal designs, but he also loves mechs and robots too,” notes Uncapped Games art director Ted Park. “So he’s kind of melded both worlds as much as he can.”

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If nothing else, Workers & Resources Colon Soviet Republic will give anyone an appreciation of the incredible complexity and difficulty of building and maintaining a city. On another day I might call it the first ever city building game.

Even a Settlers or Factorio cannot match its extreme focus on logistical simulation. It isn’t realism for its own sake (look no further than the automated vehicles and the ludicrous citizen behaviour to refute that), but a fundamentally different interpretation of what city building means. It’s about co-ordinating all your pieces so they’ll be in the right place to support each other, and how the whole is all that matters, but that whole will fail if you don’t organise its parts. It is… a lot. It’s too much at times. But if you have those times, it will occupy them like nothing else.

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Minecraft is, very often, just a nice place to potter about in. But its call to adventure rings loudly in my square ears, and now that the Tricky Trials update has dotted the underground with action-heavy, loot-filled Trial Chambers, I’m simply powerless to resist.

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Steam Next Fest 2024 has formally ended, we’ve spent a couple of weeks gorging upon demos of all stripes, from oil spill clean-up to dancefloor kendo, and now comes the all-important process of deciding which of those demos Won. Valve have helpfully shared a list of the most played Steam demos during this latest, gravest round of next festivity, and it covers a reasonable range. I mean, I wasn’t that surprised to see an open world survival shooter with monsters at the top of the ladder – why else would we dedicate a bunch of Best Of features to such things? – but I am surprised that number three is a leering parody of neglect. Also, there’s a game about mopping dungeons that appeals strongly to my Dungeon Meshi-watching sensibilities.

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The Remake Of The End Of The Greatest RPG Of All Time, or TROTEOTGRPGOAT for, uh, short, is a game that exists. I normally wouldn’t let such an opaque stub of a description survive outside of a quick Trello reminder to write something better later, but I’m currently finding it fulfilling enough just to gaze upon that title and consider the fully formed art object that may soon emerge from its tantalising promises. Ok, so the visual component helps too. Orientate yourself by means of the trailer below, and let’s dig into this brazen nose-hooker of a head turner of a game that does exist, about another game that doesn’t.

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Life By You, the Sims-like management game previously troubled by several delays, has been canceled by Paradox Interactive, and Californian studio Paradox Tectonic have been shut down. The news of the game’s cancellation came last night through a forum post, with Paradox deputy CEO Mattias Lilja painting a picture of a game still too “lacking” for more development time to fix. This morning, it emerged that Paradox Tectonic, the studio working on the game, have been shuttered, via GameWatcher.

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