Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Every now and then I reflect on the statistically determined average age of a Gamer – what is it now, 36, 37? Please let it still be under 40 – and realise with alarm that, by extrapolation, a lot of the people reading this probably have children. Augh, children! Please excuse me while I go stand on a chair, clutching a broom. I’ve never understood the craze for generating smaller versions of yourself. It’s one of those weirder subcultures you read about in the papers, but rarely observe in daily life.

I do, however, understand the appeal of same-screen co-op games like Run From Mummies – which, being a bloodless comedy dungeon romp, seems like a fair pick for those encumbered with boisterous selfspawn. Don’t worry, the “mummies” of the title are just regular old disembowelled corpses wrapped in cloth, not those sinister, non-embalmed “mothers” you’ve been hearing about down the grocers.

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Sometimes you forget to build a graveyard. It happens. When ten citizens dropped dead on the roads of one of my settlements in post-apocalyptic city builder Endzone 2, I had to work fast to avoid a sickness breaking out. But graveyards require a lot of space, and if you’ve already filled your shanty town with a sea of corrugated metal roofs, this poses a problem. Welcome to the pleasant headache of town planning in a post-nuclear world, where most of the land is brown and uninhabitable.

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Stormgate is a confusing proposition. It’s an RTS directed by former Blizzard developers that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike StarCraft. It’s a free-to-play game, but has a business model that makes you feel like you’re getting a rougher deal than if you just dropped thirty notes for it outright. It’s available now in Early Access, but has already been available in a kind of gravity-defying Super Early Access for several weeks (which you had to pay to get into).

All of which has made me feel very tired, and yearn for the days when you went into a shop and bought a game in a box for a set amount of money, and the whole game was in the box and you went home and put it on your PC and played it until your mum said “Richard!” (only my mum calls me Richard) “get off that computer and go outside and get some exercise! Do you want to be dead at 35?” Well, I’m 36 now mum. Nearly 37. So who’s laughing through their heart palpitations now?

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Workers at Nacon-owned Greedfall 2 studio Spiders have penned an open letter “to their employer” detailing grievances over a period of several years, and called for a strike in response to “management’s continued refusal” to take their concerns seriously. 44 of Spider’s 95 workers have signed the document, made public through French union Stjv in the hope that it “will finally push management to act in the best interests of employees and the company.”

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Nintendo Direct brings us a gift, and one in the form of exciting news about history’s most squirrel stuffed RPGs. Can you really claim 108 characters when five of them are flying squirrels with different colour capes? Never mind all that. Suikoden 1 & 2 HD Remaster Gate Rune and Dunan Unification Wars has a new release date: March 6, 2025.

I’ll get into details in a minute, but since it came up in Slack chat earlier, I’d first like to share with you the differences between the 1995 JRPG’s EU PS1 one cover art:

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I find it bizarre that people still really like Crash Bandicoot games in this, the year 2024, two decades after the decline of the platform mascot warz. I have ample nostalgia for the old marsupial myself, with his second Naughty Dog-developed outing being a particular obsession, but come now, we’re all about deckbuilders, soulsliking and battle royale nowadays, right?

Still, I’ll admit to a twinge of disappointment after reading that a Crash Bandicoot 5 was once in development at Crash 4: It’s About Time developers Toys For Bob, and might have featured an interdimensional team-up with one of Crash’s old rivals. No, not Mario.

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The dwarven engineers of The Lord Of The Rings: Return To Moria have formally entered the Golden Age of Steam. The game is now available on Valve’s digital storefront, after a year in the comparatively barren underdark of the Epic Games Store, and developers Free Range Games have also released a Golden Update, which adds offline single player pausing, around 100 building objects, and a sandbox mode allowing for non-story-led excavation and settlement of the game’s procedurally generated mountains. Plus, new hats and axes! Try not to get dragon sickness.

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The slugcat of Rain World is a distinct little character. He flops around, squeezing through narrow tunnels with a movement that’s both cute and mildly gross. When he is eaten by a passing disco lizard or ravenous skull-faced vulture, it is because he is basically a delicious Squirmle existing in a horrifying cryptozoological ecosystem. He is, however, never stepped upon by a mech with a missile launcher. He is never given a shotgun and tasked with shooting the other animals. Yet that basically seems to be the elevator pitch for Uruc, a sci-fi metroidvania set in a distant future where strange life battles mechanical monstrosities.

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This morning I left my torpid flat in search of coffee, sniffed the restive wind, noted with approval the gloom gathering beneath the trees, and thought: at last, summer is over. At last, we quit the disgusting sunlit months. At last we leave all that is green and good behind, and return to the time of monsters.

Supermassive Games and Behaviour Interactive must have gotten the memo too. They’ve just released a demo for their next horror game The Casting Of Frank Stone, in which you are a policeman, Sam Green, who is investigating the disappearance of a child. The search leads you to Cedar Hills Steel Mill, “where chilling secrets await, revealing a far more sinister truth than anyone could have anticipated”. I am anticipating: QTEs during escape sequences, branching choices that get people killed, and General Mature Content appropriate to the coming of Halloween.

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Almost a decade after his acrimonious departure from Konami, the shadow of Hideo Kojima still looms over Metal Gear Solid. He’s there, barely camouflaged, in the undergrowth of Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater – a remake of the fifth MGS game, originally released in 2004, which tells the tale of a lone US special operator hunting superweapons and old mentors in the jungles of the southern Soviet Union.

I say “remake” but this feels more like a re-release, in spirit. True, it now runs on Unreal Engine, with the option of a manual, third-person perspective and cover-shooter controls in addition to the old top-down viewpoints. Yes, it boasts new flourishes, such as wounds now leaving scars, and clothes picking up stray leaves. Yes, there’s a new interface with floating in-world menus, which makes shuffling between the layers a bit less awkward. It’s the product of much labour, with development split between Konami and external support partner Virtuos. But where Konami’s other big restoration project, Bloober’s Silent Hill 2 remake, is a creative dialogue with the original game, Delta seems consumed by faithfulness to Kojima’s original design.

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