Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Ah, it feels like only yesterday that Microsoft shut down Tango Gameworks, creators of Hi-Fi Rush, and now here’s Matt Booty, head of Xbox Game Studios, telling Microsoft staff at an internal townhall meeting that “we need smaller games that give us prestige and awards” – a sentence we might plausibly lengthen to “…like Hi-Fi Rush”.

See, these are the kinds of glacial changes of focus and ponderous shifts of strategy you often get at very large videogame publishers such as Microsoft. Trends are cyclical and corporations are sort of just these massive, sleepy hamsters, trundling around the wheel to rediscover practices and projects they once deemed bad for business. Hang on, let me go look up “yesterday” in the dictionary and fetch some sellotape – my brain appears to have exploded.

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I spent this morning being pseudo-profound about Animal Well and pseudo-elegaic about Tango Gameworks, so now it’s time to get back to the Real Business – being a pseud on the subject of videogame gun balancing.

The game in question is cheery co-op shooter Helldivers 2, over which Aunty Sony recently upended a can of furious worms by abruptly insisting that Steam players have a PSN account for security reasons and so, blocking players in regions where PSN isn’t available. Sony have subsequently walked back the requirement following a backlash of truly hellish proportions, though I understand that the game remains unavailable on Steam in certain regions. By comparison, Arrowhead CEO’s Johan Pilestedt remarks overnight that the developers might have been “removing the fun” with their gun balancing seems pretty innocuous.

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When I asked Tango Gameworks creative director John Johanas whom he’d give Hi-Fi Rush‘s Best Audio trophy away to at this year’s GDC Awards, he said he’d split it between the game’s audio team and “the person who taught me everything I know” – Shinji Mikami, Tango’s founder and one of the erstwhile Capcom and Platinum big brains behind Resident Evil, Vanquish and much more besides. I confess, I found this response annoying – partly because I was hoping Johanas would bring up some obscure indie composer I could then namecheck at parties, and partly, because I have spent years waiting for Tango to escape Mikami’s shadow after essentially announcing themselves as a Mikami fan project back in 2010.

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Computers have always been animal wells, in a sense. They’re havens for creatures of many shapes and degrees of literalness, all the way down to the metal. As in ecologies at large, the most abundant and widespread are probably the bugs, beginning with the moth that flew into that Harvard Mark II in 1947 and ending with the teeming contents of the average free-to-play changelog. A little further up the food chain we find “worms”, like the Creeper that once invaded the ARPANET, and “gophers“, a directory/client system written in 1991 for the University of Minnesota. There are computer animals spawned by branding – foxes of fire and twittering birds and the anonymous beasts that haunt the margins of Google documents. There are computer animals that are implied by the verbs we use in computing – take “browser”, derived from the old French word for nibbling at buds and sprouts, which suggests that all modern internet searches are innately herbivorous.

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I’m playing Rusty’s Retirement as I type this article. This cute farming sim runs at the bottom of your screen as you go about your working day. You can plant crops, hire watering robots, harvest blueberry bushes, raise pigs, all while validating the spreadsheets from Paula in accounts. Paula! Where are the running totals!? I can’t find the running t- oh, they’re under the turnips. Sorry, Paula. My bad.

But can you actually play “idle games” like this while getting your work day done? Aren’t they distracting and obstructive? These are important questions. I plan to find the answers by playing Rusty’s Retirement while simultaneously – and dutifully – completing days of work. Let’s go!

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Among Us, the super popular game where you control a little bean guy to bamboozle your pals, is getting a bunch of new things this year. Developers Innersloth unveiled the game’s 2024 roadmap, which promised new roles, lobby tweaks and better “Bean Fashion” among a few other bits and pieces.

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A recent update for procgen whodunnit sim Shadows of Doubt added “Sharpshooter Assassins” with high-powered rifles to the game’s glowering alternate-1980s cities, with players having to work out the killer’s vantage point by deducing a bullet’s trajectory, before proceeding to a secondary crime scene to search for a murder weapon and witnesses. The prospect of snipers certainly adds menace to the game’s forensic sandboxing. The trouble is, the shooters aren’t always as sharp as they could be.

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Ready for a sentence that could only apply to the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink pop-culture smorgasbord of modern-day Fortnite? Here we go! A rucksack containing Star Wars’ Yoda has been temporarily banned from the battle royale game, after crashing games when players wearing the green Jedi master on their back do the Zoidberg Scuttle emote from Futurama.

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Despite being hugely allergic to horses – my eyes once swelled up so severely at a local fair my wife had to guide me home – I continue to be absolutely spellbound by the animals. I’ve been rewatching The Lord of the Rings this week and I’ve been genuinely gripped by watching professionally trained horses galloping across the vistas of New Zealand, rearing up against tennis balls representing CGI orcs and charging down the incredibly steep slope next to Helm’s Deep. Not to mention my love of just riding endlessly in a direction on horseback in Red Dead Redemption 2 and Assassin’s Creed Odyssey (helped by Kassandra’s wonderful command of “Phobos!” to summon her mount).

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Confident design is one thing, but there is confidence, and then there’s the almost reckless certainty in both your game’s sturdiness and the player’s curiosity required to trust a feckless, glitch-hungry game-poker with Prey (2017)’s GLOO Cannon. A recklessness in designing a sprawling, multi-tiered, metroidvania-esque space station – one boasting multiple-bathroom verisimilitude – like Talos I, and then immediately giving the player a gun that lets them make their own ladders up keycard locked grav-elevators.

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