Jank Mail: Capcom, Highguard and an unplayable classic

Another week draws to a close, which means another collection of articles appeared on this fine website. Graham expressed the history of PC gaming in two delivery games, told his son The Parable Of Molyneux and stayed up late coding a dark mode for the website. I got a Warhammer expert to retcon kawaii Space Marines into the Warhammer 40k canon, and Brendy listed the best salesman in PC games, motivated by his disdain for Leon Kennedy’s James Bond-ass product placement. On Total Playtime we chatted a bit about the Next Fest demos we'd played, none of which cracked the top ten so our hipster status endures.

Beyond these delicately yellow-tinted walls, there was some good game news: Marathon is doing well, Slay The Spire 2 is doing amazingly, Resident Evil 9 is doing even better and is also a PC game now, because Capcom is increasingly a PC publisher. Chun-Li, welcome to the resistance. In bad game news Highguard threw in the towel and is shutting down, although the remains of the dev team crunched out a final update for the sendoff. When the lights go out it will have lasted 46 days in total, which is 31 days longer than Concord but still a very bleak outcome for four years of work. 

In hardware news: the new Xbox boss announced that the next Xbox will play PC games, which could mean anything given that Xbox games are routinely available on PC already and you can already buy an Xbox-branded PC gaming device. For its part Valve is still planning on bringing PC games to the living room this year although it doesn’t seem entirely sure about it. It’s likely that both will be unpleasantly expensive in any case because AI continues to ruin everything, although perhaps game developers are using it less.

The Sims 4 has a Maker Marketplace now, which means that people can run their own virtual furniture and clothing shops simply by giving EA a 70% revenue cut. I’m sure we’ll hear from Tim Sweeney on this topic, not least because he’s not allowed to complain about Google until 2032 and he’ll have to burn all that moanin' energy off somewhere. In nominative news, we learned that Clive Barker actually had quite a lot of input into Clive Barker’s Undying and American McGee is making American McGee’s Weird Plushie Game. 

800 people played Maniac Mansion under test conditions and only two of them completed it, which is probably the number of people who’d have played it if the test hadn’t happened. We learned that even the developers of Deus Ex: Invisible War thought its shared-ammo system was bullshit. The CEO of Build A Rocket Boy remains convinced that the game’s ongoing failure is due to “saboteurs” rather than it simply not being very good. Finally, there is a good horse game. 

That's it for this week. Next week is GDC, historically the industry's most powerful gossip nexus although a lot of people have bailed this year so let us see how that shakes out. We'll report back next week.