Total Playtime: A Majestic Herd of Max Paynes
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What you could play this weekend
Tell us what you're playing below
We have once again dragged our nets along the sea floor of videogames to trawl for new releases worth bringing back to port, but for once our catch is bordering on paltry. Perhaps the videogames were simply too small to be caught in our nets, or perhaps the industry's videogame farmers thought it unwise to release alongside the marketing bonanza of Summer Game Fest, which continues over the weekend.
In any case, there are still some interesting new games you could play. Tell us what you are playing in the comments.
Crashout Crew
The latest game from Aggro Crab, fresh from their success as the co-developers of Peak. Crashout Crew has a similar art style and focus on co-op slapstick, but here your and your buddies are fulfilling orders in a warehouse that's really just an escalating series of physics arenas. A little bit Peak, a little bit Overcooked.
The 7th Guest Remake
I never played The 7th Guest, but it was practically a permanent fixture for about a decade of PC gaming magazines. This remake uses volumetric filming techniques to produce
Thumper beetle vs SkiFree Yeti
Let endless battle persevere
Welcome to season one of Character Select. How many seasons will there be? Only one person knows the answer, and he is on paternity leave.
This week's hyperfictional showdown is as much thought experiment as battle for survival. Step this way, unstoppable force, let me introduce you to my good friend, immovable object. It's the Beetle from Thumper versus the Yeti from SkiFree. One of them will never stop hunting you and always kills its quarry. The other is a rhythmically violent intradimensional insect capable of passing through realms of consciousness at the speed of thought. This is the Large Hadron Collider of "who'd win" scenarios. The laws of physics hang in the balance. It's now or it is never now. Select your character!
The case for the Beetle from Thumper
Have you seen somebody perform a perfect run in Thumper? It is like watching a migraine achieve sentience and launch into space. There is no species on this planet that can compete with this... thing. I briefly thought about putting Sonic the Hedgehog into this fight against the Yeti, but the blue bozo is always stopping to refuel on chilli dogs or talk to a
The adventures of hat guy and tutorial gal
The Adventures Of Elliot: The Millennium Tales seems initially bland, but its demo won me over
Some people's names can hold up to being put in the title of a videogame or movie, but I'm not sure "Elliot" is one of them. The protagonist of Square Enix's next HD-2D game is introduced by one NPC as a man of good character, although they "will admit he has his quirks." I assume that's a reference to Elliot's red hat, which seems to be the the only notable part of his personality.
The Adventures Of Elliot: The Millennium Tales might be as bland as its main character, but I think I'm fully onboard anyway after playing its demo.
Elliot is an adventurer in a fantasy world overrun by beastmen. The remaining human population are safe inside a medieval city's walls thanks to a magical shield maintained by the princess. Adventurers are those few who travel beyond the walls to explore and find supplies, and in Elliot's case to earn money he can use to care for the children in the orphanage in which he was raised. His name could have been called Hero McDogooder and the game name would have been better.
This has the same art style
Gabe Newell’s new yacht enables him to host LAN parties on the set of an immersive sim
A troubling look into a different world
In my life I have attended perhaps five LAN parties in total, and one of those doesn’t really count because it was just lugging my 486 over to a friend’s house so we could play Quake deathmatch. Two people is not enough for a LAN party, in the same way that it’s not enough for an orgy: you need enough people for it to feel like a crowd, and coincidentally they also have to be OK with being sweaty and very close to people in a domestic setting that wasn’t really designed for it. (Also, everybody brought something alarmingly large and brightly coloured from home.)
Nowadays LAN parties feel somewhat anachronistic, replaced by the internet: there are still larger-scale events like Epic.Lan or bring-your-own corners of PAX, but bringing PCs together in one place feels like a dated relic of a former age. I was delighted, therefore, to belatedly discover that Gabe Newell has included LAN parties in the spec for his latest $500m megayacht, built by the firm he recently purchased and kitted out to serve his marine research enterprise.
The Lie-In
Links to good words about videogames
Good morning, videogames. I have spent much of my spare time this week spring cleaning, and I'm not done yet. Before we begin another day of scrubbing, lets stay in bed a little longer and enjoy some fine words about games.
For Teen Vogue, Nicole Carpenter asked, why are thin bodies the default in games? It's for the expected reasons, but Carpenter speaks to actors, animators and motion capture experts to explain the challenges and all the ways it's wholly achievable.
Problems arise when there's a big difference in the skeleton of an actor and the body they're being tied to. Drop a short actor's skeleton into a tall character's body and you've got a "spatial problem," Counsell says. "A four-foot tall character takes five steps forward, they've traveled a few meters," he says. "A ten-foot tall character takes four steps forward, they've traveled tens of meters." A short character with an unnaturally long stride, or a tall character with tiny, fast steps, is just not going to look right.
I have yet to start 007: First Light, which means I am yet to read any reviews of
Jank Mail: Get Decked
This week in PC gaming
This week on Jank: Brendan’s newborn still can’t be left unsupervised (skill issue) but he’s represented in absentia by this week’s Character Select, in which Cat From Stray faces off against Dog From Half-Life 2. As the designated Car Guy I played Mon Bazou and deemed it a cheerier time than My Summer Car. Graham also attempted an opinion about cars but it was really about DRM and not trusting companies to preserve good things so I still cling to primacy.
He also argued that tinkering with games is as rewarding as actually playing them, in which he correctly observed that my car habit is biased far more towards tinkering than actually using them. On Total Playtime, Alice and I got very hot while talking about the death of Destiny and obsessive regard people have for Disco Elysium.
This week not on Jank: The Steam Deck got much more expensive, which is a very dark portent for the price of the new Steam Machines and indeed any sort of gaming hardware for the foreseeable future. Tim Sweeney got a bitchy dig in about it which is not the best look in the circumstances, but the
What you could play this weekend
If you had infinite time and money, obviously
It's one of those weeks where several long-anticipated videogames all release at the same time, and yet still that's just the tip of the iceberg of the interesting games that released this week. Me? I'll probably just be playing that great game that's about to be removed from sale.
You? Tell us what you are playing in the comments.
Map Map: A Game About Maps
I love maps, and videogame maps, and I have a lot of fondness for the stripped-back sexy-as-it-sounds orienteering sim Virtual-O. Map Map is similarly about orienting yourself in a world using landmaps, but here you do so to make the map itself, with a much more playful presentation.
Paralives
I confess, when Paralives was first shown over five years ago, I figured it was a game that would either never come out or would be bad when it did. A wildly ambitious indie Sims? Sure, it already had a cool character creator, but the rest of the game would surely fall down just as every
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