Andrew Haining

When it opens up later on and stops nagging you it does actually get good (about 6 hours in).

Ever since then they just interrupt you every couple of minute with pointless annoying new mechanics.

Even more damning is that it's not fun to shoot, they've turned doom into a first person Devil May Cry.

Playing Doom The Dark Ages and it's got the same problem as Doom Eternal, massively over-designed. It's like they didn't read the reviews for Doom 2016. It was widely praised for getting out of your way.

Instead of pretending to allow all speech a well functioning society should instead strive to be transparent about exactly what speech it is actively suppressing.

Horses review The machine can't get off without your help.

I'm not particularly interested in the fantasy of unregulated speech and I do think this game could've made it's point without the paedophilia but this was a thought provoking read. I think it's fine that this game exists on gog and gog alone www.rockpapershotgun.com/horses-review

"Fewer people are playing Call of Duty this year than they have been before" Why has Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 seemingly sold below expectations? Is it simply not good enough? | Eurogamer.net Why has Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 seemingly sold below expectations? We asked industry experts to find out.

When you deliberately make bad things that sell a lot, you're ensuring it's success or failure rests on factors you can't control, the main one being that something actually good will come along and draw those fickle eyeballs www.eurogamer.net/call-of-duty...

a man with a beard and mustache is smiling and looking at the camera . ALT: a man with a beard and mustache is smiling and looking at the camera .

www.rockpapershotgun.com/routine-review

ROUTINE on Steam ROUTINE is a First Person Sci-Fi Horror set on an abandoned lunar base designed around an 80s vision of the future. Explore and investigate your surroundings as you survive against unknown threats.

Routine is out in a couple of days and I was curious about when I first wrote about it, in an issue of PC Gamer.

2012.

I didn't ban it, I just put my thumb on the scales by making it a bit harder to access. I watch all the summer games fest shows with them, especially the cosy games ones & they gravitate towards that stuff, Big Kitty Little City, Henry Half Head, Cult of the Lamb & Undertale are in regular rotation.

I revile Trump but Maduro did just annex 2/3rds of Guyana, there's no good guys in that fight.

DRAM is extremely cheap to manufacture but it's been controlled by a price fixing cartel for decades, at some point that cartel makes a mistake when planning the manufacturing volume and you get economic shocks, that's a big part of why cartels are illegal

The PS5 DualSense controller is a surprisingly good PC pad that’s dropped to £43/$55 in the Black Friday sales You can grab a PS5 DualSense gamepad - underrated for PC play, in this writer's view - for cheap this Black Friday.

Hall Effect and TMR gamepads have been about for years now and mainstream sites are still recommending legacy junk, you can't trust anything.
www.rockpapershotgun.com/the-ps5-dual...

YouTube video by Eurogamer What Bethesda needs to learn from The Outer Worlds 2

Hear, hear!
www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKpj...

There are many many people both capable of and willing to make that game but The Chinese Room were never going to be one of them.

"We can't make Bloodlines 2; there's not enough time, there's not enough money" - The Chinese Room reflects on inheriting a troubled Vampire: The Masquerade project One of the biggest challenges The Chinese Room faced when taking on Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 was, simply,…

Nothing makes me angrier than seeing people with no ideas try and throw an entire genre under the bus as an excuse for their mediocrity and contempt for the experience they were supposed to be making.

www.eurogamer.net/we-cant-make...

Valve responds with "additional context" following Horses Steam ban controversy Following Valve's decision to ban first-person horror adventure Horses from distribution on Steam, the company has provided "additional context" in a statement.

There's an incredibly weird cohort of people attacking valve for refusing to publish this very obvious paedophile dog whistle game and it's, frankly, utterly disgusting. www.eurogamer.net/valve-respon...

My Swedish friend brings a bag of these and Polys back from Sweden every time they go, it's amazing 😋

I dream of this same game, it feels like Bob Dylan's Talking World War III Blues to hear you describe it

Just listening to the latest backpage xl podcast, it's behind the patreon but I'm just listening to it going "hard agree" on every point. Particularly the points about discovering games from print over websites and the 100 point scale 🧑‍🍳👌

You get a free tunnock's tea cake, all they want is some liquid your body makes for free!

CD Projekt's co-CEO says The Witcher 2's momentous midgame choice was an 'experiment' and now regards it as a 'waste of resources' The developer "brought totally something new" for The Witcher 3.

It always upsets me to hear game devs say the path not travelled is a waste, it means they don't understand a single thing about making games. www.pcgamer.com/games/rpg/cd...

Asbury Pines is a murder mystery of dizzying scale that has you joining the dots from the Stone Age to Armageddon | Rock Paper Shotgun Solve a murder by hooking people up from the Stone Age through to Armageddon in this management mystery from Chaystar Unlimited LLC.

This game was a bit of a hot potato in igf judging and I was pretty against giving it a pass, I think this is one of a bunch of games that do AI draw-overs and claim the AI was used in concepting. It's why I'm not really willing to accept the "concepting" argument.
tiny.cc/2xdv001

The thing that's interesting to me is that voice actors are currently under utilised because of the realities of production that means you get them in for a couple of days at various points in the project, if we had a way to book them for a month, once that could actually generate more work for them

There ofc is a quality gulf issue with the generated voices that I don't really think can be overcome so it's purely theoretical

The conclusion I've arrived at, which may be totally wrong is that it is acceptable to use generated voices if you train your own model exclusively on voice lines you paid for and for that model to be exclusive to the project you trained it for.

I've been thinking of the tension between wanting to pay voice actors for their work and wanting to make fully voiced, dynamic npc's.

Where Winds Meet player convinces one of the game's NPCs they're pregnant with his baby Where Winds Meet players have immediately broken the game's generative-AI powered NPCs.

smh www.rockpapershotgun.com/where-winds-...

It's weird how we all thought Linux had to catch up with the usability of windows. I guess no one could've predicted that windows would deliberately become harder to use than 2000s era Linux

It feels right now like that is an improvement but what happens when we take it too far in that direction?

I often think that games criticism being dominated by writers pushed the industry, in a very unhealthy way towards linear narratives and modern games criticism being dominated by streamers pushes it towards performative dynamism