PC Powerplay

Our big featured games this issue are Park Beyond - which is about as bright and silly as a game gets, and Space Marine 2 - which is kinda the complete opposite. Rollercoasters, man… if you’re … of my age, or thereabouts, you’ve probably got warm memories of the legendary Theme Park games of old. But this isn’t that. This is OTT and completely ridiculous. In a good way. The devs have thrown basic physics out the window and gravity is now a tool with rules unfamiliar to normal Earthlings, to be abused and exploited. It’s even got a story mode, which is optional, because as we like to say here at PCPP - if there’s no point, that’s the point. While Space Marine 2 is oh so dark and serious. What…

Call of Duty’s now been part of the gaming scenery for two decades, and ever since the original Modern Warfare (2007) took it into the stratosphere, it has become a regular blockbuster release. That cadence matters, and the sheer size of the series has meant that CoD has become a focal point for Microsoft’s proposed US$65 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard. There were two years between the first two games: ever since, it’s had a yearly entry like clockwork. No other shooter releases like this, but that reliability became a huge factor in CoD’s growth. Over the last decade especially it has come to inspire fierce loyalty among its huge fanbase before, in 2020, Warzone offered a free-toplay CoD and saw huge success. This year’s mainline entry was Modern Warfare II, as…

HIGHS Word up The first ever public voted Oxford word of the year is goblin mode. Heavy stuff The Team Fortress 2 community has been begging for more support, Valve finally released an update improving its creator tools. Epic upgrade A recent Fortnite update moved it onto developer Epic’s Unreal Engine 5.1 toolset, and it looks ace. Dream on In 2021, streamer Dream was exposed as a Minecraft cheat by MinecrAvenger, Now they’ve been exposed as a cheat too. Sneaking suit An all-black suit for CoD Warzone rose up the Steam best-seller list due to its camoflaging properties. Great PARP Miles Morales’ emotional story beats will no longer be interrupted with airhorn, after a bugfix. Shame. LOWS…

Time makes fools of us all. It’s Iam, and you realise that instead of eating properly and getting a good night’s sleep, you’ve spent the entire night playing MMOs and snacking on an oversized bag of roasted peanuts. Time fool. It’s Wednesday, and you remember that you were supposed to make a stew to use up those carrots over the weekend, but instead you ordered takeaway and now they’ve gone all gross and soft. Time fool. It’s December 12, and The Spy realises that The Spy has to write The Spy’s last rumour column of the year, but The Game Awards happened a few days ago and the industry has been busy confirming all of the things that, just a week ago, would have been a hot insider tip. Time…

A year after CD Projekt Red released The Witcher 2, the studio followed with the Enhanced Edition, an enormous update with the patch notes to prove it. A 102 item changelog detailed everything from corrected item descriptions to “fixed reverb in sewers in Chapter 3”, on top of a lengthy list of more substantial additions: new quests, cinematics and ending sequences. A fledgling CD Projekt had done the same thing with the first Witcher in 2008, and though I can’t find it online, I swear I once pored over a multi-page PDF describing every change made to that first adventure. I don’t know if any developer is more committed to documenting the minutia of changes to a massive game (other than Bayl2 Games with Dwarf Fortress, which is in a…

Hyper Luminal has an interesting business model. It develops games, but also offers QA services to other companies (clients have included Sumo Digital and Disney). Scotty, as development manager, looks after the QA team. Before entering the game industry, he had a very different - but curiously related - job. Growing up, there wasn’t much of a tech industry around him. “I did what most people do around my parts, and entered the oil and gas industry,” says Scotty. In foreshadowing of his future role, he was a quality controller. He would test pipes that came in, ensuring that they were suitable to pass on to the welders. A solid job, but not one that satisfied his passion for games. “I quit my job, moved south, and pursued a college course, doing…