Rock Paper Shotgun – PC Game Reviews, Previews, Subjectivity

Neo Cab is that game you’ve seen about being an Uber or Lyft style gig-economy driver, set in a dystopian sci-fi future. It has been described as “neon-drenched” because that is the only way we have thought of to describe “thing that is cyberpunk” so far.

“We don’t actually self-identify as cyberpunk,” said Patrick Ewing, creative director of the developers Chance Agency, and not a retired basketball player. “We call ourselves ‘nowpunk’.” Neo Cab is, he explains, about a world where we just continue on our current trajectory. “I do think that's the job of dystopian sci fi, is to warn you of something while there's still a chance of changing it.”

While I was playing Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, I thought out loud, “Man, do I have a lot of questions about surgery in feudal Japan.” Less about how you operate on a man so that he wakes up and suddenly finds himself with a prosthetic, having remained peacefully unconscious throughout the entire procedure, and more about how feasible the shinobi prosthetic in Sekiro really is. Thankfully I have a place to ponder all these questions.

Hello, and welcome to RPS's weekly round-up of the top selling games on Steam for the last weeeeee...

WHAT?

"Toss a toilet at your friend today!", goes the Steam blurb. That does rather capture the spirit of Half-Life 2: Deathmatch, doesn't it?

Like Alice B, I’ve been playing Ritual Of The Moon for the past few days. In case you somehow missed it, she’s been keeping a diary of her adventures as an exiled space witch in the game, which is designed to be played for a few minutes every day for a month. The game was released on Friday and I like it very much.

I also like the bits of developer Kara Stone’s other work that I’ve played. Much of it has similar themes to Ritual Of The Moon, including both astronomy and astrology. As such, here’s a recommendation of one of her games to play, based on your star sign.

Sundays are for going on wholesome walks with family you haven't seen in months. Not for reading the best writing about videogames. If you do that you are bad.

On Waypoint, Patrick Klepek profiled one of UKIP's candidates for the European Parliment. That candidate is Carl Benjamin, one of Gamergate's most prominent figures. Klepek highlights the depths of Benjamin's hatefulness, then stresses that we shouldn't take his defeat for granted.

The latest Overwatch event, Storm Rising, takes our shooty-bang cast to Havana, Cuba, and the full escort map is available to noodle around in on the test servers before its launch in a couple of weeks. Like all of the game’s locations, it uses shortcuts to communicate place within the necessary constraints. There’s a rum distillery, of course, and a large sea fort presumably based on the Morro Castle. And then there are the cars.

Cuba is famously filled with 50s motors, but Overwatch’s cars are all futuristic, floating along without wheels. On most maps, they look basically the same as cars you would see today, other than their hovering capabilities, but in Havana they retain the aesthetic that you might expect. Except that doesn’t make a lot of sense.

You may recall that yesterday I pointed out that I had started the diary just before I went on holiday for a week. I thought I would be very clever and play it while I was at home and keep turning copy in, and Graham would be like "Wow, thank you for putting extra effort in, have a raise and a bonus of a billion million quid."

The thorn in this particular ointment is that I forgot to put the save files on a USB, and as it turns out Ritual Of The Moon doesn't automatically sync save files to different computers via your Steam account because obviously it doesn't Alice, you buffoon, you imbecile of the highest order.

With the one-two punch of Tropico 6 and then Anno 1800 launching over the last three weeks, plenty have noted that the city-building genre is currently enjoying a spate of urban renewal. Indeed, it’s hard to keep up with current releases: as well as these giant games about colonising tropical islands, recent months have seen a string of small-studio hits - Foundation, Islanders, Factory Town and Soviet Republic, to name just a few. Then of course there was Dawn of Man. This neolithic gem from a two-man studio came out of nowhere - like Fred Flintstone climbing, shitfaced, through his window after nine hours at the Ape & Megalith - and ended up briefly conquering Steam.

We’re entering an exciting time for games about deciding where to put things, and this is just the start of it: there are dozens of build ‘em ups on the way, and for those of us who’ve spent the last twenty years wistfully remembering Caesar III, the horizon is alight with promise.

How humiliating. U-96, a WW2 Unterseeboot on the cusp of greatness, has just been sent to the bottom of the Celtic Sea by a Royal Navy ship named after a hardy perennial. Should I have taken her deeper after disembowelling that freighter with a couple of T2s? Should I have zigzagged more energetically when the boom-barrel deluge began? Perhaps my mistake was not diving the instant the broad-beamed British bedding plant turned in my direction? Attempting to torpedo alerted escort vessels is seldom sensible - you'd think an old Silent Hunter would have remembered that.

Thank you and farewell, John Walker. That's him off now, off to a better place to... look, I do still half-suspect it's no accident he's scarpering on Good Friday, but surely even John wouldn't dare to return three days later and declare himself the second coming of games blogging? That's more a Kieron move.

This is Easter weekend, whether John rises again or not, so we'll be away both Friday and Monday. We have a few posts lined up over the long weekend but we'll be quieter than usual until Tuesday. We will then return... well, still a little quieter than usual because John won't be here. But in a way, John will be everywhere.

What are you playing this Easter long weekend? Here's what we're clicking on!

Before Monument Valley brought its Escher-inspired worlds to the iOS masses, there was The Bridge. Not to be confused with the excellent Scandi-crime drama of the same name (although it's arguably just as sinister thanks to the cold, dead, pupil-less eyes of the protagonist and the grinning, malicious balls everywhere just waiting to fall on your head), The Bridge is a twisty turny 2D logic puzzler from the minds of Ty Taylor and Mario Castaneda. And it's rather good.

Take a look at the specs of any of today's gaming laptops and there's a 99.9% chance it's got an Intel CPU and Nvidia graphics chip inside it. That's mostly because AMD haven't really bothered with gaming laptops for the last couple of years, but that's slowly starting to change. Case in point: Acer's Predator Helios 500 laptop, which is available in both AMD and Nvidia graphics flavours. The former has one of AMD's Radeon RX Vega 56 chips while the latter comes with a full-fat GTX 1070.

But rather than review each one individually, I thought I'd do something a bit different this time and get both models in and pit them against each other to see which one you should actually buy. After all, both laptops are roughly the same price in the US right now ($1898 for the Nvidia one and $1829 for the AMD), while the AMD version in the UK is around £300 cheaper, going for £1499 as opposed to £1769 for the Nvidia jobber. Which one will triumph? Let's find out.

I say “watch” because this week's podcast takes place in a real room in front of a real audience (don’t worry, there’s an audio version too). At Rezzed in London this month, we thought it’d be fun to re-enact three of the most memorable scenes of PC gaming, exactly as you remember them. So strap on your eye-wideners and prepare for some wonderful acting. Including a 100% faithful adaptation of the most notorious moment in any Final Fantasy game: the death of... Aerosmith?

Alice! Alice, what have you done to these scripts!?

Today is my last day at Rock Paper Shotgun. Which is damned weird to type. As I chronicled at quite some length last week, creating RPS was a thing I helped do, along with Alec Meer, Kieron Gillen and Jim Rossignol. It is, in a very not real sense, my baby. It's weird to just walk away from your baby.

Except, and see if you can follow me here, RPS isn't actually a baby. It's a website. Walking away from a baby is a very terrible thing to do, because they're helpless idiots. RPS, in contrast, is, as I've mentioned, a website, and it's legally fine to walk away. But it still feels really weird.

I realised it was perhaps foolish of me to start this series before a bank holiday and a week's stay-cation, but I'm going to play the game every day while I'm gone, and will try to file a post as often as I have time to.

What's this? Your deals herald is a day early with this week's best PC gaming deals? Fear not, for it is the long Easter weekend, my friends, which means we're all going to be too busy stuffing our faces with chocolate eggs and the best Easter gaming bargains to do any work tomorrow. Plus it's a bank holiday. And an extra day off can only mean one thing - an extra day of deals! Because that is what I live for now. And man alive, is there an Easter sale bonanza going on this weekend. Everywhere you look it's deals, deals, deals. So let's dive straight in and cram as many deals eggs in our gobs as possible.