Rock Paper Shotgun

Former Gears of War and Unreal Tournament designer Cliff Bleszinski has opened up about his struggle with alcoholism and how it's impacted his life and career in game development to this point, as he eyes a possible return to making games. Bleszinski's currently four months sober after suffering a drinking-related seizure in March this year. Read more

A Florida-based student has been arrested by the FBI after allegedly stealing over $220,000 in cryptocurrency by means of malware-packed free games on Steam. Read more

Launching a new SSD in the current hardware climate, even a simple, DRAMless, QLC-packing SSD like the Samsung 990, may seem like starting up a roof thatching business during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius: innocuous idea, apocalyptically bad timing. Read more

Sketchy Fables is a first-person explorathon in which, if you kill things with homing butterflies, the world will grow more beautiful, whereas if you kill things with shotguns, the world will slowly succumb to "dark layers filled with loss, decay, and the end of lives". Sure beats Paragon/Renegade. In a pinch, you can also batter creatures with the stickerbook housing all the bizarre artefacts you've discovered. I'm not sure how weaponising the very inventory contributes to the landscape's trans

As Oisin reported over the weekend, Steam Machine engineers Yazan Aldehayyat and Pierre-Loup Griffais gave a big Valve thumbs-down to the practice of platform exclusives – a hot topic in the context of Xbox owners Microsoft retreating back into whatever kind of shrivelled, joyless husk Xbox is nowadays. The same interview, with Bloomberg scoopsmith Jason Schreier, also touched on the acutely PC-spoiling subject of RAMnarök and its subsequent, en-masse embiggening of hardware prices. Good news? N

With Bethesda having begun to dip their fingers into the remaster bucket in recent years, some modders who'd decided long before that to get the ball rolling on such things themselves have had to reckon with the idea that official siblings of their passion projects could be in the works. It happened last year with Skyblivion and Oblivion Remastered, now it's happened for the crew behind The Capital Wasteland Project, an effort to recreate Fallout 3 in Fallout 4, and Fallout 4: New Vegas. Thankfu

Hello all! This week, there are a lot of new cat-themed games for some reason. One suspects that some dire cat anniversary is underway. Maybe week of 20th July 2026 marks 30 million years since the invention of cats? Or since cats invented us? In any case, there is already far too much cat discourse round these parts, so I've only allowed one of those sinister feline diversions into the Maw. Without further ado, the list. Read more

Game Of Thrones: War For Westeros, the Age of Empiresy RTS teeming with Targaryens and laced with Lannisters, has been delayed to 2027. Developers PlaySide have decided that while development's "progressing well", they need a bit more time to nail their strategical rendition of the Seven Kingdoms. Read more

Sundays are for realising that there's a car in Japan's Super GT racing series this year which is sponsored by horse girl game Umamusume Pretty Derby. Here it is. It's been racing in the GT300 category against, among other cars, a Mercedes sponsored by Hatsune Miku. I'm not sure I like them as much as my all-time favourite GT300 car, the Mooncraft Shiden (I mostly just dig its name), but hey, they exist. I often wonder if their small crews of drivers - Super GT has pilots swap over after a set t

It sounds like IO Interactive's take on the world of James Bond in 007 First Light was going to be quite different at first. Where the game as it currently is focuses on just Mr. Bond, once upon a time there was an idea for it to be something of an ensemble cast, where he would have been working with a number of double-O agents across his missions. Spoilers ahead! Read more

The Blood of Dawnwalker is, if done well, a game that might not land with everybody. For one, there's the lack of a traditional main story quest, and then there's the fact that you only have 30 in-game days and nights to beat it. Neither are necessarily massively novel, the brilliant Unsighted, for example, also forces a timer upon you, but this is still a notable AAA game taking a risk. This thing likely won't have been cheap to make, and crafting a scenario where not everyone is going to exper

The Steam Machine is going to sit in an odd place when it arrives. It's technically a PC, but shaped and presented like a console, which is obviously the whole point. But it differs from most traditional consoles in that it won't be coming with any games exclusive to the hardware. That's because for Valve, they want the Steam Machine to be as open as possible. Read more

Another regular day in Marathon Land. Following on from mass layoffs at Bungie after the final major update for Destiny 2, and ahead of next week's mid-season 2 Marathon patch, the extraction shooter's game director Joe Ziegler has announced that he's left the studio, with Del Chafe III taking over his role. Chafe, up until this point, has served as Marathon's assistant game director. Read more

It's been almost two months since ZA/UM released their second game Zero Parades: For Dead Spies (and obviously first after years of controversy. Unfortunately for workers at the studio, the game does not appear to have sold well enough, as more than 30 devs are being laid off or are at-risk of being laid off. Read more

Which way are you voting in the election? There’s an election coming, could I trouble you to ask which way you’re voting? ELECTION. YOU. VOTING? WHICH WAY? The time to place the great slip of paper into the holy box of ballots is almost nigh, my honoured friend, wherefore will thou be placing thine vote and whom will it be in favour of? There are a lot of ways you can ask someone which way they plan to vote. All of them are awkward. The awkwardness isn’t helped by the fact that, in these situati

What are we all playing this weekend? This weekend is the eye of the wedding storm, a brief reprieve before heading up to Sheffield next week for further nuptials. Though, that doesn't mean I can relax. My body is in a finely tuned state that I can't let slacken with the finish line is in sight. I will, of course, be following my wedding guest training regime. Read more

Following Microsoft's mass layoffs, Bethesda have clearly been told to be a bit more active in communicating exactly what they've got in the works. Cue a big blog post announcing that Fallout 5's in preproduction alongside the studio's main focus, The Elder Scrolls 6, with both being assembled on a version of the Creation engine put together following Starfield's launch. Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas remasters have also been confirmed to be on the way, though with no concrete release dates as

The original Suzerain, a political strategy game presented as a visual novel, cast you in the role of Anton Rayne, the newly elected President of fictional country Sordland. You had to tackle political turmoil as the leader of a country coming out of years of authoritarian rule, while also dealing with an economic crisis, and threats from the powerful nations neighbouring your borders. In the Kingdom of Rizia DLC, you left elected politics behind and, instead, sat in the inherited throne as King

Answering concerns that The Sims team may face pressure to reduce support for diversity following the Saudi Arabian-backed buyout of EA, senior character artist Jess Hyland says she's not "heard anything" about such a mandate and, if one were introduced, she "would fight it tooth and nail." Read more

The Communications Workers of America (CWA) union and their Canadian offshoot CWA Canada have filed unfair labour practice complaints against Microsoft, accusing the company of having mishandled the recent mass layoffs at Xbox. Read more