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Wednesday, March 1st, 2023
| Time | Event |
| 10:30a | Sons Of The Forest early access review: a gorgeous island filled with cannibals and little else so far 
One of the best things a survival game can do is make you want to share your latest experiences with your family and friends At this, Sons Of The Forest succeeds in grand fashion. Often I found myself pausing the game so I could go find my brother and tell him about the latest Big Thing that had just happened. Some of the time, it's even for the right reasons. Perhaps I'd spotted a group of cannibals adopting some startlingly intelligent behaviour. Or maybe one of my NPC companions had just done something particularly endearing in front of me. Or, more likely, I'd witnessed another example of the incredible jankiness which, like the island's flesh-nibbling denizens, loves to raid and pillage its way through nearly every aspect of the game. Perhaps I'd just cut down a tree and watched it soar high into the air, glitching all over the place like some demonic new type of tree mutant. Maybe Kelvin had just taken my instruction to gather logs a bit too literally, and deconstructed the entire west side of my house while I wasn't looking. Sons Of The Forest's great strength is its ability to utterly transport you into its threatening, unsettling, but genuinely beautiful world. It quickly builds up the player's trust until they're ready to wholeheartedly buy into what at times feels like the next generation of open-world survival and crafting games. But then, at least in its current Early Access state, it breaks that trust just as quickly with a melange of unintuitive systems, game-breaking bugs, and a painful lack of content that makes one of the most gorgeous environments in games feel awfully hollow after a while. |
| 11:04a | Over 200 Apex Legends QA testers have been abruptly laid off by EA  On Tuesday, EA abruptly laid off over 200 quality assurance testers at their LA office Baton Rouge, who were primarily working on their free-to-play battle royale Apex Legends. This news comes from a report by Kotaku which says the layoffs happened over a last-minute Zoom call, according to three of their sources. EA later confirmed the news, calling the layoffs part of their “ongoing global strategy” to expand the “distribution of our Apex Legends testing team.” |
| 12:07p | Cyberpunk 2077 joins the list of Steam Deck verified games  It’s 2023 and Cyberpunk 2077 finally works… on the Steam Deck, I mean (it’s worked elsewhere for a while now.) The open-world RPG has always been playable on the portable machine, but it’s now Steam Deck verified - meaning Valve have tested it and used their almighty wisdom to determine it’ll run without a hitch. |
| 2:45p | What's better: Quake 2's railgun or the currency 'Gold'? 
Last time, you decided that elaborate corridor architecture is better than funicular fights. I wholeheartedly agree with you, but needed to check because the number of video game funicular fights compared to real-world funicular fights did suggest they might be wildly popular. Now we know. As we continue the mission, this week I ask you to choose between the evils of violence and money. What's better: Quake 2's railgun or the currency 'Gold'? |
| 3:03p | A Year Of Springs dev npckc is bringing their fantasy tea-brewing sim to PC  If you’re a fan of visual novels, you’ve likely come across developer npckc for their work on A Pet Shop After Dark and A Year Of Springs - one of the best visual novels on PC. They’re now bringing Tavern For Tea - a lovely-looking tea-brewing sim - to PC, after it launched on mobile a few years ago. |
| 3:39p | 2023's Olympic Esports Series will feature Just Dance, Gran Turismo, and Zwift  Congratulations to us! Games have now been recognised as a ‘real’ sport by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) as the organisation have announced that qualifications begin today for their Olympics Esports Series 2023. The IOC say “the four day-festival will showcase the very best of virtual sports,” featuring esports titans such as Just Dance and Zwift. |
| 4:30p | The joy of roleplay-flavoured patch notes in ΔV: Rings Of Saturn  There's a sometimes hard to define line between a game that effectively establishes and embellishes its fiction (good, righteous), and one that has "lore" (tedious, lowly). It's a delicate art that warrants close consideration. It also warrants some good examples, which brings us to ΔV: Rings Of Saturn. Which, as it gets closer to release, I'm going to be nice to and call either Delta V or Rings Of Saturn. Even though Triangle Vee Colon Rings is more fun. It's also fun, having played it, to keep up with how it’s doing in early access, not just because I'm looking forward to seeing it take off, but because its dev has spent the last few years writing delightful patch notes in the style of in-world news bulletins. |
| 4:37p | Ghost Ship Publishing announce their first three games, including a Deep Rock Galactic spin-off  Earlier this month, the studio behind Deep Rock Galactic announced that they were branching out (or digging in) to publishing with their new initiative Ghost Ship Publishing. Today, the team held a fifth-anniversary livestream for their hit co-op shooter, and they also announced the first three games they’ll be releasing as a publisher, including a Deep Rock Galactic spin-off, a top-down shooter, and a spell-slinging roguelike - all coming from indie teams based in Denmark. |
| 5:00p | "The narrative had to be baked into the corridors": Marc Laidlaw on writing Half-Life  “I was deranged,” says Half-Life writer Marc Laidlaw of his decision to publish the plot of Episode 3 as fanfiction. “I was living on an island, totally cut off from my friends and creative community of the last couple decades, I was completely out of touch and had nobody to talk me out of it. It just seemed like a fun thing to do… until I did it.” Laidlaw first discovered that community in the mid 90s, in the office of Valve, where Gabe Newell and team were already hard at work on Half-Life. “I’d seen bits and pieces of the levels they were working on, but as soon as I heard the name, I just got this amazing buzz,” Laidlaw says. “I could see the whole world they were aiming at somehow, and I felt it was a collective vision. This is one reason it’s so weird to me when people try to attribute authorship to me that I’ve never felt. It was all there when I got there, in embryo.” |
| 5:59p | Grab the handy Stream Deck Mini for £55  The Elgato Stream Deck Mini debuted for £70 or $100, but now it's down to £54.99 on Amazon UK. That's a handy 21% off and a fairly decent cost of entry and a historic low price for a useful macro-pad, with easy integrations for streaming apps, media and general automation. |
| 6:13p | The octo-core AMD Ryzen 7700X is $299 in the US  AMD's Ryzen 7000X3D processors are now available (in theory), so we're seeing some big discounts on previously-released options that bring them into newfound relevance. Such is the case with the Ryzen 7 7700X, the middle child of the Zen 4 lineup and an absolutely beastly performer when it comes to gaming thanks to its full-fat eight-core, one-CCD design. This chip launched at $399 but is now $100 cheaper thanks to a discount code at Newegg, where you can pick up the 7700X for $298.99 when you use code BTSCP2655 at the checkout. |
| 6:19p | Introducing the RPS Game Club's first game of the month - it's Hi-Fi Rush!  A new thing for RPS in 2023 is the RPS Game Club, a kind of monthly book club for games where we pick a game to play each month, write some cool things about it, and have a big all liveblog discussion with you lot, our readers, at the end of it. It's a project I've been wanting to get off the ground for some time now, and finally, the Treehouse Game Club doors have been busted open... and there's some toe-tapping guitar music coming from inside? That's right, we're playing Hi-Fi Rush as our first RPS Game Club game, and we hope you'll join us on this month-long musical journey. |
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