Games News
X-it Stage Left
Games leaving Xbox game pass at the end of this month include Superhot Mind Control Delete a clever slomo FPS which I have meant to play for ages, Yes, Your Grace a game about being a posh king so fuck that and Resident Evil 7 AKA Resident Evil Biohazard AKA, Resident Evil (banjo playing) dick a dow dow dick a dow yeehaw. So, get two of those played now. Also leaving are NHL20 and Farming Simulator 19 but don’t worry because NHL 22 is already on there and I am loving it and Farming Simulator 22 is on there today. I know this because as a tribute I was up with the cockcrow and got fired right in there, up to my nuts in crop rotation and silage and rearing hens and kidnapping teenagers who’ve taken the wrong turn in the road and cutting their Achilles tendons so they can’t run away from me while I make chili out of their mate’s eyes. What? You can’t do that in the Farming Simulator games? How the hell can they call them simulators then? Boring.
Seriously – I think I might actually give Farming Simulator 22 a go because – you may or may not know this – I left the UK in 2009 because I retired and bought a small farm in Nova Scotia so if real life experience doing something helps you do better in the videogame version then I have a better chance of being good at Farming Simulator than I do playing Call of Duty, The Witcher or Super Shagger 22. Spoiler alert. One of those is not a real game. Yet. (Nintendo – call me)
Take 2 2 Take FIFA24?
Take 2 looks like being the first company to bite the dangly worm that is the FIFA license – now the deal between them and EA has been choked like chicken. (For more details in amusing and acerbic terms of this sequestration see Little Old Purple Column #2).
CEO Strauss Zelnick told IGN, "We're definitely interested in expanding our opportunities in sports, and FIFA has a great brand and incredible clout, but we have no current plans to discuss." He doesn’t actually sound like that – he’s got a standard American accent but that’s not nearly as much fun to do. So, you know when someone in business says, “this is fantastic, but we’re not interested yet” it means “get your people to reach out to my people tout fucking suite.” So, while not quite biting the dangly worm of the FIFA license but it is at the very least walking up to the worm, sniffing it a bit, then giving it a lick.
And why not? Take 2’s already has the 2K sports franchises out there carving great slabs of the Basketball, Wrestling and Gold market – they are also working on a more arcade-style official NFL game so if they made an arcade type football game that puts the official FIFA license onto a Sega Superstar Soccer kind of thing that would excite me. “Is that a shin guard in your socks or are you just pleased to see me?” “No. It’s a shin guard.” Who puts penises in socks? Oh yeah. The Red Hot Chili Peppers. Fair play.
Neigh Way
Talking of Take 2, in the same big conference investor money chat thing this week they announced that Grand Theft Auto V has now sold over 165 million copies, and Red Dead Redemption 2 has 44 million. Forty-four million copies of Red Dead Redemption 2. Wow. That is forty-four million people who have all said, “fuck me how long do we have to ride this damned horse and carriage until the action starts.”
CLOSE BUT NO CIGAR
This is a section for games that I have played that I really, really, desperately wanted to like but… er… didn’t. This week Citizen Sleeper on the Xbox. It said it was an attempt to replicate TTRPG of days gone by. If you don’t know what TTRPG is, then you didn’t play them. I didn’t. So, I googled it. And it means Tabletop Role Playing Game. Now I never played those, but I wish I had because Stranger Things showed how cool they are. It’s also a wee indie game and I feel this column should be championing stuff like this. So, I downloaded it – free - in inverted commas – on Xbox Game Pass. And it was like this…
You know there’s that moment when you either latch onto a game or you don’t, yeah? It’s the same with a movie, TV show or book. It takes a while. There are very few games that grab you from the off. There’s a build up. A getting to know you period. An awkward where you get a whiff of its smell and wonder if you can smell that every day for a month. It’s like docking with a space station in Elite on the BBC Micro. You have that moment when you’re waiting for everything to connect and sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t. And although this game had so much going for it – some quite incredible sci fi writing for a start as you find yourself on a drifting space craft hunted by overlords you are trying to flee and work out what the hell to do. But I couldn’t engage. Now a lot of this was down to the fact that all three of my kids were fighting with each other. Now when that happens, I get distracted by A) the noise but also B) their willingness to throw each other under the bus because they know I can hear. Now I love my kids to bits, they are extremely challenging and a lot of hard work because they are so charismatic and inventive – but I hate when they shout things like “yeah, well YOU drank all of Dad’s beer” or even more intriguing – and this was an actual sentence from last night “well you lied to Dad’s face not once but TWICE in five minutes.”
I don’t know if you have kids. But if you do? Sell them to a slave trader before they are teenagers. They change when they get to that age. Kids are amazing little things. But teenagers are absolutely fucking irredeemably horrible creations that weaponize selfishness. If you have teenage kids and they are NOT giving you an impossibly hard time? Then you simply don’t know what the fuck they are doing in their lives.
But the game looked interesting so please consider Citizen Sleeper if you have an Xbox Game Pass subscription, an interest in old school tabletop role playing games and no repeat NO horrible teenage children.
The Juicy Tip of the Column
Stuck on the BitMap Brothers’ ode to immortality… GODS on the Amiga? Course you are. You’ve only been playing it for 31 years. I’ve been playing with my wife for even longer and still nowhere near to unlocking all the secret levels in her.
At the password screen type in SORCERY and you will get unlimited energy. The game should be easier now. If it was still the nineties, I’d make some joke about unlimited energy and my wife but it’s the 2020s and she’s literally in the next room and will kick my arse.
Talking of my wife. She needs me to make money from this or she will stop letting me play videogames. So that is the end of your FREE version of the podcast this week. I hope you’ve enjoyed it. If you subscribe to the PAID version, you get NOT ONLY another 2600 words AKA 20 minutes AKA another bit over two and a half times the size of this for one measly UK pound basically. But you also gain entry into the Monthly Draw. Two draws depending on subs levels: If you take out a monthly sub at a pound a week you could win exclusive on set photos from Gamesmaster from my own collection – hmm – that makes it sound like a slightly porny OnlyFans thing – it’s not. It’s thoroughly decent although I WILL sign AND deface those photos with moustaches and cigarettes, and you know probably give me or Kirk or Dave Perry a big pair of tits if you want. If you want to go for a further commitment and take out an ANNUAL or FOUNDER MEMBER subscription, then the monthly prize is a one hour zoom call with me and up to three people of your choosing.
“But what’s actually behind the paywall this month Dominik?” I hear you cry. “I’m not paying if it’s just going to be shite!”
Well, it includes…
How I committed one of the most morally disgusting acts you can do with a videogame and I hate myself for it, what connects Ratchet & Clank with USA Abortion Law, my exclusive report from this weeks Global Midget League Counter-Strike Tournament in Dresden – spoiler alert – that bit might not be real it might be just me ripping the total piss out of eSports and their commentators, me answering a letter from a Canadian asking What is a Gamesmaster AND my Top 5 Videogame Shoot Em Ups that sound like the names of Adult Movie Stars. That’s what’s awaiting if you throw some shiny coins my way. If you don’t then that’s cool. But please recommend this podcast column to one other likeminded individual and we’ll call it evens.
Until next Thursday keep it little, keep it old, keep it Purple.
