Month: June 2023

A Critique of Power Fantasy: Warhammer 40K: Boltgun

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Warhammer 40K: Boltgun wallpaper with chad face on space marine
Always on that Astartes purge-set

Boltgun delivers a potent power fantasy, but the thrill of being powerful wanes due to a lack of challenge in the mid-to-late game.

What is a power fantasy?

A power fantasy is an imagined scenario in which one imagines being far more powerful than in real life.

They may imagine themselves as a legendary warrior, superhero, ruler, or god.

Video games enable players to engage with such fantasies in the confines of a virtual world. Rather than imagining themselves being powerful, video games render the fantasy for them.

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Will Timesplitters 4 Have Fewer Features?

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The guy wakes up from coma meme. He asks if Timesplitters 4 is out. The nurse tells him 'I hope you like microtransactions'.

Update: Turns out, it won’t have any features at all! Free Radical has been closed once again and TimeSplitters 4 is not happening. The only solace TimeSplittes fans can find is that the game may have been riddled with predatory features anyway. Not a great coping mechanism, but us TimeSplitters fans are pretty used to coping at this point.

The TimeSplitters games are uniquely content-heavy. Whereas most shooters—both then and now—feature a single-player campaign and multiplayer component, all three TimeSplitters games have a campaign, challenge mode, multiplayer (featuring an abnormally large number of modes), and a map maker. Each game has also included split-screen co-op for all modes, bots, and a diverse range of maps, weapons, and playable characters stretching across several time periods and pop culture genres.

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The Definitive Edition’s Unfixable Graphics

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Grand Theft Auto: The Definitive Edition came out over a year ago. Tragically, many people bought it. Unsurprisingly, a lot of people weren’t happy.

Grove Street Games responded by updating the game over the following year. Since the first anniversary, however, updates have slowed. The most glaring issues have been fixed or at least made less bad.

There is still much left to fix, but Grove Street Games apparently doesn’t think it is worth the effort.

Neither do I.

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Will TimeSplitters 4 Flop?

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Cortez from TimeSplitters holding a lootbox.
The bad timeline

Update: Never mind. Free Radical is dead once again. It is not, after all, time to split. Perhaps it never will be. This essay is still interesting reading though. Well worth a read-through. RIP Free Radical, one of the most abused great game development studios in the industry.

TimeSplitters is a cult classic and for good reason. For many who played it in the glory days of the PlayStation 2, memories of TimeSplitters stir them with nostalgia. In the years since Free Radical went bankrupt, there hasn’t been anything quite like it.

Over a decade later, Deep Silver has reassembled Free Radical Design and set them to work on a reboot of this beloved franchise. This is exciting news for fans of the series, but there is also an air of trepidation.

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Naming the ‘GTA Clone’ Genre

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Grand Theft Auto artwork with the subtitle "clones".

Grand Theft Auto 3 had such a huge impact on gaming that it essentially created a genre of its own. Since then, Grand Theft Auto’s presence in gaming has only gotten bigger and its domination of the genre has remained uncontested. A few competitors have sought to challenge the GTA series. So far, none have succeeded, with most failing to survive the attempt. Other games, meanwhile, have not sought to challenge GTA’s dominance but have nonetheless taken heavy inspiration from the GTA games and created experiences that are recognisably GTA in style yet different enough not to be seen as direct competitors.

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The GTA 4 vs GTA 5 Vehicle Physics Debate

Callum Gibson1 Comment
Accurate representation of driving in GTA 4

Every driving game can be mapped onto a spectrum. At one end are those with arcadey vehicle physics. Vehicles in these games do not handle realistically at all; they are typically cartoonish and deliberately silly. At the other end are those with realistic vehicle physics; these games aim to recreate the experience of driving actual vehicles.

The Grand Theft Auto series has leaned more on the realistic side of the spectrum since GTA 3. The PS2 games featured vehicle physics at their most arcadey, though they were relatively realistic by the standards of the time. The physics and damage models are simple compared to modern GTAs. They would undoubtedly be considered outdated if alternative urban sims such as Watch Dogs and even many dedicated racing games weren’t still lagging behind Rockstar’s earliest efforts.

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