Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth aims to retain the original game’s zaniness with “a lot of gimmicks thrown inside like a giant toy box.”
03.09.2023 - 20:25 / rockpapershotgun.com / Victoria Kennedy
Sundays are for being in awe of backpacks that pack into themselves. Before you scrunch it into a ball, let's read this week's best writing about games (and game related things).
For The Guardian, Lu-Hai Liang wrote about Chinese video games being on the rise, but not getting the respect they deserve. In spite of the Chinese government's restrictions, Liang feels - quite rightly! - pride in the accomplishments of his mother country. They make brilliant, creative games, and have found ways to break free of censorship.
Video games are one of the few creative media not dominated by the US. In consoles, two of the platform holders are from Japan, while developers in the UK and Europe are powerhouses of creativity. But the world’s biggest games company is Chinese giant Tencent, which is often the target of racism and online criticism. While massive corporations don’t need huge sympathy, as a Briton of Chinese heritage, it does pain me when Chinese games companies are falsely conflated with the Chinese government.
Christopher Livingston reviewed Starfield for PC Gamer. Probably one of the best reviews out Todd's mega RPG at the moment as it captures the experience of downing the main quest and pursuing your own.
I've always found the real joy of Bethesda's RPGs to be not the main story or official quests but the sandbox itself, the freedom to come up with your own goals and aspirations. So after about 75 hours I retired my helpful artifact-collecting space ranger and created a second character with the goal of completely ignoring the main quest. Once free of the tutorial I headed straight to Neon, a densely populated and gritty cyberpunk city on an ocean planet, a place packed with gangs, addicts, shady operatives, and crooked security guards. The perfect place to start a life of crime.
Victoria Kennedy asks: How realistic is Starfield? for Eurogamer. Kennedy gets the European Space Agency's verdict on shooting people in space, mining asteroids, and space elevators.
"I mean, if you look at the Dyson Sphere, which is the ultimate artificial way of going off planet, where basically you encircle your entire star with a sphere and you live on the inside of the sphere... then we had, in the 70s, a science fiction thing called Ringworld. So you had a ring around the star and that would increase your habitable volume by millions, but you'd have to dismantle the entire solar system to build it," he said. "This sort of thing, these huge engineering projects - which for us are like complete fantasy - engineering wise, it's kind of, sort of possible with a few caveats, like space elevators are kind of possible but with a few caveats. And they've been thought about for decades. But are we all gonna live in space? I
Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth aims to retain the original game’s zaniness with “a lot of gimmicks thrown inside like a giant toy box.”
Baldur’s Gate 3 has been a standout title this year and continues to be enjoyed by players doing new playthroughs or jumping on the bandwagon and experiencing it for the first time. One of the best parts of the game is the companions you meet on the way, and thanks to Larian Studios, we are about to see them all in a whole new way.
One game based on has been impossible to play since shortly after its original release, but things have finally changed in a major way. Following the financial success of, the follow-up film was poised to be a hit, and its American distributor Warner Brothers committed heavily to advertising. An in-browser game was developed as part of this strategy, with millions being invested in a major marketing gimmick. Dubbed the game was faced with the very unusual problem of being a little bit too successful to work out.
The core cast of Baldur's Gate 3 will reunite for a special one-shot Dungeons & Dragons livestream this week.
Intimidating shadows looming near wish to snap your sanity, adventurer. Will you waver in their presence?
Actual play show High Rollers will be hosting the cast of Baldur's Gate 3 for a special one-shot this week.
The entire core cast of Baldur's Gate 3 will come together to role-play their own characters in what I can only describe as the ultimate D&D session.
Even if you’ve only just started your fourth Baldur’s Gate 3 play-through, you still might be craving more of the game’s captivating characters. The actors behind those voices have been pretty active on social media, reciting memes in character and what not. Now they’re taking the immersion to a whole new level and joining actual play D&D series High Rollers for a special livestream event.
By Jay Peters, a news editor who writes about technology, video games, and virtual worlds. He’s submitted several accepted emoji proposals to the Unicode Consortium.
The Apple Vision Pro is on track for an early 2024 release, but it should be no surprise that the company’s first mixed-reality headset is in the possession of CEO Tim Cook. While previous reports mentioned that the Chief Executive uses the device daily, in a recent interview, Cook recently stated that he watched an entire season of the American sports comedy-drama series Ted Lasso on it.
Starfield was comfortably No.1 across Europe during its launch week, GSD data shows.
Nintendo seems to be all in on the nostalgia at the moment, as it recently announced a remake of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door during the latest Nintendo Direct, a game that some consider to be the pinnacle of Mario's RPG outings. The announcement came with a chunky gameplay trailer, in which we see multiple location from across the game gussied up for Nintendo Switch.