Editorials
Following a mad few weeks of reveals for everything ranging from new nVidia graphics cards to the Xbox Series lines of consoles and the PlayStation 5, this past week has felt a lot calmer. At least in the gaming world.
While the world around us continues to go to pot (I’m fully expecting to be in a local lockdown by the time this is published), with another edition of Our Week in Games we hope to shine a bit of brightness into your lives.
The current games industry isn’t set up to be friendly to the consumer, I’m not just talking about the new consoles, it’s the whole industry stretching from those new consoles to digital stores through to mainstream retailers. I don’t offer solutions, but merely to highlight some of the issues that are out there at the moment.
It’s been another up and down week in the games industry. Nintendo held a surprise mini-Direct as a partner showcase which immediately led to fans calling for more first party goodness. The Epic Games vs Apple battle continued, meanwhile Ubisoft are yet again in the news for all the wrong reasons.
But we love videogames, and on we march with Our Week in Games. Read on…
This week, Epic Games and Apple have been embroiled in a pull no punches exciting legal battle over something called Fortnite.
To be honest, I’m not entirely sure what’s going on. I used an Apple once for about half an hour, wondering where all the buttons were. I’ve also never played Fortnite. With a full time job and two children I certainly don’t have time to try a battle royale that takes two weeks to play.
Apparently, from what I’ve heard, one of the megalithic companies with all of the money wants a slightly larger cut of money from the other megalithic company with all of the money, but the first megalithic company with all of the money wants to keep it.
So now you’re all caught up, here’s what we’ve all been up to.
Can you believe our last edition of ‘Our Week In Games’ was way back in 2014? Well after a rather long hiatus in one of our filing cabinets it has triumphantly returned to bring you the weekly gaming news from the writers here at The Reticule and the wider world. Hurrah!
Escape from Tarkov has been available since July 2017 and has come a long way since then. It’s been constantly developed and updated by BattleState Games, and is turning into something very special indeed having exploded in popularity through some genius marketing on Twitch.
I’ve been playing it since late 2018 and have put in a ridiculous amount of time in it- I’m not exactly sure how much as the stats are reset each wipe, but the last time I checked I was at over 100 hours in the last wipe alone. What?!?! Don’t look at me like that….
So given that, I decided it was time to start pulling my experience together into a guide that will hopefully stop people making some of the mistakes I made during my early Tarkov life, and bridge some of the middle ground between newbie and pro.
It helps though to understand why Tarkov is such a great game. One of these reasons is that it generates truly memorable experiences like the one I had just the other day.
Last week Ion Storm’s classic first-person RPG Deus Ex turned 20. The week before that I had written about the game for the first time, having played it through again over the winter, totally unaware of its imminent birthday. I don’t know why it took me just shy of two decades to write about given its enormous influence on my creative life (I first picked it up in…2002, by which time it had made its way into the Sold-Out Software range). It might be that I owe it something of a debt.
But so much has been written about Deus Ex over the years that I knew there was little value in going over the usual talking points. I decided instead to explore what it was like to be a part of this most immersive of games, with its rich, conspiracy-laden world. It meant venturing into the margins of its story, where a surprising amount of Deus Ex’s…let’s say purpose resides. And it meant talking about two characters that have always stuck with me and to whom I wished, in some small way, to tip my hat.
So, here it is. Happy birthday, Deus Ex. This was for you, in more ways than I knew.
The other night, Sony came out with their big PlayStation 5 stream, games were revealed, the console itself was shown off, and still nobody is any the wiser to the price. So, what are my not-so-hot hot takes? Hit the break to find out. …
During the peak (or low?) of lockdown, you might have seen the Facebook trend for people to post images of their favourite films, albums or games without any words to go alongside. I was tagged in one with the focus on the games that have impacted upon me, note impacted, not just favourite. Rather than a wordless Facebook post, writing about ten(ish) most impactful games right here on The Reticule is the best way to highlight these games that have shaped my gaming life. While we’ve often talked about Our Years in Games, or even Our (Reticule) Decade in Games, I decided to take things back a step, and look at my life in games. …
A browse around any mainstream gaming website (sadly, there are rivals to The Reticule out there) over the past day or so would have revealed that we have passed the 10th anniversary of the release of Red Dead Redemption and that The Witcher 3 has turned five. And as I look through our archives, it saddens me that we have not covered this game as it deserves. Somehow we managed to deliver not one, but two Verdicts on its predecessor. Even then, I ended up writing about it myself as well. The third one though? Apart from a mass of pre-release coverage, the most we talked about The Witcher 3 was in Our Favourite Games of The Reticule Years. …