Thirsty Suitors is a cross between Scott Pilgrim’s battles with evil exes, stylish arcade skateboarding, and cooking segments all portrayed through a South Asian cultural lens. Outerloop Games’ RPG stars Jala as she returns to an old town with old flames, and frames their reconciliation through turn-based battles where the simple act of talking to each other is pumped up to ridiculous levels. There’s even a stage in which Jala enters a dream world where her exes appear as powerful, distorted versions of their own self-concept. Think Persona 5 but with fewer criminals. Jala explores her old town on a skateboard (more Jet Set Radio than Tony Hawk), and when she’s home with her family, she cooks with her mother in over-the-top, campy fashion. Thirsty Suitors portrays all of its storylines in this way, but there’s a grounded humanity at its core that will be exciting to see when the game launches on PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, and Switch.
Tag Archives: Max Payne
The Worst Games Of 2022 According To Metacritic
Another year in the books. Or ebooks. Or TikTok. I don’t know. I’m older now so I can’t keep up with all your newfangled gizmos and bookkeeping tools. What I do know is that this year is basically over. So, we can now look at Metacritic to see what game critics collectively declared as the worst of the worst in 2022.
We’ve said this before and it’s worth repeating: Liking a “bad” game isn’t a bad thing. Numbered scores come with all sorts of asterisks and caveats, which is part of the reason we don’t use them here. But if you see a game on this list that you happen to love, it just means you have a different taste than a bunch of other critics or players. That’s fine! Enjoy what you like and don’t be an asshole about it and everything will be fine. Now, as we’ve done before, here are the worst-rated games on Metacritic with at least seven reviews, the number the site deems necessary before placing any game on this list.
5. LEGO Brawls | Score: 46 (PS5)
LEGO games tend to be pretty fine at worst and really great at best. However, LEGO Brawls, a Smash Bros-like fighting game, is an exception to this rule. It seems the main problem is that this is just a port of a 2019 phone game that wasn’t very good. (I played it and totally forgot about it until a few minutes ago.) And making matters worse, the publisher had the audacity to charge $40 for this no-frills port of a three-year-old mediocre mobile game. LEGO Brawls on PS5, you deserve this spot on the list!
4. XEL | Score: 43 (Switch)
For a split second, when I first saw the name of this sci-fi 3D open-world action game, I thought some weird XFL game had shipped without me knowing. That’s not the case and instead, the somewhat nice-looking XEL is undermined by bugs, unpolished gameplay, and frustrating technical issues that exist on the PC port, too.
3. Babylon’s Fall | Score: 41 (PS5)
It’s not shocking that a flop of a game like Babylon’s Fall made the top five worst games released in 2022. That’s probably down to its awful controls, tedious combat, and everything else feeling incomplete. At the same time, it’s a bit shocking that this live-service action RPG only snagged the third spot on the list. I’d warn you to not play Babylon’s Fall, but it’s actually incredibly cheap (even free in some cases) to pick up now after Square Enix announced it was killing the servers for this live-service game in February, less than a year after its release.
2. Crossfire X | Score: 38 (Xbox Series X/S)
Remedy Entertainment makes good shit. I love Alan Wake, Max Payne, and Control, games that average in the 83 to 89 range on Metacritic. So the idea of the studio building a brand new single-player FPS campaign, as Crossfire X was originally pitched, sounded great on paper. In practice, the actual game is a boring, meandering mess that mostly plays like a bad Call of Duty knock-off and doesn’t get interesting until too late. By the time the game started turning it around, I was so tired of it that I just couldn’t care. And then I tried to play the online PvP portion of the game (which wasn’t developed by Remedy) and remembered I have access to at least a dozen better, less buggy, more interesting shooters on my Xbox and stopped playing Crossfire X.
1. Postal 4: No Regerts | Score: 30 (PC)
There will be some people who see this low score and use it as a weapon in their fight against the so-called “WOKE” critics and journalists of the world. Here’s the thing though: I played open-world shooter Postal 4 and its various quests and side quests set in a depraved city and even if I ignore its shitty, punching-down humor and awful jokes, what I’m left with is a crappy shooter which plays like Postal 2 but worse. And when you’ve created a game that is being negatively compared to Postal fucking 2, you’ve made a mistake. The best thing I can say about Postal 4 is that well…at least it isn’t Postal 3!
Nvidia RTX Technology Now Working In Some Classic PC Games
Valve’s classic Portal was recently re-released on Steam with some very fancy new visuals, including ray-tracing and DLSS support. That was great news for Portal fans, but it’s also great news for fans of all kinds of old PC games.
Before we go any further, I’ll explain the tech we’re talking about. RTX is the name given to a set of technologies used by graphics card company Nvidia that uses “ray tracing and AI technologies” to, very simply, make PC games look incredible. Here’s a trailer for Portal With RTX, the re-release of the game made with this tech, showing the improvements made to a game that most of us remember looking very 2007:
Now, the thing with RTX is that while in this case (and with Quake and Minecraft) it had to be put into the game by developers, Nvidia are also releasing a version of the tech with modders in mind. It’s called RTX Remix:
With RTX Remix, the game runs in the background and we replace the old rendering APIs and systems with RTX Remix’s 64-bit Vulkan renderer. This enables the addition of ray-tracing to classic games and it all updates in real-time as lights and objects move. Light can be cast from behind the player, or from another room, and in Portal with RTX, light even travels through portals. Glass refracts light, surfaces reflect detail based on their glossiness, reflections can be cast into the scene from behind the player, objects can self-reflect, and indirect light from off-screen illuminates and affects what you see.
Compared to Quake II RTX and Minecraft with RTX, the path-traced ray tracing introduced by RTX Remix is even more advanced, bouncing light four times instead of once, improving quality, immersion, and the simulation of real-world light. Additionally, we’ve also introduced several new ray tracing techniques that further improve quality while also being more performant.
Nvidia says that RTX Remix is “a modding platform” that will allow “modders of all ability levels to bring ray tracing and NVIDIA technologies to classic games”. Given it’s not out until 2023 I was expecting we were still months away from seeing what benefits it could bring to older games, but nope!
Modders like LordVulcan have found you can add RTX juice to some classic titles, right now, and in most cases it’s done just by…dropping some files from one folder to another on your hard drive and enabling some developer stuff in the console. That’s it. And it’s working on games like SWAT 4 and the original Max Payne.
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While the results aren’t perfect, at least compared to the professional jobs done over months on games like Minecraft, they still look fantastic! Here’s Max Payne, for example, courtesy of Alex Coulter:
That lighting. Those shadows. This is magic.
Here’s some footage of SWAT 4 taken by EiermannTelevision, which was released in 2005 and most definitely did not look like this at the time:
And here’s Half-Life 1, along with a little explainer on how it was done:
None of those examples are perfect, but it’s incredible they work this well given how quick their implementation was. This is going to be so good when the actual RTX Remix is released in 2023, but until then it’s going to be cool seeing what other classic titles this slapdash workaround is compatible with!
The Concept Art Behind Roller Skating Shooter Rollerdrome
One of my favourite Fine Art posts for the year was our showcase for OlliOlli World, so it’s a huge pleasure that we’re able to be looking at art from Roll7’s latest game (Rollerdrome, which is out this week) so soon.
We’ve looked at the game a few times on the site already; it’s basically a deathmatch shooter, which combines skating tricks with third-person gunplay. And where OlliOlli World was an adorable cartoon adventure that looks like it should have its own animated series, Rollerdrome’s cel-shaded aesthetic looks like a comic from the 1980s met a gory sci-fi movie from the 1970s. And I mean all of that in the best way possible.
I should note here that while Rollerdrome is from the same studio as OlliOlliWorld—Roll7—these are actually different artists. Everything you’re seeing below is the work of Kim Hu and Grégoire Frot, and you’ll also find links to both their portfolios in their names below:
MORE ROLLERDROME:
Rollerdrome Is Like Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater But With Guns
It’s like Max Payne, Jet Set Radio, and My Friend Pedro had a baby together…is that possible?
5 Hot Tips To Survive The Fiery New Skating Shooter From OlliOlli World Devs
Rollerdrome is an indie rollerskating murder game from the OlliOlli crew out on Playstation 4, 5, and Steam starting August 16. Rollerdrome is a single-player third-person shooter that sends you rolling toward your fate on bulletproof white skates. Rollerdrome is a shaken can of soda, exploding with color and energy, and I was able to preview it to deliver you hot gossip on what to expect and how to play.
Max Payne 1 and 2 Remakes Coming to PS5
Remedy has announced it will be remaking PlayStation 2 classics Max Payne and Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne for PlayStation 5 in partnership with Rockstar Games. The two remakes will be shipped as a single product, with the project currently in the “concept development stage”. Remedy will use its proprietary Northlight game engine and production is being funded by the Grand Theft Auto maker. The budget for the game is said to be the same as a “typical Remedy AAA production”. No release date is mentioned as part of the press release.
Sam Houser, founder of Rockstar Games, said: “We were thrilled when our long-time friends at Remedy approached us about remaking the original Max Payne games. We are massive fans of the work the Remedy team has created over the years, and we can’t wait to play these new versions.”
Remedy CEO Tero Virtala then explains how the Max Payne series has always held a special place in the hearts of everyone at Remedy. “We’re hugely excited to be working with our partners at Rockstar Games once again for the chance to bring the story, action and atmosphere of the original Max Payne games back to players in new ways.”
First released on PC in the summer of 2001, the first Max Payne made its way to PS2 six months later. Its successor, the Fall of Max Payne, followed just two years later in December of 2003. Fans then had to wait a whole nine years for Max Payne 3 to come along in 2012. Renown for its neo-noir atmosphere, groundbreaking storytelling and bullet-time gunplay, the series has sold more than 7.5 million copies to date. Alongside this newly-announced project, Remedy is also developing Alan Wake II.
Are you interested in these remakes? Share your initial thoughts in the comments below.
Remedy Remaking Max Payne 1 And 2 Inside Control Engine
Film noir sad sack Max Payne is getting his due with a full remake of the first two games, developer Remedy Entertainment announced today. The new compilation will include both Max Payne and Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max and be exclusive to PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC.
Remakes of the PS2-era games are part of a new publishing agreement with Grand Theft Auto maker Rockstar Games. Remedy will develop the games using its proprietary Northlight game engine, which made 2019’s excellent paranormal thriller, Control, while Rockstar will fund the production.
The Max Payne games mixed together traditional crime noir tropes and comic book storytelling to weave together a grim tale of a detective whose life spirals out of control after his drug and mob connections lead to his family’s murder. The games were also famous for their then-unusual bullet time mechanic.
The studio says development will be “in line with a typical Remedy AAA-game production” and that it’s still in the concept stage. It’s years away, in other words, which is probably why it’s not coming to PS4 and Xbox One. But in the meantime the studio has been doing just fine for itself.
Remedy has been making a number of big moves lately. Following the success of Control, it released a remaster of the original Alan Wake last year. Then in December it revealed that Alan Wake 2 was in development and expected sometime in 2023. Remedy is also working on two new Control games, a sequel with the working title Condor, and a multiplayer spin-off.
It also found time to work with Smilegate on the Western release of lackluster first-person shooter CrossfireX, and has a deal with Tencent to release a new online game that’s currently code named Vanguard. Remedy currently only consists of some 300 employees. It’s also notably one of the few remaining large-scale independent studios in the games industry, as others get snatched up left and right by Microsoft, Sony, and others. Deals like this are one way for it to stay that way.
Rockstar’s Portfolio Of GTA Games Touted As Diverse
Rockstar Games is widely known as the Grand Theft Auto company, a reputation owner Take-Two tried to dispel in its latest presentation to investors by pointing out that Rockstar Games also used to make other stuff like L.A. Noire and Midnight Club.
In addition to reporting its first quarter results yesterday, Take-Two released a 41-page investor presentation outlining the company’s current strategies and growth. One of those strategies? Continuing to make a shit-ton of money off GTA V and Online nearly a decade after they originally released.
But there’s more to Rockstar, the studio behind the eternally lucrative blockbuster, than just open world crime games. “Rockstar Games: Diverse Portfolio of Industry-Leading Intellectual Property,” reads the top of slide 10 (via Twitter user Adam Dorsey). It goes on to detail the success of not just GTA V but also…GTA Online and the GTA series as a whole. Franchises within franchises.
Slide 11 points out that Rockstar also made Red Dead Redemption, stretching the two games released over a decade into a trilogy thanks to the recent standalone release of the multiplayer mode Red Dead Online. Most studios would love to have one critically-acclaimed open series, let alone two. But a testament to experimentation and diversity it is not.
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Rounding out this “diverse” portfolio of games about men riding around shooting things is slide 12 which highlights L.A. Noire, Max Payne 3, and Midnight Club: Los Angeles. It doesn’t include dates, but for those keeping track at home, L.A. Noire came out in 2011 and hasn’t seen a sequel outside of 2017’s mini-VR expansion. Max Payne 3 came out in 2012. And despite four separate games and two additional remixes, we haven’t had a new Midnight Club racing game since 2008.
Why do I feel like Rockstar will release another version of GTA before the long-awaited Midnight Club revival arrives?