I’m declaring it: this is the Worst Week Ever for Steam Charts. And let’s face it – this is entirely your fault. If you were a better person, you’d buy better games. But instead you buy the same eight bloody games every bloody week, and then buy a game that isn’t even out for over a year. A YEAR! You are awful, and you do not deserve me. This is your punishment.

Real talk: I mean, I exaggerate my frustration with the incessant appearance of various games for astonishingly successful comic effect. Heck, it’d be even harder to write this rubbish without the running gags. But come on. Do you have any idea how many other games there are?! There’s this website called www.rockpapershotgun.com that has articles about so many of them!

Anyway, once more because they pay me…

“Hey Tom! What should we do with Rainbow Six next?”

[A fat worm, bloated from gorging itself within the nostril cavity, squeezes out against an eyeball, seeing it plop loosely onto the cheek below.]

“Alien mutant horror game! Excellent! What shall we call it?”

[A team in yellow hazmat suits bursts into the fetid office, spraying in the air from mysterious canisters on their backs, taping off the worst sections.]

[They are followed by white-suited professionals who carefully but firmly pull at the office chairs of the development team, dragging them away from their desks.]

“Quarantine! Excellent idea Tom!”

I hope someone somewhere out there appreciates that I’ve never once included any of the 2,940,934,834,903,489,034,980,342 Rick & Morty merchandise products.

What’s Another Thing You Could Buy Instead Of GTA V Again?

170,000th of Robby The Robot

The Fire Fades Edition doesn’t exist. Dark Souls III is so annoying that it even charts with a version of itself that you can’t buy. The whole series was on sale last week, hence its reappearance here, but I’ve no idea what was in this one. The Deluxe Edition was down to £15, which is what price a three-year-old game should be, of course. But it’ll be back up to a grotesque £60 by the end of Monday.

I know it’s probably unfair, but I blame Dark Souls for everything that’s wrong in the whole universe. It messed up all of gaming, but I suspect it’s probably also responsible for the rise of populism, global climate change, and Brexit too. You know the sorts of people who treat it more like a religion than a game they play? They’re the sort. You know what I mean. Awful people.

I went out for breakfast with a good friend this morning. We were in a nice little place, enjoying a quiet chat, when a lady made of sticks and spikes came in followed by two vile little dog-things. I cannot fathom why any food or drink establishment allows non-service animals to come in at the best of times, as if that can possibly be hygienic for anyone, but these dogs were pure evil. I mean, they had red outlines around them. Both looked like they’d been bred to the edge of possibility, utterly dysfunctional creatures that evolution would have stamped upon with a furious boot. And one of them BARKED AND BARKED AND BARKED from the moment it entered.

The stick-spike lady behaved as if it were not happening. This furry spitemonster yapped and yipped and growled without pause. It was ear-piercing and infuriating, rendering conversation impossible. So she was going to leave with a coffee, right? Wrong. She sat down at a table. And the furious dog just carried on. And carried on. And carried on. YAP! YIP! YAP! Every bark a brain-stab. For, maybe fifteen minutes? This didn’t bother sticklady at any point, until she finished her drink and left with the two eminently crushable creatures, the one of them screeching its hate all the while. At yet at no point did any deity strike her down. She just does that. Presumably every day. And no one will ever stop her.

Anyway, it looks like there are dogs in Octopath Traveler.

The description for Another WW2 Multiplayer Game Let Loose says it’s “a realistic World War Two” shooter. But I’m questioning if they even had PCs back in the 1940s.

It also says, “This is World War Two at a scale you’ve never seen before,” which makes me want to ask a surviving veteran of the conflict to have a play and see if he or she agrees.

Finally, it yet also says, “You’ve never played World War 2 the way it was meant to be played.” Which might be the stupidest sentence I’ve ever read. And I once tried to read a Dan Brown book.

What if someone made a game where, and try to stick with me here, lots of people got to hit each other with swords for a bit. I think it could be big. It’d certainly stick around on the Steam Charts like a tiresome bogey on a t-shirt sleeve.

I got a cross tweet after last week’s Steam Charts, where I wrote about Gems Of War instead of this game. From one of those accounts with a picture, but somehow 0 followers and 0 following. He’s sent two tweets ever, one to correct Tech Radar on an incorrect link, and another to point out that I wrote about the wrong game when he’d been trying to learn about this one. I replied, “Perfect.” But sadly he’s been too busy to follow up.

Which reminds me, I got another of my favourite emails this week. Someone writing to me at surprising length to tell me how stupid and wrong was my article about why the 2015 generation of VR was destined to be the complete flop it unequivocally was. I get a surprising number of these, absolutely LIVID and full of swears like “fucking idiot”, in which they furiously demand to know why I’d be so awful in public. And yet, without fail, every single one of them fails to include a single mention of what I got wrong. So many words, so little detail. Not bad examples. Not incorrect examples. Just no examples. Just hundreds of words yelling that it was wrong because they liked a VR game. So I reply in much the same way each time. This time with:

“I love these emails. You – an angry stranger over-invested in his favourite toy – send me a big bunch of insults and swears, I ask you to reply explaining one line of the article that has been proven incorrect, and you never get back to me. So, go on then, never get back to me pointing out anything I wrote that’s been proven incorrect.”

Here’s a weird thing! Nearly a week later he’s yet to get back to me! It’s weird that.

This week, in keeping with my grumpy tone, I realised that Allo Darlin’ haven’t released an album since 2014, and their Wikipedia article is all written in the past tense, despite containing no information of what happened. So I’m annoyed they’ve apparently gone. Still, Tallulah remains brilliant.



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Last week, with Divinity: Original Sin 2’s reappearance in the charts, I mused that with my new-found frightening void of spare time joblessness, I could finally pick up where I left off and finish the amazing RPG. It didn’t quite work out like that.

It’s Adam Smith’s fault. Not only did he keep it a secret from me that he was working on Baldur’s Gate 3 all this bloody time, the absolute bastard, but also caused me to start DOS2 over from the start. I asked him, since he works at Larian now (does this count as a disclaimer?), if I’d be missing out on anything spectacular if I carried on playing the original version, rather than restarting with the Definitive. He told me Act 3 is way better in the Definitive, and so here I am, still plugging away at the bit of the game I’ve already played.

Oh I’m so glad I am. It’s so good! And this time I haven’t made the colossal mistake of not adding Pet Pal as soon as possible. Last time, playing as Fane, I’d no idea that you even COULD talk to the animals until far too late! This time I’m having the bestest chats with all the rats, helping out poor thicko doggies, and feeling even more immeasurable guilt when I notice that the cat/squirrel isn’t following me around any more. This time I’m playing as Sebille, and really relishing her assassin ways, threatening everyone I can with my needle. (No that only sounds rude to you.)

I’m finding so many bits I missed last time (or perhaps were added since?), and while I’m at the point where I could trigger the end of Act 1, deliberately putting it off to hoover everything up. What a joy. Oh, and I discovered an excellent mod that lets me zoom the camera out to an actually useful distance!

The only thing that went wrong is its not being in the charts again this week so I can write about it.

I tend to judge games I don’t play by their tag page on RPS. If it’s a big long list of entries to Steam Charts, and no other articles or features, then I declare myself correct that it must actually be a bit boring.

I never thought that it would ever be OK to say that a Total War game was a bit boring, but look, there’s a system. So Total War: Three Kingdoms must be a bit boring.

That’s science. Please don’t try to argue with science.

And we’ve saved the stupidest for last.

You absolute morons.

This game isn’t coming out for over a year.* It’s not even close to being finished! And you paid money for it! WHY? WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU ALL?

There aren’t any pre-order advantages! It’s not even sodding well discounted! You just paid FULL PRICE for a game that is still deep in development! FOR WHAT?!

There’s the gargling idiocy of buying games before there are any reviews, and then there’s this. This isn’t just a few over-excited twits with £50 they wanted to part with for absolutely no reason at all – this is enough people such that this game out-grossed every other game on sale on Steam! THAT MANY people just spent money to not own a game, for no possible future gain.

Burn everything.

*No, I’m not wrong. I will eat my trousers if this game comes out in April next year. It will be September at the very earliest, and much more likely December.

The Steam Charts are compiled via Steam’s internal charts of the highest grossing games on Steam over the previous week.