Gait Games

Sci-fantasy shooter Warframe is the sexy cyborg fruit of 13 years of updates and expansions, encompassing scores upon scores of quests, areas, plotlines, systems and characters, together with a huge quantity of player-made art. Much of Warframe’s original design still exists within the game, however tweaked and refreshed: the developers have removed a few larger chunks, including the underloved PvP raids, but they’ve mostly sought to polish up aspects that have lost their lustre, while playing out stories that range from spacey self-referentiality to commentary on indentured work. Currently, the studio are reworking Banshee, a sonic avenger who formed part of the Warframe launch roster way back in 2013.

“I know the Warframe team has been talking about bringing back raids, and doing stuff with that,” the game’s original design director Scott McGregor told me, at this year’s Tennocon expo. “But overall, there’s a lot of stuff from Warframe that’s been in there for a long, long time. For better or for worse. I think, as a team, instead of mostly turning it off, we either improve it, or we replace it with something better.”

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**Netflix Faces $105 Million Lawsuit Over Stolen Master Copy of Nicolas Cage Film ‘Fortitude’**

Netflix finds itself in a legal predicament in a federal court in California, contending with a lawsuit demanding around $105 million. This legal action has been initiated by Simon Afram, the writer and producer of the eagerly awaited film *Fortitude*, featuring Nicolas Cage. The conflict emerged after Netflix conceded that a master copy of the film was taken during the theft of a significant quantity of drives from its Sunset Bronson Studios office in Los Angeles.

Reports from *The Hollywood Reporter* indicate that Afram and his production company, Op-Fortitude, officially filed the lawsuit against Netflix on July 30. The master copy of *Fortitude*, a war-themed film set in World War II, had been personally delivered to Netflix’s Los Angeles office on June 15, following the company’s expressed interest in securing the distribution rights for the film.

In an email dated June 25 from Sean Berney, Netflix’s Head of Film Acquisitions, the streaming platform confirmed the incident: “This is a first for us… Unfortunately, someone stole a good amount of drives from our office desks this past week. We’ve been working through this with our security teams to no luck. Our piracy teams are on high alert with the breach and will monitor.”

The lawsuit contends that Netflix failed to engage the Los Angeles Police Department in its internal inquiry regarding the theft. On the other hand, Netflix has opted not to make any public statements concerning the active lawsuit, but the company’s legal representation criticized Op-Fortitude’s claims as a “hostile attempt to extort money.”

Currently, *Fortitude* does not have a confirmed release date, largely because the film lacks a designated distributor, a situation further complicated by the theft of the master copy. The producers assert that the theft jeopardizes their potential to sell the film to another distribution entity. Significantly, as of now, the film has not appeared on torrenting platforms, and no possible suspects in the theft have been identified.

This lawsuit underscores the growing concerns regarding security measures and intellectual property rights in the digital era, especially within the entertainment sector. As streaming services continue to expand, the imperative of protecting creative content becomes increasingly vital.

Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls‘ pre-launch open beta has just wrapped up, having been open over the weekend. Sadly, those who’ve given the fighter a go on PC over the past few days have run into a litany of issues, leaving developers Arc System Works apologising for the inconvenience and scrambling to provide fixes.

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Hello all! Welcome to another week of sordid digital diversions, aka new PC games, dumped upon the innocent wanderer like a chamberpot upended over your head by a Victorian maid, as you saunter down an alleyway in your finest crinoline and lobster tail bustle. How are you supposed to attend the Crown Prince’s soirée in this bedraggled state? In vain do you shake your reeking fists at the chambermaid, for she is a minion of the Maw, and only squawks with glee. You totter out of the alleyway, mopping your face with your nosegay, and are promptly arrested for being a public obscenity.

Enough of this pissy period palaver! Our list of the week’s most promising new PC releases awaits. It’s a longer edition, possibly because my laptop audio stopped working halfway through the curation process, so I may have included a few extra games that sound absolutely abysmal.

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We famously love a bit of Myst here at RPS. Always have. So, naturally, Cyan Worlds deciding to bust out a teaser for a new game in the Mystverse that’s since been cancelled caught our attention.

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Grab your Geiger counter and your copy of The Arbinger Institute’s seminal conflict resolution handbook The Anatomy of Peace, because STALKER 2‘s faction war-y story expansion Cost of Hope has a release date. It’s out on August 20th, developers GSC Game World have announced, and will launch in tandem with the long-awaited Update 2.0 – which, among other tweaks, will move the base game over to a newer, less technically perilous version of Unreal Engine 5.

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I wonder what’s going to happen when we eventually run out of crusty old public-domain drawings to put in these. Hopefully by that point the standards of what’s considered ‘old’ will have shifted and we can start using photos and video stills of, I dunno, my fourth birthday party or something. Or maybe Mark can learn woodblock printing and we can make some ourselves. Should Mark learn woodblock printing? Let us know in the comments, and also, what you’re playing this weekend.

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Released back in 2018, Crashphalt is a free and eccentric multiplayer game in which players do ground-pounds to send out seismic ripples, striving to punt each other off-screen. It’s got an “overwhelmingly positive” Steam user review reception, as of writing, but that’s not entirely a judgement on its quality. You see, Crashphalt is a hit today partly because you need it to run an online multiplayer mod for Toby Fox’s wonderful RPG Undertale.

Of Crashphalt’s 555 currently existing user reviews, the vast majority were written over five years after release, and either totally disregard or cruelly dunk on Crashphalt. An example: “10/10 Funny Undertale game, will never play this.”

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Who knows when or if BioWare’ll ever be allowed to make a follow-up to Dragon Age: The Veilguard. Whatever ends up being the future of a series EA’ve left in a rather ambiguous place, a group of Crusader Kings 3 modders have stepped up to make a Dragon Age total conversion that lets folks play out a bit of their own kingdom-battling history in Thedas.

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Car Park Capital is a triumphantly unwholesome tycoon game in which you try to make an entire society utterly dependent on cars. You start with a relatively green-ish map, and do your best to tarmac it all over. A strange and unlikely prospect, I know!

When we first covered this motorist management sim last year, the options included putting up billboards to brainwash obstinate pedestrians, and selling people banana-mobiles. Since then, developer Hilko Janssen of Hilkojj Interactive has found a publisher in MicroProse. If you were hoping that MicroProse might persuade Janssen to give up on his visions of total automotive apocalypse, you were hoping in vain.

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