Posted by Paul McNally

https://www.escapistmagazine.com/full-metal-schoolgirl-anime-fps/

https://www.escapistmagazine.com/?p=1035041

Sometimes, at the end of a hard day at the office (well, sort of), families may sit down together and chat over dinner about what they did over the course of the day. How am I supposed to be taken seriously when I tell them that I spent a portion of the day bringing you news about the amazing-looking Full Metal Schoolgirl – a new FPS shooter from the people who brought us Earth Defence Force.

In truth, I will probably just gloss over it, but not with you, my friends.

It is the year 2089, the United Federation of Japan is an industrial powerhouse, while also being one of the world’s leading countries in overtime work.

In this sickening future, the economy is booming, and working 24 hours a day is considered virtuous.

The core of this country’s industry, economy, and social system is controlled by a single giant corporation. Probably needs to metal schoolgirls to fix all that eh?

For starters, watch the trailer. I make no apology for that theme tune, which may well be in your head for the rest of the day. I also make no apology for bringing you news of Full Metal Schoolgirl, which looks super fun.

At its heart, a comedy anime FPS shooter with you playing the titular role of mechanized schoolgirl vigilantes out to save the world, expect brash colors, crazy music, and robots, oh so many robots, all being blown up and chopped to pieces 24/7.

It’s the same devs at EARTH DEFENSE FORCE: World Brothers 2 and looks every bit as bonkers, and currently has a scheduled release date of 23rd October on Steam, PS5, and Switch 2.

Who are Full Metal Schoolgirl’s voice actors?

A game like this is always going to need A-list anime voice actors, and the publishers have gone all out here.

Ryoko Arahabaki – Machine Girl MG-JK001

Hugely popular anime voiceover actor Diana Garnet gets the role here. With credits in games such as Genshin Impact and Honkai Star Rail, as well as more animated anime TV shows than you can imagine, as well as a Director role on Zenless Zone Zero, Diana is anime royalty.

Akemi Minamiazabu – Machine Girl MG-JK002

Another hugely talented anime voice actor, Hannah Grace, joins the cast as Akemi. Fresh from starring in Shogun’s Ninja, Hannah is best known for roles in the Japanese comedy The Benza and Benza English.

You can wishlist Full Metal Schoolgirl on Steam ahead of its launch now.

https://www.escapistmagazine.com/full-metal-schoolgirl-anime-fps/

https://www.escapistmagazine.com/?p=1035041

Posted by Paul McNally

https://www.escapistmagazine.com/audi-airconsole-in-car-gaming-passenger-mode/

https://www.escapistmagazine.com/?p=1035029

Say goodbye to the nostalgia of I Spy on long road trips, but only if you have a selected Audi model. The car giant has teamed up with AirConsole to bring gaming into the cabin, albeit with a heap of safety caveats to ensure the driver doesn’t get involved in any marathon sessions. “This is a game-changer for in-car entertainment. With Audi, we’re redefining what’s possible inside a vehicle—bringing gaming into motion and making every journey more social and fun,” says Anthony Cliquot, CEO at N-Dream, the makers of AirConsole. “By enabling gameplay on the passenger screen in a way that prioritizes safety by not distracting the driver, we’re taking a bold yet responsible step toward a future where cars are not just modes of transport, but platforms for shared digital experiences.” So far, so PR, but what does it actually mean? Well, in Audi models equipped with a passenger display and Audi’s Active Privacy Mode – a digital curtain that blocks the screen from the driver to prevent any distractions beyond shouting and throwing your controller around when you rage quit – the front passenger can now enjoy gaming while the vehicle is in motion. It is slightly weird that many of the press shots for the announcement show the driver taking part, albeit not while the car is actually moving. The feature is now available in the Audi A5, Q5, A6, A6 e-tron, and Q6 e-tron model series equipped with Android-based infotainment systems, in all markets where Audi operates. Utilizing your own smartphone as a controller, you can enjoy yourself with a specially tailored car version (a true mobile game…sorry) of Pictionary: Car Party, from Mattel. Up to four players can connect and while away the time while the designated driver tries to drown out shouts of, “Is it a sausage?” while doing a steady 70mph. Erika Winterholler, Head of Business Development, Digital Gaming at Mattel, said: “We’re thrilled to continue our partnership with AirConsole and work with the team at Audi to bring Pictionary Car Party! to Audi’s infotainment systems. This collaboration is a game-changer, letting non-driving passengers join in on fun, interactive play using their smartphones. Most importantly, the front passenger can safely control the game without distracting the driver, ensuring that entertainment and safety go hand in hand. This is the future of social gaming on the move, making every journey more enjoyable.” Beyond Pictionary, the AirConsole catalog will be regularly updated but currently features an additional 13 games, including Who Wants to be a Millionaire, Overcooked, and Uno: Car Party. AirConsole is available through the Audi Application Store and all you need to do is boot up the game and scan the QR code with the phones of people who want to play, and you are in.

https://www.escapistmagazine.com/audi-airconsole-in-car-gaming-passenger-mode/

https://www.escapistmagazine.com/?p=1035029

Posted by Paul McNally

https://www.escapistmagazine.com/ea-sports-college-basketball-return-2026/

https://www.escapistmagazine.com/?p=1035021

The triumphant return of EA Sports’ College Football last year after a nearly two-decade hiatus has emboldened Electronic Arts to spread its wings further for the x26 titles. Now, news has landed that not only will we be getting College Football 26 but College Basketball will be making a return to our screens, some 16 years after we last saw the title. In that time, 2K Games has been allowed to hoover up the basketball licences and have a free run at any fans of the sport that may have a console in the corner of the room. Now, with the return of College Basketball, Electronic Arts has a competing proposition that does not require the NBA license to be successful. Clever, clever. The return of College Basketball to the stable completes EA Sports’ set of American sports once more, with College Football/Madden and NHL all sitting as stablemates. Other than the cartoon-like Super Mega Baseball, the company has never really dipped its toes into the diamond, but the return of basketball will shake things up in the world of sports games for sure.

Bring the Madness. Let’s run it back. #CBB #ItsInTheGame pic.twitter.com/iBNhGxn2yj

— EA SPORTS (@EASPORTS) June 30, 2025

Why college hoops matters Again for EA

A single post on the EA Sports X account shared the news, stating, “Bring the Madness. Let’s run it back. #CBB #ItsInTheGame” With 2K seemingly securing the rights to the NBA for the foreseeable future, a college basketball game, or a cartoon-like Super Mega Basketball were the only real ways back into the sport for EA – although we would definitely kill for another version of NBA Street, even if it didn’t have the NBA licence. With the general consensus that the Madden franchise needs some revigorating, it is interesting that EA Sports has decided that going all in on college athletes provides a new niche to attach itself to. No news on release dates and times yet, but we will bring those to you when more becomes clear.

https://www.escapistmagazine.com/ea-sports-college-basketball-return-2026/

https://www.escapistmagazine.com/?p=1035021

Posted by Paul McNally

https://www.escapistmagazine.com/the-alters-ai-response-11bit-statement/

https://www.escapistmagazine.com/?p=1035015

Yesterday, we brought you news that a predictable section of the gaming sphere was outraged beyond all belief at the discovery of a small number of AI-generated assets in 11-Bit Studios’ excellent The Alters. You can catch up on the full story up to this point right here, but now the studio has responded with a lengthy statement on X explaining both what happened and its overall ethos for producing games. “We’ve seen a wide range of accusations regarding the use of AI-generated content in The Alters, and we feel it’s important to clarify our approach and give you more context. AI-generated assets were used strictly as temporary WIPs during the development process and in a very limited manner. Our team has always prioritized meaningful, handcrafted storytelling as one of the foundations of our game. During production, an AI-generated text for a graphic asset, which was meant as a piece of background texture, was used by one of our graphical designers as a placeholder. This was never intended to be part of the final release. Unfortunately, due to an internal oversight, this single placeholder text was mistakenly left in the game. We have since conducted a thorough review and confirmed that this was an isolated case, and the asset in question is being updated… While we do not want to downplay the situation, we also want to clearly show its limited impact on your gaming experience.”

Misstep or massive mistake? 11-Bit’s clarification on AI use in the game’s localization

11-Bit  Studios also faced accusations that, rather than using actual human translators to localize the game into other languages, they instead ran it through a Large Language Model to do all the hard work. The statement explained: “Due to extreme time constraints, we chose not to involve our translation partners and had these videos localized using AI to have them ready on launch. It was always our intention to involve our trusted translation agencies after release as part of our localization hotfix, to ensure those texts would be handled with the same care and quality as the rest of the game. That process is now underway, and updated translations are being implemented. To give you a better understanding of what a small part of the overall scope of the game’s narrative layer they are, those few external movies are approx. 10k words out of 3.4 million across all languages in the game, or just 0.3% of the overall text. The alternative was to release those specific dialogues in English only, which we believed would be a worse experience for non-English speakers. In hindsight, we acknowledge this was the wrong call. Even more so, no matter what we decided, we should have simply let you know.” The whole thing has been a bit messy and unnecessary, and hopefully, in the long term, will not take the shine off the game, which is more than worthy of your time. The vast majority of comments following the post were from players who found it slightly ridiculous that a fuss had been made at all, with many pointing out that many larger companies employ the use of AI in the development these days. Somehow though, we doubt The Alters will be the last to fall foul of this thorny issue.    

https://www.escapistmagazine.com/the-alters-ai-response-11bit-statement/

https://www.escapistmagazine.com/?p=1035015

Posted by Paul McNally

https://www.escapistmagazine.com/g-rebels-vr-g-police-successor/

https://www.escapistmagazine.com/?p=1035006

Probably a couple of years ago now, I played a game, well more of an experience called Aircar on the Quest 3.  It popped you into the seat of a flying car and allowed you free-roam around a cyberpunk city, weaving between neon-lit skyscrapers. The fact that it illicited a cool Blade Runner vibe made it one of my favorite titles to show off the Quest 3 to friends who had not tried VR before. Looking at the released trailer for G-Rebels, it reminded me a lot of that, with shooting. Check it out for yourself below.

Flying High: Why G-Rebels Could Be the G-Police Revival We’ve Waited For

The devs, German indie team Reakktor Studios, are billing it as an “action-packed combat flight sim in a dystopian open world, to be released in 2025” and if you were wondering what Daevos is, as per the video thumbnail above, Daevos is the capital city of the Okktane Empire – so, a map basically. Set in the year 2684, G-Rebels drops players into a dystopian open world spanning over 12,000 square kilometers. Explore vast skies, pull off breathtaking aerial maneuvers, and take on high-risk missions across dangerous skies. From the very beginning, G-Rebels taps into the spirit of the PS1 classic G-Police – and is already being described by fans as a worthy spiritual successor. G-Police was a classic Psygnosis game from 1997, which I remember reviewing back in the day, so a return to that kind of gameplay would be much welcome, as we are in need of some good new sci-fi air combat games to give the genre a bit of a boot up the backside. G-Rebels is being published by Senatis, and we will get a closer look at it hands-on when we get to play a demo at this year’s Gamescom in Cologne. Watch the trailer above. Looks alright, doesn’t it?

https://www.escapistmagazine.com/g-rebels-vr-g-police-successor/

https://www.escapistmagazine.com/?p=1035006

Posted by Paul McNally

https://www.escapistmagazine.com/perifractic-commodore-reboot-retro-gaming/

https://www.escapistmagazine.com/?p=1034998

Circulating around the inner tubes of the internet for a few weeks has been the news that YouTuber Peri Fractic (aka Christian Simpson of the Retro Recipes channel) has been in talks to head up a move to purchase Commodore – yes Commodore, the actual Commodore – a company so mismanaged time and time again since the mid-90s it makes gamers of a certain age want to cry.

Commodore means a lot to so many people, from growing up with Vic 20s and C64s as their first computer to me, a former editor of the outstandingly funny Amiga Action magazine, once, briefly, the best-selling Amiga magazine in the world in its heyday.

In 1995, Commodore, a company with its hugely successful Amiga computer, collapsed, was bought out for the first of many subsequent times, and has since been a shambolic example of stubbornness and greed. About a billion fragments of various IPs and trademarks exist and are scattered around companies and people who infight and argue, and sue and counter-sue, and it’s just been horrible to watch.

Then, a couple of weeks ago, Simpson dropped a YouTube video saying he was looking to buy Commodore and reinvigorate it to its former glory, hoping to release new hardware, start a Commodore Cares charity that would install Commodore machines into children’s hospitals, and so forth.

It was very exciting, and then nothing, until this week when a follow-up video announced that the sale of the company to Simpson had been agreed, and it was all systems go. I watched the video, hugely excited, and mildly irritated that this has actually been going on since the start of the year, and now we are getting videos dropped extending the story over a number of parts, obviously to get views. Fair enough, the man’s got to make a living, but the key take here is that Simposon is now the recognized de facto CEO of Commodore (albeit no money has exchanged hands yet and the deal is yet to be signed off).

Can Commodore Rise Again? Inside Perifractic’s Bold Retro Revival

Peri Fractic has wasted no time though, and has assembled a new board of former Commodore employees and cheerleaders to look after the interests of the reborn company. He’s also well-connected through his involvement with Hollywood and has got Silicon Valley actor Thomas Middleditch on board.

Others notables include Bil Herd (Commodore lead engineer 1982-1986), Albert Charpentier (Commodore VP of Technology 1979-1984), Michael Tomczyh (Assisant to Commodore President Jack Tramiel, 1980-1984), James Harrison (Commodore Tech Support 1990-1994) and the one and only David Pleasance (Commodore UK VP & Joint Managing Director, 1983-1994) – the man often credited for the movie tie-in genre.

While some are perhaps naturally sceptical that Simpson is in it for his own ego and gain, I am not having it. I’ve followed his work on YouTube, and he comes across as a genuine lover of retro, a humble and funny guy who is deeply in love with Commodore. What he has put together here is astonishing. It is what I would love to have done, but I would never have had the drive.

In a world where publishers don’t believe we should own the games we pay for, merely license them while being pumped full of microtransactions and special editions, paying much more to play three days early, and the like, this chance to save this gaming relic is important. Nobody will be trying to save Ubisoft in 40 years. Nobody will care.

Simpson says we should expect new Commodore hardware in the near future and deals and partnerships to bring the brand back to life. I am not that sure it will be that simple getting the wider public to buy in, but more power to him and his team. As an original Intellivision owner, I backed Tommy Tallarico and the reborn Intellivision Amico to the hilt, and where did that get me?

However, if we, as older gamers, truly want to hold up a flag and say, ‘Look, Fortnite kiddies, you are only playing that because of us, and companies like Commodore”, we need to get behind Simpson’s movement and do everything we can to make it a success.’

Check out the vids above for the full story, there is no option to invest yet because international investing laws are all over the show, but Simpson is looking out for Angel Investors to help get it over the line.

https://www.escapistmagazine.com/perifractic-commodore-reboot-retro-gaming/

https://www.escapistmagazine.com/?p=1034998

Posted by Paul McNally

https://www.escapistmagazine.com/the-alters-ai-backlash-gaming-outrage/

https://www.escapistmagazine.com/?p=1034991

We live in tricky times friends. Depending on who you speak to, Artificial Intelligence is either the future or the end of the world as we know it. The truth will probably end up somewhere in between, but at the moment, for the majority of us, AI exists only to rewrite our resumes or generate images of us as an action figure. Hardly Terminator 2 stuff just yet.

The gaming industry is a mess, but it’s probably always been a mess. Yes, unscrupulous boardroom invisibles are definitely using art generated by AI and large language models instead of actual humans to cut costs and jobs. No, this is not cool, but it will ultimately go down in history as “progress”.

If that outrages you, I would urge you to check out what Henry Ford did to the fledgling motor industry when he introduced the assembly line, or just have a skim of the Wikipedia page for the Industrial Revolution – the fall guys were always humans.

Now, the excellent next game from the studio that brought us the stunning This War Is Mine – 11-Bit Studios is under fire for including some hugely sloppy AI content in an otherwise excellent spiritual successor, and the gaming corner of the internet has polished off their (AI-generated probably) pitchforks and are out for blood.

What Really Happened With The Alters?

Let’s start with what’s happened, long before The Alters came out. Valve now has a condition for publishing on Steam that any AI-generated content must be disclosed by the developers and publisher, so that purchasers of games know where the content originates. Fine. Keep that in mind, and also keep in mind that The Alters has no such declaration on its Steam page.

Imagine the horror then, when screenshots started to emerge over the weekend of the seemingly obvious use of generated AI text in The Alters. Now we are not talking about outraged YouTubers proclaiming the use of the emdash, a fairly standard punctuation mark used for hundreds of years, just that they had never heard of it, as definite proof of AI content. No, these were screenshots that, as previously described, were a bit sloppy.

Many of us have probably forwarded emails or texts on to people with something at the bottom that wasn’t supposed to be seen by them. Similar here.

If you have ever used ChatGPT to write something for you and then asked it to iterate, it will come back with something like, “Sure thing, buddy, let ‘s have another go at that and make it sound even more amazing, I really do love the way you write, pal.”

What you need to do at this point, if you use the content, is not to copy the “Sure buddy” bit and put that in your game too. I’m looking at you, 11-Bit.

Basically, on a screen in the background of one of the scenes, some text scrolls past that starts with the line, “Sure, here’s a revised version focusing purely on scientific and astronomical data”.

It may as well be a line of emdashes.

However, does it really matter? Obviously, it is a mistake and should not have been left in, but it’s not really a sign of a nefarious board eradicating humans from its workforce, but review bombers gonna review bomb because they live for it.

If somebody needed some sci-text quickly that was 99% irrelevant to the plot and got ChatGPT to knock some up for them rather than trawling Wikipedia, assuming nobody was ever going to zoom into a screenshot of it, do we need to virtue signal and be outraged?

11-Bit Studios is a small Studio competing against the big boys. They clearly pack a lot of talent into the few games they produce, and if using the tools available to them helps them, I’d be all for getting off their back, but now the internet detectives are trawling through every asset in the game looking to add to the pile-on. As yet, the studio has not responded.

Yes, it’s slack that text ended up there, and it should not have been there, and maybe there should be a declaration on Steam, but the outrage is silly. Without seeing that line, The Alters is a fantastic game, and suddenly seeing that line changes that? No, it absolutely does not.

https://www.escapistmagazine.com/the-alters-ai-backlash-gaming-outrage/

https://www.escapistmagazine.com/?p=1034991

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June 30th, 2025: Today's comic was inspired by Robert "the Bobster" Frost! To answer your question, I have NOT researched his nickname and do not intend to. – Ryan

http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=4348