When asked about whether there was anything he would've done differently, in a Q&A interview with Gamology, Roger Clark explained that the one thing that still weighs heavy on his mind is his character's mispronunciation of Colm O'Driscoll - the human-shaped rat that rivals with Arthur throughout the entire epic - or his first name, specifically.

"The only thing I regret is saying Colm O' Driscoll incorrectly," he said in the video embedded below. "Rockstar made me say it wrong, I told them it was wrong, they didn't care. It's pronounced 'Colom', it's not Colm."

In Rockstar Games' defense, the game itself acknowledges that Arthur isn't pronouncing the Irish name correctly. The clip that follows the actor's comments shows two other characters bickering over the pronunciation, with Sean telling off Kieran for also saying "Colm" - though, no character really challenges Arthur himself on his shoddy pronunciation, so who knows what the creative thinking behind the decision was?

Roger Clark parted with a bunch of interesting tidbits recently, revealing that he often has to tell fans that they didn't get the 'good' ending because none of the game's endings are the 'good' one. For a character that needs to deal with heartbreak, shipwrecks, the accidental loss of countless beloved horses, and the general discomfort of living in a time without toothpaste, Clark also revealed that the hardest part of playing Arthur was, surprisingly, the crouch--running: "3 days later my thighs were absolutely killing."

 GTA and Red Dead Redemption movies never happened because “games made poor-quality movies,” Rockstar Games’ co-founder said, but “it’s a different time now.” 

"I was in a studio doing a corporate thing. And that studio was also making the graphics for the first game. They actually interrupted my session. They opened the door and said 'David! Listen, if you get a minute afterwards, could you come in and have a look at the graphics of this computer game we're developing? We need a voice. We've got a character, but we don't know what he should sound like'. I went 'ok, yeah, sure'. I noticed a striking resemblance to myself right there. It was the look of that first game. Very kind of Film Noir, long shadows, like The Third Man. My favorite film is Blade Runner, and it had that kind of Blade Runner look, so I gave it a crack."

25 years is a long time to play the same role, and it's only natural to build a connection. It's hard not to become protective over the character, watching how they are received by the public with every new installment. Bateson goes on to say "I truly look upon Agent 47, Tobias Rieper, as a very, very close friend. I feel very protective of him. I feel like I really, really know this character. After so many years, both the writers and myself have kind of grown up with this character."

Of course, Agent 47 is not like many other characters. He was designed to be a blank slate, to fit into any role or disguise in broad daylight. The personality and funny dry delivery come from Bateson's familiarity with the character and the writers building him in tandem. 

"So they're writing with a knowledge of how he would say things, and what he would say. And they're also hearing me, how I would probably give an interpretation. It's become a kind of synergy of my acting talent and their writing talent., which has just got tighter and tighter."

Developing a role isn't an easy feat. It requires each member of the team to bring their all, and in some cases, pull from old memories to find the inspiration for the next plot beat. With Agent 47, Bateson recalls an old childhood memory that helped him resonate with the character.

"I moved around a hell of a lot as a kid. I went to nine schools in 12 years of schooling. So I was always the new boy getting the shit kicked out of time. I always felt on the outside looking in, where everyone knew each other since they were at nursery school. They'd been through each others' everything. And I hadn't."

Bateson has spent almost half a lifetime with Agent 47, and that's not something you see very often. With some IP lying dormant for years, company restructuring, and voice actors coming and going, it's nice to know that wherever Agent 47 goes, Bateson is along for the ride.

For more information on Hitman, be sure to check out the state of its developer IO Interactive.

The heart of Dominus Collection is the trio of Dawn of Sorrow, Portrait of Ruin, and Order of Ecclesia, the three DS Castlevania games. These are all classics from the height of the series' post-Symphony of the Night Metroidvania era, so you know they're great. Even better, the package - like other recent Castlevania collections - was handled by M2, a Japanese studio that's grown legendary in the retro gaming sphere for its quality emulation work.

But Dominus Collection also contains something arguably even cooler in the form of Haunted Castle Revisited. The original Haunted Castle is a somewhat clunky entry from the series' linear action era, and while this remake maintains the retro vibes, it also dramatically improves the visuals and gameplay. In the end, it looks like a brand-new 16-bit game made in widescreen, and it offers enough improvements over the original Haunted Castle to effectively be a whole new experience.

M2 built something very similar back in 2009 with Castlevania: The Adventure ReBirth, a WiiWare game that similarly remade the series' first Game Boy entry. As with Haunted Castle, the remake turned a clunky, oft-forgotten part of the series into something equal parts new and great. After all these years, it's great to see M2 still putting out quiet bangers.

Once you've run out of Castlevanias and Metroids, it's time to explore the best Metroidvania games that came in their wake.

Vermeij, who has spent the last year or so outlining development secrets from Grand Theft Auto 3, GTA: Vice City, and San Andreas, recently unveiled his new game, Plentiful. A tranquil god game about collecting rainwater by moving rocks around a map in order to grow plant life and feed your tribe, Vermeij describes Plentiful as "a relaxing game about creating conditions for nature to thrive."

It's a pleasingly simple premise, with an understated art style and an even more understated Steam page. In other words, it could barely be further from the Grand Theft Auto games that Vermeij cut his development teeth on, which are set in sprawling, complex worlds and marketed in such a way that Rockstar and Take-Two can extract every last penny from them.

Vermeij doesn't appear to be in any particular hurry to release Plentiful, which he says will be out "when it's done." Regardless of that long potential wait, I'm actually very into the premise - there's something about the idea of manipulating streams and lakes that harks back to childhood.

I'll be interested to see what Vermeij cooks up, but I'm also pretty interested in what he has to say. The developer has dropped a string of tasty morsels about his time at Rockstar over the last several months, culminating in his recent expectations for GTA 6, which he thinks won't be "wildly different" from GTA 5.

Vermeij left Rockstar after GTA 4 because he thought the series was getting "too dark, too depressing almost."

Well, that's exactly what content creator 40 Cakes is doing in Pokemon Emerald. Since January 1, 2023, they've had a bot running 24 hours a day in an attempt to complete a Professor Oak's Living Shiny Dex challenge. A mouthful of a name, but it essentially means that before each gym badge, they must find every single possible shiny Pokemon (rare, alternate color palette Pokemon), with the goal of owning one of everything in sparkly form. They can't catch just one shiny Poochyena, for example, because they need to own both a Poochyena and its evolution, Mightyena. If it's possible to obtain something before a badge, it's got to be collected at that point. 

You might think that employing a bot to do all of these random encounters and catch the shinies would make the challenge redundant, but I promise that's absolutely not the case. In fact, the whole concept is so difficult that only now, almost 20 months in, it's become possible for 40 Cakes to take on the first gym. Their bot found hundreds of shinies in that time, though, so what was the problem?

The answer lies with one ridiculously rare, weak Grass-type that lurks in Route 102 – Seedot. For some reason, Seedot only has a 1% encounter rate, which makes it hard to come by at the best of times, but when you're looking for a sparkly one in a game with 1/8192 shiny odds, that means you're looking at a 1/819,200 chance to find just one of them. Before they could enter the first gym, 40 Cakes unfortunately had to find two so that they could add shiny Nuzleaf (its first evolution) to their collection. It took 457 shinies before this second acorn eventually showed up, appearing after a grand total of 3,848,934 encounters and over a year after the first one.

Wanna know what the worst part is? Eventually, 40 Cakes will need to find a third one to get Seedot's final evolution, Shiftry – the hunter was only exempt from this before the first gym badge since they'd need a Leaf Stone to evolve it, which can't be obtained at that point. Unfortunately, while you can find wild Nuzleaf in Emerald, too, they also only have a 1% encounter rate, so 40 Cakes will be facing those awful odds no matter where the bot looks. 

I can't imagine how long this challenge is going to take to complete given what a journey it's been so far, but if you're interested in keeping up with it, it's being streamed constantly over on the creator's YouTube channel. Who knows, maybe in another year, 40 Cakes will finally have that shiny Shiftry.

Be sure to check out our list of the best Pokemon games to see where your favorite ranks. 

Vooks reports that an updated The Legend of Zelda timeline on display at Nintendo Live 2024 in Sydney lists both Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom as standalone games, disconnected from any existing Zelda timeline, meaning no previous games come before or after the events of the Nintendo Switch releases.

The new timeline reportedly has the usual lineup of a somewhat linear course of events leading up to Ocarina of Time, at which point the timeline split off into three different branches where things get a little unruly. But Nintendo's been known to have tinkered with the timeline over the years, so maybe it just hasn't made an official decision on where the newer entries land.

Either way, I think that's the greatest indication that we shouldn't place too much importance on the Zelda timeline. I like the idea that The Legend of Zelda games are connected in a kind of cyclical sense. Zelda, Link, and Ganon - Hyrule's sort of Holy Trinity - are doomed to a fate of rebirth, only to repeat the same battles for the rest of time. I don't like the idea that one Zelda game leads directly to the next, largely because the games themselves don't usually care about such details either, unless they happen to be a rare direct sequel like Tears of the Kingdom.

Nintendo did recently announce that The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Master Works, a big art and lore book, would feature a new timeline for fans to scratch their heads over, but it's only out in Japan so far and we've yet to see any proper translations.

Nintendo created its own Zelda-themed social media to help it finish Tears of the Kingdom, with rupees instead of likes. 

During the PAX West 2024 Baldur's Gate 3: A Retrospective panel embedded below, some members of the development team were asked about how showing off that scene at a pre-launch livestream changed the trajectory of the project. Once Larian Studios had aired the scene, showing the player character, errr, courting a druid in bear form, the internet lit up with memes, some mild controversy, and tons of eyes suddenly glued to the threequel.

Larian Studios founder and the game's director Swen Vincke recalled that the publishing team were yelling giddily after the livestream: "We got banned on TikTok!" Some team members' moms also had raised eyebrows too.

"There was actually some debate [about showing off the bear scene pre-launch] because we wanted it to be chosen by the audience, so we didn't know what they were going to pick, and we were actually more uncomfortable about the other part," Vincke explained, referring to the other, spicier sex scene that could've been picked instead. "The non-bear scene would've had us banned on more than just TikTok," lead writer Adam Smith joked.

Vincke then got candid and explained that the team ultimately ended up sticking with bear nookie because it paints a picture of what Baldur's Gate 3 is - a funny, sometimes raunchy, "mature game" where almost anything goes.

Larian had also presented a brief romance scene with Karlach at the event, too, since the team didn't want to accidentally make it seem like Baldur's Gate 3 was all jokes, no heart. "We wanted to show the breadth and diversity of romance in the game," Smith continued, "we wanted to show that there were different kinds of moments because I love the bear scene - I think it's fantastic - but we didn't want to [people to think] romance is just this to us. We wanted to show the breadth of it."

 Baldur’s Gate 3 and Divinity: Original Sin 2 were priced “below their value” because Larian devs had “faith” they could recover the cost. 

Rusty's Retirement is an idle farming sim that plays out at the bottom (or side) of your monitor, allowing you to make use of various farming robots to plant, water, and harvest your crops. It's adorable, even if I did try to turn it into a Palworld-inspired mecha-hellscape one time. It's also been a runaway success for its solo developer, Jordan Morris, who noted that its 200,000 sales in just its first couple of weeks was "life-changing."

As the year has run on, plenty more games have come out. As of a post yesterday, Morris notes that there have been 11,000 Steam releases in 2024 alone. But despite all that competition, Rusty's Retirement has continued to thrive - Morris notes that of all those thousands of games, Steam250, a site that ranks games based on a mix of their popularity and user reviews, currently has his game as one of the top 50 best-reviewed games of the year.

The exact position has jumped around a bit since Morris recorded that video, but Rusty's Retirement is still sitting in 39th place at time of writing. "My little game is in the top 50 of the highest-rated games released in 2024," he says. "This is definitely my biggest life achievement." Now, it's just a case of waiting to see whether the idle genre Morris spawned can challenge for his crown.

Here's our pick of the best farming games you can play right now.

In a blog documenting their experiences at Gamescom, Palworld community manager John Buckley noted that "I spoke with a lot of indie devs this year and got to hear about their struggles and worries." The extent of the difficulties faced by developers at studios of all sizes is not a new phenomenon, but Buckley pointed out that Palworld developer Pocketpair has been fortunate enough to future-proof itself.

"We were in the same position only a year ago until Palworld changed our lives," Buckley notes. "I'd like to do something to help more indie devs out because I really do think the best games are coming from the indie space." While there's no sense of what that help might look like, he says that meeting so many developers at Gamescom "has lit a fire in me" to help out.

Pocketpair went from a little-known, minorly-successful indie studio to a history-maker almost night when Palworld launched earlier this year. Shooting to concurrent player totals of 2.1 million, it become the second highest-played game on Steam until it was overtaken by Black Myth: Wukong earlier this month. That level of success had the potential to transform the studio's fortunes - earlier this month, studio CEO Takuro Mizobe revealed that Palworld's revenue count was "in the tens of billions of yen." That's at least US$70 million, enough to allow the studio's next game to "go beyond AAA," but Mizobe says he's trying to keep the team's budget expectations in check.

Buckley has been a backer of the indie community for some time already. Earlier this month, he encouraged players to check out more games, saying "you won't regret" investing your cash there instead of in the latest AAA battlepass. 

Check out our list of the best survival games.

The central premise of Core Keeper has you trapped in a procgen underground cavern that stretches endlessly, entirely submerged in shadows until you spread torches about the place, and there's nowhere to go until you mine your path outward. 

Like Minecraft, there's not an explicit goal to grind toward, but there is a mysterious core (hence the title) that lays dormant right where you wake up. From there, you're off to discover the various hulking creatures, slimes, cattle, and biomes hidden in the depths. 

What stood out to me most was the RPG progression, where the more you garden the more your gardening levels up, for example, and the untraceable number of systems to dive into. There are mine cart rails you can build. Farms you can foster. Electrical gadgets that need power. Crafting. Fighting. Fishing. Summoning. Boss fights. There's always a little nugget, a new discovery, to work toward that makes hours fly by like nothing. 

I'm not the only one who's under Core Keeper's spell since its August 27 release either. Director Fredrik Präntare jumped onto social media to celebrate some of the game's amazing feats so far. "We are feeling so grateful and amazed," he tweeted, alongside a screenshot showing Core Keeper's concurrent player peak of 45,800 on Steam, which has been steadily going up over the entire week, not to mention the 26,000 user reviews that are 91% positive. "I must be dreaming," he tweeted a few days ago.

If you'd like to get lost in the subterranean labyrinths, Core Keeper is available on PC, PS5, Xbox Series X|S, Game Pass now - and it's coming to Nintendo Switch, PS4, and Xbox One on September 17. 

Check out some other upcoming indie games to not miss a single release.