This Week in Games: Helldivers & the Game Hall of Fame

Flex your love for democracy today and vote for the next hall of famer.

Author

Robert Scarpinito
March 15, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 7 minutes

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Every week, we’ll deliver a healthy digest of big gaming news, reviews, and commentary to your inbox so you can stay up to date on the gaming industry. After all, news goes a mile a second in this space, and it’s easy to get lost among the various spaces and niches. We’ll do our best to serve up unique, meaningful stories you should know about.

Reading Between the Headlines

A player aims a recoilless rifle at a Charger in Helldivers 22

Are they really easier to kill? Let us know what you think.

I love the smell of democracy in the morning. Spawn rates changed for the bug scum in the galaxy, swapping out Chargers and Bile Titans for legions of smaller enemies. They’re also less likely to reflect your attacks (allegedly).

There’s also a new Major Order that could lead to the eradication of Terminid tyranny for good. Will you do your part? I, for one, have tried, and those new Termicide missions are no joke. Bring your best strategems and best friends—you’ll need them. Just don’t shoot them in the face like I did. Or do; after all, freedom requires firepower.

Helldivers 2 has gone off like a 500 kilo bomb. Whether you’ve been on the frontlines of liberty or are watching it from afar, it’s proven impossible to ignore. Its approach to live service gaming is captivating, and players are in on it like it’s one big role-playing server.

And hey, at least bugs don’t fly, right?

A display of titles in the video game hall of famee

Which one lives rent-free in your head, and why is it Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater?

In other democratic news, the Strong Museum has revealed its finalists for the 2024 World Video Game Hall of Fame. Voting started yesterday and ends March 21, so make your voice heard on which games you think stand the test of time!

If you want to learn more about the Strong National Museum of Play, we spoke with a director and curator in 2021 to learn more about how they’re preserving—and celebrating—gaming history.

Electronic Arts and Respawn Entertainment Logos

In unfortunate industry news, the team at Respawn behind Apex Legends suffered some layoffs yesterday. It’s the latest in an ongoing trend of layoffs across the industry, just after celebrating five years of Apex with a huge new update.

The Cold Embrace: Embracer Group Sells Space Marine 2 Publisher Saber Interactive

Embracer is “divesting selected assets” from Saber, selling them to Saber’s co-founder. This affects franchises like Tomb Raider, Killing Floor, and Metro (the Russian post-apocalyptic one). Read on to find out where they fall in the divide.

ICYMI: Wahoo! A New Mario Movie Is in Coming Down the Pipeline

For Mar10 Day, Nintendo gave everyone’s favorite Italian plumber another 1UP mushroom for the silver screen. It’s slated for April 2026, the perfect time to hunt for easter eggs. As of August 2023, nearly 170 million people watched the first one (from Illumination; sorry, Bob Hoskins). It also announced the Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door release date (don’t worry, it’s not a thousand years away).

Survival Game Spotlight

An archer wearing a hood in key art for Enshrouded, representing the 2024 Enshrouded roadmap

We’ve been watching Enshrouded since it launched earlier this year, and now we know what to expect for the rest of the year. If you somehow haven’t played this survival-crafting game, you can get a head start with the guides we have on site!

A vampire rising from the crypt in V Rising

The build-your-own-vampire-castle simulator V Rising will hit 1.0 soon for PC, and it’ll come to PS5 later this year. Check the link above to get more details—and check out our guides if you wanted to get an idea of what you’re in for.

Reviews You Could Use

Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection Review

Like most games that rely on online components, reviewing this collection before launch was difficult because of the radically different landscape we dealt with. From our reviewer Austin Suther: “The multiplayer of Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection was met with a negative reception from players. TechRaptor reviewed Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection before launch, so we were not able to properly test out the performance of this component.”

Star Wars: Unlimited Review - Trading Card Gaming’s New Hope

The hotly anticipated trading card game Star Wars: Unlimited is finally here! But is this the “Magic Killer” everyone says it’ll be?

Podcast: The Weird World of FFVII Rebirth

The planet’s dying and an evil superSOLDIER is massacring people, but Final Fantasy VII Rebirth distracts you with literally anything else. How about you get turned into a frog and play Fall Guys? What if the path to upper Junon was a time-attack mini game where you ride a dolphin and collect tokens? What if you got invested in a trading card game that could potentially destroy the world in a totally different way (I think???)?

Rebirth, along with Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth from January, gave us a plethora of meaningful, distracting side content that rewarded us with memorable, hilarious character moments. So we celebrated that on the podcast this week.