If you ever owned a PlayStation, there’s a chance you have heard of Thrill Kill, a violent, sexually suggestive fighting game that never saw the light of day. Not from the outcries of concerned parents, but by executives at the last minute.
Mark Rubin, the lead designer of Ubisoft’s now-dead free-to-play shooter XDefiant, has left the games industry following his project’s death.
So much wrong with Xdefiant. At one point they started using the worst ideas for their game and FPS fans saw it in the previews.
No offense but if Xdefiant represents your best the industry is better off for it.
"We had other issues though as well that we tried to be transparent about. For one we had crippling tech debt using an engine that wasn’t designed for what we were doing...Another issue we had was having the right resources to make content for the game."
Ubi set them up for failure out of the gate. And he says they had stuff in the pipes that should have been at launch means Ubi rushed it out and the devs didn't.
Localthunk: "The honest reason I don't have microtransactions/season pass/ads/100 DLCs/etc in Balatro isn't just about the ethics of those practices but because when I play other games that have those things it makes me want to put my computer in the dishwasher and set it to pots & pans."
While it may not have been The Witcher 4 gameplay, the Unreal Fest 2025 tech demo for CD Projekt Red's latest gave us a good idea of how the finished game might look. We talked to the developers, as well as Epic Games' Unreal Engine team, to find out exactly how the upcoming open-world RPG looks so incredible.
Wtf EA bring this back then we might let you off strongly implying might.
I remember reading about some of the development of Thrill Kill in Gamepro magazine, and it getting the AO rating. That alone in '98 warranted a purchase, because.. well, it's an AO game, man.
Then EA canned it so they wouldn't hurt their image, which really sucks for the development team and their hard work. Overall, though, no biggie. We still have Mortal Kombat and can find Thrill Kill online. And not to mention with the releases in 1998 - arguably the best year in video games ever - Thrill Kill may have been overshadowed anyway.
I had a copy I burned and played. I believe you can still download it and play it on an emulator. It was quite bad actually.
I read somewhere, if not stated in the article, that this game evolved into wu tang shaolin style, which ended up for me being one of the best fighting games ever. A 4 player fighting game is still unheard of today. I know it may fall into the brawler category, but whatever.
I've had bootlegged version of Thrill Kill on my modified PS1. Wasn't that great but it was brutal and 4 player vs. was pretty frantic.