Goodness, yet another new regular feature. Next we’ll be doing horoscopes and crosswords. (Note – we’re not going to do horoscopes or crosswords).
Anyway, the purpose of this inaugural RPSnibus is to round up every story posted over the last week, for the benefit of our less regular readers. We do, after all, write ALL THE WORDS IN THE WORLD on a daily basis, so hopefully this is easier than bewildered ferreting through our archives. It’s also a handy opportunity to highlight any interesting/entertaining stuff you lot have brought up in the comments threads, and hopefully lure fire’n'forget readers back into the discussions. An RPS post is for life, not just the front page. Is this good idea/bad idea? Let us know’n'all.
Features, Opinions & Interviews
- A Word Is Worth A Thousand Pictures – Is narrative more important than graphics? In comments, discussion of what ‘narrative’ really means in a gaming sense – is a player’s own mental attribution of personal purpose and accomplishment to his in-game deeds more affective than even the best-written dialogue and cut-scenes?
- Interview: Sins of a Solar Empire – A chat with one of the minds behind what will doubtless be one of our games of the year.
- Interview: Al Lowe – the avuncular fellow behind Leisure Suit Larry talks adventure gaming, and his uncensored feelings about the hateful 21st century Larries.
- Interview: Insurgency – Andrew Spearin, founder of Moddb’s 2007 Mod of the Year winner talks the past, present and future of the militaristic Half-Life 2 total conversion.
- The Club: The RPS Opinion
Previews
- Spaceforce Captains – strategic base building amongst the stars
- Lineage II: Ridiculously Long-Named Latest Update – an inexplicably awful video that will guarantee anyone who watches it will never play the game. In comments, Lineage II players claim the trailer isn’t representative of the actual experience.
- Empire: Total War – Part of our Games for 2008 preview series
- Battlefield Heroes Gossip-herding for DICE’s controversial foray into casual gaming. In comments, angry debate as to whether the cartoon style rips off Team Fortress 2.
- Faith and a .45, Age of Conan, Conflict: Denied Ops, MTB Target and Marble Blast Online all get the video trailer treatment, and discussion as to whether Faith and .45 is the best name for a game ever (apart from Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura, natch)
- Guild Wars 2 – Part of our Games for 2008 preview series
- F.E.A.R. 2 – part of our Games for 2008 preview series
- Zeno Clash – Insane Source-powered ‘punk-fantasy’ FPS
- Legendary: The Box – “A full scale war between man and myth begins”, it says here.
- Brothers In Arms 3 – part of our Games for 2008 preview series
- Spore – Video of Will Wright demonstrating his intelligently designed evolution masterwork to NASA
- Command & Conquer 3: Kane’s Wrath
- Rainbox Six: Vegas 2
Free games
- Goliath the Soothsayer – Room escape flash game based on the new Mars Volta album
- Dangerous High School Girls In Trouble demo – Gillen’s having St. Trinian’s fantasies again
- Shift – Ace dimension-distorting experimental platformer
- The Experiment Demo – Mad French adventure game
- Spectromancer demo – CCG fare, in the vein of the utterly splendid Armageddon Empires
- Penumbra: Black Plague Demo – Ultro-physics’n'horror in this acclaimed adventure sequel
- Sumo & Ninja – Mega-experimental indie trinkets
- Stormwinds – Steampunk base defence shmup
News
- Civilization: The MMO?
- Red Alert 3 possibly incoming
- X3: The Terran Conflict announced
- Dekaron/2Moons Euro beta signups
- Myst Online axed. Again.
- A manifesto for ‘midcore’ gamers
- The death of outdoorsmanship; study blames ‘videophilia’
- Red Faction 3 Announced
- Duke Nukem Forever release date kinda confirmed
- Assassin’s Creed on PC: what’s different?
- Games industry needs more madness, says director of impossibly dull Pirates of the Caribbean sequels
- Warcraft III gets official no-cd patch – in which copy protection is dissed, and comments discuss other games that officially remove their DRM
- Steam nets 15 million users Valve sleep on beds made of gold
- Viacom to buy Take Two?
- Lego Indiana Jones will not feature Nazis – in comments: the most pro-Nazi movement since 1942
- Major League Eating game announcement regurgitated
- Gordon Brown versus the gaming press – Is a crackdown on videogames in the UK a-coming? In comments: many rude things are said about the UK prime minister
Christ, that took a long time. What was I thinking?
Omnibus image derived from a Creative Commons-licensed photo by xddorox.
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You guys sure do a lot of writing, thanks!
Alec = word hero.
This feature should be called the Omnomnomnibus. Do you see what I’ve done there?
More helpfully, I do find it difficult to be bothered to find the post that contains the comment I made earlier in the day\week. This is probably made worse but the sheer amount of words to read and stories posted. Scrolling is bad.
That’s a damn fine bus you have there.
Wow…you guys really do write a whole lot of words in just one week!
I like this bus; it pleases me. Reminds me a little bit of an Escapist setup by showing all the articles at once. Luckily I already read rps daily, so I’m not in dire need of this kind of week-in-review.
Definitely keep doing it though, handy little tool.
I agree with Feet about finding your own comments again. It does somewhat hamper discussion that each person has to manually go back to the story to find their post. I’m not sure I can offer a constructive suggestion to improve things though… You’d need a somewhat more complex comments system to be able to do anything about it.
Good idea for a weekly feature though!
I’d quite like a game related crossword….
Omnibus?
Is it also a Desert Bus???
That’s a common problem with blog-style comment threads. The only way I’ve seen it resolved is cloning the threads to a forum so that forum features like listing threads in order of most recent comment take effect.
With my latest gaming addiction (sins of solar empire) it’s been hard to keep up with RPS.. weekly round up? DO WANT.
I’m suffering the same problem as DigitalSignalX… I luv me sum Soase.
Big J: I was thinking exactly the same thing. Any combination of videogames and buses shall forever bring to my mind the great Desert Bus.
If that’s the bus for our Big Vegas Trip, I’m definitely coming.