By John Walker on March 9th, 2009 at 4:06 pm.
Regular as a giant clock that only bongs every now and then, the Rock, Paper, Shotgun Electronic Wireless Show returns. This time Jim and John gather before the microphone to discuss our mother games. The Path and Eve get a good going over, followed by discussion based on the tweets we received – what kinds of gamers are we, and what is the future of user-generated content. We conclude with the announcement of the winner of our RPS Jingle Contest. It’s a short but sweet podcast this time, and can be downloaded from here. iTunes here. And it’s own site here. Please to enjoy.
09/03/2009 at 16:29 Matt Kemp says:
It’s almost like this is a regular thing!
09/03/2009 at 16:32 chaves says:
What? Another podcast? So soon? Guys, you’ll make my head explode with so much information.
But if coke and chips are present again I’ll be able to go over it.
09/03/2009 at 16:39 Lewis says:
The Path is $9.99, The Graveyard was $5, and the review code of The Path differs only in stability from the preview version you’ll have played.
Athangyu.
09/03/2009 at 16:50 James G says:
Aww, I was so excited to realise that I caught your request for ideas tweet shortly after it had been posted, only to realise that I had no ideas. I shall have to come up with a list of them for future occasions. I suppose they have to be vaguely PC Gaming related as well don’t they? Which somewhat dispenses with my in depth queries about sprouts.
09/03/2009 at 17:00 Dinger says:
Good to hear some follow up on the Goonswarm-BoB affair. So I assume KenZoku (aka BoB II) has failed to maintain unity? What’s the story there?
Also, I must say, judging from the jingle submissions, your podcast listeners are a disturbed lot.
09/03/2009 at 17:06 Noc says:
Regarding User Generated Content: I think it’s probably worth mentioning that beyond the obvious purpose of providing new content to players, the process of creating content provides its own entertainment value. Someone seriously attempting to produce a high quality work of art probably won’t be using a box of crayons to do it, but this doesn’t make scribbling furiously away with little, chewed up stubs of wax any less fun.
The fact that every so often you’ll see a wax-rendered masterpiece stuck up on someone’s fridge is arguably just a bonus.
09/03/2009 at 17:16 Mike says:
I’m liking the jingle that won – suits the blog very nicely! My short guitar melodies really needed something else…
09/03/2009 at 17:32 Feet says:
Another interesting and good podcast from RPS! Yay! I particularly enjoyed the chat about the difference between the two of you as gamers, and what you play and other related shenanigans.
09/03/2009 at 17:52 Mat says:
The sound quality is fantastic and sorta weird.
Can’t really complain but still its the end of a era lol!
09/03/2009 at 18:02 Pace says:
I rock. I do. Wow, tough competition though! I was apparently hoping for a distinct lack thereof. Damn people with talent.
09/03/2009 at 18:49 Optimaximal says:
Wow, the random Revisit-o-tron managed to pick article about The Path.
09/03/2009 at 19:34 AndrewC says:
Piss balls I forgot to enter the compo.
I like that you chose by far the least professional sounding jingle. It is the correct one.
09/03/2009 at 20:51 El Stevo says:
John has a very cheerful ‘hello’, and Jim has a very cheerful ‘bye’.
09/03/2009 at 21:01 Nuyan says:
POM POM POM POM
09/03/2009 at 21:08 Mister Hands says:
I like how genuinely excited John sounds about his kicking of the ball.
09/03/2009 at 22:12 hexapodium says:
Woo! Thanks, RPS, you’ve made my day. Dinger: less disturbed, more caffeine-fuelled on my part. Mike: I aspire to be that good at straight-up composition one day, and I’d forgotten quite how difficult it was to make anything sensible fit in under ten seconds- how you managed to work a full melody in is beyond me.
09/03/2009 at 22:28 TooNu says:
that was fun :)
09/03/2009 at 23:13 Ploddish says:
Well that’s rather exciting. I’m glad you can only just hear my voice in the entry – the real body of it is CFIT/Dinger, and his resplendent hick accent. I think this may well be the first time I’ve been involved in a competition where our entry has won. Hexapodium now has over 9000 gold stars, clearly.
Also, more RPS things need Wagner. We need a Wagner-o-tron that deploys Wagner on demand at the correct moment (ie, all of them). Yes.
10/03/2009 at 02:51 Ben Abraham says:
Clearly my Jingle entry was much, much too slick for RPS. Next time I’ll do better, promise! =P
Congratulations to the winners – quite an original effort. More of This Sort Of Thing.
10/03/2009 at 03:59 ForTheLulz says:
A rough list of the topics discussed would be much appreciated for these sorts of news items.
Opinion away!
10/03/2009 at 07:57 Morningoil says:
Does this mean that I can’t use the word ‘trope’ any more? Bugger.
10/03/2009 at 08:45 Kieron Gillen says:
Trope remains acceptable. Ignore Walker.
KG
10/03/2009 at 09:40 wiper says:
Yeah, I was fucking shocked at Walker’s hating on Trope. It was in the title of my master’s thesis, after all, which proves it’s not a slightly-pretentious literary term! Um.
Though to be fair, it’s a misused one – we need more gaming discussion on tropes taking the full, ‘tropes used as metaphors thanks to their repeated use’ angle, which might be difficult until games developers actually start, well, using the tropes of the medium/genres as metaphors. Only then will the truly pretentious games journalism begin. Hopefully it’s a way off before gaming’s Ulysses, though.
10/03/2009 at 10:50 Dinger says:
Just some clarifications here: the “hick” in “hick accent” stands for “Hyper-Intellectual Critical Kandor”, and — under Hex’s perspicuous direction — we sought to capture the essence of a group just as likely to diss on the use of the perfectly good (if rather hellenicizing) monosyllable “trope” as to dissertate on the essentialist fallacy inherent in the shared experience approach to videogames and blogs or podcasts dedicated thereto.
How much glory victory merits may be open to question, given that the recognition occurred shortly after a discussion in which the Balnean duo opined that user-generated content was “crap”, and then emphasized their stercorous judgment by announcing that the prize was “shit.”
Still, congratulations to Hex, who put in a lot of time and effort in motivating, arranging and mixing the piece: all the positive credit goes to him. And congrats to all the other who submitted for their fine work.
I still say we’re a disturbed lot.
10/03/2009 at 18:09 Gap Gen says:
I think a polytrope is a perfectly valid term used by physicists to describe the tendency to put parrots in videogames.
10/03/2009 at 19:30 John Walker says:
Look at Kieron’s fear! Without his silly words he’d fall to pieces.
ForTheLulz: Then you should enormously appreciate the rough list of topics discussed in the post above!
10/03/2009 at 19:38 qrter says:
Ouch!
10/03/2009 at 19:43 Pace says:
I also think the word ‘trope’ can go fuck itself right out the window.
10/03/2009 at 20:16 Kadayi says:
2 podcasts in barely a week? Surely you are spoiling us Ambassador!!
Both deeply satisfying and highly amusing to hear of the patching of Eve further to the Goonswarm-BoB affair, given the sheer abundance of people in the original thread talking utter bollocks about how ‘realistic’ it all was. Fully vindicated, lovely (curls up in front of the fire).
Regarding User Generated Content, agree that by far the bulk of what gets made is unimaginative poorly conceived tripe on the whole. However invariably a small percentage of people do have the time and patience to take a tool set and run with it and end up creating genuinely fantastic, innovative and original content with them, even if beforehand they wouldn’t have marked themselves out as particularly creative, which makes the whole thing worthwhile. The problem as rightly pointed out is being able to make it that much easier for browsers to separate the wheat from the chaff with ease, and that more than anything is something developers need to focus on, especially when it comes to fast delivery both in search results, but also in display.
I’m good with Trope, I think it serves a good role in pointing out some of the bad habits game designers have fallen into.
11/03/2009 at 01:25 maybenexttime says:
Trope sounds too much like a made up word for my tastes. It’s a useful word, but I always wince slightly when I use it. Never feels quite right.
On to slightly more gaming-related things: I think the interesting thing about the Creature Creator in Spore is how bloody difficult it is to make something rubbish. It’s easy to be unimaginative, but the amount of charm the editor injects into the creations means that once you see something moving around, it’s almost always pretty cool.
11/03/2009 at 01:59 wiper says:
The concept of a non-made-up word intrigues me (actually, the origins of language intrigue me. I mean, how? Speech is the most amazing thing. But yeah, outside of that -) as it suggests that most words simply spring into existence, with a few silly made-up words like trope there to make up the numbers.
11/03/2009 at 07:04 Muzman says:
Lying. Wrong tone of voice.
11/03/2009 at 22:50 maybenexttime says:
@wiper: Yeah, I realised soon after I posted it that that sentence was meaningless. Probably a better way of putting it would be to say that something about the sound and feel of the word always makes me feel awkward when I say it, like I’m talking nonsense or horribly mispronouncing it and everyone else knows. I get a similar feeling with ‘trait’.
Possibly that’s just me.