Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Well, we all make mistakes. This is my first one, so it feels weird, but I’m strong. Alec wrote about this a couple of months back. But it’s great, and there’s a good reason to get it, so there’s good reason to write about it all over again.

Glum Buster is a beautiful game for two reasons. Firstly, it’s a beautiful indie platformer with a ton of imagination, shifting approaches to how you play, and some remarkably detailed microscopic pixel art. It’s also rather beautiful because of its charityware sales model, which is all kinds of lovely.

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As mentioned on the podcast (what you don’t know about that podcast is Kieron and I fought to the death afterwards. He killed me. These are in fact the words of Kieron wearing Alec’s skin as a hat), we’re not entirely sure why we haven’t mentioned the surprisingly elaborate ASCII re/demake of Portal on the site as yet. Let’s correct that. Did you know there’s an ASCII re/demake of Portal in the works? And that it’s surprisingly elaborate?
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Agent Loaf returns, after a brief hiatus so RPS could spend some quality time documenting its own history. Now, my plan with this series had been to avoid the core narrative for as long as possible (even though it’s something I never got around to the first time I played Morrowind.) Then a funny thing happened. It became compelling. Based on how unsatisfactory I’d found Oblivion and Fallout 3′s main plotlines to be, this was not something I’d been expecting. It also puts me in the unusual position of narrativising someone else’s narrative -a starkly different prospect to diarising my own haphazard experiences. If you’ve not ever played Morrowind and still intend to, be aware that here be spoilers…
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It’s been interesting to watch EA’s ongoing approach with the Need For Speed series over the past few years, and it now seems to be getting rather more complex. The past couple of generations of the series (it’s up to around a dozen games now) had each game delivered with a new “angle”, beyond simply being the next generation in the franchise, with ideas such as career structures, silly plots, realistic damage modeling, or open-world play. The last NFS game I played, Need For Speed Undercover, didn’t really seem to deliver any of these notions convincingly, so it’ll be interesting to see if the two-pronged reboot of Need For Speed: Shift and free racing MMO, Need For Speed: World Online, create something worth paying attention to, and breath new fumes into the series. Continued below…
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As we mentioned last week, after hurriedly deciding to do the Gaming Made Me feature we hurriedly sent a mail around to those RPS-correspondents and famous-folk we didn’t feel too bad about hurriedly asking to hurriedly write a little thing about the games that made them who they are. 2K-Boston’s Ken “System Shock 2/Freedom Force/Bioshock” Levine didn’t write a little thing, instead giving us a thousand words on the games who made him who he is today. And you’ll find it below…
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Via Indiegames: Jan Willem Nijman’s super lo-fi Quake game, Qquak, amuses me. There’s something about the idea of creating an FPS that is lower-res than Wolfenstein that seems brilliantly perverse. Demakes often don’t follow the exact principles of the game they’re based on, but in this case it’s a fully-functional FPS, albeit in four colours. It’s also pretty entertaining: fast, and with an online score system.

Enviro-Bear 2000 – Operation: Hibernation (and yes, I do realise it’s been around since February, thanks) is one of those games that’s best simply linked to and left without description or explanation. It was created for one of TIGsource’s many ever-bountiful compos, and is winning new attention now due to cropping up in Apple’s Appstore. I’ll say only this: the controls are awful. But if they were great, they’d hardly be an accurate reflection of a bear trying to drive a car, would they now? Also: I suspect it’s a lot cleverer than you might immediately think it to be from the gloriously absurd video beneath the cut.
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On this day of rest, do spare a thought for those damaged by our hobby of choice:

(Via John Scalzi via BoingBoing)

The Sunday Papers surprises me. Sometimes it can be Thursday and my document is nearly empty. I think it’s going to be a small one. And then, Sunday hits, and I’ve all the writing in the world. So, as is Sunday’s wont, I compile a particularly bumper selection of the fine games writing across the week, while trying not to link to some pop-band who’ve managed to surprise me totally in the same period.

• Loyola Professor David Myers has been playing City of Heroes as part of his research. Which strikes me as a good thing to do. However, he’s been playing his Alt Twixt as… well, only obeying the rules of the game rather than the social rules. This lead to becoming one of the most hated players and recieving death-threats. He’s written a paper on it, and a book is forthcoming, but this article has an over-view of the events plus a link to one of his papers. Myers comes across somewhat naive, frankly. Gaming social groups act like social groups? Yeah, so what? And why shouldn’t they. Myers, from their perspective, was acting like a sociopath with no interest in societal mores.

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Just when you thought you’d survived RPS’s week of shameless nostalgia along comes another backward-looking bastard keen to share his gaming milestones with you. Will this mawkish memory mining never end?

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You know that money you don’t have? You should spend it. On some sort of oversized-hat with flashing lights and propellers, ideally. Anything that’s left should go on one of the below videogames, kindly selected for us as always by that pioneer of price-grabbing, Savygamer‘s LewieP. Oh – additionally, goodly reader Judd dropped us a line noting that the controversially expensive Blood Bowl can be had by Americanly types for a reasonable $28 – boxed edition, and only valid for the next 65 hours.. That’s better, eh?
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