By Robert Florence on October 9th, 2010.
Hello, youse.
I’ve heard from the rest of the RPS guys that you’re all horrible people, so I’m going to be talking about a subject that is probably close to your heart in this week’s column. I’m going to be talking about betrayal. I’m going to be talking about being The Bad Guy.
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By Lewie Procter on October 9th, 2010.
There was a magical moment last weekend at E2. I spent most of my first day in the Earl’s Court region seeking out the most cost effective services and utilities that me and my fellow expo goers could use in the local vicinity. I found Hollywood Chicken, a delightful foodery with friendly staff, low prices and upward of 2mg of iron in every serving. Perfect for RPS’s needs. By the time a group of seven of us descended upon it, I realised I had spent all of my currency on transport around London the previous night, and there wasn’t a cash machine in sight. Kieron and Quinns came to my rescue. They spotted an item on the menu that would satisfy our need for sustenance. The Bargain Bucket, what else? I contributed the change in my pocket, Kieron dipped into his grant from Professor X, and Quinns shared some of his no doubt ill gotten earnings. We feasted on dead animal and chips, and I survived to give you yet another digest of gaming savings. SavyGamer.co.uk is your hub for savings across all gaming formats. Here’s this week’s selection. Read the rest of this entry »
By John Walker on October 9th, 2010.
We’re occasionally asked why we don’t do more hardware related content on Rock, Paper, Shotgun. Here’s why:
Today I received my brand new netbook. The faithful Aspire One that has accompanied me the last couple of years had become completely useless after the screen was horrible cracked, then taken over by a peculiar purple disease that now obscures most of the visible area. It was time for a new one. But the quest to find it was truly quite horrendous. Buying a netbook is so ludicrously complicated, with not only an ever-increasing number of manufacturers creating an ever-increasing number of various spec machines, but also with each distinct machine being produced in about sixty-seven different formats, each subtly, but crucially, different than the other. Narrowing the field requires deciding on at least one wild extreme, and then picking from whichever you’ve got left. My picks, because in the end I’m a writer and a gamer: A screen larger than 11″, and one containing an ION graphics chip. Which, amazingly, reduces the field from seven hundred million billion to just four.
And led me to my HP Compaq 311c-1101SA. As distinct from the various other 311cs.
By Alec Meer on October 8th, 2010.
Look, we do try to write interesting, entertaining or at least semi-legible words about games, not just point and bellow ‘HERE IS A FAN-THING ABOUT A GAME WOT WE QUITE LIKE.’ Sometimes, though, it’s hard not to just go ‘awwww’ and ‘Oh God I want that so much.’
The constructor of the above delight, a man from a land down under is here. Sounds as though there’s a hundred thousand similar projects out there, but a fine starting point to do it yourself would be the ‘standardised papercraft’ downloadable schematics here. See two bigger pics below.
By Alec Meer on October 8th, 2010.
There was a collective sigh of sadness from global strategy game gonks like me at the news former Firaxis and Big Huge Games big huge brain Brian Reynolds had thrown in his trad-gaming towel and joined Farmville and Mafia Wars outfit Zynga last year. Did this mean an end to playful, progressive and p-thoughtful strategy titles like Civ II and Rise of Nations?
What with Zynga being a pretty closed-doors kinda company – rarely talking to the media – there’s been very little word on exactly what lovely Brian’s been up to there. A talk at GDC Online a couple of days ago saw him make a rare re-entrance into the limelight and reveal that, even if some of us aren’t interested in the games he’s now making, he’s still putting a fair bit of thought into it.
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By Jim Rossignol on October 8th, 2010.
Except when it is! And especially when we get some BFBC2: Vietnam footage via the international eye of GameTrailers, a sinister eye which is currently floating silently at the shoulders of NYCC attendees and beaming back these pictures. That’s the New York Comic Convention, of course. They don’t just talk comics these days, no sir. And bless their juxtapositions of words and pictures, our undead editor Kieron Gillen is out there being stalked by X-Men fans as I write these soon-to-be-forgotten words. I bet he hasn’t played any Battlefield. He’s rubbish at FPS games. There. I said it.
Anyway, look at this! More footage of Vietnam, and more people being ended by tanks and helicopters. Ugh, I am going to end up playing a hundred hours of that without blinking. I should probably blink more often.
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By Quintin Smith on October 8th, 2010.
This is excellent. ArenaNet just launched what it’s calling the Guild Wars 2 Hall of Monuments Reward Calculator. Guild Wars players will remember the Hall of Monuments, where their characters amassed trophies and rewards spread across five different categories. Well, depending on how much you collected, the Reward Calculator tells you what those achievements will gift you with in Guild Wars 2, and it can be anything from animal companions, to pets, to special weapons and armour. Guild Wars veterans! Go and see what you’re entitled to.
Such generosity demands answers. The gift horse must be looked in the mouth, because who knows what could be in there? It could be a bomb. We had a quick word with ArenaNet game designer John Hargrove about how and why this scheme came about.
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By Quintin Smith on October 8th, 2010.
Tripwire has released the third free content pack for their co-op multiplayer zombie-shoot, Killing Floor, as well as a new 99p character pack, which is currently available at half price. 49p! That’s a bag of crisps. The Incendiary pack brings a new weapon and four new maps, as well as upgrades for the Firebug perk. Bonanza! A video of some professional-sounding people completing the West London level of killing floor awaits your judgement beneath.
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By Quintin Smith on October 8th, 2010.
My first ever published review was of Project Gotham Racing, and ended with this thought: “Because really, what’s the point of winning if you don’t look cool doing it?”
Which is a concept that I feel has hobbled FPSes for a while now. An FPS athlete isn’t some cowboy gunslinger, thrashing superior numbers with grace and cunning. He’s a robot. A horrible, jinking turret, popping the heads of other players like a rushed bartender opens bottles. Having played about an hour of Brink at the Eurogamer Expo last weekend, I can safely say that Brink bucks this trend. Winning actually feels cool. And here’s why.
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By Alec Meer on October 8th, 2010.
I’ve never been a huge fan of games journalism journalism, but I took exception to GamesBrief’s ‘doomed games businesses’ piece proliferating as far as it did, most especially its repost in full on Kotaku – presenting millions of gamers with a neat list of apparently damned games, developers, publishers, concepts and business models.
I wasn’t, I admit, at all troubled when it was primarily exposed to industry types, journalists and analysts. I’m not going after the author – I’ve met him a couple of times, he seems smart and nice, has written a bunch of insightful stuff in the past, and he told me this morning that he didn’t do this for the hits – but I am extremely unhappy about the broader games media mentality that perhaps birthed and encouraged such a piece.
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By John Walker on October 8th, 2010.
The relaunched Mythos MMO has released a trailer explaining the classes. You have a Pyromancer, a Bloodletter, and the one Alec will choose, Gadgeteer. See them fight! See them also fight! See them fight! It’s hack-n-slash MMOing, which is something every sane mind wants. As is traditional in our custom, you can watch the video below.
