Rock, Paper, Shotgun

I’d love RPS to have a news ticker that pulled headlines from silly game plots: Korea has invaded the United States – Pyschic Dead Pregnant Teenager Sets Off Nuke – Skåne Invaded By Unknown Force, Sweden Deploys Mechs. What? You’ve never heard of that last game? You fools. You foolish fools of Fooltopia, wearing t-shirts that read “I is fool”, on the last week of Fulltember, during a fool moon. You’ve never heard of Sweden In Conflict? While I’ll admit this two-year old game has only just come into my life in the last hour or so, I think I’m in a position to mock you for missing it up until now. Sweden In Conflict is a free indie game with a love for destructible everything, and it is fun.
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My application to be an astronaut was turned down because it was written in crayon, and now that I read it back in the cold light of day I notice it appeared pretty threatening. Sorry, NASA! My aluminum hat must have slipped and enabled an alien to take control of my writing arm. If, like me, you’ve been rejected for astronauthood on petty and unfounded claims of bad penmanship and terrorist activity, then there’s another route. All you need is Spacewalk, and an Oculus Rift. And, frankly, the Rift’s optional.
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The Call To Arms event was another huge success, with the Vanu group peaking at about 235 concurrent RPS players across five platoons. The NC Outfit was also in action, and there were dozens of other allied and opposing groups which made the evening a splendid brawl across the continent of Indar. We saw several large tank battles across open ground, and dozens of smaller, intense battles for territory. It has to be have been one of the most spectacular multiplayer events I have seen, and I enjoyed leading one of the platoons enormously.

See you all at the next one. Perhaps a Sunday night for the next one.

Tonight on Planetside 2‘s Miller server, from 7pm UK, we will be doing laser war. Everyone is invited. You are doubly invited if you haven’t played the game before. On the Vanu faction, our heroic team of giraffe-fatigued warriors will be organising platoons for you all to play in, making an ideal introduction to the game. They’ve provided a guide to play which you can read here. That’s presented as a video, if you want to watch it as such, below. Also: action video!
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First of all, I’m bringing you the most important news: there’s a game whose name is Farm For Your Life. Let’s not let that get buried under any other information I might provide after this point. Farm For Your Life.

Other interesting factors, albeit ones that pale in comparison, are that you can buy it right now, or… earn it for free.

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Schein‘s a puzzle-platformer looking for crowd-funding. I should probably get a special button fitted to my keyboard which automatically types “a puzzle platformer looking for crowd-funding”, actually. But Schein also has a demo, showing off its light-based conundrums and slightly Limbo-esque vibe, which makes it much easier to say something useful about.
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Watergate: The Videogame is sort of based on All The President’s Men, a book about the investigative reporting that ultimately exposed US President Richard Nixon’s massive Watergate scandal and forced him to resign. Now, I say “sort of” because the game’s about as rooted in true-to-life fact as the concept of Richard Nixon’s honesty – which is to say, basically not at all. Watergate begins as a clunky point-and-click adventure with you in the role of journalist Bob Woodward, but quickly plunges into fourth-wall-obliterating, genre-wire-crossing madness. It’s often silly, frequently dumb, and occasionally educational. I think the best part was when I became Mega Man.

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When one of the finest PC releases of 2013 is a side-scrolling motorbike game – Trials Evolution: Gold Edition – I can understand that some who’ve not played the Trials games before might be confused by concept. Fortunately there’s now no excuse for not having a play of this ridiculously fun game, as at last there’s a demo.

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Wowee, this is something I need to magic up a fortnight for. Since 2009, the OpenXcom project has been unhurriedly continuing in its quest to make the original X-COM more contemporaneous, – a standalone version that doesn’t require DOSBox, that makes the interface a little more modern, that offers more rule-tweaking for those that want it, that finally kills some of the bugs which have dogged the original for the past two decades, and even one that scales up to mega-resolutions impressively convincingly. As of the new version 0.9, it’s basically got everything working, and you basically get an in theory improved, but faithful, X-COM to play right now.
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