Loving the alien
By Adam Smith on April 5th, 2013.
Another World’s 20th Anniversary Edition is now available on Steam. In 1992, when I first played it, discovering something so beautiful and strange contained on two disks seemed like an act of science fiction in itself, and realising that I can now download the entire thing in about four seconds is astonishing. Eric Chahi’s enduring voyage is a masterwork of visual communication and companionship, and it has grown in my memory over the two decades since its original release.
Derring-do
By Alec Meer on March 6th, 2013.
Once upon a time, flight simulators were the most tantalising, promise-filled facet of nascent PC gaming. First-person perspectives were the bleeding edge of software entertainment and, at that point, sticking a gun in that first person-perspective had yet to achieve the total dominance it has now. (A first-person perspective never was the only way to play a flight sim, of course, but at the time it seemed like the most thrilling one, as the skies and clouds hurtled across peripheral vision, the ground loomed and zoomed dangerously into sight and rival planes threatened to fly directly into our eyeballs.)
I thought, even post-Wolfenstein, that flying a pretend aeroplane was the single most exciting concept I’d ever heard of. Apart from flying a real aeroplane, anyway.
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Enjoy Responsibly
By Nathan Grayson on January 9th, 2013.
I don’t think violence is necessarily bad. But I do think – especially in gaming – that it’s highly misunderstood, and I argued as much quite recently. But what can we do about that? As ever, I’m erring on the side of reflection and transparency. So here we are. I’m Nathan Grayson, and I was made by violence.
You Are What You Complete
By RPS on December 28th, 2012.
As Space Year 2012 fades into the unreachable yesterday of history, we at RPS have developed preservation technologies that allow us to transmit past articles toward the future. So it is that we’re able to capture some of the highlights of the site from the last twelve months, and as with every year, among the highest of those heights are the Gaming Made Me entries. These reflections on games aren’t nostalgia, but rather personal accounts of defining moments, and that’s what makes them special. 2012′s are every bit as splendid as ever.
A Dream of Machetes
By Cara Ellison on December 19th, 2012.
June 2003: a remote jungle clearing outside Moshi, Tanzania. I am seventeen. It is sometime after midnight.
My skin is sticky with pesticide and sweat. In the treacle dark, my friend Rachael’s face presses hot against my shoulder. The hiss of the jungle soars into the sky in a cacophonous, unbearable symphony.
I need to pee.
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American Dreams
By RPS on November 23rd, 2012.
Talented RPS writer chum Patricia Hernandez asked us if she could write about the influence of RPG-classic Fallout 2 on her life. We agreed, and what she came back with was a stark personal tale of how videogame fantasy can inspire interest, provoke thought, and ultimately change how we see the world.
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Before GlaDOS Sang
By Dan Griliopoulos on November 5th, 2012.
Interrupted while coiling his precious cables, the sound guy glowers at me. “Scarface? What?” Now, the way you can tell games journalists aren’t like other journalists is our shame. We’re shy, we lack the killer instinct, mostly, that enables tabloid hacks to doorstep grieving families and hack murdered children’s phones. I’m a case in point – 6′ 1″, 13 stone – and I’m being intimidated by a diminutive roadie. “His assistant is called Scarface,” I repeat. The roadie shrugs. As he shuffles away, he’s obviously assigned me to the same aberrant category as everyone else still hanging around at the Jonathan Coulton gig – No 1 Fans, all of them.
After the gig, from the gallery of Union Chapel, I look down on the accretion disc of fandom. They’re loitering but not mingling, in the hope of catching another sight of their hero. With its non-conformist heritage, this old Gothic church is a strangely perfect venue for Jonathan Coulton, whose music is packed full of liberality, anti-authoritarianism, irony and inclusiveness – and for his reverential fans. While he’s best known in gaming circles for endlessly singable Portal ditty Still Alive, Coulton is the high priest of geek music. This former programmer’s songs about geek culture are so well known he was made ‘Contributing Troubador’ at Popular Science magazine.
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Where Hip Hop Meets Q*bert
By John Walker on September 11th, 2012.
Rock, Paper, Shotgun was recently honoured to find itself referenced in the latest track from hip hop artist, Jean Grae. Kill Screen, a track initially inspired by the documentary King Of Kong, includes a web of intricate references to all manner of subjects, frequently referring to gaming and comic culture. (You can hear it at the bottom of this post.) Which intrigued us to learn more. So we spoke to Grae to find out about the role gaming plays in her life, and how it influences her music.
From The RPS Archives
By Alec Meer on December 31st, 2011.
Over the years, we’ve built up a vast stock of Gaming Made Mes – highly, unashamedly, gloriously subjective features about the videogames that proved, for one reason or another, formative to writers including the RPS Hivemind and associates, and developers such as Ken Levine, Erik Wolpaw and Soren Johnson. This is the complete collection.
Some spectacular reading awaits you below, on a huge array of even more spectacular games.
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Catharsis ain't what it's cracked up to be
By Alec Meer on December 12th, 2011.
I’ve been playing games on computers for the vast bulk of my life. From BBC Micro to Spectrum to 486 to assorted Athlons to the quad-cored radiator I used today, I’ve rarely been far from a keyboard. I have seen much, I have played much, I have learned much. But learning so often comes from failure. There have been many, many failures: these are but a few.
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Intrinsic Virtues
By Adam Smith on November 14th, 2011.
I was only young when I played Ultima VII but I had already ventured to the depths of dungeons that dripped with dread, partaken in interstellar war and defended my home planet from invaders. Like Roy Batty and all people who grew up with games, I had seen and done so much. Between adventures in space, I’d rezone my commercial districts or build a new bus route, leaving room in the schedules for occasional postal service functions. Yes, I had lived a full life already, but I had never watched a man clad in the finest clothes in Britain eat an egg and then belch in the face of a barmaid, so who can say I had experienced anything worthwhile at all?
