Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Here at RPS, we are not shy about our support for gender equality in the gaming industry, both in terms of the representation in the games we play and at the various companies that make them. It’s a tremendously important matter from just about every standpoint imaginable, from so-called “practicality” (read: business) to common human decency. Nothing, however, beats a firsthand account of the problem at hand – not even a cheeky gallery of StarCraft II’s most cheek-ridden bits. And so, I highly, highly, highly recommend GDC’s absolutely excellent #1ReasonToBe panel. You can now view the entire thing online for free, and even in itsy bitsy box-shaped form, it’s a truly moving, important thing. The experiences Brenda Romero, Robin Hunicke, Leigh Alexander, and co outline - alienation, sadness, rage, doubt, loneliness, discomfort, fear – are why equality matters, and their continued love of gaming becomes all the more powerful in light of that. This is, in my opinion, required viewing. I very much hope you’ll agree.

Read the rest of this entry »

….Cart Life, which scooped up an an impressive triple-whammy of Nuovo Award, Excellence in Narrative and the coveted Seamus McNally Grand Prize at last night’s Independent Games Festival 2013 awards. The warmest of all congratulations to Richard Hofmeier, whose affecting, brave game is well overdue for this kind of attention.
Read the rest of this entry »

2012′s IGF Awards caused not a small amount of consternation behind the scenes. A good deal of this was bad sportsmanship, with developers claiming it was rigged against them in various ways that it absolutely was not. But other issues like games that had already won being re-entered did become a more serious issue. However, even before this year’s awards, IGF bossman Brandon Boyer has said that this shall no longer be allowed, with any finalists disqualified for another go. And he scraps the mobile category. And yet, even now, still bloody well ignores writing.

Read the rest of this entry »

Hello! I’m currently out at GDC Europe, skipping around businessy talks to cover for my day job, but I ended up sat in on BIoware’s laidback and fascinating retrospective on the making of their breakthrough game, Baldur’s Gate. It’s a landmark title, and fascinatingly critical to what modern RPGs and MMOs are, but one we’ve surprisingly not talked about much on RPS. Thanks to my magic (and now rather broken) hands of transcripting +1, let’s change that…
Read the rest of this entry »

Don’t tell anyone, but the real reason I wrote this story was purely so I could use that headline.

Yes, King Of Immersive Sims Warren Spector is to hold a keynote speech at GDC later this month. I’ll be in the crowd, which’ll be exciting. Maybe not as exciting as when I had a wee next to him at E3 once, though. Obviously Warren has broken our fragile little hearts and gone on to make some Mickey Mouse platformer for the Wii, but the theme of his speech is something we’re all likely to thrill to/howl at.
Read the rest of this entry »

A Lifetime Achievement award, that is! Just my little joke there. Sorry. You hate me now, don’t you? It’s late and the punning part of my brain has been asleep for hours.

Yes, the idmeister general is be honored with said accolade at the upcoming Game Developers Choice Awards (I swear that should have an apostrophe somewhere), for his “his contributions to the art and science of games”. Which is a rather lovely way of putting it, to my mind. He follows in the gong-grabbing footprints of Will Wright, Sid Meier and that Mario bloke, and can bask in the warm glow of knowing a panel of his esteemed peers – from the likes of Bioware, DICE and Popcap – nominated him for it. Well done, big John. Now go and make sure Rage is brilliant, please.

Details of the award and a spot of Carmackian backstory below…
Read the rest of this entry »

The 190 student entries to the IGF awards have been whittled down to the finalists. Or the “winners” as the IGF rather sweetly calls them, before later telling all but one of them that in fact they weren’t quite as winnery as the one that gets the IGF Student Showcase Award. The list and links are below. Congrats to all.

Read the rest of this entry »

This is really neat. Picked up from Indie Games. They had Jim Munroe go to GDC with a press-pass and write up his experiences in the form of a text adventure. It’s actually more of a text-based game than a text adventure (i.e. you shouldn’t be having any problems with the parser as long as you REMEMBER the instructions at the start), and actually somewhat splendid. You can play it online in Java here, for the java-hating here and for those who use an IF interpreter, its actual code is here. And some more explanation follows…
Read the rest of this entry »

At the last GDC the industry big brains were sat around telling us how games would one day be remotely rendered on big computing clusters and then streamed to our TVs. The big unveil at this year’s GDC has proved them to be correct. Maybe. OnLive is a service on which you use superfast broadband (1.5mbps minimum) to play games on a remote server. You just plug it in to any “entry level” PC or Mac, or hook it up to your TV, and play. It doesn’t matter if you don’t have the latest 3D card: because the remote server does the rendering and streams the result to you. That’s the theory anyway, and it’s a theory a bunch of big name publishers have signed up to. Watch the OnLive spokesman Steve Perlman make his big claims after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

A few months ago Mythic’s Creative Director Paul Barnett and myself went into a London bar, set a tape rolling and got mildly smashed. Only now do I dare return to these hours of tape to transcribe a series of topic-by-topic interviews. We pick up where we left off last time, with Paul about to explain why he went to Futurism-festival LIFT rather than this industry’s mecca, the Game Developer’s Conference. And it’s much more fun than him hating San Francisco.
Read the rest of this entry »

Could this be the future of PC gaming? Battlefield Heroes has the potential to be one of the most important games the PC has ever seen. Free to play, funded by advertising, super-accessible, playable on a low-spec PC, and still attempting to capture some of what makes a classic PC title so entertaining to play: it’s one of the smartest things EA/DICE have ever done. And it’s funny, too.

Past the jump: my impressions from the GDC demo, the trailer, and the some screenshots.
Read the rest of this entry »