Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Some great Naked War news here. Ste of the Pickford Brothers announces that their turn-based cute-skirmish game (Think Laser Squad Nemesis meets Worms with a distinctive wiff of Sensible-Software-esque playfulness) has passed their 100,000 turn served mark. Relevantly, this is changing how they’re allowing people to play. Basically, it’s gone free to play with optional subscriber options. That’s “basically”, I stress. I’ll explain more beneath the cut, but if you haven’t played it, you should download it and challenge a mate to a battle. Because it’s so lovely that even someone with as little taste as Dave McCarthy gets it. A game really has to be good to manage that.
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Ste Pickford, one half of indie-devs the Pickford Brothers, dropped me a line recently. Their most recent was…

Which is another major piece of evidence in the “Indie games=Best names” argument. In passing, Naked War was one of my favourite underground games of last year and a really cute tactical PBEM game: The Gollops’ Laser Squad Nemesis possessed by the spirit of Sensible Software. I gave it 80% for PCG, and Dave Taurus concurred over at Eurogamer. Despite me being better than him at it.

But that’s not what this is about – Ste has entered the blogosphere. Since the Pickfords have been doing this for longer than a good chunk of our readers will have been alive, they’ve seen games change enormously. In the most recent post, Ste’s talking about talking to Rare about developing on the NES and the strange demands that they insisted upon…
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