Rock, Paper, Shotgun

I’m scared. Here’s what I fear: I fear The Void is going to be the subject of unjust moral outrage because it features female nudity.
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[It seems to have gone through nearly as many name alterations as the Sugababes have line-up changes. It's the sequel to RPS-championed Russian existentialist minor classic Pathologic, the game Walker described as Oblivion with cancer. It's finally translated to English. It's time to send the man who Butchered Pathologic to see Wot He Thinks of The Void...]
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Come the hour, come the men. Come the hour to podcast, come the three men (eventually). Quinns, Alec and Kieron gather in a (mostly) hungover state to discuss important things. You can download the file here, subscribe to it by RSS with this, or get it on iTunes from here. Hurrah! Also, you’ll find the full list of chat-topics below…
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When I blogged about AI War’s demo, an idea struck me. It’s eight players co-op mass-scale space-RTS against apparently only of the most vicious AIs yet seen in gaming. Could we get enough people together to have an eight player game? No, we couldn’t. Seven? No. Six? No. Five? No. Four? No. Two? No. One? No. But three? We totally managed a three-player game. So Quintin, Alec and myself gathered one afternoon to start a battle for the future of humanity against an unrelenting evil AI. Nothing would ever be the same again, except for all the things that were totally unchanged.
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Alec suggested we do Gaming Made Me – ooh – last Friday? Being RPS, we only got around to working out anything on Monday morning. It takes until Tuesday to realise how special it feels, and we should pursue it. Also, we realise that since there’s only four of us, it totally means we’re lacking a post for Friday. So we quickly drop a mail to a number of RPS contacts in hope that some of them could say something by Friday. And some of them totally did. In fact, some said so much we’re extending the run of articles until at least Monday. But here’s a punchier panel, where developers like Soren Jonson, Paul Barnett, Rod Humble and Erik Wolpaw and journalists like Tom “Tom Bramwell” Bramwell and Quinns talk about their formative games. And, of course, more if any devs care to write in and share, do so.

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As anyone who picked up the last issue of PC Gamer UK might know – it’s the one with Starcraft 2 cover and the massively redesigned editorial – some friends and I have been playing a lot of Wurm Online. Since then I got in touch with developer Rolf Jansson, and you can read his answers to my questions below. But first I need to explain Wurm.

The best way to describe Wurm is as a high fantasy Eve Online, and it’s interesting for exactly the same reasons as Eve and a few more besides. While Eve starts you off in a space-faring milk float with a mining laser, in Wurm you begin as a hopeless peasant with… well, this:

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And now, in a feature I like to call Forbidden Discourse: The Oily Fruit of the Broken Heart, we present an interview with Ice-Pick Lodge CEO Nikolay Dybowskiy and all-purpose Ice Pick developer Aleksey “the LxR” Luchin. Ice-Pick are of course the Russian studio responsible for the award-winning Pathologic and The Void, two fascinating PC games.

I could give this chat an introduction about how the attitude that comes across in it gives me hope, but screw it. Instead I’ll just say that this interview proves just how much these guys are Doing It Right.
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I’m sick of talking to you guys about games that are either old, flawed, or old and flawed. If you hit the Quinns tag on RPS right now the site becomes some kind of miserable gaming emergency ward where I run around administering adrenaline to my dying loved ones before they disappear forever. Enough of that shit! Today I’m going to tell you about one of my favourite games that’s actually playable online, easy on your system, costs nothing and could easily end up starting a tiny fire in that dusty heart of yours. It’s called Armagetron and it’s about as perfect as freeware gets.

It’s pretty easy to explain, too. It’s the perfect evolution of a Tron Lightbikes sim. Course, that might mean nothing to you, in which case it all gets a little harder to explain. Here we go!
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Planetside, then. Do I have any veterans in the audience? At ease, gentlemen.

It might not have dredged up the subscribers Sony were hoping for, and you personally might have found it a disappointment, a bully, a bastard, or most unforgivably, a bore. The developers were perhaps overambitious, and in any case they managed to screw up both on paper and in practice. But their game has achieved one beautiful thing, and that’s the creation of the same invisible veterans’ club that results from a real life war. If you played Planetside you might have already encountered this phenomenon- the mutual respect that instantly exists once you find out someone’s an ex-Planetside player. Since I can’t think of a name for this whole process, I’m going to dub it “I WAS THERE, MAN” syndrome.
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One of our roving reporters, Quintin Smith, reports on the state of commercial PC gaming in Japan, with observations on a Gundam horse-touching subgame, a careful look at Hentai sales, and a wacky touchscreen card game that doesn’t have anything to do with PC gaming. Onwards, for Japan and some NSFW content.

Hi! So I’m in Tokyo for a few months right now, and recently Jim got to asking if I could write something about the state of commercial Japanese PC gaming. At least I think that’s what he asked.
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