"There was no master plan"
By Nathan Grayson on February 10th, 2013.
Chris Taylor just roared in my face. Neon dance lights are pulsing, loud, bass-heavy music is thumping, and Taylor’s sudden vocal-chord-straining shout is reverberating off our empty corner of a DICE after-party.
Intense. That’s how I’d describe the scene. It’s also how I’d describe Chris Taylor.
By Craig Pearson on January 16th, 2013.
The list of things cats can do: lick their genitals, preen, fight off bears, and benchmark your PC with dubstep. That last one is SO a thing. Remember those programs that would use pretty graphics and scenes of games that didn’t exist to test out how powerful your graphics card is? Well the best one ever has just come out. Allbenchmark’s Catzilla shows Godzilla-sized cats battling armies and each other. The video below is life changing.
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By Craig Pearson on January 15th, 2013.
Hallelujah! Just look at Reus, the prettiest game I’ve seen allllll year. I’d probably be willing to make that statement in February, btw. Come March I’ll reevaluate. Reus is a God game where you play a huge God, hunkered down over the world like a child over his toys, plucking at the malleable world and moulding it. The trailer is below, and I insist you watch it right away.
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Good Gaming Conduct
By David Valjalo on January 11th, 2013.
Like a human q-tip David Valjalo embarks on a fantastical voyage into the realm of videogame music. Rounding up three of the most high-profile composers working today, let’s call them The Three J’s: Jason Graves (Dead Space, Tomb Raider), Jesper Kyd (Freedom Fighters, Assassin’s Creed) and Jack Wall (Splinter Cell, Black Ops 2), he gets the inside story on a revolution in game music budgets, practices and thinking that has changed our game soundscapes forever.
By John Walker on January 9th, 2013.
Being old fuddy-duddies, at RPS we generally frown upon fathers’ hiring hitmen to kill their sons. Political health and safety correctness gone mad, we know, but we’re stuck in our ways. But as Kotaku spotted while we were still curled up hibernating within the warm furry fuzzle of Horace’s infinite tummy, when it comes to Mr Feng of China, we are totally down with it. Because he did it online. In pretend land.
By Alec Meer on January 7th, 2013.
bzZZT…
bzRRT…
Oh. Ah. Erm. Cough. Hello?
After two weeks of festive recovery time in our brine tanks, we have returned. Normal, daily service on Rock, Paper, Shotgun resumes at last momentarily. How was your Christmas/New Year/deflating return to normality?
By Nathan Grayson on November 27th, 2012.
I’m not the sort of person who usually watches the deleted/extended scenes of movie special editions. I mean, I’m sure they’re fascinating – and I’ll definitely go for a swim in the deep end if I’m really, really into something – but odds are, I’ve already gotten the point. I’ve seen the credits roll on the vanilla version. I’ve taken the journey, and – unless it’s been a while – I’m not super interested in trying the scenic route. That’s pretty much my dilemma with Mass Effect 3‘s DLC as well. Omega, for instance, looks like a bombastic jaunt off the beaten space-path, but I already know where it ultimately leads. Still though, a new trailer makes a compelling argument for me to play it sooner rather than later – if only because it looks like a fairly robust self-contained tale. Also, Aria’s finally doing things. Explode-y things. I bet her faithful couch is terribly lonely.
By Nathan Grayson on November 8th, 2012.
Disney owns Star Wars now, so what better way to celebrate than with the most un-Disney character in the entire Star Wars universe? In fairness, Hk-51 isn’t HK-47 (who has already appeared elsewhere in Star Wars: The Old Republic), but they’re quite obviously cut from the same organic-life-loathing cloth. They probably also both loathe cloth, for that matter. Point is, don’t go into a frothy mouthed state of paralytic shock if your new companion combines the words “meat” and “bag” to form a phrase of a far more sinister nature. But the galaxy-spanning quest to secure an adorable HK-51 of your very own is only a small part of SWTOR’s upcoming update 1.5. The rest appears in a hyper-advanced eyeball stimulating holocron after the break.
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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By Jim Rossignol on October 26th, 2012.
Demon-child adventure-horror Lucius has appeared on the various digital distribution platforms today. I reviewed it a couple of weeks back, and you can read that here. In short: it’s a fascinating game which perhaps misses some of things that could have made it great. Not really scary, but still an interesting achievement by the tiny Finnish team. I can’t wait to see more from them.
Perhaps you can wash those words down with some moving images? Delicious (poison-free) draught of trailer below.
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By Nathan Grayson on October 16th, 2012.
Everyone, it’s OK. You can calm down now. Put away your finely honed rioting tools and carefully calibrated bludgeoning instruments. Octodad: Dadliest Catch, you see, finally got the Greenlight go-ahead to haphazardly fling itself in Steam’s general direction. After flopping and flailing about in hilarious frustration for 30 or so minutes, it also managed to affix 20 other games to its tentacles – which it will now nonchalantly drag onto the storefront with it. Or maybe they were just greenlit the normal way as well, but this is how I choose to interpret the information I’ve been given.
