Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Isn’t it amazing how I’ve managed to do one of these roundups of splendid threads on our forum every month on the dot, without fail? Here’s April’s if you missed it, and now here I am again with May’s, just like clockwork. I’m incredible, I really am.

- A refreshing change from the now-traditional, cyclic bitching about Left 4 Dead 2 – fun’n'thoughtful plans and suggestions for new L4D campaigns. What? Where? With who? And for how long? Saucy.

- The venerable cutscenes are/aren’t bad for games chestnut comes up again, and proves to be quite the talking point. The definitive answer, of course, is that cutscenes are okay when they’re not fuggin’ awful. But they usually are.

More fun below!
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Hoo boy, I was going to do these bi-weekly, wasn’t I? Oops. The time is definitely right, then, to do another best o’ the forum round-up – pointing you fine people at some of the more interesting goings-on over on the RPS Talk-o-Tron 3000. Squirreled away in there are news stories we’ve not had the chance to cover on the main site, community-arranged games of all sorts, and the occasional crazy man shouting into the uncaring night.

• Somehow we missed this when it happened back in February, but fortunately it’s been reposted on the forum. A clever chap’s reworked the boxart for most of the classic Lucasarts adventures into high-resolution, poster-sized images. He’s even removed the logos from several of them, painstakingly restoring the obscured areas of the image. I have no idea as to the legality of all this, but I’m going to try and get the Sam & Max one professionally printed up to decorate my worryingly bare walls with.

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Time for another round-up of the more interesting recent threads on our surprisingly gentlemanly forum. Bloodshed is surely just around the corner, but for now it’s a hive of entertaining and illuminating game discussion. Yay, you.

• Yahtzee’s made a TV show with a couple of chums. Somehow watching all 30 minutes of the awful thing is likely to be one of my biggest regrets of 2008 – even more so than not managing to kill more puppies than I did last year – but what do you lot think?
• Apparently dissatisfied with our own best of 2008 year coverage, THE BIG STOOPID WHINERS, a set of good folk devise their own PC gaming advent calendar. It’s doing a grand job of covering the best indie games of the year, which admittedly have fallen a little between the cracks of our own coverage. One Mr M. Circus has christened it the Festivus Calendar-o-Truth, which is exactly the kind of thing we’d have called it. Inserting an -o- into any phrase makes it 38% funnier. FACT-O-TRUTH.

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When a news story falls through the cracks, our own forum is there to catch it. So, once again, here’s a few recent high points, flashpoints and point-counterpoints from the burgeoning Rock, Paper, Shotgun Talk-o-Tron: a place where men go to talk about games and piracy. Not necessarily in that order.

• A bunch of good folk embark on a reassessment of Deus Ex 2, a game which Kieron famously scored 1,999,993% a few years ago. Does the troubled sequel really deserve all that bitter backlash?
• A Nick Hornby novel made flesh – everyone proffers their lists of ten titles every PC gamer should play. Surprisingly little love for Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties.

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I know I said we’d do these forum round-up posts weekly, but a) I’m lazy b) I’m really lazy and more importantly c) the forum isn’t yet the runaway success we’d hoped for. Chatter more, damn you.

Nonetheless, there’s a respectable chunk of interesting/silly talk going on. Here’s a few that have caught the RPS all-seeing eye lately:

• Objective, sober discussion aplenty over in the The Fallout 3 bitch-fest thread. The clue’s in the name. I’ve been tempted to jump in and whine about F3′s many mini-fails at the top of my lungs a few times, but I’ve elected to give it a couple of months then come back to the game calm and fresh.
• With L4D imminent, our readers are organising themselves into gangs and groups ready to fend off – or strengthen – the zombie apocalypse. Find fellow survivors here.

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Yes, we know you have but one eye, which you understandably wish to keep forever trained on our front page in case we post a new story, or someone starts shouting about how publishers bribed us with free liposuction and toffee apples to give their game a high score.

However, it’s well worth occasionally diverting that staring eye to the RPS Talk-o-Tron 3000, our shiny-new forum, which continues to attract all manner of excited and curious PC gaming discussion. Eventually we’ll be better able to blend the front page and the forum, but for now a weekly round-up of the more interesting topics over there seems like a smart idea. We want the forum to be big, see. Bigger than Jesus. Bigger than Robo-Jesus. Bigger than Meta-Robo-Jesus.

• Kieron started off a thought experiment yesterday, asking how you’d redesign a game of your choice, given the chance. The various slaggings-off of Spore were the inspiration, but there’s a lot of room to discuss how other games that, for one reason or another, disappointed you could have done it better. It’s constructive criticism incarnate, hopefully.
• We got shouted at for not posting about the Far Cry 2 DRM (similar to that which infected Spore), and frankly that’s because there just wasn’t much interesting we could think to say about it. A lorra folks disagree, understandably, and their venting can be found here.

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