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Today
Feature: A collection of nearly-missed gems
Before I started my PhD, I was an Inbox Zero kind of person. I used labels. Folders. Conditional filtering! These days, I might as well have a permanent out-of-office message. This isn't to say that I never read my e-mails, but rather that they get filed into a section of my brain which I have deemed, "Later." Within the distant confines of Later, I promise…
Feature: WELL?
Remember remember, the nineteenth of January, with gunfire, treason, and- hang on, this must be a misprint in my 'On This Day...' cat calendar. Let's see. Ah! Wikipedia says January 19th, 1986 saw the release of the first IBM PC virus. Sadly that's not in The Malware Museum and Wikipedia doesn't list a catchy song to commemorate the event so I guess we're about done…
21 hours ago
Feature: Fish markets and snail wisdom
Into the Bruxnerverse: getting to know the frogs and aliens of Grace Bruxner
Grace Bruxner almost delayed the release of her latest game, The Haunted Island, a Frog Detective Game, which is a cute adventure about a frog trying to find a ghost. But then she changed her mind because she wanted to make sure it released near Hitman 2. Close enough that news stories mentioning both would be on gaming sites at the same time. "Like, it'll…
23 hours ago
Feature: Time's on our side
Katana Zero is much more than it first appears. And it first appears to be plenty. A side-scrolling reflexy beat 'em up, painted in very pretty pixels, with a character who cannot take a hit. It's a surprisingly interesting weakness to give your ninja-esque mass murderer, who is fast-paced, all dashes and slides, rolls and manic combat. And yet on top of that there's the…
1 day ago
Feature: A tourist's take on quadcopter sims
Need to paralyse an international airport, drop hand grenades on infidels, or shoot a spectacular intro sequence for a puffin documentary? You, Sir/Madam, require a drone and drone operator. In preparation for the day when the majority of jobs in the UK involve quadcopters, I've spent the past week learning how to manoeuvre faithful digital facsimiles of these agile aerial peeping Thomases. Thanks to a…
Feature: A screensaver pretending to be a game - or vice-versa?
Yeah, it's a screensaver. Yeah, I played it for hours. By which I mean, watched it for hours.
2 days ago
Feature: Listen now or don't, see if I care
New year, old friends. The boys and girls of the RPS podcast have not been reborn, they have no resolutions, no ambitious goal to learn German or eat more spinach. They just want to play more videogames. Unbelievable. So let’s listen to them chat about the shooters and RPGs that have them most excited. That’s what they do on these podcasts, you know, they…
Feature: Working together
“The software should be an entity that you are interested in, invested in, and feel an engagement with. That’s the idea.” That’s one of the many ways Michael Cook describes Angelina, his “artificial intelligence-powered research project that designs videogames”. It's not the world’s only experiment in automated games design, and it’s not going to rob any human developers of their jobs. Mike doesn’t want it…
Feature: Flambé zombé
Resident Evil HD Remaster is a three-year-old shine-job of a 17-year-old remake of a 23-year-old console game that I’d have little problem believing was a modern release if those corridor dogs weren’t seared into my memory and stained into my underoos. That those corridor dogs are stained into our collective underoos (the vast interconnected underoo network that binds us all) suggests that Resident Evil is…
Feature: Get me out of here
*Click*, went my gun. Not the good, Richard Beymer kind of click. The "you're out of ammo and definitely dead" kind of click. The survivor in my sights had shrugged off my first few shotgun blasts, leaving me at the mercy of his assault rifle. He turned, shouted, and aimed. Then his gun clicked too, and I charged him with my tomahawk. It was a…
Feature: Tree over par
A lie. That’s what this detailed 1990 golf simulation means to me. A great, stinking, 256-colour lie.
3 days ago
Feature:
How 40K: Mechanicus reinvented tactics for Warhammer’s cyber-monks
The Adeptus Mechanicus are one heck of a Warhammer 40K faction. These shadowy racist warrior monks are more machine than human and worship a trinity of machine gods. They say stuff like, “From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh, it disgusted me. I prayed for the strength and certainty of steel. I aspired to the purity of the blessed machine.” Those words…
Feature: More goodo than Codenames
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Feature: Mad to the maximum
Metro Exodus’s summer map is fun, but it’s at its best when you go back underground
I was told before playing Metro Exodus that, as with the previous Metro games, it is important to think before you act. Seize every quiet opportunity to craft another med kit, a molotov, another filter for your mask. Continually take stock of your, er, stock. And it’s true, there is grim satisfaction in sneaking up behind a weird anti-electricity pseudo-Christian cultist and knocking him out…
Feature: Let me, the king of skateboarding, explain
Skater XL claims to be a skateboarding sim, but is it realistic?
I am an excellent skateboarder. In the year 2000, I took my skateboard to school and showed everyone in class what the “trucks” were. They were astounded and definitely did not ridicule me. Since Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, I have been an eminent skateperson in the virtual realm too. I am the 44th best player of OlliOlli 2: Welcome to Ollywood (on the PlayStation 4).…
Feature: Push with your knees, not your back
The first time I pushed someone downstairs in Hitman: Blood Money, I felt faintly guilty. Not because I'd just killed a person, but because The Agency, my bar-coded assassin's employers, had gone to the trouble of providing me with a wealth of lethal equipment. Yet here I was, sending people to their deaths without touching a single item. Was I putting someone out of a…
Feature: Justice for Seth
Sometimes, there are game announcements that sound perfect. The creator of Mega Man and the director of Metroid Prime? Yes please. I don't care what it's about. Whatever it is, I want it. Then you see another trailer, and another, and you think: "Hmm… this isn't quite what I had in mind when I imagined a Metroid Prime meets Mega Man mash-up, but I'm sure…
4 days ago
Feature: Pre-prepared to die
A few days ago, I gave up on outwardly promising surrealist RPG Nashbored an embarrassingly short way in, due to a wildly misjudged trap-dodging section (one part of which reset me back to the start of the banal puzzle if I failed to skip past any one of its five rows of patrolling doomblades - you know the sort). I mean, sure, whoever designed that…
5 days ago
Feature: Don't take it Persona-ly, babe
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Feature: How Ignis makes you want to experiment with food yourself
For the sake of snappy videogame design, eating is often the first thing that falls by the wayside. After all, food and all the associated processes take time, time that in most games is better spent elsewhere. Just like in real life, having to hunt around for food in the middle of an adventure often tampers with the pacing. There are exceptions, but food prep…
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