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12 months ago
Feature: Shoots boots and leaves
‘Sometimes I feel like a feet voyeur’ – meet the photographer who snaps shoes of NPCs
“Walk a mile in someone else’s shoes.” It’s a common enough idiom, a plea for empathy and understanding. Taken literally, it’s also a phrase that rings true for gamers. We walk countless miles in the shoes of our favourite characters, learning to love and feel for them along the way. But despite all the miles we travel, we rarely give our well-worn virtual footwear its…
1 year ago
Feature: Once more, for those at the Bayek
Don’t forget about Bayek when you’re kissing Kassandra’s feet
There are a lot of dads in video games, and their number only grows. A rising tide of stubbled, emotionally-reserved dadflesh, heralding a new age of "serious storytelling" in games. Assassin’s Creed Origins stands out from this paternal wave by showcasing a different kind of videogame dad. Egyptian proto-sheriff Bayek, who displays as much tenderness as he does the ability to stab things really, really…
Feature: Requiescat in pace
With Assassin’s Creed Odyssey just around the corner, I find myself thinking back to last year’s entry in the series, Origins. It was packed full of side quests and collectables and set pieces – in short, everything we’ve come to expect from a Ubisoft open world adventure. But one moment in my playthrough still stands out to me. It was almost entirely unscripted, driven by…
Feature: Actually ten games!
Please sit down. Make sure you have a friend with you, or available on the telephone. Plunkbat isn't at number one. Somehow, it's something even more boring. But the rest of the charts are a splendid sight! No GTA, no CS:GO, no Witcher 3, no Skyrim!
2 years ago
Feature: The hit parade
John is missing. He flew out to GDC last week stowed inside Brendan's suitcase to save money, I'm sure you'll remember, but on the return journey Brendan's bag has gone missing. Vanished. Didn't flop onto the luggage carousel. The airport have no idea. John took a few cans of pop and bags of gross American chocolate in with him so I'm sure he'll be fine,…
Feature: The end of violence
Beyond hard & easy: Assassin’s Creed’s Discovery Tour and Soma’s Safe Mode
From a publisher as huge as Ubisoft, and in a series as chart-dominating as Assassin’s Creed's Discovery Tour represents an unusual and welcome ambition. The mode, available as free DLC for Assassin’s Creed Origins or as a standalone game, strips out all the combat, levelling-up and collectibles in favour of a promised educational experience. It takes the strongest facet of Origins – its detailed and…
Feature: Listen now for warmth
The blizzards of Siberia have gone on holiday to the United Kingdom this week. But the RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show, doesn’t do snow days. The pod squad have trekked hard through the whiteout (from their bedrooms to their computers) to gather on their respective microphones. To what end? Well, to talk about the weather. Blizzards, thunderclouds, sandstorms and, er, night-time? In videogames, it…
Feature: Holiday snaps
I have been, since November, utterly enamoured with digital Ptolemaic Egypt. Assassin's Creed Origins’ snowglobe version of the kingdom makes it excellent fodder for long, meandering walks and screenshots of tantalising vistas, but it's the small vignettes of daily life and scenes of mundanity that make Egypt feel less like just another theme park. Since the first Assassin’s Creed, Ubisoft Montreal has used scale as…
Feature: Real-time Instragram for games
Cel-shaded PUBG, ’70s Truck Sim and zinester Assassin’s Creed with new Nvidia tool
Post-processing tools for games aren't new - hello Reshade and SweetFX - but the world of dramatically altering a PC game's appearance with what could loosely be described as real-time Instragram filters has always been a scrappy wild west. Nvidia have this week built themselves a governor's mansion on this new frontier, introducing a feature called 'Freestyle' to the GeForce Experience suite of game optimisation,…
Feature: Old is new
As the feedback loop of Steam successes reaches an ear-shattering scream, this week we see last year's best sellers dominating the New Year's first week. So I refuse to live in the past. Let's look forward. Let's imagine what we might want from these behemothic developers.
Feature: The biggest hits of the past 12 months
Another year over, a new one just begun, which means, impossibly, even more games. But what about last year? Which were the games that most people were buying and, more importantly, playing? As is now something of a tradition, Valve have let slip a big ol' breakdown of the most successful titles released on Steam over the past twelve months. Below is the full, hundred-strong…
Feature: Bayek will remember that
Sometimes it’s good to go back to where you came from in open world games. When the content is the world, travelling through it can often feel like you’re gobbling it up, every virtual kilometre a chunk of media you’ve greedily consumed rather than occupied. But they rarely give you much reason for retracing your steps. Levelled rewards are rarely worth the journey; storylines and…
Feature: The usual suspects
The tail-end of Steam's Autumnal sale sees a few old favourites lingering with the usual suspects in the charts this week. The discounts that got them here are all gone now, but it's only a couple of weeks now before everything goes completely bonkers for the Winter Sale, and you can expect to see all the same names deeply discounted once more.
Feature: Assassin's Apparel
Assassin’s Creed clothes are some of the best clothes in all games. Those layers, all those flowing, flapping, swinging layers: cloth and leather and swords and knives and pouches and harnesses. I often idly wonder, as I watch an Assassin’s Creed loading screen, how many people - how many studios! - produce Assassin’s Creed’s clothes? They’re a wonder of code and art coming together, of…
Feature: A stroll down the hit parade
Hey ho, chart fans, let's go. Statman John is indisposed today, and was last seen meandering along the seafront muttering "Plunkbat! They give me Plunkbat! I've a grand idea for a grand theft five five fi-diddly-fi fi whoopsadaisy down we go," so I'm taking over for this week's Steam charts. Seeing as he's always griping about the charts being identical, I'm sure John will be…
Feature: Number one in your hearts
Imagine what would happen if Plunkbat weren't to be at number 1? Could anyone even cope any more? Has all of gaming started operating on this as a foundation, forgetting that it could, one day, not sell more copies than everything else? What if I'm writing this as a bluff because it's not at number 1 this week? What if I just wrote that to…
Feature: Map-clearing without the map
If my second favourite thing to do in Assassin’s Creed Origins is tomb raiding, my first favourite thing is travelling by eagle. Your character, Bayek, has a pet eagle called Senu which constantly follows in the sky above him, and you can possess it at pretty any time, sweeping your view up into its own. As Senu you can fly freely, ascending to extraordinary heights…
Feature: All about light
Weirdly, none of my favourite Assassin’s Creed Origins moments so far relate to assassinating. Then again, they never really did in the previous games. Instead they’re about buildings, specifically climbing them and going into them. So it’s appropriate that my absolute second favourite thing to do in Assassin’s Creed: Origins is tombs.
Feature: Next week: Steam Graphs
The continued clotting amalgamation of the Steam Charts, with CODWARs and AssCreed Oranges mysteriously occupying multiple spaces, is having frankly dangerous effects on the column. No The Witcher 3! No GTA V! And H1Z1 seems to have been entirely forgotten by the ages! What is a running joke to do?
Feature: Getting sloshed
My three year old rates games based on whether the character goes into water, and if they do, do they swim underneath. My personal rating systems are a little more nuanced, but it turns out that Assassin's Creed Origins' swimming is so astoundingly atmospheric I'm willing to forgive it a dozen other foibles. In all of gaming, water has never felt wetter.
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