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2 months ago
FPS spy romp No One Lives Forever turns 20 today but alas Cate Archer is still confined to her room, unable to come out and play. The secret agent shooter has been tied up in legal gridlock for years. You'll not find it for sale online aside from second-hand, but that hasn't stopped RPS singing its praises all this time. A remaster still seems unlikely, but…
5 months ago
This virtual museum lets you try the lockpicking minigames from loads of different games
Ages ago I learned how to lockpick in real life, and ever since I've been so impressed at how video games emulate the feeling of managing to crack a lock open. I think maybe it's the noise, that signature *clunk* that makes it so satisfying. It's a staple of RPGs like Skyrim, where lockpicking is literally a skill you can level up. But loads of…
1 year ago
Feature: The worthiest reticules of all time
The best shooters endure. While other genres warp beyond recognition, there is something solid about the first-person shooter that makes it as dependable as a nice big AK-47. Maybe it’s the gung-ho simplicity - look down a barrel and pull the trigger. It's as fun to fire a double-barrelled shotgun from an early 90s FPS as the slick shotties of today. For that reason, this…
You may not be able to buy No One Lives Forever outside the second-hand market these days, but if you do have it you'll now find it a lot friendlier to revisit. Modman Jacob Breen has made a "modernisation patch" fixing up performance, UI, and resolution issues to make the much-beloved spy-fi stealth FPS feel less like, well, a game released 19 years ago. It…
3 years ago
Feature: A better class of art thief
I never played Secret of Mana 2 on the Super Nintendo, but I could recognize its trees in a blink. I saw them in countless other games, their lush branches decorating the corners of fantasy worlds filled with magic, dragons, and bugs. Oh, so many bugs. I've never played the first Star Ocean, the Suikoden series, Terranigma, or Chrono Trigger. But I know them. They…
Feature: The worthiest reticules of all time
The best shooters endure. While the state of the art moves on in other genres and leaves old designs in the dust, it's as fun to fire a well-made shotgun from an early 90s FPS as from one released today. For that reason, this list runs the gamut from genre classics to those released in the last year. There's bound to be something for you…
DOS Boot is just Brock digging into old DOS/Windows games and talking half-remembered cool and bizarre experiences that are only available on abandon-ware sites at this point. Weekends should be for having fun and by god, we're going to have some wholesome gosh dang fun on RPS Weekends. Nearly a month back, I proposed that we all play No One Lives Forever -- a game…
So I'm going to be real honest: I haven't been a participating member of the RPS site in a year or two. I got burned out on video game news and gamer culture and all of the like. It has been a nice surprise to come back here and find the RPS community exactly as I left it: chock full of good folks who appreciate…
Feature: Listen or be unmade
Welcome to the freshly relaunched RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show! You might think this is episode 31, but actually it’s episode 1 again. We’re rebooting it, even though we just did that last year. We’ve started by making it more accessible. Instead of three of us chatting about videogames between snippets of jaunty music, there’s just a sad man saying “Sonic the Hedgehog” over…
4 years ago
Feature: No one's on sale forever
No One Lives Forever, and its sequel A Spy In HARM's Way, are infamously unavailable. Through the meticulous horrors of ownership rights across multiple publishers, and an apparent unwillingness by any involved to see it resolved, it's not possible to buy either classic game anywhere.Well guess what - there's a way to get them anyway, and we super-encourage you to do so.
Feature: No One Has A Clue
Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day, perhaps for all time.Perhaps the reason the rights to make a No One Lives Forever game are permanently stuck in limbo is because everyone keeps looking for them under 'N', forgetting that the name by which everyone refers to this fabbo FPS was only ever the post-colon tagline.
7 years ago
Yes yes yes thank goodness hooray finally oh gosh woooo wheeeee yeah excellent fantastic wonderful groovy there should be a parade.No One Lives Forever, the excellent tongue-in-cheek spy series from Monolith whose rights mysteriously went missing, is very likely about to get an online re-release. Finally. So, where in the world has Carmen Sandiego Cate Archer been hiding all this time? Well, it looks like Night…
Once upon a time Monolith made the candy/1970s-colored No One Lives Forever, but then the years passed and the colors drained away. The result? F.E.A.R., which traded NOLF's yuck-yuck-yucks for some spooky, splattery "oh... yucks." Flash forward to today: all of the color is gone, with six Monolith vets producing the gloomily black-and-white Betrayer. It's got scares in spades and thick cobwebs of dread lingering in…
8 years ago
No One Lives Forever was basically the greatest. This is an incontrovertible truth of the universe. The unabashedly groovy stealth shooter (and its sequel; though not blah blah blam blam spin-off Contract J.A.C.K) was equal parts silly and smart, with a peeling back of the proverbial weaponized banana peel yielding everything from lowbrow stereotypes to startlingly nuanced dissections of sexism and the criminal mind. Also,…
10 years ago
Feature:
Yesterday, as you may have noted, Dr Rossignol began our lecture series on the most important PC games of all time. Much like The Christmas Lectures, The Reith Lectures, and the TED Lectures, this definitive series has been a part of our institution as long as the Earth has borne stones. In this second part Professor John Walker explains the varying importanceness of a second…
11 years ago
Yesterday saw my No One Lives Forever retrospective appear on the mighty Eurogamer. Maybe you'd like to read a thing like that. A thing like that begins like this:They say money makes the world go round, but this is somewhat inaccurate. Leftover momentum from the solar nebula makes the world go round. Money, in fact, is not responsible for rotation, gravity, nor indeed any number…
