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2 months ago
Feature: I'll take it
Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines accidentally gave me a power fantasy
Vampire: The Masquerade -- Bloodlines has been written about a lot on this site (far more than one would expect from a game with both a colon and a hyphen in the title, which should be made a crime). It’s a clunky, unfinished mess of an action RPG that runs better today than it did on release in 2005 only by the grace of a…
2 years ago
Feature: SHODAN at the Better Than OK Corral
Not only does a great hero need a great villain, villains are usually just so much more fun. Whether it's the tortured lost soul who can only find peace by destroying the universe or the cheery psychopath looking to see the world burn, it's no wonder that many of the greatest films of all time have been defined at least as much by the baddie…
Feature: Faster than a bard shot out of a cannon
It's Summer Games Done Quick time again! You know what that means. The final seal has been broken, the rivers are turning to blood, and High Dread Azagorath is free to destroy the land. But while people wait, they're doing speed-runs. And in celebration of that, I thought I'd take a dig through the archives for a few particularly impressive and interesting ones that take…
Feature: World of Absence
There's a real urban fantasy gap in the gaming industry, and it's never made much sense. We see a thousand Tolkienesque fantasy games a minute (rough napkin calculation) and the future's typically so bright, even the lens flares need shades. Yet when it comes to that line where the mundane meets the magical, mostly what we've had for the last few years is false hope.…
Feature: The casualties of being spoilt for choice
We are living in a golden age of big-budget PC games that offer us choice and freedom. Be they descendants of the System Shock model - finding a route around a meticulously-crafted, locked-down and hostile place, most recently seen in Prey [official site] - or the roleplaying games based around choice and consequence rather than action alone, they are legion. There are so many, even,…
Feature: Touring different types of worlds
The problem with fantasy is that it's often not very... well... fantastical. Far too often, even brand new worlds feel like Tolkein or Warcraft or Star Wars with a few twists, and the serial numbers scraped off. The good thing about this is that when a game does take us somewhere new, it feels all the more special for it. This week then, a quick…
3 years ago
Feature: The meek shall inherit NOTHING!
So, a confession. My plan for this week was to talk about Obsidian's Tyranny [official site] - the game, not any rumours of Feargus Urquhart openly stealing puddings from the company fridge no matter how well labelled! Unfortunately, that plan hit a tiny snag... I haven't had a chance to play much of it yet. A shame, simply because the genre is well overdue a…
Feature: The Final Picks
We're coming to the end of the Summer Steam Sale so chances are you've picked up the things you'd already got your eye on, but there are always games that sneak under the radar or come from genres you might usually ignore. That's why we've put together our final recommendation list. Here's a whole list of things we love and why we think they're worth…
Feature:
Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time. I've checked the RPS master Have You Played document seven times now, convinced that I've made an error. How could we not have written one about Vampire Bloodlines yet? In many respects, the modern gothic RPG is the ur-RPS game, a game of…
Feature: Legends of character creation
Not for the first time, I've spent quite a while recently pondering the nature of roles - more specifically, mechanical role versus narrative role. When we think of RPGs, what we're usually thinking of is the latter. You play the role of the Hero, but in a universe that's typically designed to let you define that however you like. I'm not saying that's a bad…
Feature: Videogames saved the radio star
There's something oddly comforting about radio. Comforting because it's so familiar, so natural. Odd because it's a comfort that most of us don't really use all that much these days, at least not in the ways that games just casually assume. It's a little like the whole audio diaries thing - it makes a vague sense that everyone in a city like Rapture might record…
4 years ago
Feature: Tomorrow's World Of Darkness
White Wolf Interview: “There Have Not Been Enough Video Games Set In The World Of Darkness”
The news that Paradox Interactive had purchased World of Darkness creator and publisher White Wolf a couple of weeks ago came as something of a surprise. It also raised a lot of questions: what would become of existing third-party relationships? What are the plans for digital spin-offs of White Wolf properties? Can we expect another Vampire: The Masquerade CRPG at any point in the near…
Feature: Out of respect, not laziness
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Feature: Homes away from home
Most RPGs ask you to save the world, but not all of them offer a world worth saving. Honestly, there's been quite a few where given the choice I'd have joined the evil overlord just to beat up all the potion vendors who wouldn't even give me a discount before the final battle, and for the mere chance of stabbing the guard in Act 1…
Feature: Lightning bolt! Lightning bolt!
Given a choice, I almost always play as a mage. Swords? Pah. Divine magic? Save it for Sunday School. Give me control over the elements, the power to reshape the very building blocks of the universe according to my every whim, and if at all possible, a cool hat. It's an easy fantasy to indulge in almost any RPG out there. I just wish it…
Feature: A bite from the past
The RPG Scrollbars: The Long Night Of Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines (With Clan Quests)
They say the definition of madness is repeatedly trying the same thing and expecting different results. But hey, the Malkavians of Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines have lucked into stranger things, so I figure there's at least a chance that one day I'll fire it up and find a whole new adventure waiting. Today was not that day. Tomorrow isn't looking too likely. Yet still…
Feature: Level Cap
An entirely objective ranking of the 50 best PC RPGs ever released. Covering the entire history of computer role-playing games is a daunting task and attempting to place the best games in such a broad genre in any kind of order is even more daunting. Thankfully, we are equal to all tasks and below, you will find the best fifty PC RPGs of all time.
5 years ago
Feature: Father figures
This is the second part of my Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines Diary. You can read the first part here. All of this is huge spoilers so it's only your OWN fault if you read any of this and then ruin your whole life because you spoilered this wonderful game and then you will never like anything again and love will seem hollow.
Feature: Sexy, terrifying bastards
When you think of California, you probably think of sun, people wearing shades, the wide, flat pavements sunbleached and neat. But when the night falls in Santa Monica, CA, it gets mortuary cold. I'm staying there this month and I found myself thinking of Jeanette the other night. Something about a tumultuous relationship, smudged kohl, and Jeanette. So I paid for another copy of Vampire:…
8 years ago
Good, in fact excellent, tidings for those who find themselves able to enjoy Fallouts both old and new, and for anyone who lived through the 90s heyday of PC RPGs. Tim Cain, the main brain behind the original Fallout and later co-founder of the much-missed Troika, has fetched up at Obsidian. Until this July, he was at Carbine, working since 2005 on what turned out…
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