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To work at RPS, the only necessary qualification is to be a spy. Interest in videogames comes second. Secret agenting comes first.

While we obviously can't tell you which spy agencies we work for, what we can tell you is that The Agency isn't likely to match up to our lifestyles. But despite that, as sort-of-MMOs go, it looks like it could be full of fun. Combining more traditional MMO features with more traditional online FPS features, it's... oh, why listen to me when you can hear what the developer has to say (ignoring all the stuff about PS3 Home). But only if you can find the super secret spy button below.

I've been playing around with this for a while, but news reached me on (er) Friday that it's actually gone public, so thought a little post would be in order. It's CrosuS, a Game Management-System thingie from Isotx, who you may know from stuff the C&C: Generals total conversion Middle East Crisisand the forthcoming Middle East Crisis 2 and the forthcoming commercial Iron Grip: Warlord. And - er - more.

It's actually a neat little program - clearly, it's got a retail element to it where you can buy games, has all the usual community and apparently integrates with STEAM and XFire, but where it comes into its own is its extensive mod support. As Isotx said in the press release: “We realized that hunting for new mods, installing them and getting them to work was eating into the time we could spend actually playing – and decided there HAD to be a better way". I suspect anyone who has interest in the mod content - including mod-developers themselves - will find something of interest here. And I'll browse through some of the stuff it lets you do beneath the cut...

Well, it's probably coming out in 2008. Rumours report it looking finished this time a year ago, so hopefully all those additional months are polishing the game up to a glowy sheen. Alan Wake is one of those projects that has rumbled along beneath the gaming radar, without ever revealing much in the way of content or planned release schedules. Nevertheless it's a significant release: the game that the Max Payne team, Remedy, did next, and a title that Microsoft has pegged as “Vista Only” in an unsubtle attempt to nudge more gamers out of XP and into the latest operating system.

Not only that, but what we have seen of Alan Wake so far suggests it could be a genuinely interesting survival horror, mixing up the action of Max Payne with a freeform world and Resident Evil-style frighteners.

In this interview we talk to Raph Koster, the founder and president of Areae, about why MMOs must be free to play, how he wanted to make an Ultima Online expansion where the players made their own shards, and whether games have reached the end of graphics. Areae is the company with an unusual vision for PC gaming: the DIY MMO. They're calling the project Metaplace, but it's just the latest instance of Raph Koster's contributions to the MMO genre.

Yep, Raph Koster knows a thing or two about MMOs. He started out in the realm of text-based MUDS, graduated to the class of Ultima Online, where he was well-known for creating features that many modern MMOs still lack, and then he had a good crack at creating a Star Wars MMO with the first incarnation of Galaxies. Since then Koster has written a book about game design, A Theory Of Fun, and has now started work on his build-your-own-MMO project, Metaplace. With the browser-based game-toolkit now close to its beta stages we thought we'd have a chat with one of MMO gaming's finest beards and see where his head is at.

Gas Powered Games make mechanical games. Games where story and character are entirely secondary concerns to the underlying weights and balances: Supreme Commander and Dungeon Siege are creations of honed function, not form. These are games that do not understand this human thing you call 'love.'

It's a very deliberate methodology, and one to celebrate. It's quite the rarity these days, a time of graphical plenty, wherein cheap-to-make in-engine cutscenes see so many games overwhelmed by their own self-indulgent, exposition-choked narratives. At least someone’s still aware that you’ve paid your money to play a game.

With Space Siege though, everything changes.

Videogamer.com drop us a line to inform me that the fifteen-minute documentary they put together about the Introversion story is now online. While well-made, to be honest, there's little here which anyone who's followed Introversion won't already know. It doesn't really touch on major lows like the Darwinia's protracted development or highs like their IGF fuck-publishers victory speech, but is a charming recapitulation of their history and you do get a sense of what all the Introversion folk are actually like, as well as what motivates them. I'm (er) also in it as an occasional brief talking head, desperately trying to not speak at eight-million-miles-an-hour and wave my hands all over the place. The guitar propped up in the background isn't mine, by the way. Go see it here.

It seems churlish not to link to all this madness.

First up, it's TF2 in Lego!

Follow the link, as there's lots more of these, and it's obligatory that you look at them.

Next, how about a Weighted Companion Cube made of balloons?

I'm currently working on a preview of IGF finalist World of Goo - short version: pre-order the thing, if only because you get a profanity pack(tm) with it - and find myself wandering 2D Boy's website. I discover that they've lobbed online a 7-day prototype of something they were playing around with, the pithily titled Robot And The Cities That Built Him. While they make masses of caveats - it isn't finished and was designed while listening to Bette Middler on a loop - its based around a neat little mechanic where you're managing the upkeep, upgrading and growth of your robot army while they go about crushing and destroying as is a robot's wont. It's certainly worth smashing your way through the first thirty cities, before the game runs out of content. Also, as always: ROBOT! ROBOT!

I should probably point out that this particular post is entirely referral-based thanks to this post on TIGSource. Hell, I'm not going to say anything much new, so you might as well go and read it over there. So anyway: the game pixel-art types over at SpriteAttack have come up with this awesome isometric imagining of what Dwarf Fortress could possibly look like with a bit a graphical elbow grease:

Just crawling off to bed, and a news story arrives from Gamasutra. Rise of Nations (and Legends) developer Big Huge Games have been purchased by THQ. One quote sticks out from Big Huge Games' Tim Train.

Things like this throw me. A sequel of an enormously successful Console game arrives on the PC. What do we presume people know? And how do you best contextualise it. I suppose a little grounding is in order. Out of the first wave of clearly GTA inspired games that were more inspired than just do another crime game, Mercenaries was arguably the finest. Set around playing one of the eponymous soldiers of fortunes, you went on missions in an open world, generally shooting things and causing a frankly disturbing amount of devastation. Its explosions were a bit on the nifty side. It was fun, if disposable - in a "DISPOSE EVERYTHING WITH PYROKENETICS" way. And, generally speaking, this is something I'm glad to see come to the PC. Admitedly, It's nothing to do with the ancient 8-bit ultraclassic, but don't hold that against it.

Gaming SA have this, which is pretty cute. One Thrashbarg - we suspect not his given name - decided to actualise the end sequence and a suitably creaky old terminal to play the tune. The processor is a Intel 2Mhz 8080. The sound is a Commodore 64 Side. The Code is assembler. And the video of it can be seen here. One question remains - since it's a YouTube link, why didn't I just post the code linking to the video and save myself the effort of cropping and uploading a screenshot? I must have kidney beans for brains.

Looking at our big list of games we're planning to preview over the next few weeks, which is of course absolutely exhaustive and not at all limited to whatever we remembered off the tops of our heads, there really aren't a lot of RTSes on it. In fact, there're only two, and we've written about one already. Um.

It's not, for once, because we're meatheaded cretins. It's because there isn't that much to get excited about at the moment, tiny-tank wise. Which is odd, as we've just come from an extraordinarily good couple of years for RTS - Company of Heroes (x2), Supreme Commander (x2), World in Conflict, Command & Conquer 3, Medieval II... Let's hope there's a load of explodey goodies due to be revealed in the coming months.

One to look forward to that isn't on our list (largely because, let's be honest, we know pretty much exactly what it's gonna be like), is the third expansion for Dawn of War. So I'll talk a little about it here instead.

Nothing inspires confidence like a politician making a declaration about the content of videogames.

It appears the latest reason to namedrop children's most dangerous pastime is their incorrigible habit of containing knives, according to our Dear Leader. PM Gordon Brown has declared that as part of his total ban on carrying knives, he wants to see blades disappearing from games too. He explained to The Sun,

"I am very worried about video and computer games. No one wants censorship or an interfering State. But the industry has some responsibility to society and needs to exercise that."

Gordon Brown had better not try and ban sentry turrets.

My favourite indie games developer, Jonatan "Cactus" Söderström, has been receiving a good deal of attention lately. And it's hardly surprising, because his weird, short games are appearing regularly and each have something unique about them. For games developed often in just a few days they're remarkable achievements. This is the kind of chap I'd like to see get a little bit more money and some time to work on something beefier.

Yeah, we said it would be regular in the first and only column, but we only got organised enough to start collating talking points this week. Honestly, every week from now on, except the ones when we get distracted by Strawberry Switchblade videos again. For those who weren't around in those heady days of late 2007, the idea is that since it's a lazy laid-back Sunday, we do a list of things to lazily read and have a nice sedentary think about and try to avoid discussing the relative merits of motown pop hits. Er... and that's it.

• An interview with Noor, a pacifist WoW player who is trying to get through the game without killing anything. What's interesting for me here is not just his methodology, but how incredibly annoyed some people are for him playing this way. Man!
• A new Fallout 3 diary from designer Emil Pagliarulo, which is proving controversial among Fallout fans for its apparent revisionism on the Brotherhood of Steel. Emil's on the list of people I'd like to interview, randomly - games journalist turned Thief designer turned... well, what he is now. You out there, Emil?

From PC Gamer UK's Darwinia review issue.

The very moment we heard the news that Ron Gilbert had upped sticks to Canada, become Creative Director of Hothead, and announced his new game, we leapt upon him for more details. More details we have, in our exclusive chat with the brains behind your favourite adventure experiences. We discuss his new job, get some juicy details on his new game, DeathSpank, the role adventure games can play today, and the merits of episodic gameplay. And find out who Grimtub Hobblepotty is.

RPS: Congratulations on the new job. Can you tell us what you'll be doing as a Creative Director?

Ron Gilbert: First of all, it's great to be at Hothead, I could not be more thrilled. My job will be to oversee the creative aspects of the games, with most of my focus on the game designs and working closely with the designers.

RPS: What was it about Hothead that drew you toward them? We mean, beyond their agreeing to publish your game...

RG: I got to know the people here while I was consulting on the Penny Arcade game and I was really impressed with their indie spirit and how they looked at games. They were really into ideas and concepts that were different and "creative". They loved the strange satirical humor of DeathSpank and got it right away. We hit it off quickly and I realized I'd be able to make DeathSpank the way it needed to be made with them.

Here's a charming free thinger to help you through the weekend. Chivalry Is Not Dead (apologies if you've seen it before, I know it's been around for a few weeks already) is a non-linear point'n'click adventure game. Well, it is linear, in terms of having a start and an end, but you choose that end, and the line that takes you to it. And when I say line, I mean squiggly, mishappen, cheerful scribble.

Rather than each of its puzzles having a single set solution, there are multiple options for most, which in turn affect your potential hi-jinks from then on. Yeah, much like a Planescape or a Deus Ex, but far more unfettered (and, as is obvious from the screenshot, far less serious), and with entirely optional baddie-stabbing.

Despite some rumbling in the games industry jungle about the status of Far Cry 2, we have every reason to believe that this could be one of the finest games of 2008. The team have already shown off some aspects of the open-ended world, reminiscent of Just Cause, Stalker, or those opening islands of the original Far Cry game, and that alone is enough to get my non-linearity glands swollen with anticipation. I think it's clear that after the various degrees dissatisfaction we've all expressed with last year's batch of shooters, we all need a big, bold, freeform explosion to clear our conscience. Far Cry 2 could well be the game that provides it.

What fortuitous timing. I was going to link to Edge's extensive piece on DICE's (i.e. The BF2 Guys) shooter when Eurogamer lob up some actual screenshots found by fansite. So now we can start with a picture...

Before going to give some choice cuts on why this Le Parkour-influenced FPS is - for me - the most exciting looking first-person game of the next twelve months.

Ole from Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe has written to tell us about their Quake III hack for a wraparound screen. The video is pretty impressive, and shows people deathmatching using the giant multi-projector contraption.

Why, it was only the other day that us RPS types were discussing over pie and RPS-branded debit cards whether Left4Dead should be considered "a Valve game". Any doubt is now removed. L4D developers, Turtle Rock Studios, have now been om-nom-nommed into the Valve belly. If it were any other... publisher? we'd be concerned. So let's get cross about Valve buying Turtle Rock. Ready?

Oh my goodness! It's the homogenisation of the gaming industry! Soon they'll all be one company only making Sims games! I imagine the end of the world is about to occur! It doesn't work, does it? But what's important is that we tried. Valve's press release on the matter rather sweetly describes it as the "merger of the two companies," which is a bit like suggesting I'm merging with a sandwich when I buy it from Sainsbury's. So Valve now have a California office, just in case any of the Seattle crew wants to find out what this "Sun" looks like. And Left4Dead is definitely "a Valve game." Glad we've got that settled. Press release under the boink.

This user-submitted video over on Game Trailers is somewhat clumsily entitled "True 3D Future Gaming", and immediately raises the topic of whether holographic projection systems will ever feature in our gaming lives. I've been seeing this kind of stuff turn up at the prototype stage for a few years now, and they always make me think of the 3D adverts you seen in science fiction, but never of gaming. I'd suggest that these things might one day make impressive static displays and holo-billboards, but might never be any use for interactive media. We're much more likely to make use of smaller, thinner flat screens. You'll always be three-dimensional to us, Game Trailers.

Well, a tease of it anyway.

Gamasutra have posted a little of a Portal post-mortem, written by RPS-crushes Kim Swift, Erik Wolpaw and Jeep Barnett. It's taken from the January Issue of Game Developer, which can actually be bought in a PDF format for (er) money. Man, I wish people would give us money. Anyway, the two quoted sections involve the development of the game's fiction and overcoming the technical stuff. Since I'm feigning ignorance of tech-stuff, let's quote from the origins of GladOS bit. That sounds like an RPSy thing to do.

"Before the writing started, we met with Erik and discussed our list of narrative constraints. Since at the time we were using some Half-Life art assets, and because we wanted to leave ourselves the option of someday using the portal gun in a Half-Life game, we decided that the story should in some way connect to the Half-Life universe.

Two conflicting positions: I have very high hopes for Warhammer Online, and believe it will be a great MMO with fresh ideas, and a unique way of dealing with global conflict. Also: I really worry about Warhammer Online, concerned that by the time it comes out it will have devolved into a very generic WoW clone.

The very first time I saw WAR, back in February 2006, it was more conceptual than physical. They had built a bit of the beginning ground for the Dwarves and Greenskins, and that was just about it. But they had some really exciting ideas. The world of the Games Workshop monolith was going to take some really original approaches to the genre, and the most immediately exciting was the abandoning of levels. Instead they had this fantastic structure in mind that let you micro-manage your character’s skills, picking three at a time and then letting the XP you accrue fill each until it’s complete. This was then broken down into five distinct stages, and, well, it doesn’t exist so it’s not worth explaining. But they were excited about it, and so was I. It’s very telling that the MMO genre seems to have the power to force developers to lose anything that strays too far from the familiar. You’ve got to get a player-base, and if you want them, you’ve got to make it familiar enough. Which means, of course, you’ve got to make it feel like World of Warcraft. Sigh.

What a lot of words we posted yesterday. You must be exhausted from all that reading, bless you. Is ickle baby tired? Does 'is ickle eyes need a resty-poos? Well, why not take some time out to play some games instead? Here's a quick round up of recent free digi-delights (and, um, some more reading. Sorry.) potentially worthy of your exacting attention...

Soren Johnson has many things to be proud about. Most gamers would argue that being the designer of the magisterial Civilization 4 heads the list. We'd probably agree. But if you go way-way-way down the Good-Stuff-Soren-has-Done document, beneath even things like buying an expensive round in a bar a few times and opening a door for an old lady, you'll find that he was the first developer to ever mail RPS, saying that he'd like to do an interview. We'll probably love him forever for that.

After some of RPS' usual cheery incompetence, we finally got around to it after he'd returned from Brazil, visiting a games conference. The following hour long conversation wandered the entire expanse of PC Gaming – what's important, online sales, how smart Introversion are, how ace Desktop: Tower Defence is, how PC Gaming relates to Peru Ubu, the Sex Pistols and Television and pretty much everything else which wasn't to do with his current project, Spore.

How PC Gaming looks at the end of an exciting 2007, from one of the PC's most interesting designers. It all starts beneath the cut.

Good news for the 0.5 RPS readers that haven't played it yet: "Portal: First Slice" has been released as a free download. Only for anyone toting an NVIDIA graphics card, however. It's described as an "extended demo", whatever that means. It doesn't seem accessible if you own the full version of Portal already, so I can't clarify exactly what's in it as yet. "Some of Portal" would be a reasonable guess. Update - first third, apparently, which means around an hour of play - well before the omigosh stuff kicks in, but hopefully enough to entice new players into giving the full thing a crack. A Half-Life: Uplink affair, wherein there's brand new content for the demo, would have been a thousand awesomes, but no matter.

It's an interesting riposte to the existing ATI-Steam partnership, which offers up a free copy of Half-Life 2 Deathmatch and the Lost Coast to anyone owning a Radeon: a sign of Valve changing graphical alliegances, large amounts of money changing hands, or just of levelling the playing field? As has been observed, most people who want to play Portal have already played Portal, but it's probably a handy incentive for GeForce distributors to slap on the boxes of new cards, in order to lure in less gaming-aware punters. If you have been dithering about playing what was most sane folks' game of the year, here's your chance to try it. Unless you've got a Radeon.