Oodles Of Supporter Post Loveliness For EVERYONE!
A gorgeous selection box
In the backroom of RPS Towers we have a little corner. Each workday a different member of the team potters around in the corner, crafting a lovely Supporter post for members of the RPS Supporter Program. Some of those posts eventually make it out from behind the Supporter veil and into the wider world where everyone can read them. In case they passed you by we've scooped the latest batch up in our big net (it's the net we usually reserve for capturing freelancers and/or going trick or treating) and collected them here for your delight!
You can find out more about the program or sign up here BUT FIRST, here's a taster of what lurks within the program...
MGSV: The Phantom Pain Is Making It Too Easy For Me
Graham on whether Metal Gear Solid V is too easy or he just lacks willpower:
"I know there are harder missions to come which will limit your options in certain ways, but I’ve been playing large swathes of the game without breaking a sweat so far. It’s making the experience feel emptier than I would like."
The Last Eight Years Of Gordon Freeman’s Unpublished Diaries – RPS Exclusive
John has somehow come into possession of Gordon Freeman's lost diaries:
"An envelope arrived in the post this morning. Thick, stuffed with books. Diaries, in fact. Someone has sent me Gordon Freeman’s diaries from the last eight years. I don’t really know what to do about this. I mean, this is obviously big news, but this is also someone’s private life. But what if it was Gordon himself who sent them? What if he wants the… the misery therein to be exposed?"
One Night With 80 Days
Adam on one of the many emotional and intelligent moments in Fogg and Passepartout's travels:
"On top of everything else, it’s a game about storytelling. Passepartout’s narration traces the changes he goes through during the adventure and his realisation that the tale he is recording isn’t what he had had initially thought is beautifully delivered, step by step along the way, and the end of each journey is packed with meaning. There’s one particular ending that I hadn’t discovered, however, until that night last week."
The Beginner's Guide: A Journey Through Genres
Adam attempts to find games to bring newcomers in to each genre:
"A friend inspired this particular bundle of joy, someone who grew up with an Amiga but developed other interests and hasn’t touched a game for more than a few minutes at a time, either console or PC, for over fifteen years. A recent illness has left him unable to engage in his usual outdoor hobbies and games have filled the gap."
Some Classic Games Kickstarter Need Not Revive
John on which games are best left as fond memories (in case they are still dreadful):
"Fire & Ice starred a blue coyote, see. Totally different to a blue hedgehog. And he threw ice and fire or something. I think its ultimate undoing was incessantly frustrating slippy-slidey-ice-world sections, which was fairly inevitable with the title I suppose. Oh, and that the art looks like the stuff this kid called Gareth used to draw in his exercise books at middle school, which I thought was the coolest until I’d realised he’d copied it out of the Usbourne Guide To Cartoons."
This Is The Way The World Ends, Not With A Bang But A Click
Adam and the fall of the soccer superstar he nurtured:
"All of the stories were my stories, even though I’d been on the periphery of the majority. Sure, there were the Starks and Lannisters of the world – Manchester United, fallen from grace, and Chelsea, enthroned and despised, respectively – but there were so many minor players. For a period from 2022-2028, one of the greatest players in the world was a ridiculously speedy wingback by the name of Angel Blaze. I signed him to Everton in 2020 when he was 16 years old and already had the potential to be a world-class player. By 18 he was a first team player capable of scoring wicked freekicks from distance and almost impossible to pin back in his own half."
ASA Rulings: Robot Dogs, Sugar Puffs And Time Team
Pip trawls the Advertising Standards Agency for gaming ridiculousness:
“They said that any sense of realism in the filmed footage in the opening section of the ad would have been offset by the music used − a Germanic reworking of the popular folk song ‘House of the Rising Sun’ − and by the presence of the giant robot dog.”
How To (Not) Make Money In GTA Online (Without Committing Any Crimes)
Graham tries his hardest to make money on the right side of the law. He becomes a monster:
"I’m suddenly excited. They’re running because crime is happening. Where there’s crime, there’s maybe some spilled money. I run in the direction of whatever has everyone so scared. I’m a lot like Batman, I think, if Batman were a mostly naked homeless man instead of Bruce Wayne."
Don't Watch Me Play
Alec's fundamental unsuitability for Let's Plays:
"Almost everything I do in a game is with the intention of some pay-off: be it an actual reward or some sense of closure and satisfaction. But if I play in front of someone else, the game becomes instead about the moment-to-moment actions; they see what I do, rather than what I aim for. To some extent, that is only correct: I am definitely guilty of not stopping to smell the roses."
Football Manager 2035
Graham takes a twenty year holiday before heading to Leeds United:
"I find this stuff fascinating and have so far been inundating Adam with speculative fiction. He seemed entertained, but I also have this guilty feeling that it’s a little like telling someone about your dreams. I dreamed last night that Everton player Kevin Mirallas would be manager of Chelsea come 2035. I dreamed that my lead striker at Leeds United would be agitating for a move to “bigger club” Brentford, EPL champions of 2030 who are currently 8th in the league."
Football Manager 2035 + 10 Days
Graham is no longer the manager of Leeds United because he is awful:
"Let me explain. When I interviewed for the position at Leeds, I was asked about my previously poor dealings with the press. I didn’t know that I’d had any poor dealings with the press. In twenty years of holiday I hadn’t really had any dealings with the press, although this might be the precise problem. It’s possible that I had failed to respond to two decades worth of press enquiries. It’s possible that my phone has been ringing and my inbox has been sending out of office responses for the majority of the 21st century."
10 Anxieties Experienced While Playing Fallout 4
Alec on why Fallout 4 has reduced him to an anxious heap of a man:
"Why does this campaign keep going on and on and on and on, it’s been like 40 hours and I just want to know how it ends now and oh god I have to finish but now it’s 2am and my kid will scream me awake at 7am and…"
Four Examples Of Excellent Interface Design
Graham applauds a quartet of fabulous game interfaces:
"By setting the menus entirely within the world, Elite’s interface is one of the many ways in which it sells its space captain fantasy. The peak of this is the overlays that appear on nearby ships, telling you, for example, what direction they’re travelling. Those aren’t magical game overlays, but information that’s being projected onto the windows of your ship – which means if those windows get smashed during a fight, the overlays disappear, too."
Fail Forward: How Television Fails At Discussing Games
Marsh is fed up with how TV continues to approach gaming:
"Instead of focusing on a particular game I want to talk about how the mainstream media tends to describe gaming only in terms of its danger or its use and why neither of these things amounts to a particularly enlightened discussion."
The Pipwick Papers
Pip continues to talk about things that are not videogames:
"I spent a month focusing almost entirely on keeping up with League of Legends for their World Championship, now it’s over and I’m doing that thing where you try and remember what life was like before a big project. Mostly emails, it seems. While I regroup I’ve been reading up on taxidermy, Reddit Star Wars theorising and a $180 maths book."
If you fancy joining the RPS Supporter Program you can find instructions right here! If you're already a member you'll be able to find all of the posts from the supporter archive here. Just remember you need to be logged in to see the secret ones!