Supporters

Hello. Long time, no write. Last time we published a 'Letter From The Editor', I was RPS's gnarled grandad, my attention split across several websites. As of a couple of weeks ago, that's no longer the case. I am once again solely focused on Rock Paper Shotgun, in a way I haven't been since 2021.

So what does this mean?

I…don’t know how this happened. Really, I don’t. The last pvp game I spent more than a few casual hours on was, without exaggeration, Halo 3. I have spent almost 20 in strategy autobattler Mechabellum since Sunday, exclusively 1v1-ing strangers. What’s scarier is that I even win sometimes. I'm vaguely aware that autobattlers have been a thing for a minute already, but I think this might be the evolution of the RTS I’ve been waiting for? It certainly feels like everything I’ve ever wanted from competitive RTS, minus needing to have any sort of reaction speed whatsoever. It is turbo crack, I tell you. Nay, it a thousand flame mechs laying waste to turbo crack city.

One thing I didn't touch on much in my Metaphor: ReFantazio review was its real-time combat: your ability to deck monsters out in the field without having to enter into a turn-based affair. So here I am, with some more thoughts on it. Namely, that I'd rather it arrives in the inevitable Persona 6, or otherwise in a renewed state. I don't think it's all that good, really.

Take any Tim Rogers clip, and they'll be at least one quote there that has helped me understand games in new and exciting ways, but one I think about often is from his Final Fantasy 7 Remake review that goes something along the lines of “we weren’t JRPG fans - we were fans of games with more". For console players in the 90’s, JRPGs were where the big stories and big places lived. If you wanted to explore worlds that felt like worlds and meet huge casts of excellent weirdos, you were almost a JRPG fan by accident.

Many of what I’d nostalgically describe as my favourite games are JRPGs, but with the exception of Valkyria Chronicles and Ichiban’s Like A Dragon games, none of them are newer than 25 years old. This suggests to me that at least one of things I want from a game is an experience that I could once only get from JRPGs, but is now more democratised, either through design nous or technology or just more writers that feel able to tell more ambitious stories to audiences they’re confident will be receptive.

Every month, I receive a paycheck for writing about games on the internet, and while it is has never been stated outright, I must assume that this acts as implicit confirmation that all my takes about videogames are bulletproof. I wrote about Space Marine 2 a few weeks ago, and while my opinions were correct at the time, they have since changed. Again: this is not contradiction. I was 100% correct at the time of writing - I’m simply more correct now.

Never question whether I am a real gamer again, you prying, needling hounds. I have The Gamer Browser, you see. I downloaded it because the RAM and CPU limiter widgets sounded useful. In reality, tuning them down by any noticeable degree just makes the browser unusable. Could this be because I have around 30 pinned tabs at all times? No. That is my inventory. What good is the gamer browser if it can’t handle my inventory?

Is there anything more satisfying in Total War: Warhammer 3 than watching a tide of rats, so numerous to be previously inconceivable outside of a world-spanning alley filled with old yoghurt pots and Dairlylea Dunkers, break against a beardy phalanx?

This is a fairly broad generalisation, but I think there are two types of armies in the game: those you win with on the battlefield with micromanagement, and those you win before the battle has even started, through composition and arrangement. The former may be more tactically gratifying and exciting, but the latter is so cinematically enjoyable to me that it’s something I can’t get anywhere else. It also perfectly suits the Dwarfs, who not only excel at defence, but I imagine are deeply unwilling to admit to their plans are anything but perfect, even upon making contact with the enemy. It’s the same joy I imagine players of sims like Factorio and Satisfactory get when setting up a bit of perfect automation.

As you can perhaps tell from the slightly disdainful quotation marks, I am not a "shipping" person. I find it kind of annoying, in fact, if anything tending to un-ship fictional couples who clearly have no chemistry and are just doing it for the script.

It's fair to say then that Love, Ghostie isn't made for me. It's so specific that shipping might even be its genre, since it doesn't really fit into puzzle or interactive fiction. You're a ghostie, and you run a shared house full of humans unaware that ghosts exist, and that their culture is apparently based on pairing up the living. I guess... circle of life?

“When the plebeian kneels to the monarch, he is offering his neck,” writes Gene Wolfe in The Sword Of The Lictor. I read that this morning over coffee. Thanks Gene! I was literally just thinking about bowing - and more specifically, thinking about just how many stories that centre the monarch would be made more interesting from the perspective of those forced to bow.

When James, Edwin and myself played the preview level of Space Marine 2 together, I remarked on how the Imperial Guard worked as a good reference point for just how massive the space marines themselves are. Having played around three hours of the full game now - and having it found it wear very thin in about half that time - I’m realising that putting the player on the other side of that power imbalance would have made for a far more interesting game.

This week’s supporters was originally going to involve documenting a highly scientific experiment I did involving my cat and a series of numbered treats in which she ranked all the mainline Yakuza games. Alas, upon checking the photos, most of them simply depicted a ravenous orange blur. Still, I did at least get conclusive evidence that she does not care for the original Yakuza at all. No taste, I tell ya.

Casually reducing a genre to more easily slag it off, I propose that there are fighting games that are a memory test, and fighting games that are fun. This leads naturally into saying with confidence that Five Gods of Kung Fu is fun, and getting an intro I'm struggling with out of the way. Phew.

It's structured in a testy sort of way, though, with training scenes teaching the button prompts for the new moves you'll need to defeat the next opponent. But those scenes are also montages, because FGOKF is also a playful thing where you're then attacked by a gang of mooks purely for a few moments of miniature power fantasy where a single blow can take out the entire line at once. Your new fighting technique is unstoppable.

At least once a year since Game Of Thrones started, whether there’s something related on telly or not, I suddenly get all obsessed with Westeros again and start falling asleep to lore videos for a couple of months. It’s obviously coincided with a new season of House Of The Dragon this year - a season I really enjoyed, even if the consensus seems to be “we didn’t get the finale battle we were expecting so we’re going to retroactively decide the show is bad now.” It had problems, sure. Daemon’s weirwood-ex-machina vision made his entire season arc redundant. And, sure, the cinematic framing of Rhaenyra using her obsession with prophecy to justify the mass bloodshed she’s willing to inflict to, effectively, gain power is a little too noble. Still, very entertaining telly.

This has all lead me to ask the titular question: What would a good George RR Martin videogame actually look?

"Trash Bandits" is too good a name to ignore, and a slick enough platformer that I pretty much have to recommend it, even though I'm pretty bad at it...

Except! I'm always just a little bit better at it than I think. Or I get better, and want to keep playing enough to try things a few more times until I get it right. That's pretty rare for me, when there are hundreds of other games a quick alt+F4 away.

In one of his routinely excellent newsletters a good while back, Nathan Brown quoted RPS’s own blame-eater Graham Smith saying the following: "People say they want good AI in shooters, but they don’t. If FPS AI was perfect then it would be just like playing online against the people at the top of the leaderboard. It would be awful. When people say they want good AI, what they mean is they want to fight enemies that make them feel smart when they beat them."

Well, I’ve never seen the top of an FPS leaderboard, Graham, so I’m just going to stick with the opinion that The Last Of Us Part 2’s AI is very good. Oh, alright. Apparently my job is "contingent on caring about what words mean." Fine. What I actually mean is that TLOU 2’s AI has been doing a great job of making me feel deeply unsafe at pretty much all times. The fact that only a really smart cookie like me can deal with that level of pressure is irrelevant. I’ve been playing it over the last week or so, partly to knock it off the pile, and partly to chip away at the mount of karmic debt I hold with the spunked cost pantheon for buying a PS5 solely to play two Final Fantasy games.

An odd side effect of mid 30’s life is trying to find a balance between tasteful, neutral home decor and wanting to cover every inch of my space in odd, niche objects that I personally enjoy but might, say, confuse the little old lady at the cat shelter if they come do a home check.

Maybe I’m just being judgemental? She might actually secretly love this print of Mr Blobby devouring his son that I got with Frisson Comic’s Blobby Horror anthology:

I'm sure (and perhaps even hope) someone will pop up to prove me wrong, but I feel like we don't get Celtic peoples in strategy games all that much. And much as I'd enjoy a game indulging in the possibility that Ireland civilised the world twice, this neglect feels doubly true for those who wound up in Iberia instead, a culture about which I know nothing.

Songs of Steel Colon Hispania isn't an in-depth look at that culture, but it's an enjoyable look at the "local tribes decide how to keep the invading Roman jerks at bay" story anyway. If I call it kind of limited, I mean that not as a slight.

"Mmmm. Sexy cardboard" are some words you don’t really want to be discovered muttering to yourself over the recycling bins at seven in the morning when the trucks turn up, but are nonetheless very familiar to anyone with a tabletop game habit. I look up the rules of, probably, less than half of the games I buy. This feels like buying a videogame because of the art style, but I definitely do this too, and if I’m not supposed to trust my eyes over my brain then why are they at the front of my head, eh? The point is: Themeborne’s game are bloody gorgeous, and I keep buying them, and then ending up mildly disappointed at what they’re actually like to play.

One of the classic draws to games as a medium is having a go at fictional jobs like wizard, space salvager, or landlord. This week I've been playing Times & Galaxy, a kinda silly but absorbing visual novel game about a sci fi concept called "journalism". It's good!

The game, I mean. You can be a pretty terrible journalist, perhaps even intentionally. You're a robot too, which the game quietly points out in an in-universe article was installed with a blank slate for increased malleability. It is full of clever but mild mini-jokes like that, told not to expect big laughs but a baseline of playful cheeriness. I initially said "despite", but it might be precisely because of that levity that it's so easy to give real thought to what kind of reporterbot you'll be.

The last time I played Dope Wars (Drug Wars), I was hunched on ‘the shit chair’ over a CRT around my mates house. It was school lunchtime, and I was in either year 7 or 8. I was quite overweight, scruffy, and I probably had specks of bean juice on my white shirt. It’s occurring to me now how deeply cursed the term ‘bean juice’ is. Tomato sauce, then. Tomato sauce on my school shirt, because it took me longer than normal to develop a sense of self-awareness about such things, and thus embarrassment, and thus I stunk and looked like shit all the time. I sort of miss it, honestly.

Dope Wars ‘98 is an updated version of the 1984 MS-DOS strategy game by John E. Dell. Its famous for being everywhere at the time, including calculators. The Windows version I played is by Beermat Software and now it's become abandonware. In brief, it’s a game about being a drug dealer, and occasionally running from the po-po. The cop is called ‘Officer Hardass’. You can shoot him to death! With a kill-gun! Otherwise, this is the same version, visually identical. It's also not exactly the version in the header image, but I'm not even going to try screenshotting it.

Right from the ungainly 3D face taunting me on startup like the Guardian, I had a feeling I was going to enjoy Dungeons of Blood and Dream despite myself. It is a baffling, bizarre thing that lives on the border of janky, retro, and punk (insofar as games can be punk, but that's another article).

You're trapped in a Mind Prison, your "hateful magics" neutered, your memory and understanding gone. Now what?

What’s that? You’re deeply interested in learning the esoteric factors that play into my weekly choice of supporter post topics? Glad you asked, Simon T. Rawman. While I cannot compare my inspirations to the no-doubt spontaneous communion with the cosmos that inspired Debussy to tinkle out Suite bergamasque’s esteemed third movement, I did experience a moment of joyous serendipity yesterday. By which I mean that Edwin wrote a silly strapline riff on a piece of music I was already thinking about because it features in Conscript, which I just got done playing for review.

Speculative biology is something that, on reflection, I’ve been really into for ages in a disparate sort of way, but didn’t have the name to tie it together until the past few years. This has mainly been through reading interviews with - and interviewing - Gareth Damian Martin, who turned me on to Wayne Barlowe’s Expedition, an influence on his own speculative biology game In Other Waters. Also, like pretty much everyone, I find the teeming oddness and spectral beauty of underwater ecosystems both life affirming and a little bit terrifying - awesome, in the traditional sense.

The final minutes of Kerrang! TV - shut down this week alongside four other music channels in a cost-cutting effort by Channel 4 - saw a reel of clips that showed a channel frozen in time. I don’t think any of the songs were more recent than fifteen years old, and many were much older.

Kerrang! as a magazine, and a brand, has continued to champion emerging artists throughout its lifecycle, but the channel’s final moments felt like a guttural declaration that it had tattooed its name in a heart alongside its favorites a long time ago, and everything that came after was just iron-ons and pin badges. That the beating heart of the channel was always placed at a specific moment in time (always more about nostalgia than revolution) albeit one continually referenced and playlisted and occasionally revived in retro callback trends since. Deftones were always too interesting to be lumped under nu-metal, to be fair.

Me again, the Destiny 2 person (someone needs to fly the flag now that Alice0, RPS in peace, has sadly left us). Over the last few weeks Liam (also RPS in peace) and I have dunked lots of orbs, made numbers go up, and have almost come to terms with the fact The Final Shape is actually a verb. That means we've started ironically using it in situations like, "Wouldn't surprise me if we get Final Shaped", as, I don't know, our country's election happens tomorrow. So uh, anyway! What have we made of the game's latest expansion over the last few weeks?

Yeah it's leagues ahead of Bungie's previous effort Lightfall, owing to things being a fair bit zanier.

Schmidt Workshops caught my notice recently with the excellent Islands of the Caliph, a fairly simple game that I half expected to wear out in an hour. It was instead charming and engrossing, with a novel setting and encouraging atmosphere that carried it well beyond that finish line.

Aberration Analyst is about as far removed from it as possible. Instead of bashing monsters while becoming a better Muslim, you sit at a desk putting together clues to track unseen monsters. But they share a creative spirit, and a well-judged balance between revealing information and letting you figure out the rest.

It’s Shadow Of The Erdtree week (month?), so naturally we’ve been covering it a bit. I wrote about some discourse. I had some opinions. I tried to write some more, and in the process of doing that, I ended up having to confront my own thoughts on the base game, and why I’ve always felt at odds with a lot of the critical reception to it. I keep seeing very big words written about it, so thought it would be a worthwhile exercise to write a very small review.

In 1996, I played an RTS game named War Wind. I haven’t played it since, though I’ve thought about if often. Except, I didn’t actually know what the game was called until last week. I found out by googling the word 'Boncas'.

There's this one stealth section in Shadow Of The Erdtree that I won't/can't spoil for now. But know that it has you hiding in bushes to escape nasties whose version of "You're it!" is around 1000 times more aggressive than most adolescents who might prod you with Skips flavouring-coated fingers. Besides other Torrent-related things I'm writing up, I've found it's got me thinking about something...

...Tenchu. I'd like FromSoftware to do a Tenchu again.

What little rejuvenation reaches my ancient, haggard soul comes most often from pleasant little surprises like a game creeping up on me.

Our Adventurer Guild is cheerfully simple in appearance, and its turn-based fights and griddy missions establish its parts at once as familiar, potentially even by-the-numbers. But those parts are arranged into an original and deceptively detailed mercenary management game that got harder to put down the longer I played.

The RPS inbox is a wondrous treasure-trove of distraction doubloons, some delightful, some shite-ful, and not even Outlook’s lichen-like interface can dull the luster of its offerings. In amongst the press releases, indie nuggets, and the occasional pitch for sponsored AI content (no, never), something truly exquisite occasionally peeks through the chest lid. This week, it was a completely context-free message containing several photos of what appear to be artificial houseplants from a man named ‘Harold’. We take criticism seriously here, so I can only assume the sender intended the contents of these imposter pots to be judged as such. Well, I’m nothing if not obliging. Apologies for the quality of the images. I screen-grabbed then resized them up because I was too scared to download them in case they contained explosives or something.