Supporters (Page 32)

Last week at Gamescom, Star Citizen footage was released showing seamless planetary landings. It's admittedly pretty slick, as the game finally begins to look like its pitch. In it, a spaceman walks from station to ship, pilots the ship down to planet's surface, gets out, walks around, meets another man, takes a mission.

The response has been pretty unequivocal, from the cheering of the Star Citizen megafans in the audience to the press who wrote up the story. "Take that No Man's Sky," wrote Eurogamer. "Star Citizen 3.0's planetary landing blows No Man's Sky away," wrote PC Gamer.

It's true. I can't stick with anything for long, and that includes games. Giant swathes of unfinished tales or multiplayer abandoned at middling ranks and middling ability. Sooner or later, I simply slip away.

Games are boring and stupid, everyone knows that. What we really want to talk about is television. So below I've put together a few recommendations for TV shows you that you may have missed.

This isn't so much a fully fleshed out thought as something which came into my head while awaiting sleep last night: The extent to which music stands in for smell in games.

“Have you ever played the real Monopoly?”

People will try to convince you, from time to time, that there’s a good version of Monopoly. You’ve been playing it wrong all these years, they’ll say, and if you followed the actual rules you’d have a great time. They might go on to tell you that the original version of the game was anti-capitalist, a satirical swipe at Big Business and lordly landlords, but whatever they say can be discounted if their argument is built on the idea that Monopoly isn’t terrible. It can be fun, with friends and family, sure. But it’s like a bottle of bad whiskey - enjoyable in good company, but a facilitator of good times rather than the cause of them.

But Monopoly does have rules that you may not be familiar with, and the internet will happily tell you about them. What the internet has failed to tell you is that many other family favourite boardgames have original rulesets that have been lost or warped over the years since their original release.

...when you could be exploring beyond the limits of the mission area in Tribes 2?

I tried out Eisenhorn: Xenos earlier today, as part of my restless search for non-heretical Warhammer 40,000 adaptations - a question I continue in despite having been burned so many times so often of late. Question is, what would make an ideal 40K game? Well, the beauty of the maximalist sci-fi, in equal parts dark and silly, is that it can be turned to a great many things, but the execution is often lacking. One of the reasons for that it that 40K would seem to demand immense spectacle: the scale and excess of its setting and bestiary cannot easily be achieved on the cheap. So, these daydreams are ideal-world fond imaginings, from a reality where any 40K game can enjoy the budget of a triple-AAA murder sim. They are not games that could ever really exist. OR ARE THEY?

One of the things I'd love to do one day is work out a personal gaming taxonomy; something I can map games to as I encounter them and that helps clarify their relationships with one another. I'd want to do it visually/aesthetically because that's what I respond to most strongly and what stays with me long after the other details of a game have faded. I remember a game because it was visually "crunchy" or "cold" or evocative of a very particular mood/level of cosiness.

As a renowned video games expert, I'm occasionally asked by the BBC and other fine cultural institutions to weigh in on the big events and issues. They want to know my opinions on E3, on iSports, on 'women in games'. They stop responding after I tell them the greatest problem facing our medium is that we, the players, can't get cool wounds.

I've only just got around to playing Avalanche's Mad Max game from last year, having bounced off it at the time because it lacked the artful absurdity and relentlessness of the Fury Road film it was semi-promotional for. It's sat on my hard drive since, and feeling too exhausted for smarter things but with an itch to play something, I gunned it back up and am having a mostly great time with it. It works so much better in its own right, rather than as a Fury Road companion project. Here's some thoughts on what works and what grates, and why I now finding myself going back and back to it.

This last few weeks I've been thinking about game walkthroughs. The ones which tell you how to find every collectible - the time spans during which they spawn and their rarity alongside any ways you can manipulate the odds in your favour.

I've been thinking about all this because I'm kind of consulting real life walkthroughs at the moment. There are some insects I've seen in my wildlife books or which have cropped up online as I tried to ID a related creature which I've really wanted to see for myself.

One is a green dock beetle, another was a ruby-tailed wasp.

I was thinking about how PCs still have a reputation for complexity when compared to consoles, and while it's undoubtedly true in some ways, there are far fewer of them now than ever before. Which got me to remembering what it was like trying to launch a new game in 1992.

I found an old article from my freelance years which I never got published. It's about Kickstarter and the way it's brought a new type of donor portrait to the world with people able to show off their patronage as some creators offer the chance for their likeness or name to be in a game.

How I think the ideas work has shifted as creators and consumers developed their relationships with crowdfunding so I don't stand by everything here but it's a sufficiently interesting topic that I wanted to publish the article as a way of getting the thoughts out there. I'll run through what's changed at the end:

They're pretty good, sometimes.

Terror Why am I of all people playing a game that everyone says is really hard? How many seconds until I die?

I rather like that Britain's internet can be broken by a bit of sunshine. It feels right, proper, how things ought to be.

Are some games particularly suited to travel? They have to be compatible with the potentially puny power of a laptop, capable of attracting the attention of a weary wanderer, and perhaps even thematically suitable. Here are my current picks for the remainder of the year's planes and trains.

Re this. Whoops, basically.

Okay, so this is just a small post but it's about a thing that seems to happen a lot in the Let's Play videos I've watched and it's made me think about noises and impulses.

It's that thing where you're watching a video and the person making the video gets a notification. It could be Skype, it could be Facebook, or a text or anything, but if it's a tone or a set of vibrations from a service you use too then there's that moment where you think you're the one being messaged.

I recently started playing Duskers, a game in which you direct personality-free droids to scavenge derilect spaceships via a command line interface. It's a deliberately sparse game, drawing out tension from the fuzzy black-and-white images you see as your droids explore, hack, gather, and are destroyed.

Breaking this austerity is the ability to name your droids, but I'm awfully glad it does. I wish more games let me name things.

I hate Pokemon games. I'll explain why in a moment but first of all, let's cut to to the chase. Cleverphone game Pokemon Go isn't like the other Pokemons and I sort of love it. I'll probably only love it for a few days, but what the hell. That'll do.

Very little of my PC has been upgraded over the last half-decade or more, which is probably something I should be grateful for, given it leaves me free to spend my money on exciting things like tax and electricity bills instead. Intel's stranglehold on performance CPUs means I'd gain no benefit from a new processor, I'm not quite so impatient as to demand that seconds are shaved off loading times with a more modern SSD or M.2 drive, and if there's any everyday scenario in which I'd benefit from having more than 12GB of RAM I'm yet to encounter it. I plopped a GTX 970 in 18 months ago, and that's about it.

I've been planning to replace that with the total overkill that is a GTX 1080 in order to fuel the VR headset that I was lucky enough to get as part of the job, but right now I'm baulking at the price and how minor the boost is likely to be to most of what I play. VR is a long, long way off becoming my gaming norm. So then, because I'm the sort of sick bastard who is constantly trying to justify unnecessary indulgence to himself, I tried to invent scenarios in which all that power could actually be used. And so it is that I now find myself thinking near-constantly about picking up an ultra-wide 34" monitor, having read that they make games look amazing. (I should say at this point that I have been resolutely unable to buy either card or monitor, and am not likely to any time soon, because Jesus Christ that is a lot of money, but that doesn't stop me from constantly thinking about doing it).

As we head into the quieter Summer months for AAA gaming, this is the time of year we can expect to see exciting indie game announcements and releases. Away from the more conservative, traditional moulds of the big-budget publishers, indie developers are far more willing to experiment, to blur the boundaries of genres, and explore creative and inspiring new areas. Below is a list of groundbreaking concepts we're expecting to see hit the Steam New Release - All - Games list in the second half of the year.

The most frustrating bug I ever encountered isn't actually from a PC game but the PC hasn't been immune from frustrations. One notable jerk of a game is actually my beloved Deadly Premonition.

Even after trying to fix a bunch of its problems I encountered this huge pain in the ass bug which looked like it was going to prevent me from finishing the final fight because of clipping issues. Ultimately I "fixed" it but the fix was that in between QTE button mashing I was also having to repeatedly press Esc to rescue my character from inside the scenery where he was trapped.

I was hooked from the first PlanetSide screenshot I saw in a magazine. I think it was the image above. Could any game really look that good? The grass really poked out of the ground! Look at the foliage on those trees! Two people could ride in the same car! I only became more hooked as I read about what the game was hoping to achieve: a massively multiplayer world with factional warfare, cities where every player had their own apartment, and where missions and structures could be created by players. EVE Online, but before that existed, and a first-person shooter. It sounded too good to be true.

It was. I still want it.

I just received my new PC. I'm very excited, with a little tinge of sadness - this is what I've treated myself with after my dad's death earlier this year (sorry this keeps coming up in supporter posts by me). And so, rather in tribute to him, I was a little excessive. I spent more than I needed to. So I confess to having bought myself a setup with an i7 6700, a GTX 1080, and most ridiculously, 32GB RAM. Yeah, I know. Anyway, in setting it up it occurred to me that I could be useful, so here are some genuinely helpful tips for getting a new PC (or a new install) nice and comfy as quickly as possible.

Something I've seen crop up from time to time as I've tried to educate myself about my new home and the local plantlife is the idea that there are no "true" blue plants. There's this infrequent but recurring idea that cornflowers and forget-me-nots and nigella and bluebells are all lying to you and are secretly purple but using plant trickery to convince you of their blueness. Here's an Interflora blog which lists supposed offenders.

I've recently moved house. I can say this a lot - I've been moving house once a year, every year, for the last five years - but this time is different. I've also moved countries, sort of: I've traded the rolling hills and Georgian architecture of Bath, Somerset for the sandy beaches and strange parochial government of Jersey, Channel Islands.

I've been adrift these past two weeks of moving. But then yesterday I set up my computer.

A couple of weeks ago, I took my first trip to E3. I've been doing this for half a decade now, the whole games writing lark, but Gamescom has always been my big annual show. This year, I opted in to E3 as well. I had a good, meeting with interesting people and playing lots of good games, but E3 is clearly in a state of change, with major publishers locating themselves elsewhere in LA and inviting the public to events, in what is traditionally a trade-only week.

So, yes, E3 is changing and it'll be interesting to see what happens. But here's what I'd do to make it a more enjoyable experience right now.

It's time to go back to Quake. Hell, it's time to play the rest of Quake - I've only ever known the shareware version, which I played to death. The original, in all its brown'n'blocky glory, looks pretty much a mess on my 1440p monitor, which overcomes a certain determination to be a purist. So I delved into the world of mods. Turned out I could make id's old dear look what some might consider to be amazing, and certainly a whole lot younger than its advanced years - but at what cost? Excluding that of my own life, which resident Dylan goes electric protester hardcore Quake enthusiast Alice has threatened to take as a result of me playing the game in anything other than lowest-res software mode.