Supporters (Page 34)

The official story of the Winchester Mystery House, the one the tour guide will tell you, is that the 160-room sprawling Victorian mansion was an architectural attempt to appease the spirits of those killed with Winchester rifles. A team of carpenters worked 24/7 for almost 40 years, building room over room around room inside room. Sarah Winchester believed she was cursed, a delightful chap who once played the dastardly Abanazar in an Aladdin pantomime will explain, and sketched her ideas for new rooms in seances. That's the official story, anyway.

I visited the Winchester Mystery House after GDC this year and would like to tell you about it. It's certainly the most exciting house I've toured, mysterious or otherwise.

This weekend I spent part of my Sunday at the V&A Museum of Childhood reduced to squeaks of excitement by their Smallfilms exhibition. In case you don't know the name, Smallfilms is the company consisting of Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin which is responsible for Bagpuss, The Clangers, Noggin The Nog, Ivor the Engine and more.

I've been using VR a lot lately. More for movie and TV-watching than for games - partly because little Vive-specific software had been released until a few days ago, partly because I haven't got quite enough floorspace - but nonetheless, I've had a a plastic box strapped onto my face for a few hours every day for the best part of a month.

And I don't feel so good. I'll be damned if it's stopping me, though.

I've taken some bold steps into the world of Reality Reality this week, and can report back my experiences of the "real world" experience that comes with this latest technology.

I haven't had a moment to sit and read this week - or at least to take in information - so instead of a return to the Pipwick Papers I'll just share a snippet about a mood I've been in and how it's sent me ping ponging back and forth across my game library.

Perhaps it's because I was always a PC person and didn't follow any Japanese studios as a youngster, but the only game I've ever imported is Grim Fandango. I was desperate to play the game having seen a preview – probably in PC Gamer – and when I saw that it was available in the US a few days earlier than the European release, I jumped online and found a place that would send a delivery over the water.

It was ridiculously expensive, as I remember, mainly due to the shipping costs, but I didn't care because I'd be playing the game while everyone around me was still waiting for it to show up in the shops.

Because I'm an idiot, I hadn't factored in how long it actually takes to send a skellington overseas and I ended up receiving my copy of the game – which had presumably traveled on board the SS Limbo – slightly after the UK release. So I paid more, played later and had nothing but a slightly attractive disc sleeve to show for my troubles.

It is April Fools' Day. I hate April Fools' Day. You get one or two good pranks or jokes if you're lucky but in general it is this awful slurry of lazy lies and boring memes masquerading as humour. If I wanted that I would phone my sister. She sometimes just tells me that she uses teabags instead of bath salts or that you need to set the oven to a temperature the oven doesn't go up to as the pre-heating instructions for dinner and then laughs and laughs when you are confused. And at least she's not marketing a videogame.

A thing I do every couple of days is look through all the new releases on Steam. I scroll through the full list (still cruelly hidden a few clicks deep by Steam, and still requiring you remember to tick the "Games" box to prevent seeing 590 DLC releases for a visual novel that sold four copies), hovering my mouse over game titles to read the brief summary, clicking through to anything that might be interesting. It's how I've caught quite a few fantastic games that would otherwise have disappeared in the ludicrous churn of Valve's store.

By doing so, I see a lot of phrases a lot of times. Phrases that make me far less inclined to click on that game. And so I'm calling for a moratorium on a whole bunch of these hoary old tropes - not their inclusion in the games, but their inclusion in the game's description.

So this is sort of a confession but also a kind of "lesser of two evils" musing about The Witness [official site]. I can't guarantee no spoilers because The Witness is the kind of game where something might look or sound or seem innocuous and then you end up posting a spoiler. Do you have any idea how fraught it is trying to find a screenshot that won't upset people?

With that in mind I'm going to say if you want to guarantee absolutely no spoilers for The Witness MOVE ALONG THERE IS NOTHING FOR YOU HERE.

And for the rest of you...

Welcome once more to my hidden Android reviews. I've discovered a couple of proper crackers of late, games to play in those oh-so-awful moments when your arms aren't long enough to reach the PC. This time it's The Room 3, and Prune.

While I was in San Francisco for GDC I saw a lot of games, game developers and related events. But I also made an effort to step outside that space and see a little of the city. It's because if you aren't careful you end up stuck in this weird bubble of unreality for a week, just looking at screens and spending a lot of time away from natural light - more so given virtual reality headsets were a big part of the event this year. I didn't get as far as the Winchester Mystery House which is out in San Jose but I did see an indoor rainforest and an octopus so I figure Project Other Things was still a success.

Since we launched the supporter program, there have been two features requested a great number of times by you, the lovely supporters. The first is an auto-mailer that sends you an email when your subscription is about to expire. This now exists!

This isn't a story about football. Honestly. After last night's embarrassment, I'd rather not think about football for the next few weeks.

This isn't a post about football but it begins at the National Football Museum in Manchester.

Of the four games on my 'Favourite Art Style' shortlist, three went missing on the way to the final selection interview. Close Combat 2: A Bridge Too Far was least seen leaving the path to retrieve a packet of smokes. Ultimate General: Gettysburg went off to investigate mysterious radio babble and was never seen again. The last thing Birth of America remembers before waking up bound and stripped behind a bush is stopping to chat with an unfamiliar sentry.

Taking a day off during the week is something I used to do a lot when there were gallery or museum shows on that I wanted to see. It let me avoid the majority of the crowds and spend a bit more time with whatever the exhibition was, not being jostled or crowded out. I've let that habit slide in recent years for one reason and another but yesterday took me to the Natural History Museum and their Otherworlds: Visions Of Our Solar System show.

I'm in love with isometric or near-isometric graphics. Anything with clean, crisp lines and a clear depiction of 3D space via 2D images. The best of this is SimCity 4, which uses the viewpoint and 2D sprites to depict a city that's full of detail but which never looks messy, or cluttered, or hard to parse.

The last time Pip stuck her hand into my mouth and ripped out a fill-in featuretooth, I showed you my plants. You have seen those. I have no more plants to show you.

However, today when Pip explained John was AWOL, put her knee on my chest (she's got a ladder), and slipped on the falconry glove, between snapping at her fingers I told her that over the weekend I visited the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh's Glasshouses and could share some photos of their plants. She relented.

This week I went to the orchid festival at Kew Gardens - it was wonderful and I recommend it if you can get to South-West London before Sunday. I was going to post about it a bit more here but I'd also put the pictures on social networks so it didn't feel exclusive and supporter-y. With that in mind you're actually going to get brain dissections, competitive yoga and listening to music through your teeth...

I've been playing the Hitman beta. It's good! It contains only the two prologue missions, which also serve as a tutorial, but they offer freedom of multiple kinds. Freedom to ignore the tutorial advice at certain points, freedom to approach the assassination missions as you please just as you will in the main game, freedom to replay those missions to attempt different routes through.

This freedom also necessitates something else: forgiving the game certain flaws.

My mantra for most of last year was "I'm going to play Life Is Strange this weekend," because I was aware that a steady diet of games about murdering people in some form or another was not exactly exposing me to the great breadth and depth of this medium. Childcare duties (two-year-old Connie no longer screams for 16 hours a day but she isn't yet able to play by herself for more than five picoseconds) meant I struggled to play anything that wasn't expressly during work hours, so I failed to meet my own pledge until just a few days ago. I've just finished episode two of Dontnod's angst'n'time travel odyssey, and I'm well aware that SHOCKING TWISTS and allegedly a jump in writing/acting quality awaits me, but it's safe to say I'm already hooked despite sometimes wanting to tell it to stop being so wet.

"I would like a post that is just pictures of your plants tbh," Pip said, asking if I could cover Adam's Supporter Post spot this week while he globetrots. Even I couldn't resist that. I who once said "Trying to get a feature out of me is like pulling teeth. Both people pulling each other's teeth out simultaneously. Screaming and biting down on the other's hand and spitting blood."

I hadn't planned to write anything particular about Firewatch as I'm busy getting everyone killed in XCOM 2 at the moment, but I've spent a couple of evenings with it (note: my evenings start at 8pm and end at 10pm, because I am an indentured servant to a toddler, so please don't interpret that as some commentary on the game's length) and ancient habits mean I take notes just in case. Here are those notes. N.b. in addition to contextless rambling, this piece contains several theories which may or may not be spoilers: I haven't finished yet, so I don't actually know.

I have spent the past weekend sort of getting myself back together after a truly miserable week of brain chemistry. As such the reading list below is more about things I found soothing than things which are contentious

In our last fireside chat, I wrote about the ways in which we had updated the function and design of the site. Now let's talk about editorial.

I'm tired, readers, and this supporter post is late. It should have been with you on Monday but I was busy with other things and Pip filled in for me because she is great. And so I should have written it on Tuesday or Wednesday, but I was still tired and busy, and then I wanted to share loads of photos from a recent press trip and couldn't manage to import them to my computer.

This year, I'll reach my five year RPS anniversary and this very day is my thirty fifth birthday. That means I've been writing about games on the internet, professionally (snicker), for almost one seventh of my entire life. Keep in mind that I was a tiny baby for parts of my life and wasn't even capable of doing any job, let alone a job that requires me to deal with technology and furious people.

This post isn't going anywhere particular. I just wanted to share/stare in horror/wonder at how much of my life has been spent doing the same thing, which is playing XCOM & X-COM games.

After a weekend of defending Europe against vampires thanks to Fury of Dracula it is back to videogames. But I think it's currently illegal to post about videogames that aren't XCOM 2 and since I'm not playing XCOM 2 I will do a Pipwick Papers to avoid being arrested.

If you're a regular reader of the site, you might have been startled by recent changes to the site. Or you might have not noticed them at all. Or you might simply be wondering why you still can't edit your comments after posting them. Whatever the case, here's an update to changes we've made to the site and those that are still to come.

Yes, I am using that title, because I only had four hours' sleep last night thanks to a toddler-attack, and the freedom to use appalling gags in post titles is the least I deserve. In any case, it is true and accurate. By which I mean, I now own a steering wheel controller for the first time in my life, and it is good.

I've bought it specifically for American Truck Simulator, my review of which is annoyingly going up after this post. But, spoiler: I liked it so much that I bought an enormous toy steering wheel to play it with.

You can tell a lot about a person by their desk, I hear. How much can you learn about a desk from the person who owns it, though? Alec covered his gaming setup yesterday and so here's my attempt to do the same. I don't know where any of this stuff came from.