Supporters (Page 34)
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Supporters only: My Games Workshop Relapse Part 2: Wraithing My Time
Magnets, how do they work?
A continuing story of reverting to type.
Eldar were, I suppose, my first love, although it was more a matter of being allocated something by the 40K players I fell in with at school than it was choosing. Every other faction at the time - and this was pre-Necron and Tau - had been claimed by another boy, so I got the space-elves. Fortunately, this still seemed like a radical idea at the time, and my boredom with pointy-eared posh people had yet to set in. Plus, Eldar were cool: they had bone armour and ghost-robots and floating tanks, and nasty tricks like shooting razor webbing underneath their enemies' skin. Badass elves, basically.
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Supporters only: A Short Photo Story
Exhibit C
Following on from last week's Supporter Post, I present to you a short photo story:
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Supporters only: E3 And Orlando, Gaming And Tragedy
Guns and games
I know that some of you are interested in some of the behind-the-scenes stuff at RPS; how we pick what we write about, why we do this, how traffic works… I'll share a few thoughts I've had since the weekend with that in mind. This is personal ground and it's about Orlando and E3. I doubt I'll share it beyond the Wall but it's perhaps worth sharing in a limited arena.
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Supporters only: Raised By Sprues: My Games Workshop Relapse, Part 1
It was always only a matter of time until I returned to the 41st Millenium.
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Supporters only: Cardboard Collection: Pip's UK Games Expo Haul
Playing your cards right
I spent the weekend at the UK Games Expo which is a big board gaming event up in Birmingham. It's been a while since I played board games because of how spread out my friends and I ended up being in London so I sort of splurged on a whole heap of things which caught my fancy as well as catching up with my occasional Shut Up & Sit Down colleagues for two straight days!
Here's what I got:
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Supporters only: Games vs Sleep
Knowing when it's time to stop
This is mostly a letter to myself, which I wouldn't write otherwise. I shame myself to you in the hope it achieves something.
Games have cost me so much sleep over the years. So much sleep in the past week, too. Games, see, invariably seem so much more interesting than sleeping, in the much the same way as continuing to drink beer seems so much more interesting than going home, and the consequence is woefully similar too. I wake up broken, head stuffed full of cotton wool and misery, and whatever had occupied me so fiercely just a few short hours ago is forgotten, replaced entirely with the question 'why?' Why did I do this to myself again? Why did I think it would somehow be different this time from the last five hundred times?
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Supporters only: More Gamification Please
New high score!
Gamification is the worst word in the English language, but importantly, also the worst thing a person can do to an ordinary activity. And yet, I have the perspicacity to recognise that there are many areas of my life at which I am no good, and perhaps would do better were it a game. Here are a few:
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Supporters only: Warcraft Movie Listings From Alternate Universes
Movies that might have been
Warcraft movie listings from alternate universes where the cinematic adaptation went in some very different directions...
- Warcraft: The Movie - the story of John Warcraft as he tries to follow his dream of becoming an opera singer.
- Warcraft: The Movie - a big screen adaptation of the popular medical soap opera, Warcraft.
- Warcraft: The Movie - a singalong musical where a bunch of plucky orcs battle to make it to Regionals.
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Supporters only: My White Whale: Monet - The Mystery Of The Orangery
I'm not actually sure that "white whale" is exactly right here. I mean, physically the game isn't eluding me. I have it captured on my shelf in a box so take that, Ahab.
The problem comes when I actually want to play it.
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Supporters only: Bloodborne Is Basically A Warhammer Game, And Can We Have It On PC Now Please?
My favourite Souls game, and the coolest one too
Once I finally cracked the Dark Souls nut, I became obsessed. I understood fully why people fall so hard for these games, and have now become what I once mistrusted. "Oh God, you're turning into one of Them", messaged a mate on Steam the other day, when he spotted me playing the first game at 11pm. Oh, I am one of them. Praise the sun.
That said, I am yet to complete a Souls game, which is not due to a lack of dedication but rather due to wanting to get a sense of what each was like before I settled into one the long haul. Dark Souls 1-3 are on PC of course - but one game isn't. Bloodborne isn't a Dark Souls game, but it is a Dark Souls game. It's made by From, the devs behind 1&3. It fundamentally works the same way and very clearly shares the same technology as the later Dark Souls III. And it's only on PlayStation 4. Which is a great shame, because it's the best Warhammer videogame I've ever played.
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Supporters only: Exclusive Extract From Warcraft Movie Script
MMFRPG
With the film's reviews appearing a week early, we can see no reason to hold back this exclusively leaked extract from the forthcoming Warcraft movie.
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Supporters only: Visionary Crazy Golf - Potentially Digital?
Hole in £120,000
I've been keeping an eye on the Visionary Crazy Golf Kickstarter for a while now. The idea is that a number of designers created crazy golf course holes to be placed in Trafalgar Square as part of the London Design Festival. You can see Paul Smith's signature stripes in the image above.
I started following its progress because one of the holes was by the late Zaha Hadid, but from the initial funding amount pledged by backers I didn't think it was going to be successful. With a fortnight to go it's scraped together just a sixth of the necessary funding so I'm thinking it's pretty much dead in the water at this point (sorry for being cynical). But, something I've been thinking since I initially read the Kickstarter, is that perhaps it would be a cool digital project/golfing game.
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Supporters only: The Pleasantness Of Confounded Expectations
When a bad game turns out to be good game
I admit it: I genuinely, but secretly, believed that DOOM would be a wretched game. It was not.
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Supporters only: A Survival Game But...
I'm a survivor
A survival game but set in flower meadows and one of the bars you have to manage is hayfever
A survival game but you are surviving a long car journey where your brother is CLEARLY on your bit of the seat and his elbow is in your air space and who just farted and why are we listening to Enya?
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Supporters only: My Favourite Game Trailer: Deus Ex Human Revolution
You didn't ask for this.
I love game trailers. When they're at their best they can be tiny films that in just a few minutes reflect the themes, story and mechanics of a game, and when they do those things well I find them enjoyable entirely separate from whether the eventual game is any good.
In the case of my favourite, however, the game was good. It's the extended CGI trailer for Deus Ex: Human Revolution.
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Supporters only: Three Things I Get From Galleries Not Games
Physical attractions
Here are three things I get from art shows that I don't get from regular PC games. That's not to say games need to or should adopt them somehow, more that they're absences which form part of the pleasure I find at galleries.
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Supporters only: Slowing The Conversation
Let's play games together.
If you've been playing Dark Souls 3 over the past couple of weeks, chances are you've also been reading about Dark Souls 3, talking about Dark Souls 3, watching videos about Dark Souls 3, slurping Dark Souls 3 slushies and wearing Dark Souls 3 pyjamas. But if you don't have time right now, if it'll be months or (gasp) years before you will have time, then all those conversations and videos and night clothes will have long since turned to dust. What once might have been a communal experience will be rendered lonely and cold and, perhaps, in some way less vital and essential.
Maybe we can help each other, though. Maybe we can slow the conversation down.
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Supporters only: Criticism Outside The Comfort Zone
Three critical oddities
Working as a critic, it's important to expand your horizons. Since I started writing about games on this here website, I've played releases I'd never normally touch with a barge pole, eased out of my comfort zone, and I've enjoyed the whole experience. The joy of playing and loving something that I'd initially dismissed, or that I'd begrudgingly accepted would be landing on my to-do pile, is much greater than the satisfaction of having good times with a game I'd always expected to love. The latter is a lovely thing, of course, but the former is glorious.
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Supporters only: Cracking The Dark Souls Nut: What Happened Next
A funny thing happened on the way to the High Wall of Lothric
When I decided to try and finally crack the Dark Souls nut, it was primarily for work purposes – it seemed simply unprofessional to be so in the dark about such a well-respected series. I also noticed a sort of snobbery was developing in me, presuming that people who professed to love the game were just time-wasting grinders, trying to justify their relentlessly samey actions by claiming there was something more profound to it than hacking away at health bars. That, too, is not a healthy position for a haha professional games critic to take. I wanted to break that down; I wanted to understand the game far more than I actually wanted to play it.
Here’s how that worked out – a hamfisted novice plays Dark Souls III. Then a funny thing happened.
Last night, I booted up Dark Souls 1. For fun.
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Supporters only: The Fourth Of May Be With You
Homophones are magic
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Supporters only: Seven Reasons Why VR is DEFINITELY DOOMED
1. Every single VR game is really just that bit at the end of the Crystal Maze where they're locked into a glass box then flail around like idiots trying to grab weightless junk. This is not necessarily irredeemable, however - all that's needed is to get Richard O'Brian to narrate every single VR game.
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Supporters only: An Interview With A Man Who Won't Play Games
Mailing it in
My chum Nick Mailer is one of my bestest friends, someone who's taught me more than any other person, and someone with whom I get on extraordinarily well. And yet despite this, he has no time for video games. Not just for playing them himself, but seemingly for them as a concept. We routinely argue about this on our podcast, Rum Doings, but I thought I'd interview him today to find out some more.
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Supporters only: Personal Ads: A Dystopian Noah's Sex Ark
WLTM
I recently moved house so I've been trying to do things that make me feel more at home, trying to hasten the process of feeling settled. First up was unpacking as quickly as possible, finding homes for my stuff and getting rid of the boxes which would otherwise have lingered for months. Then stocking the fridge and cooking meals - some kind of connection to a place because you have leftovers and leftovers represent some kind of domestic continuity. I also bought a local paper. I've not done that in years, not since I live in a different semi-rural locale and half kept up with local gossip and half sniggered at the ridiculousness of it all - the man arrested for simulating sex with the city wall, for example.
But the thing I used to do, and still do today is try to match up the people in the personal ads. That's my own little newspaper game, and far more fun than the actual puzzle page.
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Supporters only: What I Missed About Games
When a baby pinned me.
I just spent the last month on paternity leave, during which I did not play a single game of any kind. In fact, during that period I only sat at my PC once, for an hour of writing emails. I've been thinking about the things I missed about games during that time. The list is different than I expected.
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Supporters only: The Timeless One-Man Sausage-Fest
Sizzle sizzle in the pan
Just a small post from me about the weirdness of reviewing a puzzle game, or even simply playing one for work.
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Supporters only: YES I'M WORKING!
No I'm NOT on a break!
There is nothing that crystallises the ridiculousness of my life like a person with a proper job coming into my house. Today we are having a few windows fixed or replaced, windows fitted by previous owners that are either illegal or useless. And that means I'm sat in my study doing my silly job while people who know how to actually do things, mend things, carry things without tearing out chunks of paint from walls, keep walking past my door.
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Supporters only: I'm On My Way To The Rapture
The Chad who loved me
I was hoping to finish Everybody's Gone to the Rapture [official site] by late Friday night or early Saturday morning, so that I could share some thoughts with you all. It's now Sunday morning, as I begin writing this, and I'm still not done. It's not that the game is particularly long, I've just been repeatedly distracted by other responsibilities. So, rather than bringing a second opinion, following Pip's review, I've made some notes about the village of Yaughton.
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Supporters only: The Finite Infinity Of Winchester Mystery House
SpooOooky?
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.
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Supporters only: Smallfilms: The Delights Of Noggin, Bagpuss, The Clangers And More
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.
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Supporters only: My Eyes Hurt, Or: Should I Be Scared?
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.