Supporters (Page 35)

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.

It's like Cribs but incredibly dusty, and starring middle-class nerds who don't have time to clean because they have a child and in any case spend all their free time playing games!

Today it is raining and I am rather knackered. There's one more trip on the immediate horizon and then I can take to my bed for most of February, swapping my suitcase for a pair of fluffy slippers and my dorkiest cardigan. Here are some of the things I've been reading while I wait for my month-long bedtime!

The time is almost here. My little girl will be three in May, and already she's capable of a dexterity and understanding I never believed possible during the long, dark months of screaming, feeding every twenty minutes and dropping every single meal all over the floor. (Granted, an ear infection means she's spent the last week essentially regressed by about a year and doing most of that stuff all over again; I haven't left the house since Sunday because she's been clamped to my leg the whole wile, and every single word I've written this week has been with her on my lap and to the gunshot-disruption soundtrack of wracking coughs. Don't have kids if you want to have a life).

She's increasingly aware, too, that sometimes I'm playing games when I'm shut away in my work room, and sometimes she wants to watch.

A small but hopefully interesting Pipwick this week. I'm supposed to be playing Oxenfree and responding to my inbox but let's just take a minute for some reading about things that aren't game. I won't tell if you don't...

Can you afford that game? Should you wait for a sale? How much is too much? We all need to make difficult purchasing decisions every day, which requires a lot of painful thought. How can you be truly sure that the game you're buying is worth the money, and that you couldn't better place your hard-earned cash with a more deserving creator or entertainment product?

Good news! We've taken the "decision" out of "purchasing decision" for you. Just take this handy quiz and you'll find out once and for all whether that game in front of you is one to buy.

So here's a short puzzle game based on recent real-life events: Find the cucumber.

That isn't an innuendo. I lost two slices of cucumber while on a flight and am now accepting solutions to the problem of what happened.

I mentioned this in passing during my review of dice-in-space game Tharsis, but right now there's an awful lot of discussion about the worth or otherwise of random number generation in games. Really, it's a debate about whether the player has absolute control or the game does, and as with many public-facing game design discussions, I'm seeing a fair amount of absolutism. RNGs are good or RNGs are bad, end of discussion. I'm somewhere in the middle, and I'm going to let Arnold Rimmer tell you why.

I've already written my 'What Are You Playing This Weekend' entry for tomorrow, but it doesn't include a PC game. That's because I'm currently between games, so to speak, and uninspired by the many available to me.

Maybe you can help? I currently have 54 games installed through Steam, some of which I've played and some of which I haven't. Which of them should I boot this weekend?

I remember when Christmas holidays meant so much PC games. This holiday break I barely entered my study. The cruelty of grown up life. But I shall not let the horror of a family prevent me from gaming, NO SIR. So it is that I've been phone clasped in hand for so much of the break. And there's been one game that's dominated.

Last year Tate Modern had an exhibition called Conflict Time Photography. It was one of their best in recent years in terms of structure.

A week into 2013, I declared that it was “the year of the roguelike”. This year, I've made three bold predictions as to how things might play out and you'll find them below.

Fallout 4 [official site] has an official beer. Here's wot I think.

It's the last Pipwick Papers of the year (although one or two will go up over Christmas so that might make me look like a liar). I've been travelling a lot as per usual but I've managed to squeeze in a tiny bit of non-games reading so here are some highlights:

I've had a Steam Controller for almost three months now. I suspect my total usage of it during that time totals about four hours.

The thing frustrates me deeply, and not because it's bad as such, but because it feels so tantalisingly close to achieving what it intended to, only to bungle it with bizarre decisions.

Late as I am to all fads, I only recently learned of the popularity of real-life room escape games. Presumably fuelled by the success of mobile games like The Room and its many copycats, and just that the idea is really damned cool, opportunities are springing up all over the world to be locked in strange buildings packed with esoteric puzzles. Last weekend, at Bath Escape, I played one for the first time.

Commander Keen is 25 years old today. A quarter of a century. The sci-fi platformer was the first id Software game that I played and I still remember it fondly. Quite how well those memories match up with the actual game is unclear; I haven't played it for at least twenty years. Below you will find my memories of Commander Keen. I have done no research at all to confirm that these memories are factual.

There are almost no games released before 2000 that it's still important to play.

This week was supposed to be a Pipwick Papers but I enjoyed looking into Japanese Spider Crabs in a bit more depth last week so I thought I would do something similar this week.

(For Pipwick fans here is a potential secret chamber in Tutankhamun's tomb, a Twitter bot that reworks photos in the style of famous artists, a gallery of Krampuses... Krampii?)

I've just hired a (very small, very squalid, very cold) office with a couple of other (non-RPS) writers, as cabin fever was taking a heavy toll after almost of a decade of working from home. I couldn't afford a new gaming PC for it, and I didn't want to lock my home one away there at evenings and weekends, so I've compromised. I say 'compromised', but really I've been incredibly lucky. One of my pseudo-colleagues had a not entirely old PC they didn't really use as they've got a flashy laptop too, so it's now sat under my desk, its old school mechanical hard drive chuntering away noisily but otherwise sitting fairly pretty with Windows 10.

Gaming is another matter. I have entered a new world.

I get this knot in my stomach at around one-third of the way into any RPG. I know what’s coming: it almost always does around about then. I’ve been happily following gentle questlines, roaming across open countryside and being glad to bump into one or two traders here and there, but now the time has come: time to go to a city, and everything will change.

Two in one month! You are positively spoiled for DevLog Watches nowadays. Want a source of in-development GIFs for games that may be weeks old, may never be finished, may never be any good? That's what I've got for you below.

I've played almost all of it three times. But I've never finished it. Never felt especially compelled to, either. I think my life - or, at least, my fond memories of Troika's beloved but shonky modern-gothic RPG - is better because I have always left it incomplete.