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Feature: Spooky - not scary.
These days I love horror. However, I haven't always been a fan of all things spooky, scary, and skeleton-related. There was a brief period of time (I call this time "childhood") where even catching so much as a glimpse of a horror film would give me nightmares. Then my older brother brought home the game Fatal Frame. As the neighbourhood kids and I watched him…
Feature: Free games of the week, short and sweet.
Hello? Is this thing on? It's good to be back! I took a handful of weeks off to write exams (thank you all for your well-wishes!), and now I am returned to the RPS feeding tube of content. I'm poised and ready with my itch.io firehose, looking forward to blasting y'all week after week with those sweet, sweet video games. In my weeks off, my…
Feature: Free games of the week to tide you over
Greetings, all! It's the end of August, and so, these dog days are over. The temperatures might remain warm well into September, but do not be fooled: autumn is on its way. It has been one year since I started writing Priceless Play, carrying the baton for Free Games of the Week. I love it! Bringing you weird writing on weird games week after week…
Feature: Games of mourning and melancholia
Whenever I go a week without writing a Priceless Play, my head goes a little fuzzy. It has become a part of my weekly routine and when I take a week off here and there to tend to other writing commitments, I feel a little lost. When I load itch.io back up again, my fingers feel a little clumsy, as if I have lost the…
Feature: The tiniest slice of the Game Maker's Toolkit Jam 2019
The Game Maker's Toolkit Jam is, according to itch.io, the largest jam on its website. Wow! That sounds... overwhelming. The 48-hour jam is focused on "design, mechanics, and clever ideas" and ran from the 2nd of August to the 4th. There are nearly 3,000 entries and there's no way anyone is going to be able to accurately cover all of them in a sustainable timeframe.…
Feature: Like birds of a feather, we game together
When I moved to California two (!!) years ago, the flat block I lived in was overrun by crows. Just utterly crawling with cawing corvids. Initially, this was unnerving and unwelcome -- Los Angeles is meant to be populated with palm trees, smoothie bowls, and Instagram filters. I don't remember seeing shiny black feathers, beady eyes, and cacophonous murders in the brochure. Over time, however,…
Feature: Are you feeling lucky?
I was inspired by my serendipitous game-playing from last week. Did you know that itch.io has a randomizer button? It brings back memories of when I first discovered the "I'm feeling lucky," button on Google's homepage. It used to take you directly to the first result of any Google search, but nowadays it takes you to different random search pages related to different lucky-adjacent emotions.…
Feature: Fortune favours the bold
Luck, happenstance, pleasant coincidence and serendipity. Good fortune feels decidedly rare in 2019, what with a burning planet and all. There are days when I wake up on the right side of the bed, and my entire to-do list gets checked off -- and then some. Why does this happen on some days and not others? Who can say. Here is a collection of games…
Feature: The NES carts of tomorrow, today
The Famicase game jam, or A Game By Its Cover, has officially begun and will be accepting submissions for the month of July. This annual jam draws inspiration from the My Famicase Exhibition and usually shakes out to be one of my favourite jams of the year (it's co-run by my friend Dominic Johann, but what's that got to do with it!) Games run on…
Feature: Kat has thoughts about cyberpunk
For most of my life, I've been cyberpunk ambivalent. I like speculative fiction just fine, but I feel like if there are Fantasy People and there are Science Fiction People, I am firmly in the former camp. I've never truly vibed with fiction revolving around spaceships, computers, and dystopian futures, but I never could really articulate why. Transmetropolitan? Tried it. Blade Runner? Eh. Shadowrun? Never…
Feature: En Dinopianito, siempre ganas.
Hola, jugadores. I rarely see videogames in Spanish. It's understandable: English-speaking countries make up a significant portion of marketing demographics and sales for big-budget games. But even in the indie-sphere, where I do most of my trawling, I wasn't finding much. I knew that this was an oversight on my part -- I live in a majority English-speaking country and the development circles I operate…
Feature: #LoveIndies is love indeed
#LoveIndies is an annual community-driven effort to celebrate indie developers, the games they make, and the communities who love them. I've been at the helm of this little corner of RPS for ten months now, which has given me the opportunity to cover over 150 indie games. Each one of those games is an inspiration, tbh. I think it's a miracle that any game gets…
Feature: Roguelikes, rogue-alikes, RPG-lites, and adventures alight!
Happy June, Priceless Pals! We did it. We made it all the way to those summer months. Get out your picnic blankets, your Pimms fixings, and your complaints about the heat ASAP! I, for one, am stoked for all the games I plan to play late into the summer nights. I am also so stoked for when I realise that I definitely don't have the…
Feature: We're dying the minute we're born! Fun!
Spring has sprung. That's what they say, isn't it? The air is full of sick-sweet over-bloomed flowers, and there's a thin sheen of pollen on car windscreens. It is around this time of year that I am always reminded of floral genre paintings of the Northern Renaissance and Dutch Golden Age, you know? Casual. Still lifes and vanitas make for pretty compelling stuff -- molting…
Feature: "Your life is currency," makes for some bleak games tbh
Goodness gracious me alive, look, it's Ludum Dare time! Ludum Dare is a biannual (as in happening twice-a-year) game jam, and probably one of the world's largest and longest-running game jams. Who am I to say otherwise? It says so right on their website. I am always amazed by the sheer creativity and talent which comes out of each Ludum Dare, and this go around…
Feature: Let's all love Guy Fieri
Spring is settling in its April bones, showering to bring May flowering. The farmer's market around the corner is getting lusher and greener each weekend, the beach is peppered with more and more tourists in swimsuits and towels looking to soak up the sun. It is reassuring to watch the last dregs of winter (if you can call it that in southern California) drip away,…
Feature: Leaving on a jet plane
Greetings from Terminal 2 of the Los Angeles International Airport! I'm seated in one of the ubiquitous hybrid chair/benches which grace all airport terminals across our great planet gearing up for a ten-and-a-half hour flight. Hooray! Like many people, the thing I love most in the world is shuffling into a gigantic airborne tube with numerous strangers for an extended period of time. (Bonus: I…
Feature: If anyone says "always-already" I swear
I spend a lot of time thinking about the past and future, and the little moments which rely on them. I mean, maybe it's just inherent in the contemporary state of Being Alive™ that we spend so much time thinking about time: setting alarms, making dinner reservations, meeting deadlines, missing deadlines, scheduling due-dates, planning for investments and interest rates... A 30-year mortgage? Will I even…
Feature: If this website goes slower than 60mph, Keanu Reeves will yell at us
Hey, why are people so tired on the first of April? It's because they just finished a March of 31 days! I was taking a casual stroll through the 'net, and discovered the super legit wiseoldsayings.com page for March. There are a bunch of wise old authors saying wise old things about wise old March, though I'm particularly partial to "In like a lion, out…
Feature: Sex: from hyperreal to hyper-abstract, text, sext, and Flash.
**This week's Priceless Play is NSFW!!!** Sex in games is certainly nothing new. There are, of course, the various moral panics -- GTA's famed "hot coffee," for instance -- to countless articles about the sex lives in SecondLife. Our Very Own Kieron Gillen wrote a primer on Sporn (that's "Spore porn," for the uninitiated) eleven years ago. Cara Ellison had a column, called S.EXE, here…
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