The RPS Omnibus: The '90s came with thieves and hackers

One of the things we hear most often from readers is that we're too handsome, too clever, too lovely. Putting this quantity of quality into the world makes it hard to keep up with us. So as an experiment, I'm revising an old RPS format: the Omnibus. Here, we'll roundup the prior week's offerings - like a Sunday Papers but only for our own articles, the real best writing about videogames.

Monday

We started this week with Cyber Monday. No, not an onslaught of deals from digital retailers - well, not only that. I'm talking about a celebration of hacking games and everything 'cyber'.

Our best hacking games got hacked, though thankfully the hacker only made small, useful additions.

Astrid Johnson celebrated Hardcoded, a porn game starring trans people that's designed by and for trans people.

John put a cyberspin on the usual Monday Steam Charts.

Alec countered our early celebration of hacking games by skewering the worst hacking minigames.

And Alice popped in late (because I scheduled it late) to champion Quantic Dream's Omikron: The Nomad Soul, which starred David Bowie as a pop star and a messianic revolutionary, just like real life.

This wasn't related to anything cyber, but Alec also faced armageddon to write a Darksiders 3 review. He was ambivalent about it.

Tuesday

Alan Wen interviewed the makers of Ashen - which Brendan previously called 'skinny Dark Souls' - about how its co-op multiplayer works to deceive players.

We also published 71 Fallout reviews that day, but don't worry if you're pressed for time: author Nate Crowley condensed them down to tweet length. Beware the dogmen.

Wednesday

Amr Al-Aaser explained why Nidhogg 2 acts as a better tutorial to the fighting game genre than most core fighting games manage.

Alec returned to robot wars with a BattleTech Flashpoint review. It's a forgettably named expansion that re-tools the strategy game as something you can play indefinitely.

Matthew Lee - writing for us for the first time - highlighted 8 lesser known Japanese games that deserve a new audience on PC. We stayed away from obvious choices like Persona 5, but each of these is a game that would easily feel at home here.

Thursday

Brendan, Dave and Matt gathered in the podding booth to give their early impressions of Valve's card game, Artifact, which released this week.

Thursday was a light day but Alice B has been off all week so it's a miracle there's been anything on the site at all OK.

Friday

On Friday, Thief turned 20 years old. That's a pretty big game for the PC and for us as players, and so we published two articles.

In the first, John celebrated Thief for all its many facets, large and small.

In the second, RPS founding member (and now comics author) Kieron Gillen returned to us to hang Thief in the context of the time it was released. What it meant to him, what it meant to its fans, and where those things diverged.

Tim Stone's Flare Path column wrote about a mission in the extremely beige Panzer Battles: Battles Of North Africa 1941.

Finally, we also published 4 Have You Playeds this week. Those were on:

Slender: The Eight Pages (Matt C)
Secret Agent Barbie (Alice L)
Indiana Jones & The Fate Of Atlantis (Dave)
Sailaway: The Sailing Simulator (Brendan)

Note that I'm not mentioning the excellent hardware coverage, guides and videos we also published this week. We produce a staggering amount of work now, but I'll use the Omnibus to pick out the features, reviews and long reads from the bunch.

The Omnibus will be weekly, though. If you'd like a daily roundup of our best articles, you can now get that via one of our shiny newsletter. Or there's a weekly one, too, where I'll be attempting to offer trenchant insights about... uh...

Next week: the advent calendar begins.