Supporters (Page 37)

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.

It is Tuesday. The people who live next door have been drilling and sawing and sanding and hammering for about two weeks now on the other side of the wall where I have to work. I need my PC, I can't put it anywhere else. My Google history is littered with things like "How long does hammering take I mean really" and "It is anti-social to start using a bandsaw at 8.30am right?" #Pray4Pip. Anyway, here are some other things unrelated to games which might be more fun to hear about - it's strongly art-themed this week!

As I'm writing this, I'm craning my neck to look upwards. This is because I've rotated my monitor so that it's vertical instead of horizontal, so that I can play vertical platformer Downwell [official site] without so much wasted space.

O M G this is amazing.

Important: please bear this article in mind while reading the following.

I've long been keen on Microsoft's Surface Pro range of tablet/laptop hybrids, which are incongruously well-designed given they abstractly come from the same company that makes the aesthetically horrible Xboxes. The trouble is that they're chasing that sweet Apple dollar and keep updating them. Then I desperately want the new one but cannot possibly afford it unless I embrace a life of debt in order to lay hands on higher resolution screens, better battery life and marginally improved integrated graphics. And this time, the heartless bastards have only gone and announced two new types of Surface.

I really want to play space games. I love the idea of space games! A little ship, a lot of space, and the freedom to go where you want, take on the missions you choose, be a goodie or baddie, trader or pirate... It sounds so great. So why is it whenever I try to play any of them, within about half an hour I'm trying to fly my ship into the side of a planet?

This weekend was a hectic one but it did involve navigating TFL planned engineering works so there was some time for reading and catching up with the internet. Here are a selection of links from the last few days from Star Wars to sexy emoji!

Earlier this week we published my interview with the creators of 80 Days. It was published shortly after the game was released on PC, is 3426 words long, and I asked exactly five questions.

The interview was actually conducted back in March, before the game was announced for PC, in a Mexican restaurant near the Games Developer Conference in San Francisco. In reality, I didn't ask some of those questions featured in the piece linked above. The questions I did ask were in a different order. The complete length of my transcript is 7867 words and includes longer discussion of the game's design, specifically as relates to the UI and the PC port. You can find the full thing below.

Here's a little supporter post link roundup to read with an afternoon cup of tea. There's colour name weirdness, overwhelming art installations, musings on octopus consciousness and Playboy's disappearing nudes:

Last night, I watched the final of the Great British Bake Off. Don't worry, I won't spoil anything about what happened. Suffice to say, I was weepy at about halfway, and I cried at the end.

Then I watched My Neighbour Totoro, a film I've seen twice before but not in many years. I got a bit weepy at that, too.

Then I felt a bit sad about videogames.

One of my favourite things to do of a working day is browse the new releases on Steam for the worst game descriptions I can find. No, YOU procrastinate too much. And boy, there's always a fine selection to choose from. But why should I only share my seemingly mean mocking of people whose first language probably isn't English* with just the RPS chat, when I could do it here?

This edition of Pipwick comprises "things I saw as I did esports coverage and bookmarked for reading in bed" so it's not SUPER WORDY but there are videos of killer snail makeup faces and Rose from Titanic is a murderer.

DevLog Watch is a way of featuring games that:

i) Aren't very far along their development journey yet. ii) Perhaps don't have the marketing budget or video editing skill required to make fancy trailers.

That means that the column features a lot of GIFs, but my favourite game GIFs are rarely of ongoing development projects and rarely with the kind of additional detail you might called a "development log". They tend to be from creators who produce a lot of small games in quick succession, sometimes without finishing or releasing them, in which the GIF itself feels like as important a result of the process as the game. So this is what I'm going to round up this week: not devlogs to watch, but developers, and developers who have lifted these short animated clips into an artform all their own.

This is the new home of The Pipwick Papers. I'm not sure how frequent it will be - I'm starting off aiming at fortnightly and we can take it from there, wobbling towards regularity in the cosy swamp that is the Supporter post coccoon.

Used to be I’d sit down with a game and play it non-stop for an hour or two, before the call of nature, thirst or scary throbbing in my legs mandated a pause. These days, it’s rare to manage ten minutes of play before I switch out to check this or that.

Maybe I should have picked a different subject for this week but Proteus has been on my mind still. I like the space it affords and the relaxation and wonder that it prompts. This time I was playing the mod Purgateus [official site] which transforms the landscape into a dreamy purgatory. I also fiddled with the colour palettes myself but mostly ended up with weird candy-coloured landscapes and blue chickens.

I started playing Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain [official site] over the weekend and it has made me very aware of how much I'm being asked to trust that the director, Hideo Kojima is going somewhere with all this.

If you want to duck out for fear of spoilers do so now, although know that I've only played the prologue and half the first mission so I won't have seen even a fraction of the game.

I spent part of the weekend with Plant Tycoon [official site] open. I was playing Destiny and checking back between rounds of a PvP event to see which plants had sold and which had bloomed.

The plants take a while to mature and in the meantime all you can do is watch them, maybe picking up the bug catching net a few times to swipe at the insects in order to add them to your collection. That's why I like having Plant Tycoon open while I work or while I play rounds of another game.

Sometimes I fall into the trap of watching and waiting, whiling away the time as I keep too much of a close eye on my plants. I hate those times because I walk away from them feeling like I've wasted part of my life.

I’ve dissed so many musicians without ever intending to. It’s not that I don’t consider them talented, and it's often not even that I dislike their work. It’s just that I can’t bear to anything that many times. There are very, very few games in which I’ve not dragged the Music slider all the way to zero after an hour or two, desperate to hear something, anything other than what the title’s creators wanted me to.

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain [official site] is almost upon us and I am eyeing it fearfully. Not because I'm afraid of boxes or anything weird. I love boxes. I used to drag big tray-style boxes home from Tesco as a child and go on voyages across the living room carpet using cardboard tubes as oars or punting sticks (apparently these are called poles or quants depending on the exact construction). Sometimes when friends have moved house and are assembling big new furniture I will come round to "help" and scope out the boxes the furniture arrived in to see if I could climb inside them and make a fort. THAT is how okay I am with boxes. No. This fear is because I know that I now have a very small window of time in which to finish Arkham Knight.

The problem here is that I have an absolutely terrible memory in some respects. I can remember conversations with friends from years ago, family car license plates back as far as the late eighties, I can name the entire casts of reality shows (some in eviction order) and yet if I allow a weekend to pass without playing more of a story game I completely forget where I am and what I was doing.

With London-based Assassin's Creed: Syndicate [official site] on the horizon I thought I would share a playthrough of its seafaring predecessor, Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag [official site]. I think you'll find it includes all the SAILient points.

Innocently browsing the internet yesterday, I was hit with an aggressive reminder that there is a new Hitman movie coming to cinemas this year. During the tiny teaser trailer, a helicopter crashed into an explosion. It's not the Hitman film I'd want to see but I'm not convinced there's any Hitman adaptation I'd want to see. Something along the lines of Le Samouraï Chauve maybe. I sure as heck don't want to watch an actor crouch-walking through corridors and stealing peoples' clothes. Hitman's world may look fairly convincing but its rules are abstract. Act them out and you'd be exposing just how abstract they actually are.

Here are some films that actually understand games.

Having spent the morning watching Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 videos I am reminded of my idea for the series which I started nursing back during E3 after a hands-on. I'll be brief because jetlag but it's an idea I keep mulling at odd moments:

"So you play games all day for a living? That must be amazing!" "Uh, I mean sometimes but mostly I wri..." "You must be so good at them!" "God no, not in the slightest."