Supporters (Page 37)

I have a confession. It is a confession of weakness. It is a confession of greed. It is a confession that, several months on, I am still playing free, vacuous yet horrifyingly clever incremental game Adventure Capitalist. And I think I am obsessed.

This piece was originally published on May 19th, the day The Witcher 3 was released, as part of the RPS Supporter Program. It's a fittingly relevant read at any time, however.

Yesterday I had the latest episode of Game of Thrones spoiled. I wasn't as fed up as I could have been because the new series just isn't filling me with excitement, but it was still bloody annoying. It also prompted some thoughts about the pressure to consume media the second it comes out just to be "part of the conversation" and whether that's something which applies to games as well.

Horror, in gaming, is the strangest genre. Mostly, a genre tag tells us what we'll be doing in a game – shooting, forming strategies, managing, flying, walking – but horror tells us what the game will be doing to us. That might explain the emergence of the term “survival horror”, which attempts to add a guiding verb. If our prime purpose is to survive rather than to triumph, then we expect to be outnumbered and overwhelmed, in desperate need of ammunition, improvised weaponry, healing items, a safe/save location, a hiding place. Along the way, we expect to be startled, unnerved and terrified.

Across various scattered hard drives, I have the visual relics of 15 long years in games journalism. Sadly many of my old screenshots have been lost to dead PCs or a hunger for more drive space, but a precious few remain. Some of them are, accidentally, wonderful images. Others speak to the limitations or absurdities of their age. From early Witchers to long-lost MMO characters, here are just a few of my favourite screens. They take me back, they make me miss what was and what might have been, they impress me, they make me cringe, they make me cheer.

I spend most of my life indoors, slouched at or hunched over a desk, with curtains pulled shut to stop the sun glaring in my eyes or on my screen. This never used to bother me, but I find myself more and more wishing I was slouched in fields or hunched over tree branches. That's not always possible - work and weather and all that - but games are getting much better at helping.

The Witcher 3 [official site]? The Witcher Tree, I'd have called it.

So I wrote 17,000 words about the 50 best PC first-person shooters, which I think is the longest thing I've ever written, with the exception of some aborted, terrible novels I'm so grateful were lost to a dead hard drive years ago. I know lists aren't for everyone, but in an age when game recommendations disappear into the forgotten bowels of the internet within moments, we wanted to provide some perhaps longer-lasting reference points, and to plant a few more stakes in the ground in terms of being a definitive authority on PC games. I worked very hard to make this 50 informative and substantial celebrations rather than 50 bullet points, and really hope you found it a worthier read than features with numbers in the titles tend to be. YOU WON'T BELIEVE WHICH GAME IS NUMBER ONE etcetera.

Clearly my selections were 100% correct, but the final list was not without some wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth on my part. If you'll permit me I'd like to go into my DANGEROUSLY WRONG-HEADED thinking a little more. These are the questions I asked myself while compiling the piece and attempting to keep it to 'just' 50 entries, and thus wasn't at all surprised to also encounter in the wake of it.

You know what's bothering me this week? And also many other weeks?

The lack of good octopuses in gaming.

Back when I regularly updated my art blog I had a regular feature called Octopus Monday which dealt with octopuses in artworks and related fields. It's why my blog is the number one Google search result for "octopus stop motion porn". But since making a move into gaming I've been saddened by a lack of cephalopod action.

Yesterday I was watching the Batman: Arkham Knight trailer. I watched it six (6) times and in the accompanying article I wrote this:

"This might well be sacrilege but I never find myself particularly drawn to Batman. There’s something about the character which rubs me up the wrong way even when individual implementations or explorations are interesting. I really like the high camp of the sixties incarnation and, to some degree, its polar opposite in Nolan’s movies. I’ve also dipped in and out of the cartoons in ages past and had friends wax lyrical about various story arcs or moments in the comics. I never finished it but I remember Arkham Asylum had a really pleasing sense of movement and grace of action.

"But despite this variety, the basic Batman template in my head is of a bullheaded, humourless guy, living in a miserable world and whose superpower is white male privilege. It doesn’t bar access to those games or movies, but it adds an extra layer of needing to be sold on a particular concept before I’ll fire the enthusiasm cannons."

It's an opinion I hold as a member of a potential audience for a triple A game – one with experience of various tellings of Batman stories but not via the comics – and the paragraphs above were intended as an explanation of why the idea of Batman, as expressed through the iterations I know, isn't enough to draw me in by itself. Graham is more excited about the franchise, and about Batman in general so we decided to have a Bat-chat to see how our opinions differ. Or not...

I have been playing Grand Theft Auto V. I'm almost exclusively focused on the online multiplayer rather than the singleplayer, because the former is great at generating stories. I've been screencapping as I go so I thought I would share some of the current crop:

"StarCraft II is a challenging game, and we wanted to make that challenge both more exciting and more accessible with Archon Mode."

That's what Blizzard say on their official blog about their team control mode, Archon.

Every now and again I go to browse the 'Gifs of games being worked on' thread in the TIGSource forums (The Independent Gaming Source community forum). I probably shouldn’t admit this but I’m not really there to scout out games. Sure, something cool might stand out and I’ll investigate further but the real pleasure is the pretty or interesting or characterful gifs. Perhaps I’ll find something broken but gorgeous or finished but puzzling. It’s about finding game actions which work as a repeating loop. I thought I’d gather some of my recent favourites here and share them with RPS readers. Please take this as an invitation to share back or pick your own favourites from what’s below.

I’ll try to include information where I can and a link back to the source in case you want to follow up the discussion or feedback.

You might be new to this. You might have just resubscribed. You might be thinking about it. Whichever, whatever, thank you. There are different types of people who visit RPS - those here for just a particular story or a review, those who wound up here by mistake cos they were looking for Kieron Gillen slashfic, those who just want to scream nasty things at us because some guy on Twitter told them to, those who pop in occasionally, those who visit regularly and then this shining guard of impossibly lovely folk - you. Those who like what we do enough to give us money as well as eyeballs. (And yes, I do mean actual eyeballs, as the members of the RPS Platinum Supporter Program would be able to tell you were they still able to read these words.)

Pip and Graham dig into Ori and the Blind Forest [official site] as they try to work out whether the emotional cinematic bits and the tricky platformer bits hang together properly:

Pip: Graham, have you played much of Ori And The Blind Forest yet?

Graham: I have played roughly 30 minutes. Long enough to watch Pixar's Guide To Emotional Manipulation give way to a surprisingly tricky action platformer. Whyyyy?

Pip: Well mostly I wanted to see if you thought the two worked well together. I was thinking about this while on a train recently and I think the mechanical repetition and the frustration might be the things which stop the game feeling too cloying and twee for me. I do not react well to cloying and twee. Nor whimsy.

I spent the weekend revisiting last year's schlockiest big budget horror game and...perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps The Evil Within [the official site] is an unusual and expertly poised survival horror masterpiece.

"These chancers, they don't know what they're doing. Why don't they write about this game or that game more? Why aren't they interviewing such and such? Whatever happened to that thing they said they'd do?"

There's a good chance that, if you're reading and supporting RPS, then you're a person of exquisite taste. You know what you want and, no matter how much your Venn diagram overlaps with what RPS provides, I bet there's some measure of your PC gaming interests that we're not catering to.

So tell me to do it.

Something I've been thinking about a lot is voices and who should lend theirs to videogame tutorials.

I mean, generally there's a lot of just pop-up text which tells you what button to press as a basic mission takes place around you but I like a good voice, chipping in and telling you what the hell is going on. There are a couple of people I'd particularly like to have in-game, telling me how my guns work and what jumping is. I thought I'd share them and ask for yours in return!

In his impressions piece of the Catacomb Kids [official site] Early Access, Adam spoke of is average lifespan being measured in minutes. My experience has been the same. The game takes the basics of Spelunky and re-introduces excised elements from the broader roguelike and RPG genres, like inventories, levels and magic, and in adding that complexity, it creates a world that's likely to slice you apart repeatedly within your very first few seconds of life.

I like the game, as did Adam, but I've been struggling to decide whether that's because of or in spite of its immediately tall difficulty curve.

I know it's a drum I've banged before, but the unlock structure which characterises the biggest multiplayer shooters seems so very counter-productive to me. I used to play a fair bit of early CoDs and Battlefields, primarily during lunchtimes at the magazine company I worked at, and it always felt like a true contest of champions. Presuming "a dozen pale, out-of-shape men who spent all their time either in front of a screen or in a pub" can be thought to be champions. Thiswas the only objective: my team had to win. There was joy if we did, fury if we didn't, and no other motivation or regret.

I've skipped most of the post-Modern Warfare CODs' multiplayer and Battlefield 4, so dropping into Battlefield: Hardline this week was a shock to the system. Never mind that the theme has shifted to cops'n'robbers, every screen is an exhausting, elaborate explosion of progress reports, strings of macho emblems and badges with long-winded names. Whatever theme or tone should be there, it's lost to the message that I should be hungry for more, more, forever more.

I loved the tech quotes from Civilization IV. In fact I find them running through my mind at odd intervals, complete with Leonard Nimoy's voice acting.

"If you speak the truth, have a foot in the stirrup," he opines as I'm about to say something honest but unpalatable. "A god from the machine," as my third harddrive makes its weird beeping noise. "Compound interest is the most powerful force in the universe," as I try to make sense of a pension I don't remember signing up for.

Civ V took similarly famous and weighty quotes and married them with voice actor William Morgan Shepherd. But I was always a little sad that they hadn't gone with the idea I thought of down the pub one evening, which was to have William Shatner performing relevant song lyrics instead of proverbs in the manner of his iconic rendition of Common People.

There are tens of thousands of games that I've never finished but I haven't even started most of them. Of the games that I've started, I've probably finished less than half. Definitely less than half. Some can't be finished – Crusader Kings II, Football Manager 20XX, Civilization – while others didn't seem worth the time it took to reach the bitter end.

But there are other games on the list. I've never see the ending of some of my favourite games, either because I played them before the internet existed to provide handy walkthroughs and let's plays, or because I became do distracted by the experience of being in the world that I didn't care about reaching a cut-off point. This is a small compilation of games that I have a thousand opinions about but have never managed to finish.

This week I have tirelessly worked to bring you photorealistic renderings of videogames. You might be able to detect a few differences between my own (faithful) renderings and the game's own graphics but I am hopeful that you will still be able to recognise the videogames.

Well, sort of hopeful.

Doubtful.

Maybe I should have stuck to pressing F12.

An exploration of the Academy Awards, including the suggestion that Papers, Please takes place in the same world as The Grand Budapest Hotel.

Hello videogames.

Does the central character of your game look like this:

How does your garden grow? Branching thoughts on games about growth, including Starseed Pilgrim, Pixeljunk Eden and Grow Home.

Last month, Marsh Davies wrote for us about the properties that define a good puzzle game by speaking to designers like Jonathan Blow and Draknek. The article offers great insight into why some games get their hooks into you and others don't, but it's made me realise something: programming is my favourite puzzle game.

As our blockbuster series of flowcharts explaining all of gaming continues, this time we turn our guiding gaze toward whether games are art. It's a complex subject, and one that requires a depth of nuance to comprehend, so follow as down the arrows as we explore the topic.

I travel a fair bit for work and that means some long plane journeys. On my most recent flight I decided to play a handful of games on the in-flight entertainment system and see how they held up...

Eight hours. Eight hours in the air heading back to Heathrow. This has been the trip I've finally cracked and decided to try out the in-flight entertainment games. I think it's because I've been at an eSports event for days, almost exclusively viewing and not playing. At this point I'll take any form of gaming.

The past, I’ve noticed, is rather easy to predict. But sadly our skills in pre-precognition do not extend nearly so well to remembering the future. And when it comes to gaming trends, we the people are at our absolute worst.

Even our greatest technomystics fail to offer any useful information about the direction in which our pursuit could be heading. The vast majority of predictions tend to declare that whatever’s big at the moment is going to go on to take over everything else. And it never, ever does.

Looking back, I wonder if a little bit of the old ultraviolence would have been less worrying. Not that they ever expressed concern, but my parents must have found it odd when I suddenly started dropping references to timetables, public transport and vehicular infrastructure management into conversation. I hadn't became a fan of rolling stock - the truth was far darker. I wanted Transport Tycoon Deluxe and I wanted it bad.

Pip: Hello! I've summoned you both here because of jumping in Smite. Not hero ability jumping, just regular spacebar jumping. It does nothing! Well, it actually hinders you because you can't attack while jumping – BUT I was talking to Bart from Hi-Rez and they included it in the game because people feel restricted without a jumping option.

Graham: I LIKE THIS.