Latest Articles (Page 2148)
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"You know what would be great?" said Jim, looking me square in the IM window. "Kittens the size of buildings?" I replied. "Yes, yes it would," he wistfully responded before getting back to the point. "But also if you were to review the gaming capabilities of your all new Asus EEE."
In my heart I knew he was right. But then the cold, harsh reality of my own massive incompetence struck home. That would involve... technology. "Can I get a man in?" I wondered to myself, Kieron somehow knowing this was my thought and smirking to himself at the innuendo, wherever he may have been. Now, I'm no fool - I'm not about to fill the 4GB of flash memory with Windows XP. Frankly, that would be too easy. I'm sticking with Linux here: FOR THE CHALLENGE.
I then thought to look on some forums to look for helpful guides to unlocking the EEE's potential. Ha ha ha! As if Linux people would offer help to those who don't already have a degree in Linux. "Run the deb .3fd file with a trivert culumbus modulator, xdrting it in the command line with the usual _)xx command definitions. If this causes an 88 X-PT error, simply reflash the hard drives with a standard lucu rebuff, and install Uruntee as usual..."
Then I thought about you.
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It's a gaming rundown, increasingly late, Of digital adventures, all lovely and great. So it's time for a gander Inside Fairtrade Calendar Door's contents revealed as...
.
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In an idle couple of hours earlier today I found myself reading the peerless architecture and urban speculation blog, BldgBlog. It's the kind of writing project that makes me sick with envy, and I can't wait to see Manaugh turn his ideas into book form in 2008. Anyway, one of Manaugh's recent posts was headed up by an image of the Chartres cathedral map from Quake 3. It's a map that's as old as the (virtual) hills, and not even that interesting a build, given what many others did with Quake 3 mapping. Nevertheless it sparked a recollection of the hours I used to spend downloading and playing around in Quake III maps, when I should have been editing the online section of PC Gamer.
Digging out my old Quake III installation (which I found buried in a spare hard disc filled with old games that I don't want to part with just yet), I decided to have a root around in the virtual architectures of yesterday and see what I could unearth.
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...we think the Duke Nukem trailer is a load of old balls too, for the record. But it's purely a misfiring promotional video clip, and probably has very, very little bearing on what the actual game's like. So there's really no need to send 3D Realms hate mail just yet. Hopefully.
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Slightly unsettling news: the apparently awful Juiced 2: Hot Import Nights only supports Xbox 360 controllers (as confirmed by angry Amazon user reviews). That's the PC version of a racing game, and thus something that really needs a gamepad (or a wheel, if you don't mind your PC desk looking like a nursery), not the clunky, binary inappropriateness of a keyboard.
So, anyone who buys the game pretty much has to also drop around £30 on a 360 controller. Which is about as obscene as the topless picture of himself Gillen inexplicably sent to his friends to demonstrate his new beard a while back. The horror, the horror.
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A few weeks ago, when Eidos Montreal had their open-house, we wondered if any RPSites were going to get the scoop. It seems that one kinda has. Friend of RPS, Matt Kumar popped along for a good nose for official industry Cleverthinks site, Gamasutra.
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So, you collapse in, drunk. It's Christmas. That's how it works. It's you and the screen, trying to make some sense of your relationship. You know you should just crawl into bed, but you know that sitting in front of that monitor just makes more sense. You sip your drink and realise - hey - you haven't opened the RPS-approved fairtrade advent calendar so you turn to it and pull away the recycled cardboard to reveal...
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Naw, I'm just yanking your chain. The real deal's after the jump.
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While my RPS fellows have been celebrating Duke Nukem Forever Probably Trailer Day by either taking a pop at the game, or taking a pop at the entire rest of the world, I've been casually brushing up on a little bit of DNF history.
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The handsome fellows at PC Gamer have posted my interview with David Speyrer - project lead on Half-Life 2: Episode Two - up on their website. You may remember a few weeks back we posted the bits that were left over. Well, here's the cream of the interview for your eye-based enjoyment.
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While there's little actual information available on the site proper, the first official shots of Cyanide's version of Games Workshop Fantasy Football are become available. It's coming across several formats, including DS, so who knows what version these are for. They look kinda PCy. Let's say PC. Cyanide's most relevant previous game was Chaos League which - er - I may have done the English translation for the commentators for. Er... is that the time? Go screens!
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I've been a full-time games journalist for close to a decade now, and it amuses and surprises me every time I think that Duke Nukem Forever was already a delayed and mysterious thing when I joined this dark fraternity. We were making Duke Nukem Taking Forever jokes back in 1999, for Christ's sake.
Of course, that's one reason why I eye-roll a little at the general scorn that surrounds the game. I'm bored of Duke Nukem jokes as much as I'm bored of waiting for Duke Nukem. More so, in fact. 3DRealms are acting like creators in control of their own destiny, for better or for worse. We're acting like...
Well, "Vapourware". It's a fascinating, vile phrase which stinks of misplaced entitlement.
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My review of Armageddon Empires goes live over at Eurogamer. In which I start like...
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PC gaming's favourite joke is trying to give the impression that next year's promise of a release is really, really, really true this time. And at around 6pm (UK) today, the "first" teaser trailer will be released. You know, after the trailer released in 2001. Six years ago. 3D Realms bossman George Broussard appeared on the company's forums to announce the exciting news that gaming's most unreleased game is going to receive a teaser, and to offer a screenshot of said short (their servers are too busy to show it, so here it is below).
"Gameplay footage?" the world asks in excitement? Or ironic excitement if you've been listening to 3D Realms' nonsense about this alleged game for the last decade. "Um," quickly comes back the reply from Broussard.
"This is a teaser. It's not a full blown trailer like the 2001 trailer (but something like that is coming). I tried to be clear about that in the message board post, so just bear in mind that it's a teaser."
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Those of you who have already played World In Conflict will be aware that it's the most Christmassy game on the PC. But just to confirm that, here's a holiday video from the Massive team:
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Give a man a December the 18th advent calendar window and he can eat chocolate for a day. Give him an entire RPS-approved Fairtrade advent calendar and he can eat chocolate for (almost) a month. Or he could just gobble the lot in one crazed OM NOM NOM frenzy.
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As readers of our comments threads will know, the day after we had our last - er -chat with Warren Spector, I was heading off to London to have a chat with Real Warren Spector. Luckily, he hadn't seen our previous post. He was, however, in a fine mood. Unable to talk about what he's acually doing for Disney, when asked about what the response will be upon its announcement he says...
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I'm having a bit of a moment. Portable gaming has just been sorted, made a done deal. There is no need for anything else.
Peggle has been released for iPod. Peggle! PEGGLE!
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I've been meaning to write about this for a while, because it just tickles me pink. If you were paying attention to PC gaming in 2005 then you'll probably remember Deep Shadows' spectacularly open-ended FPS, Boiling Point. It remains one of my favourite games of all time, partly because it was an astonishingly ambitious game of the kind I can't seem to get enough of, and partly because it it was an accidental surrealist masterpiece of outlandish bugs and terrible production. Few games were as weirdly broken as Boiling Point, and there were plenty of commentators who came away with wry smiles and unhappy brains as a result.
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Because you all already own copies of Uplink, Darwinia and Defcon, right? So you won't care that there's an Introversion Anthology pack up on Steam containing all three games for just $20...
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EA have released some more details, and the above screenshot of an ED-209*, to announce Tiberium, their squad-based FPS set in the C&C universe.
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Despite being someone who allowed his fashion sense to condense into a comfortable black shadow about a decade back, I found myself unable to resist playing Gamelab's recent game: Jojo's Fashion Show, because I'm perfectly at home with my inner cliched bitchy gay fashionista.
In short: You have to dress models as fashionably as possible to fulfill a vague look ("Racy", "Summer", "Bridal"), then push them onto the runway to see how your taste in fashion matches the games. While clearly aimed outside the traditional gamer market, there's something intrinsically funny about imagining the standard gamer demographic obsessively playing it. And it's actually neatly done, polished and better than you'd expect it to be. There's a 2 Peggles Demo available to try, which gives you an hours free play, but I suspect you'll find some further impressions and/or ladies in their undergarments beneath the cut.
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...a new Q&A with developers GSC Gameworld mentions that they're contemplating turning the sublime post-apocalyptic shooter into an MMO.
"If you mean an MMOG, then we are seriously considering it", is the exact quote. No more details than that, but it's more gossip than proto-videogames generally yield. Let there be much rejoicing.
Certainly, colour me excited.
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Hmm. It's an apocalyptic Monday here in Bath, Engerland and we're forced to scavenge among the littered wreckage of the weekend for sustenance. What's this? A discarded 17th of December RPS-approved Fairtrade advent calendar window? Perhaps some small fragment of food can be found within...
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With delightful gardening/breeding game Viva Piñata having recently turned up on PC, I thought it appropriate to link to this rather interesting design article over at Gamasutra. In it developers Rare discuss the unique visual design of the game from initial conceptual art to commercial product. They discuss things such as the problems of stuff a game with quite so much cuteness:
In the original plan, non-resident Piñatas would retain their colors and markings while being indistinguishable by shape, only morphing into full form in the garden. All Piñata subsections, e.g. birds, quadrupeds, small things, slimy things etc. would have their own non-resident shape. On this slide you can see it next to their final form. The Mallowolf and Macaraccoon were almost just jellybeans on stilts; the Parrybo and Crowla retain some distinctive bird features. The cut duo of rattlesnake and cane toad both look like baby salamanders, while the Whilrm and Taffly appear to have grown ears. Pleasingly, the Whirlm has gained an eye. Although he still looks sinister.
One of the main reasons this feature never made it to the final game was because it would require yet another model for every Piñata. Given the overheads we had already, trying to free up the space would have been very stressful.
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Professional gaming academic Ted Castronova has been talking about his new book, Exodus to the Virtual World: How Online Fun Is Changing Reality, and he's been saying the kinds of things that have been playing on my mind a whole lot in recent months. How valuable is our gaming escapism? And what does it mean to spend so much time in virtual worlds? Ted's book is about making some judgments, as he explained to the BBC:
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In my continuing attempt to purge all real-time elements from my PC playing - the gaming equivalent of a high fibre diet, probably - I've been spending a little time time playing the ongoing Beta of Galactic Civilization II: Twilight of the Arnor. While I've been meaning to return to GalCiv since Tom Francis' brilliant GalCiv2: Dark Avatar diary (My personal favourite piece of games writing of 2007, for the record), and I figured this was a good an excuse as any. And I don't need many excuses to make a Space Empire.
There wasn't much good when I started playing. No, not the game. The game remains, from what I've played, one of the premier strategy games of the last few years. Me. There wasn't much good in me.
Tales of interstellar brutality beneath the cut.
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I have to be honest: I nearly forgot to open today's window on the RPS-approved Fairtrade advent calendar. Thank f*** Alec reminded me.
Um...
...
There is no window sixteen. What the hell? Kieron!
It's okay, we're professionals... And, yeah. Anyway. Let's travel through the electronic cardboard portal, and into a fresh kind of Wonderland...
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Sad tidings for fans of heavily normal-mapped pretend-man-shoots. Seems both Crysis and Unreal Tournament 3 haven't exactly stormed up the charts, which is a tragic and strange state of affairs for what were seemingly two of the most eagerly-anticipated PC games of the year.
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