When the historians of the future cast their cyber-eyes over the deluge of stupidity we encrusted upon the primitive internet, they will see that our fables, our moral storytelling, was mostly conducted with flashing colours and double-jumps. Yes, videogames have adopted the moralistic finger-wagging of fairytales and Victorian novels, for better or for worse. They have taught us a lot about ourselves and our place in the world. Here are 13 of the “best” moral lessons from PC games. Yes, you may take notes.

(more…)

You’ll ocassionally find someone on the internet sounding off about how the strategy genre is dead. If you see such a person in the future, send them this list of the best strategy games ever made.

(more…)

The war chief is dead. Aminai, our wisest herder, took her place but was struck with a deadly illness. Crop after crop failed as the world became darker and colder. Our herds are pitiful, barely half of our people have a horse. Our neighbours, once toasting our clan, raid us without mercy, burning defences and stealing precious cattle. Storm worshippers from the south sense weakness and attack, crowing that their gods are ascendant. Our magic dwindles, our rituals and offerings fail. The gods are at war, say the spinners. It didn’t fully dawn on me how transformative this would be for the whole valley until a dead god fell from the sky.

Part of me was pleased. King Of Dragon Pass is back. And Six Ages has improved on it in every way.

(more…)

Look! A ranking of the 50 best RPGs on PC. I know, you never asked for this, but here it is. It is 100 percent correct, we double-checked. The RPG is a broad and deep sea and fishing out the best games from its characterful waters is no easy task. But we are capable fishers on the good ship RPS, and know when to humanely throw back a tiddler or fight to heave up a monster. Enough of this salty metaphor. Here are the 50 best RPGs you can play on PC today.

(more…)

The cows have been sacrificed. The rituals have concluded. The RPS god-talkers return from their tent and declare that Six Ages: Ride Like The Wind, will finally be released on PC on October 17th. Six Ages is of course the spiritual successor to the legendary King Of Dragon Pass, the 1999 strategy-RPG hybrid about leading an iron age village to prosperity in a dangerous land of monsters, spirits, and complex political, economic, and cultural decisions. It’s been out on iOS for a long while, but now it’s coming to PC. I am very excited to end this intro and get into the details below.

(more…)

It wasn’t till some way into development of Six Ages: Ride Like The Wind that designer David Dunham realised he was making a game about climate change. Like its 19-year-old predecessor, the seminal King of Dragon Pass, Six Ages is set in Glorantha, a fantasy universe originally cooked up by Greg Stafford, and sees you raising a community in the wilds after being expelled from your ancestral homelands. In the first game, you’re fleeing the ravages of a malevolent wizard. In the second, your clan’s once-proud Golden City has been swallowed up by a glacier.

With their casts of werewolves and nymphs, dinosaurs and talking ducks, neither game has much to say on the surface about present-day cultural upheavals, and they certainly weren’t created for that purpose. While Dunham argues that most games have a political dimension, he’s unconvinced by message games that trade nuance for impact. The theme of displacement by a disaster is in some ways just a designer’s dodge, a convenient excuse to start you off poor and working your way up , and the parallel in Six Ages with the contemporary effects of global warming is entirely accidental: it just happened that that was what was going on in Glorantha’s Mythic Era, at the time. Nonetheless, Dunham admits to nurturing the comparison as work on the new game continued. The root cause of your migration is still an issue, so you ll meet other refugees from the Golden City during the game, he says. None of this was intended as political commentary, but it s easy to get a message.

(more…)

An entirely objective ranking of the 50 best PC strategy games ever made, now freshened up to include everything from 2017 and 2018. From intricate, global-scale wargames to the tight thrills of guerrilla squads, the broad expanse of the genre contains something for everyone, and we’ve gathered the best of the best.

The vast majority are available to buy digitally, a few are free to download and play forever. They’re all brilliant.

(more…)

Six Ages: Ride Like the Wind is another of those games I’ve been excited for since the moment it was announced. Long-awaited successor to ’90s cult favourite King of Dragon Pass, it’s a blend of tribal management and roleplaying presented primarily as as Choose Your Own Adventure. Today, Six Ages gets its first non-teaser trailer, along with a release window announcement – we’ll be raiding clans and taking cows again in 2019, although iOS folks will have the game in just a few weeks.

(more…)

King Of Dragon Pass is one of that games that speaks to me like no other. It is all of my favourite things blended together. It is a generator of sagas. It s part tribal management game, part Choose Your Own Adventure romp, and it was doing a lot of what Crusader Kings 2 has become known for way back in 1999. I m beyond excited, then, about the announcement of a spiritual successor from the some of the first game’s creators: Six Ages. Check out the teaser trailer below.

(more…)

Ahoy, landlubbers! The first DLC for open-world pirate game Tempest [official site] lets you step your leather boots onto solid ground for the first time. Treasure Lands DLC adds a new ship and invites you onto shore to assault forts, dig up treasure, defend villages and explore ancient cities.

If you missed it, Tempest is an adventure across the high seas, with quests to complete, crew members to manage and plenty of boom-y cannon combat. Brendan thought its large, fantasy world full of sea monsters had promise but that its missions were generally about as fun as scrubbing the poop deck. Still, one of his main criticisms was the lack of gameplay variety, which this DLC certainly addresses.

(more…)