Looking for something to read? Peruse our calendar of the year’s best PC games!>

It’s back! The ultimate Christmas list of games on the PC that were okay, or better: The RPS Advent Christmas Games Calendar Of Games! Yes, it’s the countdown to the origination day of RPS Sponsor Deity, Horace The Endless Bear, the Space God who gave man the gift of video computer systems. Praise him, praise him.

We will be updating the calendar with click functionality day by day. Amazing technology for all.

(And if you just want a list of the games, you’ll find them below…) (more…)

Hello! Eurogamer have been doing their own, inferior to our, end of year celebrations. Basically, they get a load of their writers to do an essay about a game they loved this year. Alec has written some more about Minecraft, but I grabbed the opportunity to hammer out 1000 words about Robot Unicorn Attack. Wherein I say things like…

Like an inexperienced teenager rushing orgasm-ward, Robot Unicorn Attack starts fast and then only accelerates towards its prematurely sticky conclusion. The question is how long you can delay that moment.

And giggle a lot. Read the rest here.

Sundays, like every other day, are for the written word. It’s part of what makes us human: those ants of script crawling across page after page. Those wisps of intellectual ether frozen into ink and pixel. If there was nothing else to do besides read, we would still experience lives of extraordinary richness. Unless you were just reading reviews of Call of Duty games. Then it’d be shit.

• Edge Online talked to Jon Blow and Chris Hecker, at the same time>. Well, they actually take turns to say stuff – Edge Online isn’t some creature of miraculous dual-consciousness and doubled attention centres that can interview people in parallel. It’s just a guy. Gary Edge. He’s okay. Anyway, in the interview Hecker says this: “There’s a kind of punk theory going on in the industry right now. Frank Lantz, the head of the NYU Game Center, talks about this all the time. We’ve got developers like Mark Essen, the guy who did Flywrench and is doing Nidhogg now – they show their games in art galleries, and they’re brash and loud. It’s a cool movement. There’s a comparison to be made with music here. Big bands like Led Zeppelin or The Beatles took their craft farther and deeper. You can throw together a song and bash it out and if you’re naturally talented there’ll be something cool there – but you’ve got to develop your craft, and a lot of these kids they just don’t take it anywhere – they throw together a game in a weekend, then go on to the next thing.” And much more besides. Go read.

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There might be a couple of minor updates during the next week, but we’re otherwise slumbering until the 3rd, when we get cracking for another year. And it’s going to be a really significant year, too. You should see my list of Stuff To Write About. It’s awesome.

On that note, I just wanted to say a couple of things. Firstly, thanks to everyone who subscribes, or who has donated cash at any point in the past. The money provided by readers has genuinely kept this site alive over the previous couple of years. We bought a new server with the money, and pretty much survived on that cash while we transitioned to having our advertising handled by Eurogamer. Subscribers should expect a huge bundle of competitions and other exclusive content in the new year, as well as a more regular newsletter! We have tonnes of games to give away and other stuff, too. So that’s a thanks to all of you.

Secondly, yes, the site is finally, thankfully, paying for us to work on it. That was always the intention, and boy was it hard work making it happen. If that profitable status changes anything then it’s that we can now focus on our efforts here, and won’t have to spend quite so much time forging wordthinks for other publications. 2011 should be the year when RPS really hits its stride, and I can’t wait to share that with you lot.

Thanks for reading, and here’s to the future.

You’ve already caught a glimpse of what lies behind the final window, haven’t you? You are so naughty>. But then again, there was no hiding that particularly cubic outline, was there?

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EA’s Spore-infused action-RPG Darkspore is due early in 2011. Intrigued to understand how it relates to Wright’s original creature creator, and what it brings to an increasingly busy A-RPG scene, we spoke to executive producer Michael Perry. We talk about how the idea came about, the multiple-hero approach and why they’ll be unique to us, the advancements made to the Spore Creature Creator, the presence of an AI Director for co-op, and the game’s “chaining” system.

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Belgian fantasy role-playing epic Divinity 2: The Dragon Knight Saga has a demo version! Just in time for you to turn your back on your family over the Winter holidays and club some goblins to death in the privacy of your game room/office/laptop parlour. The 2gb demo is the first valley of the game, which is a fairly hefty chunk of play, I think. And the game has, of course, been heavily overhauled since its original release last year, both adding new content and new visuals. And it was fairly pretty to start with, if a little grindy.

Also, in the full game, you can build an “abomination” to fight for you, which can’t be bad.

Rod Humble, you might recall, has been at the controls of EA’s The Sims projects for the past few years. But no more. Linden Lab have just issued a statement, full of comments about “growth” and “exciting opportunities”, saying that Humble (pictured in his previous state) is taking over as CEO. Not much more than that at the moment, but this is the first thing Linden has done for a while that has made me sit up and take notice. I’ll be intrigued to find out more. Maybe you’ll tell us more, eh Rod?

We’re all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the Star Trek. (more…)

By which I mean “the Manhattan Project Pack free DLC for RUSE has (probably) arrived.” As evidenced by yon screenshot above, this multiplayer-centric gimme adds a little nuclear frisson to yer World War II strategisin’. For your no-dollars, you get three new maps and two new modes – one of which includes nukey “Long Toms”. Missus. There’s also the option to play the game at accelerated chronology, which the boy Quinns got quite excited about the other week. The DLC is in theory supposed to auto-update onto the parent game in Steam right now, but I hear murmurings of some sort of snafu. And luck, generals?

And whatever was I quoting in the headline?