Dec 17, 2023
Rock, Paper, Shotgun
Sundays are for almost pulling the trigger on a silent mechanical keyboard you definitely don't need. Let's read some of the week's best writing about games and game-related things.
Share: 
Sundays are for almost pulling the trigger on a silent mechanical keyboard you definitely don't need. Let's read some of the week's best writing about games and game-related things.
We come to the sixteenth door of the advent calendar, but unfortunately it's quite far up above you. You're going to have to climb.
This week most people are once again awake, but Alice0 has taken the day off, which means I needs must once again ask everyone to tell me what they're playing this weekend. I think last week I might have forgotten to update whatever it was I was playing. I can't remember. It's nearly the end of the year, what do you want from me? To do my job? Pah. Anyway, we're playin' some stuff, alright.
In the market for a new SSD and> a new controller? Good news, Ebuyer has got you covered with deal that bundles the excellent Sony DualSense PS5 controller with a fast Crucial T500 2TB SSD, complete with heatsink. Bought separately, these would run you £180, but together you can pick them up for just £140.
This deal is marketed as the 'ideal PS5 upgrade kit', but it's actually just as relevant for PC users looking to pick up one of the best gamepads (alongside the Xbox Elite controller also discounted today) and get more game storage at the same time.
Microsoft's phenomenal Elite Series 2 controller is down to £100 after a £60 discount at Amazon UK. That's a great price for, in my opinion, one of the very best gamepads for PC and Xbox - and well worth picking up for the holidays.
If you want just the core controller without its accessory bag (purchaseable separately), you can get the controller for even less - £78!
I don't look for Christmas games. Partly because they're basically all terrible, and partly because of how tiresome it is when everything is saturated with the same theme wherever you look. But Ebenezer And The Invisible World is about helping Scrooge run around London bashing capitalists and other evil spirits with his cane, and summoning friendly ghosts to prevent Caspar Malthus from genociding the working class. I simply could not find out what the hell was going on there.
Turns out, it's kinda good. But it has too many problems to reach much beyond that.
It's always saddened me that Simogo's brilliant text-based adventure Device 6 has been trapped on iOS-only devices since it first came out... ten years ago? Hell's bells, now I feel old. If you're unfamiliar with it, it's about a girl named Anna who must escape from a mysterious island, but the whole game is presented like you're reading a book - only one that you can click on and prod with your fingers to reveal new puzzles within that text. It's very clever, especially when it occasionally asks you to rotate your device to navigate parts of its game worlds - there's an excellent bit with stairs that I won't spoil, but seriously, if you haven't played Device 6 and you own an iOS device, go and download it now.
Once you've done that, you should also have a look this year's Delete After Reading, which does a very good impression of it for us folks on PC, hiding smart, tactile text puzzles inside its interactive spy thriller.
To celebrate Doom's 30th birthday we had a discussion about the (understandably) vaunted FPS's influence, and what games would look like without it. It seems particularly interesting today in light of the recent resurgence of Doom-style shooters, often known as "boomer shooters" because of their deliberately retro style and singular focus on shootin' stuff and bein' cool, much like Doom. And then the obvious solution was to just ask the devs making these games about what they think of Doom and its impact on their work.
I reached out to developers who've worked on Turbo Overkill, Prodeus, Forgive Me Father (and Forgive Me Father 2) and almost the whole stable working at New Blood Interactive to ask them some annoyingly specific questions about Doom in the hope of getting the sort of idiosyncratic answers you get from interesting devs - and they delivered! In fact, they delivered in such quantity and quality that I've elected to just present their answers to you, rather than try to weave them together as if we were all sitting together at dinner exchanging bon mots, both for clarity and to include as much as possible in their own words. It's a fascinating and entertaining collection of thoughts.
Gaze down the sights of today's Advent Calendar window and you'll find time is a tricksy, malleable concept that's all slow-motion power slides and extraordinary grenade explosions. Just mind the gibs on the floor there. Wouldn't want to stain your boots.
The first mod I ever downloaded was for Skyrim. It replaced NPCs with Shrek. The second was a texture pack for Dark Souls: Remastered. I believe that these two examples form a representative sample of what mods are: quality of life improvements, and Shrek. Doom’s modding community, known by its file package WAD, is the Ur modding community. Thanks to John Carmack’s lightning-fast engine, creating levels and content for Doom has been accessible for 30 years. WAD devs have gone on to become fully-fledged game designers, and some WADs have been released commercially. The breadth and depth of this community formed the bedrock of game developers. And yet even with this pedigree, MyHouse.WAD is a miracle.