***** The RPS team are currently in their winter hibernation state and will return on 4th January. In the meantime we didn’t want you to think we’d forgotten about you or the supporter program so we have hand-crafted a selection of the Bestest Best RPS Cracker Jokes. It’s also our way of giving you the “reveal” moment that we had to take out of this year’s advent calendar. We’ve made these posts open to all. Whether you celebrate or not we hope they raise a smile. Love, RPS xxx *****>

Q: What do you call a dog who helps you with your Christmas presents?

… [visit site to read more]

I’ve spent a lot of work time playing Fallout 4, what with its being the biggest release of the year. It gave me the chance to write a couple of super-helpful guides, and a three-part diary about trying to approach the game different from that of most reviewers. So I’m left with a whole bunch of opinions about it, which it makes sense to collate into my own little WIT. It’s worth noting I’ve nowhere near completed the game, approached it strangely, and not put in nearly as much work and effort as Alec did for his official RPS review. These are just my thoughts based on what I’ve experienced so far, as spoiler free as I can get it.

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Scant few games stand the test of time and retain a large active player base sixteen years after release. But not only has Age of Empires II endured, it has thrived. It’s gained new steam thanks in part to an official high-definition re-release but mostly due to the ragtag group of modders-turned-developers who made that release possible. Forgotten Empires filled the game with new stuff and rebalanced the multiplayer in one enormous mod and then two HD expansions: The Forgotten and the recently-released African Kingdoms. I spoke to the team to find out about the challenges of transitioning from mod team to professional development studio, and of continuing to expand a game within its ancient limits.

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I owe almost my entire existence to DOS.

If you survived DOS, you became a PC gamer. To have laboured in the command prompt mines was to become someone who is only slight fazed by the many technical problems and complexities which blight PC games to this day. … [visit site to read more]

***** The RPS team are currently in their winter hibernation state and will return on 4th January. In the meantime we didn’t want you to think we’d forgotten about you or the supporter program so we have hand-crafted a selection of the Bestest Best RPS Cracker Jokes. It’s also our way of giving you the “reveal” moment that we had to take out of this year’s advent calendar. We’ve made these posts open to all. Whether you celebrate or not we hope they raise a smile. Love, RPS xxx *****>

I’m having trouble reading this Christmas card from a stealth game

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RPS is eight this year. Bloody Nora! Longest job I’ve ever held. It’s crazy to think back to early 2007, when I was unexpectedly invited to join Jim, Kieron and John in their nascent plans to build our own PC gaming website. We were bemused that there wasn’t a great site of that kind around back then, and we were sick of the vagaries of freelance work. We had no idea if it would work. We’d never have believed it would last this long.

We were young punks then. The site has young punks now, of course, but I am an elder statesman as games journalists go, and no longer have the anger I did in those first few years. There is no shortage of RPS articles in which I’m moaning about something or someone, and these I do not care to pull from the archives. It’s those where I was enthusiastic or wonder-struck that I do. This, then, are my own ego-surfing highlights.

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Have You Played? is an endless stream of game recommendations. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.>

Oh, the months of fun I had in Theme Park as a sprog! I’d spend hours creating beautiful parks with elaborate rollercoasters, places I’d dream of visiting, then force them collapse into hellscapes as quickly as I could. I didn’t have the patience or interest to play ‘properly’, see, and mostly cheated. So I’m asking you: have you played it properly? What’s it actually like? What did it do that modern park ‘em ups don’t?

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There’s no Sunday Papers this week as RPS continues to sleep off its Christmas dinner, so here’s a Pipwick Papers from the Supporter program archives.>

Last week I finally took a holiday and it was glorious. I went to see a bunch of cool art exhibitions and projects as well as finally catching up on some sleep. This edition of the Pipwick Papers is going to be a smattering of the things I read and saw while pottering about – there’s a lot of art!

… [visit site to read more]

***** The RPS team are currently in their winter hibernation state and will return on 4th January. In the meantime we didn’t want you to think we’d forgotten about you or the supporter program so we have hand-crafted a selection of the Bestest Best RPS Cracker Jokes. It’s also our way of giving you the “reveal” moment that we had to take out of this year’s advent calendar. We’ve made these posts open to all. Whether you celebrate or not we hope they raise a smile. Love, RPS xxx *****>

Q: How do you know Turians keep hogging the laundry room?

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1) Passivity makes me fidgety. Even in a film, TV show, gig or novel I’m hugely enjoying, my mind will at some point drift to the clock, wondering how soon until it ends, how soon until I can stand up or talk or check something or eat something or go somewhere. Awful, I know. Games, broadly, need me to be doing something most of the time, and that is the greatest weapon I have against a propensity to boredom that I am not at all proud of. This is also why I start to go spare in something like StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void, as it spends so much of its duration pummelling me with particularly low-grade passive storytelling, and my frustration that I have to watch this nonsense instead of do things for myself goes through the roof.

… [visit site to read more]