If there s one thing that RPS has been trying to teach us over the past few years, it s that tabletop gaming is cool, possibly even sexy, and definitely done by some handsome folks (hello there, Rab). Sadly, not all of us are blessed with a local circle of sexy and handsome friends to play with. Enter Berserk Games and their solution: Tabletop Simulator [official site].

Something of a rising star of Steam Early Access, Tabletop Simulator boasts the ability to simulate (fancy that) a 3D, physical tabletop with up to 7 other players online. While it comes bundled with a handful of copyright-free board/card game staples, its real strength lies in its easy moddability, allowing you to import just about any tabletop, playmat, token, card or custom dice that you can find an image file or 3D model of and share it with others. Combined with full Steam Workshop support, it s a potentially huge boon for those with tabletop gaming friends in far away places, and (unsurprisingly) a bit of a legal minefield.

I’ll come back that minefield later, but for now: here are four of the best Tabletop Simulator mods, what they do and how they play.

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I don’t know why John’s Wot I Think of Metamorphabet [official site] talks so much about babies and other varieties of child. Sure, I suppose children might experience some pleasure when a cyclopoid letter B sprouts a hoary beard then a beak pokes through its upper B hole to scream a torrent of bugs, but those snotty idiots are endlessly entertained by you covering your face with your hands. A child’s opinion is worthless. You know who truly appreciates letters being impaled by bug-blasting beaks? Alice. Me. I do.

Maybe you do too, and you can see for yourself as Metamorphabet now has a short browser-based demo on its site.

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Blizzard’s upcoming Heroes of the Storm [official site] is, in my humble opinion, a belter of a game. Such praise is small beer to the Californian mega-developer, however, which with HotS and the upcoming Overwatch intends to reclaim a leading role in the eSports industry it helped to create. HotS is still in beta but the long road began this weekend with Heroes of the Dorm, a college-focused competition that culminated in a grand final broadcast live on ESPN the latter being not only something of a coup, but also an eSports first. The event laid bare Blizzard’s intentions for HotS and, despite some community grumbling, what looks awfully like a new take on how best to present competitive gaming.

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Almost the first thing I did when our family bought a PC was to break it. I can’t remember quite what I did, but I was probably attempting to customise something to be more to my liking or to speed something up, and as a result I mangled the Windows 3.1 installation on the very day that this 25MHz 486 SX arrived. The next thing I did was to fix it. Pre-internet, this meant hours of research, and still more hours of trial and error to establish what I’d done and how to undo it. I edited .bat files, I backed things up, I retrieved missing files from compressed directories, I tried and tried and I won. Oh, the perseverance of youth. … [visit site to read more]

Oh hey, remember how I was telling you about Circa Infinity [official site] last week? That demo of the first few levels is out now so in the interests of Following Up and Being Thoughtful and whatnot, I’m letting you know.

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Star Wars versions are a serious concern to fanatics. Really> you should watch the LaserDisc versions of the original trilogy, so I hear. The same goes for versions with certain Star Wars games. It was nice that GOG dug up X-Wing and TIE Fighter, and nicer that they included the original floppy disc versions as well as their 1998 revisions, but what about the CD-ROM versions from 1994 and 1995? According to Those Who Know, those are the best versions of the two space sims.

GOG have rummaged around again, and dug them up yesterday. If you own X-Wing or TIE on GOG, you’ll now find you have their Collector’s Edition versions too. May April 29th be with you.

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Endless Legend’s [official site] Guardian’s DLC is a giant expansion in that it’s an expansion that adds giants, although that’s not to say there isn’t a large bundle of new things to play with. The first major expansion to our Game of 2014 adds new global events, cooperative and competitive quests, legendary deeds and buildings, unique structures, and the titular Guardians. That’s one of the blighters in the image at the top of the post, Skoros the Dust Guardian. He can fully heal allied armies and control enemy minds. Handy chap to have around in a pinch.

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Hi folks!

I’m Scott and I help moderate the RPS community forum. There’s some great discussions going on over there but what I’m really interested in is what the members of the community do together – whether that’s in games or out of them. Every month I’m going to provide a summary of what RPSers have been up to and how you can get involved. This month: Cities: Skylines [official site] succession games; our Guild Wars 2 [official site] guild get more involved in PvP; the PlanetSide 2 [official site] outfits do battle in a server smash; and how to join the capers of our Grand Theft Auto 5 [official site] crew.

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Pip: Adam and Graham, do the football simulators include curve ball physics? I was trying to get to sleep last night and I started wondering if curve ball physics were seen as weird or unfair or OP if they transitioned to games on account of being less predictable than straight shots.

Graham: You can add after touch to shots to curl them in PES or FIFA, but it requires careful aiming on the part of players and is usually limited by the skill of the real life footballer you’re controlling at that moment. The camera angle, because it’s side-on like a television camera, also stops it from being an easy bend-away-from-goalkeeper cheat.

Adam: Going way back, it was the best way to score in Sensible Soccer.

Pip: But people don’t kick off if you use it? What I mean is if curling a ball happens in real life you have to suck it up – okay you might complain but it’s something that physically just happened and you can’t argue that it’s a broken system – but in a game I was wondering if that held or whether it was treated differently.

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I lost interest in Team Fortress 2 [official site] around the time that I became good enough to regularly top public servers but had neither the skill nor the interest to jump to organised competition. A little matchmaking, pitting me against other pubstar-tier fraggers, would’ve been wonderful. So huzzah! After many, many years, Valve are finally planning proper matchmaking.

Details are a little thin for now, based on memories of conversations that TF2 community folk had during a recent visit to Valve, but one thing’s clear: competitive matchmaking is coming.

… [visit site to read more]