At the beginning of every year, the RPS crew begin work on a team-building crafting project, which we recreate wonders of our world: 2016 was the year of the matchstick Blackpool Tower. Welcome to day nine of The RPS Advent Calendar, which highlights our favourite games of the year, daily. Behind today s door is…
The year’s best 4X game: don’t settle for less, it’s Sid Meier’s Civilization 6 [official site].
Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.>
I tend not to like games with obtuse interfaces, even those which have chosen those interfaces for deliberate affect. Duskers is that rare exception. You use a command line-stlye interface to control a small fleet of robots in order to explore and scavenge derelict spaceships.
We can all agree that the Christmas season doesn’t begin just because John Lewis tries to punch you in the heart or because Ian Starbucks cracks open the syrups again. That’s crass commercialism denigrating the season where people buy me presents. No, the only corporation I trust managing Christmas is Valve Corporation, who each year put cute little festive jumpers on the chickens in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive [official site]. That’s real Christmas to me. Ladies and germs, Christmas is here.
Oh, and Valve added some fancy technology to improve positional audio to help folks play the game better but look, the chickens are what really matters. … [visit site to read more]
This week has already flown past, in a blur of Christmas music and busy shops. The closer we get to Christmas, though, the more acceptable it is to gorge on chocolate and mince pies, so there s always a silver lining. Whatever you re planning to do with the upcoming holiday season , we ve got another week s worth of deals to check out, from the depths of the information super-highway. Let s get to it.
As usual, we ve got deals that ll work in the UK, deals that ll work in the US and some deals that will work in both the UK and US, as well as presumably many other places.
The man currently sipping a Koskenkorva and consulting his cue cards in the U/S Williams X-Jet The Flare Path uses as a dais is Ilja ‘Zipuli’ Varha. Our second ‘atypical simmer‘, Ilja has very kindly agreed to talk about his journey from juvenile M1 Tank Platoon fan to 33-year-old brigade simulator officer in the Finnish Defence Forces. Whether your polygonal battle wagon of preference is a Steel Beasts Leo, a Steel Fury T-34 or a World of Tanks Tiger, the following paragraphs should prove interesting.
Steam, you may have noticed, is a little bit broken. One of its multifarious idiosyncrasies is to include games that absolutely have not been released in its full list of released games. Every now and then I’ll spot a game that looks worth a peek, go to install it, and find it doesn’t even have a release date yet. So I tend to stick them on my wishlist and forget they exist. One such game that just popped up in my email as now released is OneShot [official site]. I don’t even have half a recollection of ever marking it, but gosh I’m glad I did. I’ve been playing it this morning and this top-down meta pixel adventure is completely charming. … [visit site to read more]
As folks continue to feel out what virtual reality can do and what works well in it, I’m interested to see what the hardware companies themselves want on their cybergoggles. Oculus have already been funding and publishing cybergames for years and now HTC have launched Vive Studios. It’s a new internal studio to develop their own games and publish games made by other folks.
Their very first game launched yesterday too, and it looks surprisingly bland. Rather than a “Gosh-o wowza!” experience like TheBlu or Tilt Brush or a “This is so cool it HURTS” game like Superhot VR, they’ve gone with VR remakes of ’80s arcade games. … [visit site to read more]
Shadow Warrior 2 [official site] is hardly story-heavy but if you simply want to launch yourself into a horde of monsters with your swords swinging, a new update has your back. Developers Flying Wild Hog last night boshed in trials offering a series of rewards as you murder the heck out a load of demons. Why delay? Murder today! … [visit site to read more]
Multi-bazillion-transistor behemoths like Nvidia’s Titan or the AMD Radeon R9 Fury are all very well. But the stats suggest hardly any of us actually buy them. Not a single Titan shows up in the latest Steam survey. If that’s some kind of driver-related GPU flagging anomaly, the next rung down in the form of Nvidia’s GTX 1080 clocks a mere 0.3 per cent of Steam gamers. On the other hand, the third most popular GPU on Steam is Nvidia’s old budget board, the GeForce 750 Ti. Enter, therefore, AMD’s latest attempt at a parsimonious pixel pumper, the Radeon RX 460. Aspirational it ain’t. But could it be that an entry-level board now makes for good-enough gaming graphics? There’s only one way to find out.
DOOM, Skyrim and Fallout have been recreated as Pinball FX2 [official site] tables. Because nobody else at RPS has the flippin’ guts to take on such a massive task, I’ve spent a couple of hours with each, and have now judged them. Short version, I like them about as much as I like the games they’re based on, which means one is great, and the other two are a bit of a ballache. To find out precisely what I mean by that, join me below.