I’ve long been absorbed by the pleasure of games as safe places. Those oases that allow you to be entirely distracted from the outside, encased in a fantastic world that let you find calm. As someone who lives with the incessant turmoil that is generalised anxiety disorder, such games can offer extraordinary respite. And none has ever done this more for me than Subnautica. (more…)
The latest limited-run event mode in Fortnite Battle Royale is less dramatic than the 50v50 mode that Fraser Brown enjoyed so much, but it does offer a slight change of pace. ‘Sniper Shootout’ is its name, and arming players with only snipers and revolvers is how it affects the game. If you’re a fan of powerful shots with tension-filled pauses, or if you’re just plain rubbish with these guns and could use the practise, you’ve got until Friday the 2nd of February to click clack bang. (more…)
Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day, perhaps for all time.>
You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you might find you get a steaming pile of half-baked ideas, geriatric technology and an exhausting cocktail of ill-judged satire and straight-up misanthropy. (more…)
The roguelike card game Slay the Spire has marched into RPS and conducted a coup. Now a slug with a pocketwatch is forcing us all to write articles about how great it is. For example, I ve just done an interview with the game s creators, which you can read later. For now, let me sneak out this bit of info, while the slug isn t looking: They plan to add new playable characters after the game s full release. We will almost certainly have more than three characters, said Anthony Giovannetti of Mega Crit Games. OK, it s no huge surprise, but at least you know they don t plan to dust it off when it drops out of early access in the summer. (more…)
They may be billions, but so so far it’s only taken a few dozen zombies to break through my defences in tower defence/RTS hybrid They Are Billions. That’s a shame, because if I was any better then I’d love to take part in the weekly challenge run that was included in Friday’s early access update. Every week you get one chance to take a stab at the same survival map as everyone else, then compare your score with strangers and friends.
Also added in the update are waypoint commands for units, a sprinkling of (habitable!) abandoned towers, and transportable explosive barrels – three things that every apocalyptic scenario can’t be complete without.
What Works And Why is a new monthly column where Gunpoint and Heat Signature designer Tom Francis digs into the design of a game and analyses what makes it good.>
I love Deus Ex, System Shock 2, and Dishonored 2, and the name for these games is dumb: they’re ‘immersive sims’. If you asked me what I liked about them, my answer would be a phrase almost as dumb: ’emergent gameplay!’
I always used to think of these as virtually the same thing, but of course they’re not. Immersive sims usually have a whole list of traits, things like: (more…)
People are leaving Miramar in droves. A confusingly large number of people apparently prefer the original Erangel map, which is why I’ve seen player counts dwindle as people leave at the start of a desert match, seeking greener pastures. Nowadays, those kids are even editing game files so they automatically leave a round when it loads up Miramar.
Today’s update to the test servers for Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds seeks to tempt some of those players back. My guess is if anything’s going to do that, it’ll be the promise of extra buildings and cover across the map. I haven’t tried it myself yet though, so the jury’s still out.
One of my favourite touches in first-person video games is your virtuahands reaching out to objects in the world. This is used to lovely effect in Beyond R’Proach, a nice little new walking simulator where we stroll through dense underwater foliage, pushing plants out the way as we go. It’s short, it’s colourful, it builds a nice little song along the way, we touch lots of plants (a bonus in any game, to be sure), and that’s all nice. Then it brings in my favourite magical video game element: that old ‘hall of mirrors’ glitch, which still delights me more than most fancy special effects. (more…)
Though Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds now has two maps, it does not have an option to choose which you play. While the devs do plan to add one, for now players have used sneaky tricks to get the map they want. Some disconnect from servers if the randomly-selected map isn’t what they want. And, it turns out, some make it simpler by outright removing one map’s files. The game does still run, but any time it tries to join a game on the undesired map it’ll return right to the menu. One player even made a tool to remove maps easily. It’s awkward that there still isn’t a map-select option. (more…)
This is Spawn Point, where we take something from the world of gaming and explain what it is, why it s worth your time and how you can get involved. This week, Final Fantasy XII is coming to PC – a whole 12 years after its release on PlayStation 2. That s good, it s one of the better ones. If your idea of Final Fantasy is boring turn-based battles, well, that s fair. But this one is a little different. (more…)