As you approach this door of the Calendar you get a feeling of déjà vu. "Oh no," you mutter. "It's going to be another bloody time loop." You're right reader, it is! But this one will kick hard enough to start the day again, and really puts the writing on the wall.
Finally, catboys and catgirls have invaded Halo Infinite. Yes, you can now outfit your Spartan with cat ears in multiplayer and transform your serious Spartan into a feisty kitty. Move over John Halo, we now have Felix, who is much cuter and loves scritches. Hello mister! Pspspspspsps.
It struck me recently that I’ve not played as much of Halo Infinite’s multiplayer as I thought I would. I envisaged myself wiling away most evenings with my mates, playing Oddball and Slayer and laughing like someone from those video game adverts, swaying violently with a controller in hand.
I now know the reason why and I hate to admit it. Infinite doesn’t have a battle royale mode, which I've come to realise is the perfect FPS template for gaming with my mates. Something about it just works, you know? Listen, let me explain.
I know almost nothing about Alfred Hitchcock. He’s the kind of archetypal director whose work I’ve been exposed to in bits and pieces without ever actually sitting down to watch one of his films in full. All of that is to say that, upon starting Alfred Hitchcock - Vertigo the game, I was in no position to judge whether it was a faithful adaptation of the film or to recognize all but the most obvious illusions to Hitchcock’s body of work (look, birds!). That’s okay, though, because as it turns out, Vertigo is an original story based on a collage of Hitchcockian concepts, not a direct adaption of the 1958 film by the same name.
Vertigo the game follows author Ed Miller as he grapples with a debilitating case of vertigo–a condition that leaves him unable to stand as the world appears to spin around him–and paralyzing guilt over the death of his daughter and her mother, Faye, after their car falls off a bridge into a ravine below. With Ed bed ridden, it’s up to Dr. Julia Lomas, psychologist and> psychiatrist, and Sheriff Nick Reyes to unravel the mystery of what really happened, and whether Faye and his daughter even exist. My thoughts on how Vertigo goes about telling this story are... complicated.
Gather round, readers, and I'll tell you the tale of the time I opened the 22nd door on the RPS Advent Calendar. I was with three friends, and we'd been adventuring together for years at this point - two of us were lovers, and yet a third had made a strange pact with a wolf God. We could do anything together, we four. And then we stumbled upon this door...
Hello folks. It's been a funny old year, 2021. On the games side, it's often felt like a year of shifting goalposts. Games that were delayed by the pandemic last year finally got their due in 2021, but in turn many of the releases we were expecting this year have inevitably slipped into 2022. The pandemic has affected games of all sizes this year, and I don't think it will go down in the history books as one of our all-time greats. There were still plenty of fantastic games that came out this year, mind, and we're still counting down our absolute favourites over in our Advent Calendar.
That said, I do think 2021 will prove to be a pivotal year for RPS - and not just because I stole Graham's key card and changed the locks on the front door of the Treehouse. It's been a year of immense change here at the site, so I wanted to take some time to reflect on everything that's happened this year, and look forward to what we've got in store for 2022.
This door on the Advent Calendar is probably locked with a needlessly complicated key split into several pieces. Also, it is very, very tall, as if for someone who is already taller than average and then wears heels.
There’s no single, solitary reason why it’s been so hard to buy certain PC components over the past year and a bit – it’s more like a perfect storm of multiple circumstances, unfortunate coincidences and unforseen annoyances. That said, one of the biggest underlying causes of MIA CPU and graphics card stock has been a shortage of the chips needed to make them, and it’s a shortage that Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger has warned could likely continue into 2023.
Oslain Brante tried to be a decent guy. Kind to his relatives except the one who murdered him. Resolutely loyal to his friends, even dying for one. Willing to die once again rather than betray his revolutionary allies. But it just kept going wrong for reasons that felt utterly artificial and sometimes deeply dissatisfying.
I'd have given up on the game if it weren't so interesting. For one thing, none of those deaths were final. He died as a child and came back. He died as a teenager and came back. These were not saved games, but ordinary occurrences. It's an interesting world made infuriating by awkward design choices.
The twentieth door on the RPS Advent Calendar this year is very small. In fact, it almost looks small enough to attach to someone's head, if you were the kind of weirdo who'd do that kind of thing.