Supporters

As you can perhaps tell from the slightly disdainful quotation marks, I am not a "shipping" person. I find it kind of annoying, in fact, if anything tending to un-ship fictional couples who clearly have no chemistry and are just doing it for the script.

It's fair to say then that Love, Ghostie isn't made for me. It's so specific that shipping might even be its genre, since it doesn't really fit into puzzle or interactive fiction. You're a ghostie, and you run a shared house full of humans unaware that ghosts exist, and that their culture is apparently based on pairing up the living. I guess... circle of life?

“When the plebeian kneels to the monarch, he is offering his neck,” writes Gene Wolfe in The Sword Of The Lictor. I read that this morning over coffee. Thanks Gene! I was literally just thinking about bowing - and more specifically, thinking about just how many stories that centre the monarch would be made more interesting from the perspective of those forced to bow.

When James, Edwin and myself played the preview level of Space Marine 2 together, I remarked on how the Imperial Guard worked as a good reference point for just how massive the space marines themselves are. Having played around three hours of the full game now - and having it found it wear very thin in about half that time - I’m realising that putting the player on the other side of that power imbalance would have made for a far more interesting game.

This week’s supporters was originally going to involve documenting a highly scientific experiment I did involving my cat and a series of numbered treats in which she ranked all the mainline Yakuza games. Alas, upon checking the photos, most of them simply depicted a ravenous orange blur. Still, I did at least get conclusive evidence that she does not care for the original Yakuza at all. No taste, I tell ya.

Casually reducing a genre to more easily slag it off, I propose that there are fighting games that are a memory test, and fighting games that are fun. This leads naturally into saying with confidence that Five Gods of Kung Fu is fun, and getting an intro I'm struggling with out of the way. Phew.

It's structured in a testy sort of way, though, with training scenes teaching the button prompts for the new moves you'll need to defeat the next opponent. But those scenes are also montages, because FGOKF is also a playful thing where you're then attacked by a gang of mooks purely for a few moments of miniature power fantasy where a single blow can take out the entire line at once. Your new fighting technique is unstoppable.

At least once a year since Game Of Thrones started, whether there’s something related on telly or not, I suddenly get all obsessed with Westeros again and start falling asleep to lore videos for a couple of months. It’s obviously coincided with a new season of House Of The Dragon this year - a season I really enjoyed, even if the consensus seems to be “we didn’t get the finale battle we were expecting so we’re going to retroactively decide the show is bad now.” It had problems, sure. Daemon’s weirwood-ex-machina vision made his entire season arc redundant. And, sure, the cinematic framing of Rhaenyra using her obsession with prophecy to justify the mass bloodshed she’s willing to inflict to, effectively, gain power is a little too noble. Still, very entertaining telly.

This has all lead me to ask the titular question: What would a good George RR Martin videogame actually look?

"Trash Bandits" is too good a name to ignore, and a slick enough platformer that I pretty much have to recommend it, even though I'm pretty bad at it...

Except! I'm always just a little bit better at it than I think. Or I get better, and want to keep playing enough to try things a few more times until I get it right. That's pretty rare for me, when there are hundreds of other games a quick alt+F4 away.

In one of his routinely excellent newsletters a good while back, Nathan Brown quoted RPS’s own blame-eater Graham Smith saying the following: "People say they want good AI in shooters, but they don’t. If FPS AI was perfect then it would be just like playing online against the people at the top of the leaderboard. It would be awful. When people say they want good AI, what they mean is they want to fight enemies that make them feel smart when they beat them."

Well, I’ve never seen the top of an FPS leaderboard, Graham, so I’m just going to stick with the opinion that The Last Of Us Part 2’s AI is very good. Oh, alright. Apparently my job is "contingent on caring about what words mean." Fine. What I actually mean is that TLOU 2’s AI has been doing a great job of making me feel deeply unsafe at pretty much all times. The fact that only a really smart cookie like me can deal with that level of pressure is irrelevant. I’ve been playing it over the last week or so, partly to knock it off the pile, and partly to chip away at the mount of karmic debt I hold with the spunked cost pantheon for buying a PS5 solely to play two Final Fantasy games.

An odd side effect of mid 30’s life is trying to find a balance between tasteful, neutral home decor and wanting to cover every inch of my space in odd, niche objects that I personally enjoy but might, say, confuse the little old lady at the cat shelter if they come do a home check.

Maybe I’m just being judgemental? She might actually secretly love this print of Mr Blobby devouring his son that I got with Frisson Comic’s Blobby Horror anthology:

I'm sure (and perhaps even hope) someone will pop up to prove me wrong, but I feel like we don't get Celtic peoples in strategy games all that much. And much as I'd enjoy a game indulging in the possibility that Ireland civilised the world twice, this neglect feels doubly true for those who wound up in Iberia instead, a culture about which I know nothing.

Songs of Steel Colon Hispania isn't an in-depth look at that culture, but it's an enjoyable look at the "local tribes decide how to keep the invading Roman jerks at bay" story anyway. If I call it kind of limited, I mean that not as a slight.

"Mmmm. Sexy cardboard" are some words you don’t really want to be discovered muttering to yourself over the recycling bins at seven in the morning when the trucks turn up, but are nonetheless very familiar to anyone with a tabletop game habit. I look up the rules of, probably, less than half of the games I buy. This feels like buying a videogame because of the art style, but I definitely do this too, and if I’m not supposed to trust my eyes over my brain then why are they at the front of my head, eh? The point is: Themeborne’s game are bloody gorgeous, and I keep buying them, and then ending up mildly disappointed at what they’re actually like to play.

One of the classic draws to games as a medium is having a go at fictional jobs like wizard, space salvager, or landlord. This week I've been playing Times & Galaxy, a kinda silly but absorbing visual novel game about a sci fi concept called "journalism". It's good!

The game, I mean. You can be a pretty terrible journalist, perhaps even intentionally. You're a robot too, which the game quietly points out in an in-universe article was installed with a blank slate for increased malleability. It is full of clever but mild mini-jokes like that, told not to expect big laughs but a baseline of playful cheeriness. I initially said "despite", but it might be precisely because of that levity that it's so easy to give real thought to what kind of reporterbot you'll be.

The last time I played Dope Wars (Drug Wars), I was hunched on ‘the shit chair’ over a CRT around my mates house. It was school lunchtime, and I was in either year 7 or 8. I was quite overweight, scruffy, and I probably had specks of bean juice on my white shirt. It’s occurring to me now how deeply cursed the term ‘bean juice’ is. Tomato sauce, then. Tomato sauce on my school shirt, because it took me longer than normal to develop a sense of self-awareness about such things, and thus embarrassment, and thus I stunk and looked like shit all the time. I sort of miss it, honestly.

Dope Wars ‘98 is an updated version of the 1984 MS-DOS strategy game by John E. Dell. Its famous for being everywhere at the time, including calculators. The Windows version I played is by Beermat Software and now it's become abandonware. In brief, it’s a game about being a drug dealer, and occasionally running from the po-po. The cop is called ‘Officer Hardass’. You can shoot him to death! With a kill-gun! Otherwise, this is the same version, visually identical. It's also not exactly the version in the header image, but I'm not even going to try screenshotting it.

Right from the ungainly 3D face taunting me on startup like the Guardian, I had a feeling I was going to enjoy Dungeons of Blood and Dream despite myself. It is a baffling, bizarre thing that lives on the border of janky, retro, and punk (insofar as games can be punk, but that's another article).

You're trapped in a Mind Prison, your "hateful magics" neutered, your memory and understanding gone. Now what?

What’s that? You’re deeply interested in learning the esoteric factors that play into my weekly choice of supporter post topics? Glad you asked, Simon T. Rawman. While I cannot compare my inspirations to the no-doubt spontaneous communion with the cosmos that inspired Debussy to tinkle out Suite bergamasque’s esteemed third movement, I did experience a moment of joyous serendipity yesterday. By which I mean that Edwin wrote a silly strapline riff on a piece of music I was already thinking about because it features in Conscript, which I just got done playing for review.

Speculative biology is something that, on reflection, I’ve been really into for ages in a disparate sort of way, but didn’t have the name to tie it together until the past few years. This has mainly been through reading interviews with - and interviewing - Gareth Damian Martin, who turned me on to Wayne Barlowe’s Expedition, an influence on his own speculative biology game In Other Waters. Also, like pretty much everyone, I find the teeming oddness and spectral beauty of underwater ecosystems both life affirming and a little bit terrifying - awesome, in the traditional sense.

The final minutes of Kerrang! TV - shut down this week alongside four other music channels in a cost-cutting effort by Channel 4 - saw a reel of clips that showed a channel frozen in time. I don’t think any of the songs were more recent than fifteen years old, and many were much older.

Kerrang! as a magazine, and a brand, has continued to champion emerging artists throughout its lifecycle, but the channel’s final moments felt like a guttural declaration that it had tattooed its name in a heart alongside its favorites a long time ago, and everything that came after was just iron-ons and pin badges. That the beating heart of the channel was always placed at a specific moment in time (always more about nostalgia than revolution) albeit one continually referenced and playlisted and occasionally revived in retro callback trends since. Deftones were always too interesting to be lumped under nu-metal, to be fair.

Me again, the Destiny 2 person (someone needs to fly the flag now that Alice0, RPS in peace, has sadly left us). Over the last few weeks Liam (also RPS in peace) and I have dunked lots of orbs, made numbers go up, and have almost come to terms with the fact The Final Shape is actually a verb. That means we've started ironically using it in situations like, "Wouldn't surprise me if we get Final Shaped", as, I don't know, our country's election happens tomorrow. So uh, anyway! What have we made of the game's latest expansion over the last few weeks?

Yeah it's leagues ahead of Bungie's previous effort Lightfall, owing to things being a fair bit zanier.

Schmidt Workshops caught my notice recently with the excellent Islands of the Caliph, a fairly simple game that I half expected to wear out in an hour. It was instead charming and engrossing, with a novel setting and encouraging atmosphere that carried it well beyond that finish line.

Aberration Analyst is about as far removed from it as possible. Instead of bashing monsters while becoming a better Muslim, you sit at a desk putting together clues to track unseen monsters. But they share a creative spirit, and a well-judged balance between revealing information and letting you figure out the rest.

It’s Shadow Of The Erdtree week (month?), so naturally we’ve been covering it a bit. I wrote about some discourse. I had some opinions. I tried to write some more, and in the process of doing that, I ended up having to confront my own thoughts on the base game, and why I’ve always felt at odds with a lot of the critical reception to it. I keep seeing very big words written about it, so thought it would be a worthwhile exercise to write a very small review.

In 1996, I played an RTS game named War Wind. I haven’t played it since, though I’ve thought about if often. Except, I didn’t actually know what the game was called until last week. I found out by googling the word 'Boncas'.

There's this one stealth section in Shadow Of The Erdtree that I won't/can't spoil for now. But know that it has you hiding in bushes to escape nasties whose version of "You're it!" is around 1000 times more aggressive than most adolescents who might prod you with Skips flavouring-coated fingers. Besides other Torrent-related things I'm writing up, I've found it's got me thinking about something...

...Tenchu. I'd like FromSoftware to do a Tenchu again.

What little rejuvenation reaches my ancient, haggard soul comes most often from pleasant little surprises like a game creeping up on me.

Our Adventurer Guild is cheerfully simple in appearance, and its turn-based fights and griddy missions establish its parts at once as familiar, potentially even by-the-numbers. But those parts are arranged into an original and deceptively detailed mercenary management game that got harder to put down the longer I played.

The RPS inbox is a wondrous treasure-trove of distraction doubloons, some delightful, some shite-ful, and not even Outlook’s lichen-like interface can dull the luster of its offerings. In amongst the press releases, indie nuggets, and the occasional pitch for sponsored AI content (no, never), something truly exquisite occasionally peeks through the chest lid. This week, it was a completely context-free message containing several photos of what appear to be artificial houseplants from a man named ‘Harold’. We take criticism seriously here, so I can only assume the sender intended the contents of these imposter pots to be judged as such. Well, I’m nothing if not obliging. Apologies for the quality of the images. I screen-grabbed then resized them up because I was too scared to download them in case they contained explosives or something.

Sonar Shock is a reminder that some of the best game concepts or settings seem so obvious as soon as you play them.

System Shock on an unreasonably huge submarine on an equally ludicrous trip around the Northeast Passage via Cape Agulhas? With a satirical Soviet setting that isn't just "lol russia" or "I think Stalker was about machismo and gun attachments"? And a third thing that I'll get to in a minute because this intro is getting out of control? God yes.

Whether or not they actually amount to anything, rumours of a new Doom have had me diving back into Doom Eternal recently. There’s at least one level in it that feels like essay-bait, so I’m obliging. The centerpiece of Mars Core - the FPS’ best level - is a comically massive superweapon called the BFG-10000. Oh, Chekov. If only you could see what we’ve done with your wisdom. The literary subtlety to gun-big-enough-to-scar-planets pipeline will eventually subsume all of pop culture, and those of us who chose to specialise writing about headshots will alternate between grins and tears from the wreckage.

In Mike Judge’s 1999 cult comedy Office Space, there’s a scene where Ron Livingston’s Peter - a programmer working a tedious corporate job - visits a hypnotist. “Is there any way that you could, sorta, just zonk me out so I don’t know that I’m at work, in here,” Peter asks of the hypnotist, pointing to his head. “Could I come home and think that I’ve been fishing all day, or something?”. That’s basically the high-level concept for brilliant sci-fi comedy show Severance, right there. Not wanting to spoil any more than I absolutely have to, I’ll present you with two facts up top. 1. It features a touching queer relationship between John Turturro and Christopher Walken and 2. It’s some of the best television I’ve seen in the last few years. Throw in some Stanley Parable, Control, Gilliam’s Brazil, and some more meta undertones of general musing on gamified reward loops, and you’ve got Severance.

We have been cursed with a terrible devouring monster. Each harvest, one villager must don the ceremonial, mildly magical mask, and enter the fields alone, to gather the precious life-giving ambrosia before the beast can befoul it. For five nights you must do battle, or evade its ravenous clutches.

Those of you who have known your own Devourer are surely thinking: Only five nights per year? Luxury. Harvest Hunt is good, though.

In one of the better gaming trends of the last few years, we appear to have entered a golden age for booting the crud out of doors. There’s Deathbulge of course, but also the upcoming Anger Foot, Abiotic Factor, and a load more I’m sure. There was also literally Door Kickers, but that was ages ago. Anyway, the latest game to put a hinge-disrespecting protagonist front and center is also my current obsession: the excellent Post Void/Hotline Miami-type beat, Mullet Mad Jack. It’s a very fast, very silly FPS about shooting robot billionaires that takes its aesthetic from 80’s anime and PC-98 games. I’m not sure what else you need, honestly.

In a twist of fate I've mentioned in some recent Destiny 2 news posts, I am fully back into Destiny. Former vidbud Liam and I used it, initially, as something we could do while catching up on life. But now? Now we're all in. Liam has created a spreadsheet of things we're ticking off to prepare for the upcoming expansion, and I think it's the perfect summation of what the game is to us: something that makes no sense at all and yet something that makes our brains hum with happiness.

And what we've found with Destiny, in all of its bloat, is that we haven't explored for a single second since our return. Everything is accomplished through menus, making it quite Starfield-esque, which is terrible… but also good. We can't make sense of it and we don't think we ever will.

I love building games, but it's not that often that put one down and feel particularly tempted to get straight back into it again. Of Life And Land is one of those, but thankfully not so much so that it threatens to consume my every waking moment.

It quietly does several things in a modest little way, that are all the more impressive for its lack of fanfare. The core one though, is that it takes the kind of simulationist foundation normally reserved for the punishing Dwarf Fortress derivatives or gnarly logistics games, and builds on them an approachable, gentle, even philosophical game instead. In a word: it's lovely.