The last couple of years have been pretty good for management games, but only the select few have made the cut for our list of best management games you can play right now. If you're looking for something to sink into over the holidays, check out our picks below.
]]>Look, we've not got time for life histories here. If you've read anything of mine on this site or elsewhere, you'll know full well I really like, y'know, fish and that. Sea Geezers. Damp Daniels. The Wet Squad. Call them what you will, I'm into them. I subscribe to Practical Fishkeeping magazine. My office at home has ten fish tanks in it. If you weren't aware this was my thing, you are now. So you can imagine how keen I'd be on the prospect of a proper aquarium management game. Now admittedly, Megaquarium is not my ideal aquarium game. But since that would be a game so hideously in-depth and dry that it would probably sell about eight copies, all to me, I feel it's a decent compromise with the appetites of reasonable humans.
]]>Halloo, gentle reader. Since we're half way through the entire year of 2020 (yet somehow it is also still March?), we decided to run down, lasso and tie up some of our favourite games from the last six months, and force them into a nice list for you.
2020 still has plenty of new PC games to come, of course, but these are the ones closest to our little hearts so far. We've got strategy, we've got card games, we've got systematic reclamation of scraped spaceships. And, since Nate Crowley is one of the contributors to this list, we've got fish. Statistically speaking, there's bound to be at least one game on here that you'll ruddy bloody love too!
]]>Look out. The year 2018 is going down in a storm. There are hundreds of games aboard, running, jumping, trying their best to survive the maelstrom. But there’s only one tiny lifeboat, and only enough room for three games. It falls on the sorry shoulders of the RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show, to decide which trio of games clamber onto the life raft and which games drown and become lost to history.
]]>I bet you thought that what with all the spooky stuff we’ve had on the site over the past while, we were leading up to a big horror extravaganza of Halloween-themed stuff today. “Someone is going to use the word ‘spoopy’,” you thought. Well you’re wrong!
All our special Halloween features are about nice things today. We are wall-to-wall niceness. Dare I say suffocatingly cute. Guaranteed no fun jump scares built into the code of the website as you scroll down. The only thing you have to fear is being so relaxed that you fall asleep and nap for too long and then you wake up with a fuzzy brain and aren’t able to do anything except nap again. Oh no! You were going to make dinner but now you’ll just have to eat a can of pringles and a bag of Bitsa Wispa! Let RPS be the light you turn on when your living room is a bit dark and you think the bag on the sofa is actually a monster about to kill you. And you turn on the light and you're like, phew, it's okay, it's just the replacement Bitsa Wispa I bought from Tesco. Everything is okay.
To start, here is a big post rounding up lots of sweet, cute, or otherwise lovely things we’ve written or made or talked about on the site for the last few months.
]]>My body betrayed me last month, trapping me in my bed when it wasn’t sending me rushing to my poor, overworked loo. I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t work and so I turned to management games to take my mind off the virus squatting inside me. Juggling budgets, disasters and production chains might not sound particularly relaxing, but there’s also a swathe of low-pressure sims that serve as a brilliant panacea for stress.
]]>Megaquarium's off-screen fish scientists had just unlocked some eels, and they seemed like just what my aquarium needed to draw in the big crowds. Sure, I had some guests, seduced by the promise of clean floors, well-stocked vending machines and at least three types of fish, but I lacked the kind of big-ticket item that put aquariums on the map. So excited was I to display my new eels, I dropped them into a tank that already had a few underwater residents. Disaster ensued.
]]>Have you been checking in on the Rock Paper Shotgun Video Department? It has its very own video corner on the site where everything is collected. But in case you missed it, I'm going to round up our moving picture delights from the last week. From life-consuming RPGs to fish prisons, we covered a lot of bases.
]]>Dear RPS, Hullo everyone! Dashing off a quick postcard from my hols. Ate three sticks of rock for breakfast today. Have started wearing a hat. Sand's everywhere. Margo did it again. Sophia says she's going to kill Judith. Visited the world's largest dairy statue of Alan Shearer; have bought you a lewd souvenir. And you wouldn't believe what we found while diving in the bay - or the noise it made ha ha! All my love to Dottie, and please spoil the cats rotten for me.
Warmest regards, A
p.s. What are you playing this weekend? Here's what we're clicking on!
]]>Why did the fish stop arguing with the barnacle?
Because she didn’t like to coral.
Why did the shark always consult his horoscope?
He was the terror of the Pisces.
Why was the shipwreck annoyed with its partner?
It had crabs.
Okay so Megaquarium is a fishkeeping tycoon game from the makers of Big Pharma and it’s coming out on September 13.
]]>FISH FISH FISH FISH! Oh goodness, I have zero chill when it comes to fish. That is going to make writing about Megaquarium [official site] - a theme park management game from Big Pharma creator Tim Wicksteed, where you run your own aquarium - difficult because mostly I just want to tell you everything I think about fish at any given moment. I will try to rein it in so I can get this news post up efficiently.
]]>EGX Rezzed 2017 is now underway in That London, filling Tobacco Dock [nb: offers neither boat trips nor fags -ed.] with games, talks, and lights for three days. We're Rezzed's official "media partner" so we've dispatched Pip, Adam, and Graham (and, soon, Alec) to poke around, host some talks, interview some developers, look proud of our 'Cave of Wonders' showcase, cast a live pod, and go to the pub on official RPS business. To slack off, in other words. To ensure they continue generating content while on this holiday, I'm making them send me updates throughout their day.
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