This week the Electronic Wireless Show podcast discusses some of our favourite (and least favourite) inventory configurations. A humble beast, the inventory, yet a feature of many games - sometimes even a necessity. Often we only notice one if it's terrible. But boy, a good inventory is worth a dozen mules. So lets talk about them today!
In other news this week, Nate thinks he has come up with an original premise for a Pixar film, only to discover he has invented Seth Rogan's nightmare film Sausage Party, and we are officially starting our campaign to get Henry 'Vitamin H' Cavill on the show. We will be mentioning him every week from now on. Plus: what we like doing on our birthdays, school plays, and pro-wrestling adaptations of Dickens.
]]>There's never been a better time to get into survival games on PC, as the recent revival of the genre means Steam is now awash in some truly great games, both in early access and in full release. There are more arriving every year, too, which is why we've done the hard work for you and ranked the very best survival games to dive into today. Fair warning - there are some early access games on this list, which mean they might be a little janky early on. Give them the time they deserve, though, and you'll find they often blossom into some truly great games over subsequent updates. We've only included the very best and most complete-feeling survival games on this list, though, so you can rest assured that every game here will leave you hungry for more. It's by no means exhaustive, but it should give you a nice selection of wolf-taming, base-building, carrot-picking action to choose from.
]]>Whether you prefer wizards, sword-and-board warriors, the irradiated wasteland, vampires, or isometric text-heavy stories, the RPG is the genre that will never let you down. Accross the dizzing number of games available where you can play a role, there's something for everyone - and we've tried to reflect that in our list of the best RPGs on PC. The past couple of years have been great for RPGs, so there are some absolute classics as well as brand spanking new games on this list. And there's more to look forwards to, with rumblings of Dragon Age: Dread Wolf finally on the horizon, and space epic Starfield in our rear view mirror. Whatever else may happen, though, this list will provide you with the 50 best RPGs that you can download and play on PC right now.
]]>Post-apocalyptic videogames, the ultimate escape. How wonderful to venture to a strange land, so different from our own, and see what the world may look like an entire week from now. Well, today the PlayStation clan secluded themselves behind their barricades with The Last Of Us Part 2, leaving the PC tribe to suffer in the harsh elements of reality alone. But never fear, wanderer. Here are some similar games to play if you want to leave your austere existence behind, and indulge in a grim struggle instead. Pull up a plastic bucket, break open a tin of Pedigree Chum, here are the 8 bleakest post-apocalypses in PC gaming. A post-apocalyst.
]]>It's been an eventful decade for PC games, and it would be hard for you to summarise everything that's happened in the medium across the past ten years. Hard for you, but a day's work for us. Below you'll find our picks for the 50 greatest games released on PC across the past decade.
]]>Living in space sounds like a claustrophobic nightmare, and Ostranauts isn't doing much to change my opinion on the matter. Billed as a "noir spaceship-life sim", it's the next from Neo Scavenger studio Blue Bottle Games, and set in the same universe. Earth is completely screwed by forces both man-made and cosmic, so players get to manage a small ship, trying to make ends meet in a solar system in the throes of (very) late capitalism. The game's full nature is still a mystery, but it's reminding me of The Sims, Duskers and Space Station 13. Take a peek at the teaser trailer below.
]]>This is Brendan, broadcasting live from rumour world, where everything is made of a nebulous candy floss-like substance. The locals call it “hope.” Amid this sticky cloud, a figure has formed. It’s Geralt of Rivia, hero of popular Gwent spin-off, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. The monster-hunting swordsman will “make an appearance” in another game later this year, according to CD Projekt Red community lead Marcin Momot. Some have asserted that he'll be a guest character in upcoming fighting game Soul Calibur VI. Which makes sense given the close business ties between the Polish studio and Japanese publisher Namco Bandai.
It isn't confirmed. But it does raise the question: who else deserves a place on the stage of history? I asked the RPS treehouse who they’d like to see. Here’s the list we all settled on.
]]>Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day, perhaps for all time.
There are lots of things I love about NEO Scavenger [official site]. I love how, despite its lo-fi visuals, it conveys the fickle fortunes and indifferent cruelty of a wilderness better than many technologically superior survival games. I love its ridiculously detailed combat system that lets you rugby-tackle feral dogs. I love the ambient sound effects that convey the misleading serenity of its natural environments; the chirping of birds, the wind in the trees, the soft crunch of grass underfoot. Delightful.
]]>NEO Scavenger was one of our favourite games of 2014. Now its creator, Daniel Fedor, is working on his next game, and he says it's a "mashup of Starflight, Prison Architect, and some Firefly." That is, it's about top-down ship and crew management in a hard sci-fi universe.
]]>What are the best Steam Summer Sale deals? Each day for the duration of the sale, we'll be offering our picks - based on price, what we like, and what we think more people should play. Read on for the five best deals from day 10 of the sale.
]]>I spot Adam looking for me in the dark and edge closer. Adam swings blindly and misses. I tackle him to the ground and start kicking. When he passes out, I stop - I wouldn't normally, but he's a friend - and start rumbling around in his pockets. Nothing. I check for a plastic bag and - yes! Inside: the rights to review turn-based, permadeath RPG NEO Scavenger. I scurry off into the night... and die three days later from the Blue Rot I caught from Adam.
NEO Scavenger is out of Early Access.
]]>A lot of games contain an onslaught of right hooks, high kicks and hot lead, but few manage to make each individual encounter with violence meaningful, tense, exciting, important. NEO Scavenger manages to do all of the above through a turn-based RPG with permadeath, and it has offered more memorable fights than any other game this year.
Graham: I could happily give every one of this year's awards to NEO Scavenger.
]]>All I want to do in life is play NEO Scavenger. In those moments when I'm unable to play, all I want to do is tell other people about NEO Scavenger. It's an RPG in which you flit from scrabbling around abandoned mobile homes in search of the barest necessities of life, to uncovering a complex, well-written, Fallout-style world. As you start it over and over again, choosing new skills and finding new paths with each new beginning, you'll discover that there's no need to ever repeat yourself and that the one constant is the inevitability of your own crummy demise. I've written about its swell depiction of failure before, but this week I started a new project.
I've been playing one session of NEO Scavenger per day: one life, one death. Here are the week's endings.
]]>I spent half my evenings this week advancing through Advanced Warfare. Call of Duty games are uniformly about forward progression, but some of their most memorable moments comes from points of scripted failure: missing your chance to grab a gun as a Russian soldier in the first Call of Duty, or the nuclear blast in Modern Warfare 1. You learn something about the realities of those scenarios in both moments.
Advanced Warfare squanders its one point of necessary failure: the first mission's unfortunate end incites action from both the player and from Kevin Spacey, but there's little that's real about it. You lose an arm, you gain a robot arm. As a player, you learn nothing. Failure in videogames can be so much more, both as a way of generating interesting play experiences and in making less abstract the knowledge we hold about the world around us.
Here are some games that I think do failure better, and what those failures taught me.
]]>Neo Scavenger is one of the best turn-based RPGs I’ve ever played. Although still in Early Access, it has oodles of content and has received several hefty updates since I first played it. As part of Survival Week, I decided to document a single playthrough of the game. No quicksaves, no restarts, no chance. Here’s how I died.
The previous parts are here.
]]>Neo Scavenger is one of the best turn-based RPGs I’ve ever played. Although still in Early Access, it has oodles of content and has received several hefty updates since I first played it. As part of Survival Week, I decided to document a single playthrough of the game. No quicksaves, no restarts, no chance. Here’s how I died.
Part one is here.
]]>Neo Scavenger is one of the best turn-based RPGs I've ever played. Although still in Early Access, it has oodles of content and has received several hefty updates since I first played it. As part of Survival Week, I decided to document a single playthrough of the game. No quicksaves, no restarts, no chance. Here's how I died.
]]>Adam has previously scavenged through the lovely, horrible, turn-based NEO Scavenger, killing a blind man in order to steal one of his shoes in the process. The game has changed a lot since the start of the year though, and one of the largest updates launched last week, introducing new encounters, weapons, recipes locations, a nasal allergy, and a load of bug fixes.
]]>It seems like only a few days since the last write-up of an RPG created by former Bioware developers. Neo Scavenger is actually the work of a single man, Dan Fedor, and it’s a less lavish production than The Banner Saga. This is a brutal game about survival in a harsh world. It’s also one of the best single player turn-based RPGs I’ve played for a long time.
]]>This could be the most important thing you read today, unless you're planning to operate dangerous machinery and haven't peeked at the instructions yet. Actually, forget that, this is still more important. That is providing you're the sort of handsome individual who enjoys survival sims, hex-based RPGs, post-apocalyptic scavenging and turn-based everything. If you like any of those delicacies, I have just the thing for you. It's called NEO Scavenger, you can try the demo in your browser here or read on to discover more.
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