There you are, rambling through the woods of Interactive Entertainment with an empty pack and a spring in your step. Here I am, lying in wait behind a tree. Wham! Bam! You reel back in consternation as I bounce into the path and clobber you with a sack containing no less than eight venerable RPGs, from Baldur's Gate to Warhammer 40,000: Rogue's Trader - well over a thousand hours worth of dungeons, dragons, dicerolls, dwarven shopkeepers and many other things I refuse to spend time alliterating, all of which will (currently) set you back just £32.07.
Were you planning to spend this weekend playing some cute two-hour artgame sideshow, without any levelling at all? Shut up, you DOLT. You will play what the nice journalist tells you to play! Best lay in extra caffeine tablets, because it's going to take you till Monday just to get through the character creators alone.
]]>Less than 18 months after it acquired Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition and Mythforce developers Beamdog, Embracer Group has reportedly laid off more than two dozen staff at the studio. Mere days after the release of its nostalgic co-op shooter, no less.
]]>Humble Bundle’s latest collection of good games for a good price and a good cause is a whopping instant library of classic Dungeons & Dragons CRPGs, including both original Baldur’s Gate games, some similarly legendary classics and some more modern additions to the genre. It’s quite the deal.
]]>May is on the horizon and that can mean only one thing: Star Wars Day of course. To celebrate May the 4th (be with you), Amazon Prime are giving away 15 games to subscribers over the next month, with the flight combat sim Star Wars: Rogue Squadron 3D leading the pack of freebies. Every single Thursday a new batch of free games will be available to claim, so take a look at the lineup below.
]]>Gather close, adventurers, and prepare to ceremonially Tweet "I feel old!" en masse. 20 years ago today, the influential and undeniable RPG Planescape: Torment was released. What a strange and wonderful achievement that game was! What impact it has had, even now, literally decades later! You can see PST waving at you from yer big epics like Divinity: Original Sin 2, and yer indie weirdnesses like Disco Elysium.
We felt we couldn't let Planescape's birthday go unremarked upon. But we've made a lot of remarks about it over the years, so we weren't sure if we had anything new to add. So, as a compromise, we've decided to round up just a few of the articles RPS has spaffed out about PST, so you can read them with us, and we can all feel old together. Spoilers: a lot of the spaffing was done by Alec (RPS in peace), but you probably knew that already.
]]>Update: The year is finished, which means you can now read the final list of our favourite games of 2017.
2017 has already been an extraordinary year for PC games, from both big-name AAA successes to no-name surprise indie smashes. Keeping up with so much that's worth playing is a tough job, but we've got your back. Here is a collection of the games that have rocked the RPS Treehouse so far this year.
We've all picked our favourites, and present them here in alphabetical order so as not to start any fights. You're bound to have a game you'd have wanted to see on the list, so please do add it to the comments below.
]]>'Terrible' only in the sense of their gaming capability. Honestly, I'm sure your laptop is lovely to look at and it was definitely a extremely sensible idea to spend all that money on it instead of buying a holiday or helping to save the pandas. Truth is, though, that playing recently-released games on the vast majority of laptops is about as effective as starting an online petition to uncancel your favourite television show.
A little discretion goes a long way, however. Sure, you may be denied the glossiest of exploding viscera, but it is entirely possible to keep up with the Joneses even on a Terrible Laptop that has no dedicated graphics card. Here are but twelve contemporary games - either recently released or still-evolving going concerns - that will indeed run on your glammed-up toaster. Additional suggestions below are entirely welcome.
]]>What can change the nature of a game? It'll take more than high-res support and a scalable UI to change Planescape: Torment, but why would you want to muck with its guts? Black Isle's RPG is still a fine thing, and the Planescape: Torment: Enhanced Edition [official site] simply makes running it on modern systems less of a faff. A worthy re-release! Our Alec told us all Wot He Thought of the Enhanced Edition back in March but it actually only launched last night. Break out your gel pens and start updating your journal.
]]>Surprise classic RPG remastering attack! Mere weeks after revered 1999 philoso-roleplayer Planescape: Torment [official site] enjoyed a belated spiritual sequel in the over-lored but otherwise strong Torment Tides Of Numenera, it gets itself a modernised re-release too. It's due out April 11, but I've got the thing updating my hard drive's journal and changing the nature of my VDU right now.
We're not going to run a full review because we all played PST a thousand years ago and know full well it's a solid-gold classic of narrative'n'choice-led games, but I do want to look at what's changed in Beamdog's 'Enhanced Edition' and whether it's a meaningful improvement. It's a bit of a mixed bag, though the net result is the most playable and best-looking version of PST to date.
]]>Planescape: Torment [official site], the revered 1999 fantasy RPG from Fallout creators Black Isle, is getting overhauled a touch in an Enhanced Edition due next month. It'll bring support for modern high resolutions and a new interface to match, along with tweaks and fixes. It's being handled by Beamdog, the folks behind the Enhanced Editions of Icewind Dale and Baldur's Gate then a new Gate expansion of their own.
Yesterday, following the wee teaser campaign, Cobbo had some grand predictions for the Enhanced Edition. He's close with some but, as far as we know, it will not actually let Nordom transform into a battlesuit for Morte.
]]>If you go down to planescape.com today, you're sure of a big surprise. Unless you're expecting a countdown, in which case, it's that. What could it mean? Well, if you open the page source, you'll see a secret message hidden in there - 0x50 0x53 0x54 0x45 0x45. Convert that from ASCII numbers to letters and you get PSTEE. The two most likely translations of that are either Planescape Torment: Enhanced Edition as Beamdog's latest updated release, or someone is really looking forward to going down to Gregg's for a pastie sometime on Tuesday. It's not confirmed. It could be something else. Maybe there's a 'Planescape Kids' TV series coming out. Nobody's told me.
Though it would explain this changelog I found lying around the other week...
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