That guy's a Maniac...

For those of you outside the UK the current weather may not seem like a topic for conversations lasting more than a couple of minutes. For the British however, it is a source of endless conversation particularly when the weather does surprisingly interesting things outside of the format: depressing rain.  Well now it's fucking snowing so productivity in the UK drops ten percent, not because, people have to stay at home because of death warnings and avalanches but because everyone takes the time to tell everyone they meet that "It is snowing", "It's cold" and endless details about the varying extent of the snow from their own areas and the areas they've heard of through friends and colleagues "I heard Essex got it bad but Kent is fine". Us. We'll just rerun this post from two years ago thanks.

...because every time I sit down at a keyboard my fingers default to WASD. And because some of my best memories and games have been on the PC, from the heady sprite driven days of DOS games; pointy-clickies like Discworld or the ancestral king of FPS's Doom.  SETSOUND= SB16  Through to the graphic driven monsters that plague benchmarking sites. My gaming memories start with the humble Commodore 64 in the 8-bit era and Amiga 1200 in the 16/32 bit era. Yes I flirted the consoles of that time, NES, Mastersystem, Super Nintendo and Mega Drive, but weirdly I remember playing Street Fighter II on the C64: But my first PC was an ex-office PC that ran windows 3.1 akin to the specs below: But as time went on I learned more about PCs I upgraded my 33MHz CPU, to 166MHz. My GFX card got a much needed boost, and as time went on upgrading just became a thing that had to happen, not necessarily just to play a game, but to keep a PC ahead-of-the-curve for a few more years

Our part of the Internet is all a flutter about A not THE Steam Box (Piston or something) and now some biometric gaze tracking thing but I for one couldn't care less. Note, American friends it is couldn't care less not could care less. Could care less means that you still care about something. You could lower the level of care about something. Couldn't care less. Could Not. Anyway, I'll probably never be a PC gamer. Don't get me wrong I think PC games can be brilliant. Rock Paper Shotgun is my little window into the world of PC games and every now and then I'll get a little bit jealous of the gaming opportunities I'm missing out on. I love the stories that come from the RPS team and the unique gaming experiences that can only be had with mods, indie platformers almost as good as older platformers, the 'five second' games and loser generated stuff that really reaches into the upper echelons of what gaming is capable of being. On the other hand t

As we mentioned in this post we've finally acquired all of the Operation Rainfall titles for the Nintendo Wii and we're proud of it. Thanks again to all the people who badgered Ninty to localise these titles. We've spent hundreds of hours on Xenoblade Chronicles , tens on the Last Story and fractions on Pandora's Tower . Nonetheless we're now in a position to bring you the most important information about these innovative titles that caused a mini renaissance in JRPGs. That was until nobody bought them. That question, which we bring to you now, uncut and unedited, free from the chains of 'the man' who keeps the video games press subdued and gagged. That question, which we're about to ask and then answer is: What are the tit physics like in the Operation Rainfall titles? We know. Finally right? Each of the games being a JRPG of sorts, Pandora's Tower is more of an action adventure if you insist on using nonsensical genre terms like that, f

Okay, so we all take review scores with a pinch of salt M'kay? That said it interesting seeing how the world of games with it's bagillions of entries looks when you par each game down to a grade or number and compare them to each other, or platform to platform or year to year. MCV (who definitely did not have a bad year last year) reports on Metacritics analysis of last year and the results chime with how we felt about last year's games.  They were just a bit pants and this is the games that were making the headlines and everyone was talking about. For our personal tastes we hardly picked up any of these titles. Ass Creed still hasn't fixed the flaws that put us off the first and second one and Far Cry seems to be picking up GOTY nominations here there and everywhere by default. Like everyone else Dishonored was good but eerily instantly forgettable. Last year our gaming palettes were gorged with Xenoblade Chronicles (technically a 2011 release for EU), Poke

New years Resolution are like video games, [insert witty analogy here. Perhaps watch that "The Thick of it" DVD box set your snooty guardian reading friend got you for Xmas for inspiration]. And as such we have some resolutions this year. Number one, do more posts. And dear reader(s) this is not just for you, you conceited twat(s), don't be so selfish. This is for us too. We need to spit some venom and bile about how games are not as good as they were X years ago, otherwise it builds up and the only way to vent is by punching random handicapped children on the street. Number two, We do solemnly vow to refuse to accept browser gaming, any review of such will only be ironic or sarcastic. We almost did a review in 2012 of Family guy online which is a browser-based- microtransaction-fueled-wow-clone, (remember when games were just defined as, Shoot-em-up, RPG, Beat-em-up, Platformer...) But thankfully we got our act together and did our usual; opened blogger and crie