It’s been a bizarre 12 months at RPS for me. After eight years as information editor, I began the nebulous new function of affiliate editor. This introduced a broad mandate to cowl indie games and PC Game Pass and to do, like, no matter else I feel is likely to be enjoyable or good. It has been bizarre to not clock in and simply Do News, and to have duty solely over myself. This freedom has felt nice when I’ve had concepts, and horrible when I’ve not. I’m nonetheless feeling it out, settling in, and making errors, however I’m fairly having fun with myself. Hopefully you will have loved a few of it too. Here are a number of of my favorite issues I’ve written this 12 months!
My greatest mission was my Tour de Jeux, a biking tour of PC gaming spanning 12 posts, 14 games, a handful of movies, and 11,146 phrases. I acquired again into biking throughout lockdown, exhausting, and was eager to take a look at bikes in games and in life. Running alongside the Tour De France, my Tour De Jeux checked out xtreme sports activities games, technique games, bicycles in multiplayer shooters, cute indie strolling simulators and visible novels, childhood adventures, and even a game powered by using my actual bike, in addition to chatting in regards to the Tour, bicycles usually, and my very own biking adventures.
At the beginning of the 12 months, again within the information division, I had quite a lot of enjoyable sighing and groaning about NFTs. Publishers have been as much as garbage and nonsense however I did no less than generally benefit from the alternative to ‘go off’, as the children say. I used to be glad to see the horrible concepts begin to wither and die till I realised, wait, really, NFTs are the longer term, and it is a implausible future we should always all get behind. So I began writing Non-Fungible Future, a sequence of younger grownup cyberpunk novels about teenage cryptorebels saving the dystopian future utilizing NFTs.
While some minor authorized/ethical points are holding up their launches, you possibly can nonetheless learn the excerpts and writer’s notes I’ve shared from the primary two books: 1/1 and Original Content.
Speaking of kewl hackers, I additionally loved celebrating Cyber Monday with a sequence of daft posts about mirrorshades, knuckle tattoos, and a Swiss military knife for PowerPoint displays. Because everyone knows that Cyber Monday is about our on-line world and hackers and cyberpunk and nothing else. I had hoped to do extra, and higher, however ah it is okay. I did discover it very humorous that William Gibson himself responded to talk about mirrorshades as an infosec hazard.
Honestly, that submit exists primarily as a result of I believed a pair of mirrorshades reflecting Solitaire quite than a dystopian skyline could be a humorous twist on a basic cyberpunk picture. And it’s. I loved the method of taking that mirrorshades picture too. I spent ages squished in entrance of my monitor, staring into my purple rear bike gentle balanced on the nook of my display, attempting to angle reflections good whereas holding my cellphone up and snapping on the selfie digital camera. This would have been a lot simpler with an actual digital camera, or an assistant.
And with regards to placing a lot extra effort into a picture than anybody would ever discover or respect, I opened up about how typically I enjoyment of creating these particulars. After spending hours capturing one screenshot and 43 seconds of video displaying a cat in Morrowind (for a submit a few mother or father modding within the household cat to guard their youngsters from mudcrabs), I defined that course of in my first Screenshot Secrets submit.
I used to be glad to have time for Screenshot Saturday Mondays, reviving a column began by Jay Castello then continued by Nat Clayton. Every week, a decide of a dozen-odd attention-grabbing screenshots and video clips from indie games which caught my eye on Twitter’s #ScreenshotSaturday share-o-rama. It’s thrilling to jot down, scrolling by way of tons of of tweets and seeing the huge vary of indie games, and an effective way to identify upcoming games we should always pay extra consideration to. I do not know what is going to occur after Elon Musk kills Twitter.
My new function additionally gave me time to revive my mission to reply the most important query: what’s one of the best factor in video games? A toughie. So every week, I decide two instantly comparable issues (e.g. “dynamic music or hex grids?”, “ridiculous spell animations or the mangled palms of Ethan Winters?”), look at them, then flip it over to you to vote. We’re nonetheless within the first spherical however absolutely I’ll quickly have coated each single factor in video games. Maybe sooner or later I’ll courtroom options for extra issues. The format has been a enjoyable writing immediate for me, and I’ve very a lot loved your critical debate within the feedback over these critical points.
This bit is from a favorite, What’s higher: a degree 1 rat, or Alone In The Dark’s jacket stock?
Could you kill a rat? Can you have a look at a shiny little lad, grown fats on brewer’s barley and dropped pork scratchings, and put a blade between his shiny eyes? I’m asking each bodily and emotionally. Have you seen how briskly rats transfer? Have you seen how cute they’re? Can you kill one after which carry on killing after the primary fleck of blood hits your face? Can you heave apart the sacks of neeps and tatties his household will flee behind? If you possibly can, hey, perhaps you are able to carve a bloodsoaked path throughout the land seeking fame, fortune, vengeance, or regardless of the hell it’s you assume you deserve. But if this primary step causes you to stumble, Judith is aware of the place you will be two days from now. She cannot maintain doing this.
But I’ll let you know what I did not do that 12 months: substitute the more and more gross corpse of a mangled outdated mousepad. Yes, the ruminations on its decay will, I’m sorry to say, proceed. Certainly nothing to do with me processing grief in a method I feel some individuals would possibly discover humorous.
I don’t know what I’m doing subsequent 12 months, however I did not know what I used to be doing this 12 months both. Let’s discover out collectively. Thanks for studying!