This is a piece I’ve written for Rock, Paper, Shotgun. I’ve reposted the whole thing below because a) my hits aren’t going to hurt them and b) it’s very personal to me. If you want more information about the game, go read it on RPS – the commenters really know their stuff about Ultima.
To the tune of: Kraftwerk – The Robots Here’s the transcript of an interview for Rock, Paper, Shotgun I did with Chris Rippy, Producer, Robot Entertainment (formely Ensemble, creators of Age of Empires) about their new game Orcs Must Die; the original preview is here: Why a tower defence game, not another RTS? Good question. In
To the tune of: Various Artists – A Visit To A Sad Planet Gareth Garratt is curled up in his wheelchair, his body secured in a bucket seat while his hands clutch at the side of a desktop. His chin is pressed down onto a Toshiba mouse and he’s using that to control a virtual
A couple of paragraphs I worked up for PC Gamer, for a forthcoming article, but I didn’t end up using. To the tune of: Tenacious D – The Government Totally Sucks Prior to the 2010 election, all three national parties had pledged to give UK games developers tax breaks; despite being something the Tories and
To the Tune of: Jeff Wayne;Richard Burton;Justin Hayward – The Eve Of The War This is the longer draft of a short piece I did for the just-released Delayed Gratification. Before the Wikileaks stuff happened incidentally, so I was prescient about 4Chan. Missile weapons, phalanxes, military organisation, artillery, ironclads, dreadnoughts, machine guns, submarines, and finally nuclear
All dreams begin and end with an elipsis… …so I’m feeling a bit lonely right now. My friends have all bummed off and left me to entertain myself, except one who I’m just walking up to the top floor of the hotel to say goodbye to, before I go and find something to do. We…
Oh, mum! I’ve got ichor in my beard! I’ve got ichor in my nose! I’ve got bits of demon stuck in my chainmail shirt! HOW DO YOU CLEAN CHAINMAIL? Calm down, calm, calm. I’m lucky to be alive; I don’t mean to worry you, but when the demon fizzed and exploded I was standing right…
To the tune of: Count Basie – Board Meeting – Original I’ve been playing lots of board games on the iPhone. Many of the old family favourites are on there, normally produced by EA, and accurately represented; but, let’s face it, the mechanics of most of those are highly simple or broken in key ways.
(Panning montage of serious-looking people talking, national institutions, angry fingers being pointed, people walking around and behind things.) (Tenor voice-over). “It’s a blight on the national psyche, an easy way out for hundreds of people who want easy answers. Politicians condemn it, Doctors say it destroys lives. But what does documentary-making really do to Britain?
Continuing my naif fanfic from our WFRP group. If you’re wondering why my dwarf student speaks Yiddish, and why Dwarvish sounds so much like Hebrew, it’s down to Tolkien. He created some parallels between Jews and Dwarves; both were “at once natives and aliens in their habitations, speaking the languages of the country, but with…