Procedural Kowloon: Phantasmal On Steam Early Access

Do you know about Kowloon Walled City? It was a small but densely-populated hunk of unregulated city in Hong Kong, known for drugs, Triads, and unlicensed doctors and dentists, but also home to 33,000 people a few years before it was demolished in 1993. It looked straight out a cyberpunk flick, with building upon building crammed in close and veined with mazes of corridors. Which makes it an interesting setting for procedurally-generated sneak-o-shoot-a-horror.

Last time we saw Phantasmal [official site], it was set in a ghost house. Now it’s out on Steam Early Access, ooh look it’s switched to Kowloon.

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Why £200 / $250 Is The 1080p Graphics Card Sweet Spot

What’s the best graphics card mere mortals can buy for around £200 / $250? This is a question for the ages. Or at least for a slow Thursday evening. In all seriousness, the £200 / $250 price point ticks a lot of important boxes. It’s been in and around the sweet spot for balancing price and performance for properly gameable graphics for a while. I reckon it’s also pretty near critical mass in terms of how much you lot are willing to spend on a video board. At a push, most of us can stretch to £200 / $250 if the payoff is great gaming. Luckily, it is.
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Wot I Think: Shadowrun Chronicles – Boston Lockdown

How old will I have to be, and how much drek with a vague Gibson theme will there need to be, before cyberpunk stops being catnip to me? All being well I shall never tire of people with mohawks and cybernetic arms wandering through dark’n’neon future-cities with Tokyo overtones, but I worry I might have said similar about zombies or space marines many years ago. The going’s still good for now, and as such I was a moth to Shadowrun Chronicles’ flame.

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Kalimba Concept Art: Floating Islands And Totem Charts

I liked the art style of Kalimba so much I asked Press Play if they had any concept artwork I could peer at. I’d like to do that more with developers and their games – “Hey, gimme that sketchbook!” They did and here it is for you to examine and enjoy too – there’s also a level design gif*. I promise I’ll shut up about it now:

*gif is a little over 1mb, dearest mobile users

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Cardboard Cousins: The Best Tabletop Simulator Mods

If there’s one thing that RPS has been trying to teach us over the past few years, it’s that tabletop gaming is cool, possibly even sexy, and definitely done by some handsome folks (hello there, Rab). Sadly, not all of us are blessed with a local circle of sexy and handsome friends to play with. Enter Berserk Games and their solution: Tabletop Simulator [official site].

Something of a rising star of Steam Early Access, Tabletop Simulator boasts the ability to simulate (fancy that) a 3D, physical tabletop with up to 7 other players online. While it comes bundled with a handful of copyright-free board/card game staples, its real strength lies in its easy moddability, allowing you to import just about any tabletop, playmat, token, card or custom dice that you can find an image file or 3D model of and share it with others. Combined with full Steam Workshop support, it’s a potentially huge boon for those with tabletop gaming friends in far away places, and (unsurprisingly) a bit of a legal minefield.

I’ll come back that minefield later, but for now: here are four of the best Tabletop Simulator mods, what they do and how they play.

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Bearded B’s Beak Blasts Bugs In Metamorphabet Demo

I don’t know why John’s Wot I Think of Metamorphabet [official site] talks so much about babies and other varieties of child. Sure, I suppose children might experience some pleasure when a cyclopoid letter B sprouts a hoary beard then a beak pokes through its upper B hole to scream a torrent of bugs, but those snotty idiots are endlessly entertained by you covering your face with your hands. A child’s opinion is worthless. You know who truly appreciates letters being impaled by bug-blasting beaks? Alice. Me. I do.

Maybe you do too, and you can see for yourself as Metamorphabet now has a short browser-based demo on its site.

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What Heroes of the Dorm Means For Blizzard And Esports

Blizzard’s upcoming Heroes of the Storm [official site] is, in my humble opinion, a belter of a game. Such praise is small beer to the Californian mega-developer, however, which with HotS and the upcoming Overwatch intends to reclaim a leading role in the eSports industry it helped to create. HotS is still in beta but the long road began this weekend with Heroes of the Dorm, a college-focused competition that culminated in a grand final broadcast live on ESPN – the latter being not only something of a coup, but also an eSports first. The event laid bare Blizzard’s intentions for HotS and, despite some community grumbling, what looks awfully like a new take on how best to present competitive gaming.

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