In a change to the usual schedule I bring word of my first article to be published on Rock, Paper, Shotgun. The piece is called China And The Future Of Gaming and is an extension of my dissertation with a focus on games in the most populous country in the world.

This is part of a series of guest articles to appear on Rock, Paper, Shotgun, Lewis Denby wrote about Galatea and Phill Cameron should see something published sometime this week.

The Roundup will still be coming this Friday, don’t worry about that!

Those wonderful fellas over at Rock, Paper, Shotgun have gona hands on with Left 4 Dead and, in the process they claim to have killed over 11,000 zombies. That is a lot of zombies. A hell of a lot of zombies.

Each of the four writers have posted their thoughts on their massive play test during their trip to Valve and they make for some very exciting reading.

For those of you who pre-ordered the game, then the demo will be going live sometime tomorow, I can’t frickin wait.

I’m shocked to look back in my archives and see that I haven’t said anything about Love before, the MMO being created by Eskil Steenberg. Well Rock, Paper, Shotgun have the first in-game footage of Love and it looks just like I expected it to look, a bit trippy.

This time though they are talking about EndWar. Ubisoft Shanghai creative director Michael de Plater told Videogaming 247 that they aren’t releasing the PC version of the game at the same time as the console version due to rampant PC piracy.

“To be honest, if PC wasn’t pirated to hell and back, there’d probably be a PC version coming out the same day as the other two.”

“But at the moment, if you release the PC version, essentially what you’re doing is letting people have a free version that they rip off instead of a purchased version. Piracy’s basically killing PC.”

I don’t want to take the same line that I did when tackling Cliffy B’s piracy comments so I will simply link to what John Walker wrote over on Rock, Paper, Shotgun.

John takes the view that unless we get hard evidence regarding the impact of piracy on sales of PC games then these comments are just rumour-mongering and doing untold damage to the reputation of the PC. Damn right, tell us the truth devs and stop tarnishing the image of the PC.

Anyone a member of the Rock, Paper, Shotgun almighty, godlike, over 1000 members Steam Community Group. In honour of reaching 1000 members sometime recently we decided to do something to benefit all of us who are regulars in the community. The result? A Team Fortress 2 server.

It is known as the Rock, Paper, Shotgun – Community Server for Servicing the Community server and the IP is – 85.236.101.56:27115

It shall be, and must be noted that this is not an official Rock, Paper, Shotgun server, this is just something we as a community came together to do. If you do check it out, then please, keep everything nice and friendly. We have powers, powers to kill…

(This short piece was written in response to this and this, two articles from Rock, Paper, Shotgun dealing with Pathologic.)

Do games have to be fun to be good? This is a question which following Quinns take on Pathologic over on Rock, Paper, Shotgun has been running around in my head like a hamster does on a wheel. Or is that a mouse…anyway one of the points that Quinns raised in his examination of Pathologic was that while it may not always be a fun game to play, it was a good game.

Of course this statement caused some debate among the RPS fanatics, another issue that was raised in response to this detailed examination of Pathologic was whether current reviewing methods are really all that good.

Read the rest of this entry

Pathologic and Tension are two games from Russian developers Ice-Pick Lodge.

Pathologic was released a few years ago and Tension is still in development. Why do I want to talk about these games? Well because they seem pretty damn weird, interesting and, well throw in numerous other words like that.

I would like to direct you to a couple of articles on Rock, Paper, Shotgun that are all about Pathologic. The first one can be read here and the second one can be read here. There third part of that series of articles is here.

I will just say those two articles convinced me to buy this game, I may hate it, but I am determined to play it. It sounds very intriguing.

In regards to Tension there is little I want you to do apart from watch this (not work safe) video to see what it is all about.

Why do Russian studios make the best games eh?