Space Marine: A 40k fan's view

My half tonne genetically engineered superman rockets into the sky, two giant jet engines strapped to his back, and a hammer the size of a small truck gripped between his hands.

Reaching to top of my flight arc, I feel like doom incarnate a living personification of the Sword of Damocles. Hanging in the air for a moment, before plummeting towards a hapless victim.

There were times when I played Space Marine when just for a second everything just clicked into place. In those moments it was hard not to smile, the game made me feel like a unstoppable force of nature full of momentum and power. At its best it was a intoxicating and potent example of the sort of power fantasy that has increasingly fallen out of favour as games have begun to seek mainstream cultural acceptance.

What Dune 2 taught me about Gaming: Part 2

Much of my youth was spent unable to put into words exactly what it was which made me so enthusiastic about games. Even now I have find it very hard to articulate what I love about games to the people I love. Dune 2 was the first game where I encountered this problem, where I couldn't explain what I liked about it with a simple sentence like 'its fun' or 'its looks cool'.

*image took from a scan at the amazing Amiga Magazine Rack

I showed the game to anyone who was stupid enough to give me the impression they might listen to me, but time after time the way my parents and my peers seemed unmoved by Dune 2 to totally confused me. I wasn't equipped mentally to make the simple leap that what was awesome to me wasn't automatically be awesome to others.

But there was somewhere where  I knew there were people who 'got' games. Amiga power is considered to have been one of the great magazines of its generation. Some might pick holes at its professionalism at times, but there was no denying the passion that went into it.
Just like me I felt the writers didn't care who's name you threw onto a box, or if the graphics were flashy they cared about the game itself.
Just like me it felt these were people who felt a sense of belonging of being one of the tribe, who felt there was something special about games.
But unlike me they had found their voice, and they were shouting from the rooftops.

What Dune 2 taught me about Gaming: Part 1

Its 1993 Whitney Houston and Kevin Costner are stinking up the screen and the charts, John Major (Aka Pantsman) is Prime Minister, there's a weird new football division called the Premier League, and I'm trying to persuade my friend Lee that Dune 2 on the Amiga is the greatest thing since sliced bread.

My Amiga was a thing of wonder to me,and as I sat there with my A500+ it would seem implausible to me that the company behind it was already in a slow decline. In December Doom was released on the PC in all its 3D glory, changing the face of gaming and driving another nail into the Amiga's coffin. By April 1994 the fight was over and Commodore would be bankrupt and the Amiga dead.

At age 11 such things didn't register with me, nor would they have really mattered to me because at that moment all that mattered to me was I had a new game. Games typically cost around £30 which since I got £1.10 pocket money meant they were a huge investment for me. I spent months scanning issues of Amiga Power before making a decision on a which one i was going to buy next. I typically got 2-3 games a year and the wait was unbearable, though I soon realized that if I didn't spend my lunch money It virtually doubled my spending power. I mean whats a bit of food compared to a new game?

The World needs more Death cats

I've haven't seen anything as gloriously chaotic as death cat for a long while.

Courtesy of Tom Francis of PC Gamer :

People make maps in Team Fortress 2 specifically for grinding achievements. Bleak, joyless rooms of endlessly spawning bots and resupply crates, where people don’t play the game, they game it. But in one of these, achievement_all_v4, the author’s added a surprise. A violent, horrific, hilarious surprise of biblical proportions

Regardless of the intent it been seized upon as a hugely entertaining way of dealing with a practice that much of the TF2 community disproves of. Why make a angry forum post when you can unleash a cat with laser beam eyes.

Just watching it makes me wonder if admin's & dev's couldn't use more interactive and visible ways of dealing with unintended player behaviour.

Deep Stress: My Experience's with Neptunes Pride

Neptune's pride is a very strange game. A pure game. A exhausting game.
And one I certainly wouldn't describe as a fun game. But it is a game worth playing (at least once)

Developed by Iron Helmet games a company formed by former Irrational Games employees. NP's is a web based 4x strategy game.

To quote them:
"Neptune's Pride is multiplayer game of Strategy, Intrigue and Galactic Conquest!The game is a real-time game played over several weeks. You can log in at any time of the day to check the progress of your fleets, view the results of battles and issue new orders. Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate!"
The game's rule set is very strict, cold hard numbers determine the outcome of combat with no tactical elements and nothing left to chance the game is purely strategic.

Quentin smith put it well in his excellent write up for GameSetWatch when he said:
"If I have 30 ships defending against your 45, I will lose the fight. If my empire of 20 star systems is invaded by your empire of 30 star systems, I will slowly but surely lose territory to you"

This very no nonsense combat system plus and a equally harsh and unforgiving diplomacy system provides a perfect catalyst for human drama. Both Rock Paper Shotgun and PC Gamer have produced engrossing play diary's of a UK games journo battle royal with the game. Just as no plan ever survives contact with the enemy the plaudits Neptune's Pride initially received has slowly waned as more people have got their hands on the games beta, and slowly that old cliched question 'but is it fun?' has reared its ugly head.

Well to cut a long story short, no its not. To give a longer and more relevant answer, it's not but the reason why it isn't fun is interesting in itself.