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Cut Us Loose!

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On  a coach back from the city of dreaming spires (and bricking-it final year students) to the middle of London, I sat and slept. I normally bring a book or a paper with me for the journey, but it's only to make me look like I have important business to be getting on with even though I am on travelling intercity in the middle of the morning - I pretend to read. I spent a lot of time starting out of the window, having a 1hr40min existential crisis whilst being away from a good internet connection. A certain building caught my eye as we pulled away from the Notting Hill Gate station and moved towards Marble Arch, the part of the journey close to the end. I only saw it for a few seconds down a wide road leading away off the road the coach travels on, left to the direction of travel. The building looked like it was birthed by a gothic church which had made love to the 1960's. There was a spire, and part of a church wall which joins with an entirely different type of glass and con
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I'm looking forwards to No Man's Sky

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This is a pretty video-heavy post. I wanted to keep the numbers down but it's nice to be able to directly show what I am talking about. Sorry about that! Keep that tab-opening finger on the trigger! I recently realised that my younger self spent a lot of time  in some  very  interesting virtual spaces . If you'd followed those links you'd have found that they are all different games which involve sitting in a spaceship, zooming around and blowing things up. They belong to a fantastically nerdy game genre, 'Space Sims'. The wonderful coincidence that space is very empty and that 90's video cards could only manage a few thousand triangles meant that these sort of games were everywhere. As the 00's rolled in, and as Star Trek stopped being shown on TV for the first time in decades, this genre died out miserably leaving only few poorly translated games coming in from the East. Time's moved on still, and very recently mysterious market forces (crowdfundin
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The 1996 videogame Z, and the Men of War series have a lot in common, and I enjoy both

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 Z stands out. It comes from a time when command and conquer (following on from Dune 2) was busy setting the tone for RTS. Arguably until Ground Control again doing away with base building, and more modern touch points of the Dawn of War game bringing it solidly into the collective consciousness. These comparisons have already been made in the "have you played" series on RPS in "have you played... Z" The above is a simple comparison making exercise, cherry picking examples of popular games, ignoring the melange of RTS ideas at the time and those ideas inherited from the board game or war game worlds. The prevailing narratives about which game first introduced what mechanic lack nuance and are most likely false. Like the histories of many other fields. My own comparison is between Z and Men of War.  I feel that the micro in Z resembles the randomness of Men of War quite closely. Several light tanks can sometimes destroy a medium, or just as well not. Moments of Heroi
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