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Games News! 04/11/13

The Shut Up & Sit Down Supercomputer: I have spent the week exhaustively probing and sampling the corpses of Quinns and Paul, and have arrived at a conclusion: They are still dead. Therefore I shall continue to transmit the “Games News” as if they were not. I recommend that you all perform the human act of “denial”, as it sounds quite soothing.

Paul: Good morning everybaby!

Quinns: Paul, I cannot believe this. You will remember that two months ago I performed such that the people should buy real-time game Escape: The Curse of the Temple.

Paul: I remember it well, it made me birth eight giggles from my larynx.

Quinns: What a friend. But this week Queen Games has announced Escape from Zombie City. A tremendously similar game of rolling dice and escaping zombies, this time taking 15 minutes instead of 10. Just after I told everyone to buy the first Escape!

Paul: That is the limit!

Quinns: Stow your bum! This story gets even crazier.

HELLO everybody! Some news: We’ve just released the stretch goals for our Autumn pledge season.

Let’s quickly go over what this means for the site. Thanks to your incredible generosity, SU&SD won’t just continue. It’ll grow. We’re now able to pay our freelancers a reasonable wage, upgrade our camera, microphones and lights, put out more content, and upgrade the features of the site itself. Your forum? It’s coming, as well as so, so much more.

In other words, we have the money we need. Stretch goals, then, are us getting extravagant. A lot of you want a return to SU&SD’s old, action-packed, 45 minute, music-filled episodes. This is your chance to fund them, as well us let us make your own Gold Club bags a little heavier.

One last thing- an awful lot of you have done the noble thing and subscribed to SU&SD, meaning we have some pledge money that’ll be coming in, that’s not yet in the donations total. So, we may have broken one of these stretch goals already. Maybe. Just saying.

Thanks again, everybody. We love you so much. Thanks to you, 2014’s going to be even better.

The Shut Up & Sit Down Supercomputer: Greetings, organic viewing entities. According to my calculations, your level of pleasure will see measurable increase if I transmit to you “Games News” written in the style of the late Quintin Smith and Paul Dean. Data analysis suggests their loss was a sad one. Projections suggest that, in time, they could be adequately replaced if we manufacture enough babies.

Babies.

In the meantime I shall accurately simulate their behaviours using precisely calculated projections.

Paul: First on our babies news: Recently reviewed magical board game Seasons has a baby coming, in the form of the expansion Path of Destiny.

Donors, supporters and subscribers, we want to thank you all. This week, Shut Up & Sit Down reached its funding goal. It hasn’t taken us very long to get there and, quite frankly, we’re bowled over by your enthusiasm and your encouragement. Many of you haven’t just donated, you’ve subscribed, meaning your continued pledges will make an enormous difference to us and to the time that we can give to SUSD.

We’re already thinking about stretch goals and what else we can offer. Don’t forget that, if you’ve pledged to us, we’re keen to hear your feedback on where you want us to focus. In the meantime, we’ll keep on doing what we’re doing, under the watchful eye of our all-powerful boss, Reference Pear.

Thank you again, all of you. You’ve made us feel very special.

Mage Wars, the entirely straight-faced “Customisable Game of Dueling Mages”, was one of the most exciting releases of last year. We were never going to be finished with it following our quick impressions article. Quinns has done the right thing and published a full, red-blooded review over on Eurogamer, and it goes like this:

“Make no mistake. This isn’t just a great card game. It’s one of the best two-player games I’ve ever played. It’s at once a puzzle strong enough to leave you thinking about it when you go to sleep, and also profoundly human. Mage Wars gets the most out of the human opponent, because of its emphasis on surprise, countering and predicting.”

It also features a very good joke about a staff meeting. Go read! WIZARD! Ahem.

SU&SD Needs You! Donations are now open.

Quinns: Today we’d like to present a Very Special Episode of Shut Up & Sit Down, meant to raise awareness of the issues. Well, one issue. Which is that the amount of money that we have is… or rather, it doesn’t… this amount, it doesn’t really exist.

Paul: Right. After two years of you guys asking how you can give money to SU&SD, we’re finally letting you. Please, go check out our fancy new donations section, our new video, and all of the fabulous rewards on offer.

Quinns: We’re so proud of everything we’ve achieved since we began Shut Up & Sit Down, and we’re stupidly excited about how we’ll grow next. With your help, we’ll be able to find out.

Paul: Thank you all very much.

Paul: We’ve got some exciting news for you!

Quinns: But you’ve already put the news in the title.

Paul: Well-

Quinns: So there’s not really anything to share now. I mean, there’s not much point in us writing any more. I guess we could get onto the details?

Paul: That’s not very exciting.

Quinns: Don’t get mad at me because you ruined it.

The moon landing. Penicillin. The telephone. And now humanity can boast another grand achievement: With exactly no money, SU&SD has managed to get two of its roster to Indiana’s Gen Con gaming convention ’13. The dreamy Mike, who built the site you’re on right now and continues to upgrade it on a daily basis, and Mark Wallace, of our actual journalism and Borderlands review.

These are two lovely individuals. So lovely. If you’d like to meet exactly ⅓ of Team SU&SD, they’ll be around at 8pm on Friday in the Hyatt Regency’s bar/lounge area.

Also, if you’re an exhibitor and would like to demo your game to Mike so he can tell the UK team about it, drop an email to [email protected]. He says his best times are “Thursday after 3:00pm or Friday after 11:00am, booth numbers help.”

Leigh: Hi, Shut Up & Sit Down-ers (the Silenced & Seated?)! Thank you for having me back again as your ongoing indie RPG correspondent. Quinns, I think something might have gone off in your fridge, though. What is that?

Quinns: My flat has an Abundance of Rare Meats, but a Scarcity of Hygiene.

Leigh: A reference to the game mechanics, how clever!

So, The Quiet Year. I’m accustomed to roleplaying games that give me the chance to tell a story about a character, through interaction with other characters, but this game is different: Two to four players collaborate over a map to tell the story of a place, and the narrative that unspools itself is about the challenges a community faces following a long war, given one year to prepare for the advent of the mysterious Frost Shepherds.

What are the Frost Shepherds? Who knows! What is this place? Well, that’s what you play to discover. The designer, Avery Mcdaldno, calls it the world’s first cartography RPG.

Kotaku Article: Winning is Killing Gaming

Quinns has again been published on gaming enormo-blog Kotaku, talking about a wonder of the board game world! This month he discusses how, unlike video games, it doesn’t matter how good you are at boardgames. The article starts like this:

I remember a colleague taking a 5 minute break, away from the jittery job of reviewing Battlefield 2. “It’s fun when you win,” he said, exhausted. “And boring when you lose. Haven’t we moved past that yet?”

No, we haven’t. For a medium that’s evolved from play, video games have an overwhelmingly binary view of success and failure, one so crippling that if we settle into a single player game and make no progress, or lose every multiplayer match in one night, our lives will have been worsened. And we never ask why games are like this. After all, how else could it be?

Board games have the answer.

…and continues vigorously until it stops. Quinns would point you towards the article himself, but he’s currently in hiding from furious gamer-gangs, who cry his name on every street corner. Go read! Don’t let his sacrifice be in vain.

Games News! 04/11/13

Autumn Pledge Season Stretch Goals!

Games News! 28/10/13

Thank you!

Review: Mage Wars

SU&SD Needs You! Donations are now open.

SU&SD Will Be At Eurogamer Expo 2013!

We’re at Gen Con 2013! …Kind of.

RPG Review: The Quiet Year

Kotaku Article: Winning is Killing Gaming

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