Simone de Rochefort

Simone de Rochefort

Simone de Rochefort is a game journalist, writer, podcast host, and video producer who does a prolific amount of Stuff. You can find her on Twitter @doomquasar, and hear her weekly on tech podcast Rocket, as well as Pixelkin's Gaming With the Moms podcast. With Pixelkin she produces video content and devotes herself to Skylanders with terrifying abandon.

Feb 09 2016
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Screencheat

Screencheat: The Shooter With Invisible Players Makes For Great Couch Play

Posted by | Feature, PC | No Comments

In Screencheat, you’re completely invisible. Sick strategy, right? Especially since you’re trying to find and take out your opponents before they can get you.

The only thing is, they’re invisible too. All of you are.

It shouldn’t work, and yet it does. Screencheat is a first-person shooter (and depending on your choice of weapon, perhaps a first-person hacker and slasher as well), with split-screen play, in which all the players are invisible.

So how the heck do you win? By screencheating, of course. The much-maligned practice of peeking at a player’s screen to find out where they’re hiding on the map became the core of Screencheat’s gameplay.

I got to play Screencheat at PAX South and speak to Samurai Punk co-founder Nicholas McDonnell about where the game came from and how it works. Read More

Jan 19 2016
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Everybody's Gone To the Rapture British Writer's Guild

British Writer’s Guild Honors Unsettling English Games Like Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture

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The British Writer’s Guild has decreed Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture as the winner of its video game writing award.

Other nominees included Her Story and Sunless Sea, which are likewise powerful and creepy stories.

Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture was written by Dan Pinchbeck and developed by a small team at The Chinese Room. It’s a meditative and impactful game. You can read Keezy Young’s review right here.

One of the most interesting things about these three nominees is that they all tell their stories in a manner that isn’t quite traditionally linear. Everybody’s Gone To the Rapture has chapters, but you can move through each individual section however you want.

Sunless Sea is a roguelike that lets you explore a vast undersea world at your leisure. And the order of Her Story’s narrative depends entirely on how the player chooses to explore it.

You can check out the full list of nominees for all of the British Writer’s Guild awards right here. Other categories include radio, film, and television. Russel T. Davies was honored as well, for his contributions to television in the original “Queer as Folk,” and the 2005 revitalization of “Doctor Who.”

(The Writers Guilds of America’s nominees for their own awards trend toward the AAA instead of indie titles, with Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, Pillars of Eternity, Rise of the Tomb Raider, and The Witcher 3 leading the nominations.)