Minecraft
Liam:Those faces! Can you remember the first time you sawL.A. Noire’s faces? Watching in awe as they wiggled their eyebrows and grimaced, their skin contorting and their lips flapping as they threatened to break the kneecaps of a (probably innocent) man.
I’m ashamed to admit that L.A. Noire’s face tech left me feral for about six months. I was obsessed with it, scurrying around showing it off to anyone who’d listen as I screeched about the future of video game performance capture. “Look at how subtle those expressions are!” I’d squeal, pointing at an old man pulling the same expression a four-year-old would make if you accused them of shoving slices of ham into an Xbox’s disc tray. “Imagine whatGrand Theft Auto Vwill look like!” I’d howl, oblivious to the countless news stories that documented the atrocious working conditions the staff at Team Bondi endured to ship such an ambitious game.
CJ:I didn’t build a PC forThe Old Republic, but I might as well have. It was all I played on the first new desktop I’d managed to cobble together in years, like a Jedi constructing their dodgily glowing lightsaber, back at the start of the last decade. I wasn’t expecting a game that could do justice toKnights Of The Old Republicand its sequel, but The Old Republic drew me in anyway. There’s proper nuggets of a third Knights Of The Old Republic in there.
Yes, it had typicalMMOprod-cooldown-repeat combat that I spammed the bejesus out of. My immersion in the surprisingly interesting solo storylines was somewhat spoiled by seeing loads of other players racing about with their companions in tow, too. Still, those storylines kept propelling me further into The Old Republic’s version of theStar Warsgalaxy, and it was a blast. I never got to tangle much with the game’s Legacy system, which riffs on the series’ Skywalker saga nonsense to let you craft a family of characters on a server, but it’s certainly a very cool feature.
James:Can you imagine the pressure of making a newDeus Exsequel, eight years after the last one, which also happened to sour half a generation on the very concept of Deus Ex sequels? I’d be up every night stress-sobbing into the Nietzsche book I’d borrowed for research. Eidos Montréal must have been made of sterner stuff becauseDeus Ex: Human Revolutionis a corker, paying its respects to the timeless original while confidently making its own moves.
That means gadget-heavy stealth that’s even more playful than JC Denton’s style, with the added challenge of enemies whose fields of vision are bigger than an ice cream cone. It means an instantly recognisable neo-Renaissance aesthetic. And it means creative, entirely dialogue-based boss fights, where you genuinely need to consider your words against madmen who may nonetheless be making some good points. There’s also some regular, largely crap boss fights but, uh, we’ll skip over those. Kind of like how I did by putting points into the explosives-shooting aug.
It’s one of best examples of soft rebooting in the industry, and I hope it’ll be fondly remembered. Specifically, by Embracer Group, when they’re deciding which mothballed game series in theirdisturbingly vast library of acquisitionsto bring back.
Alice0:It is good. Though Time Capsule rules mean we’re putting in the original release, mandatory violence and annoying DLC decisions and all, rather than the Director’s Cut. But I would happily go back and once again stuff an entire building’s ventilation system full of unconscious men.
Seriously, Terraria deserves preservation because it gets the upward curve of survival right. You’re forever chasing something bigger and bolder in a colourful world replete with exciting loot drops and nasty surprises. And it guides you expertly from one boss to another through the gradual drip feed of curious materials and biomes, which keeps you singularly focused on the various tasks at hand. That’s one of its greatest strengths, I reckon. I haven’t played a survival game since that hasn’t deviated in its hold on me, not once inciting frustration or snorts of, “I hate this biome”. It’s tirelessly fun.
And I like to believe that the RPS Time Capsule has a little incubator for Terraria, so when it does end up in the hands of some 3000-year-old Horace, they’ll get to experience the joy of what it eventually becomes: a game swollen with so much stuff that it’ll makes them forget to piss.
Alice0:I think a key part of any time capsule experience is, as you rifle through the treasures of the past, picking up one item and asking, “What on earth is this?” And no one knows what it is. And you try to find out yourself. And think you can figure out one use for it. But you don’t know if you’re using it right. And you certainly still don’t know what it is. That’sE.Y.E.: Divine Cybermancy, which I think is a FPS-RPG set in a non-copyright-infringing cyberpunk world of Warhammer 40,000 fanfic. I think. I wouldn’t know for certain: I haven’t finished it, and likely never will.
Divine Cybermancy is a fantastic janky sprawl of systems, and as I play I often find myself thinking, “Wait, I can do WHAT?” I’ve started it over several times across the years, a game I will eventually find myself installing on each new gaming PC and, discovering it doesn’t store saves in the Steam Cloud, start from scratch each time. It’ll have been long enough between attempts that I will dimly recall some parts, but be surprised all over again by others.
So, my understanding is: it’s an FPS-RPG set in the grim dark future of humanity, where heavily armoured warrior monks (who are legally distinct from Warhammer 40K’s Space Marines) are fighting across the galaxy for… something? And it feels like a shootier Deus Ex set in a Hive City? Full of respawning enemies from rival factions who fight each other across the labyrinthine levels? And you can hack loads of systems over Wi-Fi but they’ll also hack you back, so you can get gibbed by an ATM or have a door block your screen with a giant smiley? And then you need to hack yourself to clear that smiley? And you can hack NPCs to make them follow you, and build a small army? And it has loads of weapons from pistols and sniper rifles to miniguns and dual katanas which block bullets? And it has stealth, though you’ll often end up in firefights with people halfway across its giant open maps? And it has magic spells and cybernetic implants? And there’s a research system which leads to… stuff? And everything has baffling names? And I don’t know what all my numbers mean? Or know why I sometimes develop paranoia or start hallucinating? It fizzes with ideas, many of them weird, or executed weirdly, or wildly underexplained.
Wild is a good word for E.Y.E.: Divine Cybermancy. This is a wild game, borne of wild ambition and untamed by focus testing. Every time I return I am delighted to discover something that either I’d forgotten or the game neglected to explain. I envy the unsuspecting futurefolk who will open this Time Capsule and encounter this game.
Hayden:Fable 3is a game about baking pies, buying property, making lots of promises to become the ruler of Albion, and then breaking those promises once you’re on the throne. Then, maybe you can bake some more pies. Fable 3 casts a wide net, but whether you want to focus on fantasy questing, business management, or just making some very big moral decisions, it’s got it all. It might not excel at any of those things, but combining them all in one package created some of the best fun I had as a kid.
‘Kid’ is the keyword there, though. See, it’s rated 16 in the UK, but the fart jokes and making a baby with my mate were much funnier when I was 10. The combat is also stunningly simple, which makes it boring if you’ve been playing actionRPGssince video games were first invented. For little me, who was jumping into their first RPG outside of the Pokemon series, Fable 3 was a great place to learn and mess about. I could crack silly jokes, kick a few chickens, make some babies, and occasionally my parents would walk past and shout “Hey, that’s wotshisface from those films!” whenever they heard Simon Pegg. I want to be able to give Fable 3 to my kids when they reach 16 and definitely not a moment sooner (wink wink), so it’s going in the Time Capsule.
Rebecca:The SimsMedieval was the spin-off everyone thought they wanted. Medieval decor and clothing options had been so popular with Sims players sinceforeverthat the long-awaited DLC on the theme eventually grew into a stand-alone title. But when a highly-touted Sims game gets only a single expansion pack before fading into oblivion, you know something went wrong.
Whatever the problem was, I can’t believe it was the game itself. The Sims Medieval is seriously lovely. A fantastical RPG-lite total conversion which manages to be both wholly a Sims game and completely its own thing. Everyone I know who’s played it seems to love it. And yet in under a year it had basically disappeared.
I don’t have quite as much fondness forThe Sims 3era as I do for the franchise’s first two generations. But I have to admit that it was the series' boldest period of experimentation, pushing the boundaries both of what the hardware of the time could handle, and which previously unexplored ideas players would respond to. The fact that 11 years later, The Sims Medieval is still unchallenged as the best Sims spin-off on PC speaks volumes. Unfortunately, what it seems to have said to EA was: “Don’t invest in any more niche spin-offs”. But I’d urge anyone who was (understandably) put off at the time by the thought of purchasing yet another full-priced Sims game to give this one a try, now that you can nab the collected edition for a tenner. It really was something unique.
As well as being the start of my love for indies, it also marked the beginning of Supergiant’s reputation of making bloody great games. Bastion’s punchy combat, painterly fantasy world, and heart-wrenching story of loss still hold up to this day and together with the gritty tones of Logan Cunningham as the Rucks the storyteller and Darren Korb’s evocative soundtrack, it’s a game that, even after all these years, still gives me chills to think about.
Katharine:Yes, we included the originalPortalin our2007 Time Capsule, and I swore at the start of this whole exercise not to put multiple entries from the same series in multiple Time Capsules, because otherwise we’d likely be drowning in sequels and remakes rather than cooler, more interesting games that might otherwise get lost to the depths of time and spaaaaaaaaaace.
But I think you’ll agree thatPortal 2is a rare exception to this rule (heck, Imakethe rules, just try and stop me). Both games have lots to teach future generations - if nothing else, it’s a brilliant case study of how to do a proper sequel without diminishing what came before. It still has brilliant puzzles, the funniest lines, and who can forget the incredible introduction of uber corpo villain Cave Johnson? It’s also still thebest co-op gameever created by our reckoning, because of course it is. It’s Portal x2. That alone makes it worthy of Time Capsule inclusion, but let’s not forget all those gloriousmods, too. It is a testament to both Portal 2’s ingenuity and its inherent flexibility that we’re still getting new mods for this incredible game over a decade on from release. In short, Portal 2 is just one of the very best games of all time, and rightly deserves its place in this Capsule alongside its 2007 predecessor.
The impact that each trial-and-error death has in Limbo is part of the point. It’s horrible when you see the little fellow die, alone, in a dark wood. It’s horrible watching the long, creeping legs of the giant spider. It’s horrible when you eventually pull the legsoffthat spider. The sound design and the atmosphere are pretty exemplary, and there are multiple theories about what the game actually represents. Are you dead? Are you travelling through hell or purgatory to escape? Does it matter?
Here’s my secret, though: once you get past the spider, I think the game becomes way less good. But it still deserves to be Time Capsuled, because it inspired a whole raft of platformers. You can see Limbo’s long, spidery legs in the excellentLittle Nightmares, for example, and even this year I playedSilt, an underwater creep fest platformer (floater??) that iswellLimbo. That’s pretty significant reach, if you ask me.
