Friday linkswap: Rock Paper Shotgun

Its tasteful color scheme says it all: RPS is a megalith of good taste in a world gone pink, green and cornflower blue. Its utterances shoot forth like the baleful glares of a reawakened god: no, ladies and gentlemen, it is not the nineties, and there is not time for Klax.

The Trouble with Demos
Games demos suck. Instead of crafting an exciting overview of a new title, developers typically just dump out the first level or two.Alec Meer slams efforts which amount to "all tutorial and no trousers," and points to what a demo needs to get a gamer in on the game: an introduction to its world, the illusion of openness, and a movie trailer's "hyper-edited" frenzy.

Dinosaurs!
They've been hitting the fumes again, posting multiple examples of games that feature dinosaurs. See Dino Run, Petroglider, Ketpack Brontosaurus and Offroad Velocirapter Safari.

RPS: The Game
In which the origins of the world's best PC gaming blog are illustrated through the medium of an official game

Rock Paper Scissors originates as an early attempt to simulate the Prussian/Hungarian conflict of 1842, where the Prussians armed their grand imperial forces with Rocks. However, a Russian-funded Hungarian counter-attack with Paper lead to the complete rout of the Prussian forces and the later capituation of Prussia to the Parisian commune. Scissors was added later for game-balance purposes, in a move which offends historical purists to this day.

Commmenter Bob Ince responds: "Doesn’t work with a joypad. Doesn’t take advantage of DirectX 10.1 features. YOU ARE KILLING PC GAMING."

Future of the PC: “the de facto single format”
Jim Rossignol finds an interview in which Atari founder Nolan Bushnell is said to remark that the PC is the future of gaming. He agrees, pointing out that either PCs will either supplant consoles under the TV, or consoles will expand until they do everything a PC does.

"When I suggest this future people generally dismiss it as a 1950s-style technofuture dream: one box fits all? Never! But it’s not quite like that. One box scales to all."

Also, buy Jim's book. Joel says it's good.