How to make money in space.
Your Minecraft modding and server guides.
John, Jim and Alec convene for hot orc chat.
What do you do when your friends are worse/better than you?
Pip interviews makers of space ninjas.
Hiya Poopy
By Adam Smith on October 20th, 2014 at 7:00 pm.
Neo Scavenger is one of the best turn-based RPGs I’ve ever played. Although still in Early Access, it has oodles of content and has received several hefty updates since I first played it. As part of Survival Week, I decided to document a single playthrough of the game. No quicksaves, no restarts, no chance. Here’s how I died.
By Graham Smith on October 20th, 2014 at 6:00 pm.
I’ve had a copy of ZZT by Anna Anthropy – a book about the game of the same name – kicking around for six months, but I haven’t yet had the time to read it. That prompted me to almost instantly scroll by news that the same publisher was Kickstarting a second series of books in the same vein: small, independently published, and each focused on a different game.
Then I saw that one of the books in the second series is about Spelunky. And it’s written by Derek Yu, the creator of Spelunky. And the project is already funded anyway.
By Graham Smith on October 20th, 2014 at 5:00 pm.
Ultimate General: Gettysburg is out. The historical real-time strategy game that got The Flare Path’s heart fluttering is now finished with Early Access and available in final form.
By Alice O'Connor on October 20th, 2014 at 4:00 pm.
While futuristic racing is defined by Wipeout for many, for me it’ll always be dear old MegaRace. My futuristic racing comes as a dystopian TV show starring campy presenter Lance Boyle in reels of reels of full-motion video. Pre-rendered 3D! FMV! Prizes! Even the name is exciting: MegaRace! It’s an awful game, of course. I recognise I have a problem, and that jetcars are probably my salvation.
Quantum Rush first caught our compound eye last year with its pretty jetcars and wacky idea of Kickstarting a free-to-play multiplayer game (which, obviously, failed). Developers GameArt Studio persevered and in July released Quantum Rush Online, and now have followed up with singleplayer-only jetcar combat-o-racer Quantum Rush Champions. It’s on Steam Early Access for £3.99, which is more appealing to my hovercar hankerings than a F2P oddity.
By Adam Smith on October 20th, 2014 at 3:30 pm.
Have You Played? is an endless stream of game recommendations. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.
This has nothing to do with the popular FPS series, Unreal. It’s much more interesting. UnReal World has been a mainstay on various hard drives that I’ve owned since I first discovered it at some point in the mid-nineties. The first release was in 1992 and to describe the game as being ‘a bit ahead of its time’ would be like describing Usain Bolt as ‘quite fast’. Unfamiliar at the time, the elements of play are now a genre in and of themselves. It’s an RPG about wilderness survival, with borrowings from the roguelike ocean, and an enormous amount of things to craft.
It’s also, quite possibly, the best example of its type.
Not So Peachy
By John Walker on October 20th, 2014 at 3:00 pm.
When browsing through Steam to spot any survival games I might have missed, I discovered there was one that we had woefully overlooked. Disney Princess: My Fairytale Adventure.
Now, it’s fair to say I could have been a little more sceptical about the tagging, what with its also being listed as both “Family Friendly” and “Nudity”, but that wasn’t going to deter me. I could also perhaps have perceived it as a sign when, midway through installing, the particular hard drive switched itself off.
By Alice O'Connor on October 20th, 2014 at 2:00 pm.
Children rarely know when to shut up, even when it’s for their own good. I remember a sibling ‘whispering’ “BUT WHAT ABOUT THE BOMB?” while our vaguely Irish-ish family’s car was searched by customs at Dover port in the early ’90s, the week after an IRA bombing. Shut up, children.
2Dark has children who should be quiet too. It’s a survival horror lead by Frederick Raynal, a designer on seminal survival horror Alone in the Dark, about rescuing children from serial killers’ lairs and leading them out safely. Luckily, here you can give them a good shushing. It’s having a crack at crowdfunding.
Into The Wild
By Graham Smith on October 20th, 2014 at 1:00 pm.
In early 2012, a mod for Arma II called DayZ was released. Two-and-a-half years later, its odd mixture of multiplayer, horror, and a need for players to keep themselves fed and watered, has given rise to the survival genre.
Let’s celebrate that genre.
By RPS on October 20th, 2014 at 12:30 pm.
Welcome to Survival Week! Over the course of the next five days we’re going to be celebrating videogames which make our stomachs rumble, cause our toes to fall off from frostbite, and abandon us to bleed out on some forsaken hillside. Survival games, we call ‘em – and we love not dying.
By Alice O'Connor on October 20th, 2014 at 12:00 pm.
Goat Simulator. Accountant Simulator. Door Simulator 2015. Corgi Simulator 2071. Turtle Simulator. Going Right Simulator. Room Cleaning Simulator 2014. Grass Simulator 2014. Cat Simulator. Tree Simulator 2013: Treeloaded. Teabag Simulator 2014. Alien Probe Simulator 2014. Tea Party Simulator 2014. Barbershop Quartet Simulator. Dish-washing Simulator 2014. Butt Touching Simulator (obviously I showed that one to Cara).
You might have noticed that joke Simulators are all the rage nowadays. They’re often not very funny. Usually their mere name is meant to be the punchline. Pro Chess Simulator 300 is a single-joke Simulator too but it’s a good joke. Not one to retell at your Britain’s Got Talent audition, but worth a few smiles.
By Konstantinos Dimopoulos on October 20th, 2014 at 11:00 am.
Very few games attempt to convey the complete and utter terror of war, to avoid any sort of jingoism, and to still create a sense of desperate excitement. Even fewer succeed. Hill 160, rather impressively, is one of the latter. What’s more, as one 2014′s more traditional IFComp entries, it accomplishes that using nothing more than text.
Glorious, evocative text that paints an atmosphere of complete dread.
By Alice O'Connor on October 20th, 2014 at 10:00 am.
Project CARS? More like Project DELAYED! When we last gawped at Slighty Mad’s oh-so-pretty drive ‘em up, it was slated for release in November. Now that November is almost here, they’ve announced hey, wait, no, it’s been delayed into next year. Until March 20th, to be precise — a delay of four months. The official story is that this “positions the title away from the competitive holiday scene dominated by household names” and, sure, gives more time to work on it too.
By Adam Smith on October 20th, 2014 at 9:00 am.
Octopus City Blues is an adventure game set in a city built around a giant octopus. So far, so weird. The player character sounds about as odd as the setting, as well as containing an apparent nod to fans of the Franz in his name – “Assume the role of Kaf Kafkaryan, a cowardly middle-aged octopus blood junkie and tentacle trimmer”. Plagued by strange dreams, Kaf journeys into Octopus City’s underbelly and uncovers a conspiracy, which looks like it might involve a cast of wretches and bizarre enough to make you cough up your naked lunch. The demo is available now and there are some suggestions as to how it should be played below.
Spelunky book a book about Spelunky
Because "Ultimate" means "last"
Nyoooom!
From an Alone in the Dark designer
