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2 weeks ago
Feature: We built this city on conveniently delineated tiles
A lot of genres have had a resurgence over the past five years, but none more successfully than management games. There are now more ways to direct trains, lay conveyor belts, coral visitors and profit, profit, profit than you could play in a lifetime. The question is: which of these famous timesinks is worth your time, and which of the whipsmart new hires can compete…
2 months ago
Feature: Farming XP
Will It Harvest Moon? – a beginner’s field guide to rehabilitating inferior games
To this day, the jaunty static of the opening jingle to Harvest Moon: More Friends of Mineral Town brings me back to a simpler time. Summer evenings spent hunched over my Game Boy SP, a pane of glass between me and nature’s suburban bounty as I tilled my little squares of land, pet my happy little chickens, and bribed a town’s worth of reticent heartthrobs…
9 months ago
Feature: Irredeemable
OK, look, it isn't a Red Dead Redemption 2 edition, because Red Dead Redemption 2 isn't out for PC yet. But if I keep typing Red Dead Redemption 2 into this Google is going to be SO TRICKED and the clicks will pour in and Graham will give me a promotion!
Feature: The end times are pricey
Please check to see if your cats are laying down with dogs, and if your downs are presently up, because it'll only further confirm this week's Steam Charts' signs of the end times. SEVEN new or re-entries, no GTA, no Counter-Strike, no Witcher 3 - and please, look, sit down, make sure a relative or loved one is close by - Plunkbat is at #6.…
Feature: Welcome to the story farm, we grow disaster
RimWorld is a game of perfect catastrophe. Not simply a homage to Dwarf Fortress, or a skin graft of Prison Architect, it has spent five years of early access becoming its own simulation of farce, hopefulness and inevitable disaster. Today, it's finally "done". It starts as an opaque management game about the marooned survivors of a sci-fi shipwreck. But it quickly harnesses the darkness and…
Feature: Live, die, repeat
We’ve been battered by wave after wave of survival romps since Minecraft popularised the genre, with its deadly nights and groaning zombies, almost a decade ago. In its wake, we've been introduced to a cavalcade of punishing, persistent environments intent on putting us in an early grave. The masochistic impulse to put ourselves through the wringer for entertainment has spread to RPGs, management games, cosmic…
Sci-fi colony simulator RimWorld is getting its official 1.0 release date on Wednesday 17th October, the developers announced today. The game’s been in early access for five years, generating stories about crash-landed space explorers trying to survive and thrive on strange planets.
11 months ago
The "Ah c'mon don't pretend the possibility of cannibalism isn't part of why you were interested in spacelife in the first place" colony simulator RimWorld has launched a big early access update focused on expanding the most important thing in life: being near water. Beta update 19 lets players build bridges and build light buildings atop them, and baselords can also build power-generating watermills and…
1 year ago
We've just passed the half-way point of 2018, so Ian Gatekeeper and all his fabulously wealthy chums over at Valve have revealed which hundred games have sold best on Steam over the past six months. It's a list dominated by pre-2018 names, to be frank, a great many of which you'll be expected, but there are a few surprises in there. 2018 releases Jurassic World…
Sci-fi colony catastrophe sim RimWorld is finally almost ready to leave early access and launch in full with a shiny version 1.0, creator Tynan Sylvester has said. It's a game that one could keep adding to forever, he says, but after five years of development he's ready to draw a line in the sand and call it ready. Sounds fair, really. He still plans to…
2 years ago
Feature: The biggest hits of the past 12 months
Another year over, a new one just begun, which means, impossibly, even more games. But what about last year? Which were the games that most people were buying and, more importantly, playing? As is now something of a tradition, Valve have let slip a big ol' breakdown of the most successful titles released on Steam over the past twelve months. Below is the full, hundred-strong…
RimWorld has left its awkward alpha stage, blossoming into a beta with update 18. It’s called A World of Story, but the update really dabbles in everything, from crazy weather to orbital super weapons. Hitting beta also means that it’s in the final stretch, says developer Tynan Sylvester, and there won’t be any “major” new additions like entirely new systems before launch, though there will…
I don’t know how I finished Far Cry 3. Luck and perseverance, I suppose. It’s hard to play when you’d happily take a bullet for a dog, though. The island paradise is full of them, and for some reason they are extremely aggressive. But I refused to harm a hair on their precious little heads.
Feature: Big talk
The planet is full of aimless people. Dozens of non-descript robots silently going to and fro, with no discernable purpose or meaning. Yes, I’m at Gamescom, the annual gaming conference in Germany, but I’m not talking about the visitors on the show floor. I’m talking about the on-screen player bots of Dual Universe [official site], a sci-fi survival MMO making big promises about player numbers…
Digital store Itch.io is tightening its policies -- just a touch! -- after some high-profile naughtiness where an unknown scoundrel uploaded and sold RimWorld as their own game. Part of why Itch is so great is that it freely lets all and sundry sign up and add their games, which does also bring the risk of antics like this but the Itch team usually catch…
Feature: A wealth of splendid 2016-17 games for the lousiest of hardware
'Terrible' only in the sense of their gaming capability. Honestly, I'm sure your laptop is lovely to look at and it was definitely a extremely sensible idea to spend all that money on it instead of buying a holiday or helping to save the pandas. Truth is, though, that playing recently-released games on the vast majority of laptops is about as effective as starting an…
3 years ago
I'd quite happily write and read about Dwarf Fortress and RimWorld [official site] all day long. There might even be time to play them every now and again as well, though I've become accustomed to enjoying them vicariously, reading about other peoples' virtual lives and escapades. A new RimWorld update arrived today and it's a big one, changing the way that worlds are built and…
Feature: "Code is never neutral"
Reed’s having a bad day: her spaceship crashed, she’s one of three survivors, and the other two won’t stop hitting on her. Unfortunately for her, she’s beautiful, which means that they’re immediately enamoured with her; unfortunately for them, she’s gay, which means the feeling is definitely not mutual. Her life is a constant hellish stream of corny pick-up lines and work for the colony. RimWorld…
Feature: Checking in?
We sent Brendan into sci-fi disaster simulator RimWorld [official site], where he quickly established a failing hotel in the middle of a scorching desert. In the final part of his diary, things fall apart. Is everybody ready? Okay, let’s smoke this shit. I order the staff to smoke their flake, and one by one they light up. Then we immediately move onto the next drug.…
Feature: Tales from Bogdan's Rest
We dispatched Brendan back into sci-fi disaster simulator RimWorld [official site], where he quickly established a failing hotel in the middle of a scorching desert. Last week, the hotel staff were in the grip of drugs and cancer. In part two of this three-part diary, a tragedy brings the hotel to its knees. Wide-eyes Pete was on another one of his binges. He’d gotten his…
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