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2 weeks ago
Feature: Running it into the ground
Yes, yes, it's me. I know, I know, but calm down. While it's obviously very exciting to have a celebrity as handsome and excellent as me writing you some Steam Charts, I'm still just a regular ordinary guy underneath it all. I leap into my trousers both legs at once, same as anyone else.
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…
3 months ago
Feature: This one's about grief, to be fair.
Often, games are burnt into our memories by the light of the events that took place offscreen. Sometimes, the fused structures are happy ones: a snatch of music from Sonic 3 brings with it the smell of cut grass and caravan upholstery, while the cover art for Discworld II dredges up midsummer sweat and wafting net curtains, the night before a family holiday.
10 months ago
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…
1 year ago
Feature: Update Night
Update Night is a fortnightly column in which Rich McCormick revisits games to find out whether they've been changed for better or worse. I’ve got a robot chicken in the shed that parps out batteries. Do you want to have a look? No, seriously, she’s next to the electrical sheep, and she’s a proper money maker. Every day I teleport down to my little farm, collect…
3 years ago
Feature: Gardening, giant mechs, guest appearances & more.
Venturing onto an unexplored foreign planet is a bit like emigrating, but instead of immediately setting up a bank account, renting a flat, and/or hiring a car your primary is concern is, well, staying alive. In interstellar sandbox adventure Starbound [official site] there are plenty of moon-bound monsters out to get you from the off - be that of the biome, procedurally-generated or unique variety -…
Feature: Something for everyone
I’m a space cowboy made of stellar gas and I’ve spent the day farming. Starbound [official site] is a gargantuan galactic playground jam-packed with gunfights, planet-hopping adventures and tomb raiding, but I’ve probably spent just as much tending to my crops, decorating and going on shopping sprees. I’m utterly content.
4 years ago
Feature: Settling for less
Crafting requires commitment. How does a person wary of settling down survive in the barren worlds of Minecraft, Terraria and Starbound? A tale of tourism, travel and cooperative tension.
6 years ago
Feature: Starbounding across the universe
Starbound was always going to be a game that players would want to re-build in their own image. A procedurally generated sandbox means systems. Lots and lots of systems. It means the community can change whatever they want, and the players have responded at a phenomenal rate of moddery. I've done ridiculous things to my game that I'd never recommend you do. I've added a…
Feature: Procedurally awesome.
Starbound is a procedurally-generated universe, where you have a ship, a star-map, and an infinite number of planets to visit and plunder. It is a game that makes almost no definition between single and multiplayer, allowing you to bring your character across the void and back again, visiting the same places online and offline, and sharing those worlds with friends. Its first beta just welcomed…
7 years ago
No, seriously. This may be the most tree-rich game I've ever come across. And yet, while Starbound's latest trailer runs through woodlands of all shapes, sizes, and colors, Chucklefish chuckles in its oh-so-recognizably fish-like fashion at my pitiful notions of impressiveness. It's designated this bouquet of majestic foliage as a "small selection of the art that will be present in the finished game" from just one of…
It was probably when the first screenshot from Starbound emerged onto the hazy plains of the internet that a law was passed making it illegal to refer to the game without nodding approvingly and saying, "Huh, Terraria in space I guess". Yes, it's a side-scrolling game with mining and construction, a similar visual style, and, yes, there's crossover in some of the design talent, but…
