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1 month ago
Feature: A little fall inside yourself
Back in late March/early April, I got to know all the corners and bits and pieces of my house a little better. There’s a small bit of wood chunk missing from the threshold into the kitchen, and a crooked staple in the doorway to my office. The golden afternoon light in my bedroom is unparalleled, but the light in my office before 10:00 is perfect…
9 months ago
Feature: Game jams for indoor-types
When you're cooped up inside all day long (for forty-five days and counting), making a game can make for a good distraction. There have been more than a few quarantine-related game jams, each with their own themes and concepts. Isolation, social-solidarity, and "stay home" are common, and when the historians look back at the prolific game dev output of 2020 it won't be too hard…
3 years ago
Around the turn of the decade, that hot-takin' video games discourse became consumed by a terrible question: "What is the Citizen Kane of video games?" Perhaps because any sensible intellectual ignored the raging debate in favour of e.g. twatting ghosts with a guitar in Deadly Premonition or doing crimes while dressed as a toilet in Saint Row: The Third, this question was never settled. Some…
5 years ago
On today's episode of Things That Might Have Happened And Could Have Been Cool But Didn't Happen But The Idea's Still Cool So That's Cool, it's the time retro adventure game folks Wadjet Eye might've made games based on DC Comics' moody Vertigo line. It didn't pan out, but they get as far as whipping up ↑ a nifty bit of artwork showing Hellblazer's John…
8 years ago
I think I exclaimed "Oh no!" about three times in the first two levels of Vertigo. The good kind of "Oh no!" Taking elements from a lot of other games, and a strong visual similarity with the wonderful 1000 Amps, Vertigo is a free puzzle platformer that's genuinely clever. And hurts my brain. My poor, maligned brain.
9 years ago
I'm a simple man, driven by simple pleasures. Such as when playing a climbing simulator, deliberately placing one foot on the rock, and then with arms by my side, placing a second foot on the rock. And watching the character fall stupidly on his back. But then I'm a twit. Vertigo is actually a rather serious climbing game, very impressively recreating the necessary actions and…
Feature: Simulation and wargame news
Before I serve newly baked word-cakes in The Flare Path tearoom, I like to leave them by an open window to cool for an hour or two. This week I left stories about the Microsoft Flight beta-tester recruitment drive, the Steel Armor: Blaze of War trailer, and the GTR3 teaser site on my usual sill, and when I came to collect them... THEY WERE GONE! I can only…
Feature: Simulation & wargame news
Looking for the latest gen on brutal Peruvian insurgency games? You're in the wrong place. My Shining Path column appears on a Tuesday. The Flare Path concerns itself with gentler, less Maoist matters. In two of the splendidly singular creations word-sketched beyond the jump, the only person you can murder is yourself, and in the other one it's plastic tanks and army men that get…
12 years ago
While I wish AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! every success, I can't let the "there's nothing like it" claim in the feature list go unchallenged. For the last two years Russian outfit Digital Dimension Development have been quietly peddling their own flying squirrel sim. BASE doesn't have surreal skyscrapers, smashable panes or hand signalling, but it does have aerodynamic realism, a scary sense of altitude, and a demo that lets…
