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Well I'm completely exhausted after an hour's crying, and utterly invigorated for it. I just watched Samuel Coster's postmortem of Crashlands [official site] from GDC this year, and goodness me, I've never felt so simultaneously sad and inspired. I implore you to give this a watch.
Feature: Train talk
While out at GDC I spent a bit of time chatting to Alan Hazelden about Cosmic Express [official site], his train-themed logic puzzler. I was playing the preview build of the game at the time and was curious to know a bit more about how you go about sorting the levels for a difficulty curve and how you interpret good and bad kinds of frustration…
Feature: Procedural precision
I'm not sure if Heat Signature [official site] will be labelled as a comedy game when it goes on sale, but I haven'y played a funnier game in recent years. Your role in each brief life that you lead is to earn money by completing missions that involve kidnapping, assassination and theft, so that you can use the money to buy information regarding an end-game…
Feature: Bite > Bark
I'm very wary of licensed games. It's not just that I've played a lot of bad tie-ins over the decades, it's that the license itself often seems to be used as a veil to disguise tired design, or as the only actual hook. Let's be honest – 'Reservoir Dogs top-down shooter' isn't a tantalising pitch in and of itself, is it? What a shame it'd…
Feature: Artificial investigations
One of the talks I went to at GDC was about AI in Dishonored 2 [official site]. I'm not sure what I was expecting because my encounters with the AI are mostly terrifying. As someone who doesn't play much stealth gaming and isn't great at combat from a first person perspective the AI is primed to deal with strategies I'm nowhere near perfecting and thus…
Feature: It's all under control
One of the best, most joyful parts of GDC is Alt.Ctrl.GDC – the section of the show floor dedicated to alternative control methods for games. This year was no exception and I played games using a laser lyre, a box of sand and a bookshelf to name but a few. I think my personal favourite might have been the Calvin and Hobbes-inspired Spacebox [official site]…
Feature: Lost in space
Tacoma [official site] is a game I'd been avoiding until there was something to play – I loved Fullbright's first game, Gone Home, and part of that was the sense of discovering the world and story as I played the game in its completed state. I wanted to do the same with Tacoma so was largely avoiding "news". GDC brought with it a snippet of…
Potentially a difficult one to search for online thanks to flash games of the same name, The Gentleman [official site] was a delightful rhythm-action game I bumped into while squeezing through the crowd at the MIX event at GDC. From the prototype I played it's about following the onscreen cues so that your character Fred will caper along the street performing a Golden Age of…
Feature: Set phasers to translate
Inkle’s Heaven’s Vault: a stunning sci-fi archaeology adventure
With 80 Days and Sorcery, Inkle have made some of our favourite games of recent years, but Heaven's Vault [official site] might just be their greatest achievement yet. It's early days, of course, but a half hour play session at GDC has already convinced me that this science fiction adventure is a very exciting thing indeed. It's a game about exploring the past, in the…
Feature: 21st Century Warriors
Rockstar's adaptation of The Warriors is one of my favourite licensed games. That's probably at least in part because The Warriors is the perfect film for a game adaptation, seeing as it's full of minibosses, action sequences and a basic level structure. When I played Huntdown [official site] at GDC last week, a stack of decades-old games came to mind, but it was The Warriors…
Feature: Divisionary
Steel Division brings fresh tactical ideas to the battlefield
I can appreciate a carefully crafted digital tank rolling into combat as much as the next war game fan, but there are few things I enjoy more than a visible front line. Not the actual troops huddling beneath hedgerows as explosions tear up the dirt, but an actual line, drawn onto the map, bendling, flexing and breaking as the battle plays out. Steel Division [official…
Gearbox Software have opened up a little more about the next Borderlands, after yonks of mutters and murmurs. Well, about some of its technology. Potentially. Gearbox head honch Randy Pitchford showed off some of the Unreal Engine 4 tech "that will power the next Borderlands game" during Epic's 'State of Unreal' presentation at the Game Developers Conference yesterday. Gearbox have been working on lighting with…
Hacking heist 'em up Quadrilateral Cowboy has won the Grand Prize at the 2017 Independent Games Festival awards, taking home $30,000 (and another $3,000 for winning the Excellence in Design award). The ceremony went down last at the Game Developers Conference, with other winners including Ladykiller in a Bind and Hyper Light Drifter. The IGFs may no longer turn up many huge surprises but they…
Feature: Monstrously clever
Into The Breach: FTL follow-up is smart, tense and surprising
Within a couple of minutes of sitting down with Justin Ma and a build of his new game, Into the Breach [official site], preconceptions are torn to shreds. Ma is one half of the team behind FTL and when Into the Breach was announced, I wasn’t alone in thinking it looked like tactical skirmisher Advance Wars, with added monsters. It is that game, to an…
Paradox have announced a new strategy game, Steel Division: Normandy 44. Created by Eugen Systems, the studio behind clever clogs WWII game R.U.S.E. and the Wargame series, it contains "400 different real-world vehicles and units designed with careful historical detail and accuracy" and maps based on aerial recon photos of 1944 Normandy. Mmmmm. Lovely authenticity. It's the tactical tricks that make it sound so appealing…
And so this cosmic dance begins anew. The finalists for the Independent Games Festival awards 2017 have been announced. Out of 650 games examined by the giant gang of 340 judges, a final 30 have been selected for a bunch of categories. There’s plenty of familiar names among them, including Inside, Stardew Valley, Virginia, Hyper Light Drifter and Event[0]. But also some other boyos worth…
