Don’t replay Max Payne. 2001’s coolest game in the known universe is all a bit Tommy Wiseau in 2017. Read the rest of this entry »

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day, perhaps for all time.

In this digital age, there are probably hundreds of people who’ve never experienced the joy of sitting on public transport with a boxed game in their lap. I lament for those people and strongly advise them to recreate the experience of reading a manual on the way home from the shops, hype and anticipation building during the short trip in a way that a six month multi-million dollar marketing campaign could never replicate. Maybe print off pages and pages of patch notes for your favourite game, and read them on the train or the bus, only applying the update once you’re home and hyped. Read the rest of this entry »

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day, perhaps for all time.

Long before Euro Truck Simulator 2, I fell in love with another game about a vehicle-based profession. Taxi driving. The cool console kids might have had Crazy Taxi, but years earlier I was playing with Chuck Rock’s cab-driving sibling, the preposterously titled Ugh!. Read the rest of this entry »

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.

I’ve been playing Injustice 2 recently (sadly, not on PC) and even though it’s probably quite rubbish if you’re a proper fighting game fan, the kind who could have been a concert pianist given your digital dexterity, but if you just want to watch superheroes biff one another, it’s top stuff. Mostly, it’s the loot system that makes it so compelling. It’s all silly boxes that spew out random bits of costume and stats, but that’s enough to keep me coming back again and again.

The studio behind Injustice 2 is led by Ed Boon, creator of Mortal Kombat, and all of this punching and kicking has got me thinking about how much I loved Scorpion back in the day. Read the rest of this entry »

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day, perhaps for all time.

Attack On Titan: Wings of Freedom [official site] is a solid 7/10 kind of game, but its concepts and combat are unusual enough that I find myself thinking about it a lot more than other, better games. In short: Attack on Titan is Spider-Man vs. Godzilla in an open world with destructible buildings. Read the rest of this entry »

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day, perhaps for all time.

WHAT. How have we gone so long without mentioning Halo in ‘Have You Played’? Maybe because it’s such an obvious choice, a monster of both profit and influence. Every shooter since has something to owe Halo, for better or worse. Microsoft’s console expedition certainly has something to owe it, not that we care. Read the rest of this entry »

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day, perhaps for all time.

If somebody were to remake Flood, as a spiritual successor or otherwise, and give it something of Spelunky’s feel, it might well end up being my game of the year. Read the rest of this entry »

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day, perhaps for all time.

BeamNG.drive [official site] has the best crumple-car physics of any game ever. Read the rest of this entry »

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day, perhaps for all time.

Wikipedia tells me I was eight years old when Populous [GOG page] came out and it was my birthday or Christmas present around that time. I’d have been nine at most when I first played it so at least some of the blame for my current predicament must lie at its feet. Read the rest of this entry »

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day, perhaps for all time.

The Simpsons has often been eerily prophetic of future events, be it unreliable autocorrect on portable Apple devices, horse meat scandals, ebola outbreaks, a thin-skinned satsuma becoming president, The Simpsons somehow still continuing decades later…

Even so, revisiting 1997’s The Simpsons: Virtual Springfield reveals striking similarities to many of the VR games we see twenty years later. Janky 90-degree rotation-based movement! Low resolution 3D sightseeing! Minimal interaction! Becoming entirely tedious after 15 minutes! Read the rest of this entry »

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day, perhaps for all time.

Clustertruck [official site] is a first-person platformer about leaping across the tops of a pack of moving trucks, like the most ridiculously overblown movie action sequence. But it didn’t live up to its premise, for me. Read the rest of this entry »

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day, perhaps for all time.

A take on Ridge Racer by the developers of FlatOut, Ridge Racer Unbounded ditched blue skies and smooth racing line for muddy browns and a driving system that rewarded you for destroying things. Read the rest of this entry »

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.

It must be a kind of curse, to be a platformer character. Gex is right up there with the other Z-listers. Blinx, Croc, the Jersey Devil. All dead and gone. Arguably only Mario Mario has been able to sustain the life of a well-respected spike-avoider. The rest end up in the mass grave of childhood memories, which is exactly where you’ll find this rude, polygonal lizard. Read the rest of this entry »

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day, perhaps for all time.

I do love to talk about Cryo, my arch-nemesis for the first few years of what I so confidently call a career. They created bad games with so much vigour and effort, like badness was something that for them required the hardest work. And little they made was as all-encompassingly dreadful as From Dusk Till Dawn. Read the rest of this entry »

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.

They’re making a HD version of it, so it must be good, right?
Read the rest of this entry »

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.

In Sethian you find an alien computer and, as an archeologist of such things, you must decipher the language of its ancient users. It’s a very clever piece of interactive fiction that I happily recommend despite a glaring central problem, which was summed up perfectly by a comment on my original review:

“You’re essentially trying to talk about philosophy with a chatbot,” it said, “while possessing the linguistic ability of a toddler.” Read the rest of this entry »

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day, perhaps for all time.

Naturally, I’m one of those awful snooty elitists about it these days. Doesn’t mean I didn’t play it. Doesn’t mean I didn’t obsess about it at the time. Read the rest of this entry »

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day, perhaps for all time.

I was vibrating with excitement by the time god game Black & White came out, having read umpteen development diaries about its physics, its AI, its morality system, its gesture controls… So many ideas! So much potential. Read the rest of this entry »

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day, perhaps for all time.

I installed Midtown Madness because I thought it looked like Crazy Taxi. But it wasn’t anywhere near as good. Read the rest of this entry »

Well, you can’t. It’s long dead. That was never the plan, of course – Tabula Rasa was supposed to be Richard Garriot’s grand comeback and the game that took down World of Warcraft. Read the rest of this entry »