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

Delivered to me on a CD of assorted bootleg delights, a gift from a university friend with ties to the thriving software piracy scene of South Wales in the late 90s, first-person shooter Blood II meant nothing to me. I had not played Monolith’s first Blood, and I found the in-game story to be almost incomprehensible. (Only years later would I discover that Blood II wouldn’t play most of its cutscenes in the event the player did not choose the one canonical option from the four offered playable characters). But I found something uncommonly dark. 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.

Now, I never owned a copy of Strip Poker II. It came out in 1988, a year during which I spent most of my time being 10, and a little bit 11. But, I did have the demo. It came on a cover disc (no, too easy) with an Atari magazine, probably ST Format, and what I mostly remember is a confusing mix of feelings. 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.

Perhaps the reason the rights to make a No One Lives Forever game are permanently stuck in limbo is because everyone keeps looking for them under ‘N’, forgetting that the name by which everyone refers to this fabbo FPS was only ever the post-colon tagline. 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 worry that one of gaming’s most infamous releases may be being forgotten by history. Almost never do I hear its name raised when people talk about great gaming disasters these days, so let’s remember once more lest we be doomed to repeat it. Rise Of The Robots was the beat-em-up you could win by just doing flying kicks to the right. 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.

That’s a rhetorical question – of course you have. Everyone’s surely played Barbie Dreamhouse Party [official site]? 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.

VIDEOBALL is no Rocket League, but it is a pretty neat take on multiplayer ball-wrangling, breaking down various rulesets to make a game that is just sort of Sport rather than any particular sport. Read the rest of this entry »

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

It’s me, the person who cannot understand how anyone can enjoy playing puzzle games because they feel like maths exams. Hello. Did you know that of all the puzzle games the ones I hate the most involve pushing crates around a warehouse? They suck and I would ban them.

I’ve been playing Slayaway Camp quite a lot. It’s a brilliant game about oldschool slasher films and it doesn’t even vaguely resemble those puzzle games that I loathe so much. Read the rest of this entry »