Perhaps Atari is being meta. That’s my theory. Two old, undesirable game series returning, both about things that should be dead coming back to life. Again. It’s awfully clever.

So it is that we have yet another attempt to revive the never-good Alone In The Dark, and the Atari 2600 cartridge game, Haunted House. Both now have their first trailers, below. Neither seeming to have much to do with Atari’s recent declaration that it was to focus on the extraordinarily specific choice of making “LGBT and social casino” games.

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If Capcom’s announcement of Resident Evil Revelations 2 had included any useful or interesting information, I’d have told you about that. As all they offered was a teaser trailer and some artwork, let’s talk about Troll 2>. One of those so-bad-it’s-good cult classics, the horror movie (not in any way a sequel to Troll>) is about backwoods town Nilbog, whose residents are secretly goblins (not trolls). The goblins eat out-of-towners, of course, but are vegetarian so they magically turn people into plants then scoop up the goop. It made a serious point about vegetarianism, its director insists.

Based on the live-action trailer, the only rational assumption we can make is that Revelations 2 will do the same for fitness culture and those Fitbit wristband computer things.

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The Behemoth have a strong track record. Actually, ‘strong’ may not be the right word – the track is littered with banana skins and slick pools of blood, and dappled with spluttering sprinkles of deer poo. Castle Crashers, simple thing that it is, was one of my favourite XBLA games. Prop a couple of friends on a couch with controllers in their hands and the cartoon lunacy of the world is a joyous thing to beat seven thousand shades of shite out of. Battleblock Theater is a lovely thing as well, with the best narrator since Bastion. That narrator returns in ‘Game 4′, which has now been revealed. It’s a turn-based tactical game, made up of delicious hexes. The singleplayer mode is showing at PAX and the short video below follows each playthrough.

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Nobody knew about it, but Haunted Castle is a game that has been around since the 1970s and, apparently, this makes it beyond any doubt the oldest game this column/garden will ever cover. Most probably one of the oddest too, as the Haunted Castle really isn’t much of a video game. It’s a board game.

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Heroes of Newerth devs S2 Games declared their second wizard ‘em up, Strife, a “second generation MOBA.” (Don’t confuse Strife with Smite, Hi-Rez’s similarly-named wizard pusher.) With one Dote ‘em up under their belt, the reasoning goes, they’ve learned from successes and mistakes of the wizard murder simulator genre. Yes, yes, but what’s it actually like? We can now all see for ourselves, as S2 launched Strife into open beta testing on Friday.

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I lead a high-end life and have high-end tastes: penthouse suites, the finest champagne, custom cars, and Cuban cigars the size of your forearm. I demand the same from my video games. The Premium Edition, that’s the one I’ll buy with my many dollars. Gold Edition. Titanium Edition. Blood Red Edition. Deluxe Edition. Ultimate Sith Edition. Collector’s Edition, oh yes; I collect the finest.

Total War: Rome II is now up to my standards, as it’s getting an Emperor Edition. Technically it’s only a renaming of the base game to mark the launch of a big patch and a free new story campaign, but just look at that name: Emperor Edition>. That belongs in my Steam display cabinet.

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Anything can catch my eye while browsing for new games. A gorgeous art style, my preferred theme of sci-fi, genres rarer in indie circles, the list of things that take my fancy is as numerous as it is seemingly random. Sometimes a game will hit all of these, like Interloper. It’s a strategy game that wants to last no more than five minutes per match. It uses very literal interpretations of territory control, with units blocking off passages until they’re destroyed, and supply lines, covering viable routes in your colour. Controlling the action looks simple, but the speed combined with the number of variables and map layout mean I suspect it’s difficult to master. To cap it off, it’s beautifully drawn from a top-down perspective with some lovely-looking alien tribes. See it in motion below.

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Goodness me, the Firewatch trailer looks a bit good. Just shown for the first time at PAX by Campo Santo – a team made of developers from DoubleFine, 2K Marin and Telltale – it seems to be a freely explorable, though narrative-led, mystery adventure. And good gravy, it looks pretty. The first trailer, and first eight screenshots showing the 1980s Wyoming first, are below.

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Team Meat’s peculiar teaser a fortnight ago for a game they’d called A Voyeur For September, has been revealed to in fact be a game called Super Meat Boy Forever (anagram, see?). And despite thoughts it was to be a “live action stealth game”, it is in fact a touch-based “auto-runner”, that will have a Steam release alongside phone/tablet. Confused? I think they were aiming for that.

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Volition have announced a new entry in the Saints Row franchise, the curiously in-joke entitled, expandalone, Gat Out Of Hell.

After the most ugly of starts, Saints Row has gone on to be one of the series most worthy of excitement in recent years. Saints Row: The Third saw the franchise free itself of its genuinely unpleasant origins, and realise itself as a joy-filled, if somewhat problematic, alternative to GTA, rather than a clumsy clone. Last year’s Saints Row IV somehow survived both the collapse of THQ, and the conversion from add-on pack to complete sequel, to become one of the funniest, funnest games ever. So it’s with justified happy expectation that we receive the news that there’s to be a standalone expansion to part VI, Saints Row: Gat Out Of Hell.

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