Like many people, I've had a difficult year. My dad died, an uncle died soon after, and everything is a lot, you know? Even in the best of years, I find Christmas challenging. That's why I'm filling my ears with the maximalist sounds of a song which knows true suffering, a song from a fictional musician in a video game. Reader dear, it's that time of year: if you've not already started, pour a cocoa and join me for Christmas Pain In Christmas Town.

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Ah, the internet. It might be a cesspool of fibre optic-fuelled hate and anxiety these days, but back in ye olde dial-up times of 1999 it felt like a new frontier of hot information. It was a place where people were just trying to share their art, thoughts, music and other assorted paraphernalia with like-minded folk half way across the globe, and where today’s trolls were but mere gnomes in a forest of cobbled together home pages and horrifically bad graphic design.

It’s this early version of the internet that Hypnospace Outlaw captures down to the pixel, only here you surf the web while you sleep via a special headband. Part museum piece, part detective thriller, it’s a wonderful reminder of happier times when all you had to worry about were turds called Zane and making sure your virtual hamster doesn’t die of loneliness while you solve online crimes.

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The Geocities-esque internet of Hypnospace Outlaw is silly fun until you see the tragedy beneath the surface, so it’s fitting that the game produced one of the all-time-great Christmas heartbreak songs. Last year its washed-up rocker, The Chowder Man, gave us the present of Christmas Pain In Christmas Town – a straight banger with a delightful music video. I wept, and vowed to listen every Christmastime. I guess I’m not asking you if it’s too early in the Christmas season to cry to this song as much as I’m telling you I already have.

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Now that Cyberpunk 2077 is delayed again until December 10th, what are you to do? You’ve grown a lurid blue mohawk, your leather jacket is almost worn in, and your prescription mirrorshades are ready for collection at Specsavers – but for what? You might as well use this time to explore all games cyberpunky, from edgy and nihilistic griping about how the future sucks to wacky cyberjapes that make you wanna jump up and shout HACK THE PLANET. I have some recommendations.

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If you tuned into Nintendo’s Indie World stream yesterday, you’ll no doubt have seen that the excellent Hypnospace Outlaw is finally beaming its way onto consoles in all its faux late 90s glory on August 27th. Its arrival on other platforms also brings with it a whole host of neat updates for those of us who have already enjoyed it on PC, too, including over 60 new pages to scroll through, two hours of additional original music, new HypnOS apps and games to play, and new custom HypnOS cursor themes.

But the best and probably most unintentional new addition to Tendershoot’s Bestest Best internet sim adventure is that it’s finally turned my Switch into the ultimate console. With its new mouse and keyboard support, the Switch is finally the portable PC of my dreams.

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Despite being delayed, then later moving entirely online due to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, Summer Games Done Quick is still preparing for some awfully fast gaming next month. The schedule for this year’s event has just gone up, kicking off the annual week of charity speedrunning on Sunday, August 16th. Expect your usual bouts of boundary-breaking and donation shouting, of course, but can you really call it GDQ without the couch banter?

Yeah, probably.

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Now that Cyberpunk 2077 is delayed from April to September, what are you to do? You’ve grown a lurid blue mohawk, your leather jacket is almost worn in, and your prescription mirrorshades are ready for collection at Specsavers – but for what? You might as well use this time to explore all games cyberpunky, from edgy and nihilistic griping about how the future sucks to wacky cyberjapes that make you wanna jump up and shout HACK THE PLANET. I have some recommendations.

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2019 was a great year for PC games – aren’t they all? – but you might not yet know what the very best> PC games of 2019 were. Let us help you.

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The biggest musical surprise of this Christmas is not the back-to-back Christmas Number Ones for songs about sausage rolls but a monster jam coming in hot from Hypnospace Outlaw. The Chowder Man, a faded rockstar you might have encountered when surfing the information sleeperhighway, released a Christmas song over the weekend. It’s named Christmas Pain In Christmas Town and here’s the thing: it’s an absolute banger. A proper great Christmas song. A friend who doesn’t know Hynospace likened it to a Carly Rae Jepsen song, which is one of pop’s highest compliments. And the Hynospace-y music video, oh my!

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Hypnospace Outlaw is a game about surfing a fictional 1999 internet, a web of GeoCities-like pages made by a community of weirdo artists, rock stars, scammers, edgy teens, pastors, hackers and spiritualists. It s funny, bizarre, poignant, and sometimes dumb, just like the early internet that it spoofs.

But it s also a game, so its wild thickets of pages, all written by distinct personalities, are also navigable and carefully laced with puzzles to figure out. How did did the three-strong team behind Hypnospace Outlaw make something so playable out of something so chaotic? The answer lay in looking at how the early internet worked. (more…)