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

Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance initially amazed with its scale. It’s a real-time strategy game in which hundreds of robots collide upon enormous maps, in which the units you build at the start of a match are the size of a metallic toenail on the Experimental units you’ll be building at the end, and in which you’ll spend your time zooming seamlessly up into the clouds just to fit all the destruction on screen.

Seven years later, the scale doesn’t impress me as much. Instead it’s the depth> that continues to amaze.

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A couple of weeks ago, a roguelike which uses the Banner Saga engine to create a rather attractive post-apocalyptic cocktail of FTL, The Oregon Trail and XCOM popped up on Kickstarter. Bedlam’s around $90k into its $130k goal, with just eight days left on the clock. I’ve had a chat with the devs, who include veterans of Darksiders studio Vigil, about what they’re aiming for with the game, what the Banner Saga engine enables them to do, what they’ve changed about it, and the 80s/90s comics visual influences for this game of desert bandits and desert death-buses. Also – what about that other> game called Bedlam? … [visit site to read more]

Titan Quest is a game I’ve gone back to a few times over the eight or so years since it came out. A straight, classic(al) Action RPG, I find it hard to fully justify why its calm ways engross me so much. Yet every so often it calls to me, so back once again I went. And found I couldn’t start. Not because of technology issues – it holds up extremely well – but because of that opening moment: it felt too good.>

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The beautifully bleak first-person shooters Metro 2033 and Metro: Last Light have both been retooled and are being resold: a bit weird since the latter only came out last year. Is Metro Redux worth the dough if you already own the original games? How about if you don’t? How about if, like me, you own one but not the other? Well, here’s whut ah thank, y’all! (Note: I’m an American. We all talk like that.)>

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Update: Relax, everyone! A bit, at least. Steam’s offering each Redux for half-price if you own the original game.

Huh! Metro 2033 and Metro: Last Light are being “remastered” for re-release, which is a funny thing. The pair of solid shooters are still quite recent, after all, not to mention pretty enough. It all seems quite odd until you remember new consoles now exist–shiny new consoles hungry for pixels and games, which people are quite keen to feed. So thank you, Xbox One and PlayStation 4. Thanks to you, 4A Games are giving 2033 a grand makeover and Last Light a fetching new outfit.

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You’ve got to get your Humble Bundles out when guests come over, haven’t you. Show them the collection, that’s right. They always say they enjoy looking, don’t they, though they do ask why you never play any of them. They don’t get get it, do they, but that’s fine. You’ve got your collection, all tidy and shiny in those pewter frames. Those frames with a gap in the middle. That dreadful, gaping gap that creeps into your dreams and you awake screaming. The Humble Bundle you missed.

Chin up, chuck! You might catch it again. The Humble folks are running a fortnight of daily pay-what-you-want Humble Bundles–some old favourites and some new hopefuls–so fingers crossed That One That Got Away comes around again.

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Update: Confirmation/statement from Nordic Games below. The short version? “We can and will not settle for second-best solutions in the case of Darksiders.”

Original: Things were not looking so great for, er, Death for a little bit there. THQ had a run-in with its own sort of reaper, and the Darksiders license sat in limbo seemingly unwanted for ages. That is, until Nordic Games scooped it up along with roughly one trillion other pieces of THQ’s flaming wreckage. But it’s not like the Painkiller: Hell & Damnation publisher can just churn out sequels to everything from Red Faction to Supreme Commander. You’d figure, then, that Darksiders is probably stuck on the sidelines – not pushing up daisies, but not pushing blocks or scything occult beasties either. Former series creative director Joe Madureira, however, claims we might not have to wait long to see something new after all.

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GameSpy, a relic from times long before the modern Internet – or indeed, games and spies – existed is closing down. This on its own is not surprising as the multiplayer service is, by modern standards, buggy and kind of a joke, but it leaves a startling number of games with their e-wings clipped and their online-heaving hams strung> in its wake. How many, you ask? Well, Reddit’s /r/Games board compiled a massive list, and the results aren’t pretty.

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Normally I wouldn’t even bat an eyelash at some random cross-game promotional effort – let alone dedicate precious RPS Hyper Maturity Space to it – but this time is different. The reason? Two of the dumbest, most laughably enjoyable games I’ve played in ages are colliding, and there is now no way> that last clause wasn’t a euphemism for something, authorial intent be damned. Yes, it’s finally happening: Saints Row The Third‘s infamous dildo bat is invading another game. I know, I know. It’s only a matter of time before it replaces the standard-issue pistol as every game’s go-to default weapon of choice, but for now Shadow Warrior’s caught its purple, pulsating disease. Continue not being able to look away below.

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We haven’t mentioned before now, but the current Humble Weekly Sale is a clutch of Cliffski’s Positech games, which have already netted over $100k, with a day and a half to go. Beers are on Cliffski! (Just don’t mention piracy.) And now a new fortnight-long Humble Bundle proper has launched, this time showcasing the products of the decidedly not indie Deep Silver. Four of their games (including Saints Row 3!) for pay what you want, two more for over the average, and the rather average Dead Island Riptide if you throw in $25.

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