Hello! Welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we've found ourselves playing over the last few days. This time: falling, driving, and travelling back in time a bit.

If you fancy catching up on some of the older editions of What We've Been Playing,
here's our archive.

Here is a game you feel in your ankles: Downwell, a roguelike about plummeting through space with guns attached to your feet. The guns reload when you hit the ground, and if you don't want to shoot enemies you can also land on many of them and start a combo going. That beautiful jolt of impact - right through the ankles and up the legs.

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Hello! Welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we've found ourselves playing over the last few days. This time: fast travel, cars, and lovely chirps.

If you fancy catching up on some of the older editions of What we've been playing,
here's our archive.

I sometimes like to think - warning: I'm boring - about a video game city designed entirely from parts of different video games. Who would make the post offices, the fire stations, the roads? One thing I am certain of is the underground network: the lines would belong to Mini Metro, but Hollow Knight would get the stations.

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Hello! Welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we've found ourselves playing over the last few days. This time: cards, cars and a thrilling demo.

If you fancy catching up on some of the older editions of What we've been playing,
here's our archive.

Never Yield is just a demo at present but I've been playing it and playing it. It's so simple - simple in a way that allows a game to become lavish too.

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Hello! Welcome to a new regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we've found ourselves playing over the last few weeks. This time: A Ubisoft Battle Royale, a truly immersive sim, and fun with cards.

Designers: be careful with your fonts. My wife thinks Hyper Scape is called Hyper Slap. Such is the confusing retro-futurism of the title screen. She'll come into the living room: "Oh, you're playing Hyper Slap again."

I am playing Hyper Scape again. I am terrible at it, and as the audience dwindles it takes longer and longer to get a match going, which is an awful fate for a Battle Royale, which needs so many players. But when the matches do kick off, I feel like this might be an underappreciated charmer. Combat is brisk and movement is wonderfully smooth, but it's the map that has me: a sort of grey-box take on a European city, right down to a huge model of Notre Dame.

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Just after the sun's risen on the second day of a 24 hour race comes what's known as happy hour. It's when the track's at its best as some warmth returns to the tarmac after the chill of the night, and when lap times begin to tumble. It's when endurance racing presents its most picturesque side, the morning light capturing the bumps and bruises upon the cars that remain, a gentle mist rising from the trackside verges. For the drivers and teams, just having survived through the night of one of motorsport's greatest challenges is reason enough for good cheer.

Ever since I fell in love with the 24 Hours of Le Mans, I've always made a point of being around for happy hour. On the years I'm lucky enough to be trackside, I'll stroll from Maison Blanche to Tetre Rouge, enjoying the strange serenity of a world slowly waking to a race that hasn't stopped, pausing to get - depending how the night before went - a fresh coffee or one final branded beaker of flat beer. Watching at home, I set an alarm so I can sprint downstairs just before dawn, where my visiting dad will be sitting on the sofa wide awake having powered through the night.

This year, though, I found myself in my shed at sunrise, lowering myself into my primitive rig and strapping on a Rift headset as I prepared myself for a stint in my first ever iRacing team endurance event. They're sim racing's equivalent of an MMO raid, where small groups share cars in a race that goes once around the clock. My team - a gaggle of friends with a few iRacing veterans amongst us happy to show rookies like me the ropes - had made it to the morning, and my team boss, knowing how sentimental I can be about such things, gave me the privilege of taking the seat for happy hour.

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Lando Norris and Max Verstappen - arguably two of F1's hottest properties - have just wrapped up a pretty major achievement together, the two working as part of the joint Team Redline/Pure Racing Team effort to win iRacing's 24 Hours of Spa event.

The two were joined by sim racing veterans Max Benecke and Max Wenig and found themselves in the top split where they dominated proceedings, though that's not to say their race was without drama. With the race well into its final hour, Verstappen had a 'technical' issue - with his brake pedal falling off of his home rig - meaning that Lando Norris had to step in to stroke the Audi R8 LMS GT3 home. Despite the late hiccough, Team Redline PRT finished nearly 30 seconds up the road from its nearest competitor.

Norris and Verstappen are no strangers to the world of sim racing. Norris is a regular who also frequently streams his sessions on his own Twitch channel, while back in 2015 Max Verstappen pulled off an audacious move around the outside of Blanchimont in that year's Belgian Grand Prix - a move he'd practiced previously in iRacing before making it stick in the real world.

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