Oh man, Hotline Miami. I can still feel it. What a cutting, embarrassingly necessary parable of violence. What a way to stand on the shoulders of Shadow of the Colossus, by taking that moral throughline and wrapping it, head to toe, in the trappings of its time.

What's weird, though, is I think parables are a bit rubbish. More often than not a parable will do somewhere between most and all of the work for you. You'll finish up - watching, reading, playing, whatever - and you'll know exactly what it is that you just consumed, what the point of it was, and what you need to do next, which is usually nothing.

Hotline Miami, a lot of the time, is at real threat of falling into that trap. You are summoned, via anonymous phone call, into a series of ultra-violent raids on various bad guy hideouts, and you obviously oblige. It's 2012 so naturally, Drive still fresh in the mind, this is set in the late '80s. It's a cult hit because it's indie and violent and has music, and the cult following has nicknamed your character "Jacket", because he has a cool jacket. Everything is neon, but a sort of grim neon, with a dirty, grainy flicker over the top that could be a sort of VHS effect or could be a glaring sign, as it gradually flickers with more vigor and grunge, that what you're seeing here isn't entirely real.

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OK, so I know Eurogamer's actual birthday was two days ago, but as is our style, the Eurogamer video team is once again Late to the (birthday) Party.

Over the past three years, we've been introducing each other to our favourite (and/or least favourite) games from yesteryear as part of our Late to the Party series. During that time we've shared our love (and/or hatred) for over one hundred and fifty different games and thanks to this, we've been able to make a compilation episode of LTTP that features one game from every year that Eurogamer has been alive.

In this video, Aoife, Zoe and I are joined by some friendly video team faces from the past (who?!) as we play our way through the 20 years worth of games, including 1999's Dino Crisis, 2006's Gears of War and 2017's PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds. Basically, if you want a healthy dose of nostalgia (or just want to feel rather old) this is the video for you!

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It's four in the morning on 18th February 2017, and a 19-year-old modder and writer named Spencer Yan is sitting in his college dorm at his computer, with a server full of Discord users eager for him to drop the latest update for Midnight Animal, a total conversion mod and original story built upon the bloodstained, bullet-riddled blueprints of Hotline Miami.

At this point, Yan has worked on Midnight Animal for over a year. The project has grown from a Mod DB page and some well received YouTube trailers to being greenlit on Steam. He has permission from developers Dennaton Games to use the source code, and an entire community of engaged and supportive Hotline Miami fans behind him.

What the community isn't yet aware of is the drastic creative reimagining the project has undergone in the time since they last saw an update. A transformation from what its creator describes as a "comically dark, pseudo-cyberpunk revenge story" to something far more personal, philosophical and poignant.

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