Cor blimey, it’s only the weekly Steam Charts! As always, these are based on the accumulated sales on Steam over the previous week, not what’s doing best for itself at this exact moment in time.

A nice number one this week, but a rather old-fashioned top ten otherwise – with one unexpected aberration.

N.B. there is NO VENGABUS this week. Repeat NO VENGA BUS. It’ll return when it is most needed. … [visit site to read more]

This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the inner workings of their games. This time, Astroneer [official site].

Astroneer is a space game about hoovering up alien materials with a magic gun and listening to them plop into your backpack. And in this Astroneer has cracked something very special in crafting and resource management: it s actually fun.

Developer System Era Software has put a peculiar focus on how resources are presented and how you manipulate them, and at its centre is an idea that s surprisingly rare in games:

THE MECHANIC: Resources are physical … [visit site to read more]

It’s the weekly Steam charts! These are the games which sold best on Steam last week. This week, it’s the first true> chart of 2017, as the last one covered the arse-end of 2016. All change, all change.

I’m even going to do this one upside-down. New year, new rules! And I don’t want to spoil the surprise right away.

… [visit site to read more]

Out with the old, in with the new. By which I mean ‘and our weekly Steam Charts, showing the ten games which sold best over the previous week, returns – replete with most of the same names as last year.’

SHOULD AULD ACQUAINTANCE BE FORGOT AND NEVER BROUGHT TO MIND?

Welcome back. … [visit site to read more]

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time. (Apart from the next week and a half while we hide in Horace’s warm, warm fur.)>

Normally when selecting games for HYP, I favour those that are at least a few years old, so that the suggestion comes as a greater surprise. But Astroneer [official site] is all I’ve been playing since it was released into early access earlier this month, and it’s lovely enough that it deserves more words written about it.

… [visit site to read more]

Astroneer [official site] is so lovely. It’s a really pretty game with this fondness of geometry and at the moment, in its early access phase, it’s forgiving enough that I can potter in my sleep-deprived state without getting confused. There are also ace caves to explore and weird plants and ribcages and hostile fungi to find. To explain what I’ve been up to in the last day or so I’ve made a video explaining some basics and showcasing my base! … [visit site to read more]

It’s the most wonderful time of the year. It’s THE mosssssssst wonderful tiiiiiiiiiiiime ahaahahaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah I wish I had a machinegun ho ho ho ahahaha, get stuffed 2016. … [visit site to read more]

I drive the short trip back to my base, park my truck close enough to one of the buildings for the cable to attach, and offload the red blob from the back of my buggy. It looks like a thorned vegetable and I plug it into my research station, which is receiving power via cables from the solar panel on the back of my truck. When the research is complete, I will have the knowledge of which resources I need in order for my 3D printer to create a drill head, which I can then attach to a vehicle and use to cut paths through the fully deformable terrain.

Astroneer [official site] is a survive-and-craft game like many others, but it throws out a lot of the cruft and grind. I played it and suddenly it was five hours later, the intervening period a blur of pretty landscapes and achievable goals.

… [visit site to read more]

Astroneer [official site] caught my eye at… GDC? Yes, it was GDC, earlier this year. It’s a kind of planetary potterer where you bimble around doing space exploration and terrain reshaping as you search for crafting/trading resources. I remember I rather liked the polygonal art style and figured I’d probably end up with a bulging screenshot folder when I got to playing it. It looks like my screenshots folder should start preparing itself as Astroneers is popping onto Early Access this Friday, 16 December.

This is something which got announced earlier in the year but which I’d forgotten because CHRISTMAS THINGS! until a dev update landed somewhere in my newsfeeds. … [visit site to read more]

We have been cooing at Astroneer [official site] on and off for the past year, its colourful planets, bouncing astronauts and clicky base-building. And although we enjoyed footage of little men bounding across low-poly worlds together and carving out tunnels in the rock with some sort of futuristic matter displacer, we didn t know exactly when it would come out. Well, we still don t know. Not exactly>. But it will be in December this year, say the developers, hitting Steam and Windows 10 as an early access game. Here s another trailer they released along with the news.

… [visit site to read more]