I’ve been waiting for Hegemony Rome for a long time. Longbow’s previous Hegemony game has endured long in the memory, even if I haven’t played it for years now. Boasting an enormous map with seamless zooming from a broad imperial view to the details of the battlefield, it’s the kind of RTS that I can get behind. The grand scale means that decisions rarely have to be made quickly and you won’t need the world’s fastest fingers to succeed – expect to plan around seasons rather than split seconds. When battle is joined, however, the pace and your pulse may quicken if you’re a map-happy sort of person like myself.

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I’ve been harboring a desire to return to Red Orchestra 2 for a month now, but perhaps I might be derailed for duty on another muddy frontline. Verdun is a multiplayer first-person shooter set in World War 1, about trench warfare, slowly shifting frontlines and squad tactics. It’s currently in alpha, and there’s a new trailer showing the game’s impressive progress below.

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We’re directionless in life. Lost, drifting from day to day, doing the same thing over and over, not really working towards any clear goal. Why oh why would I want to play a ‘real-life’ RPG when every day is grinding misery? Oh! But Always Sometimes Monsters actually has a clear goal, to somehow get across the United States within 30 days to break up the wedding of “your one true love.” So now we can all experience life as a colossal clueless selfish jerk–but one with a goal–as Vagabond Dog’s RPG launched last night.

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If someone has made a game that mixes Dwarf Fortress with The Sims, I haven’t played it yet. I really want to play it though. Instead of mountainhomes and goblin raiders, there would be suburbs and plagues of hipsters. The beautifully ugly dive bar on the corner is reconfigured into a barista training school, where the only skill taught is ‘nonchalant superiority’. People would still lose their minds if they didn’t have enough chairs but instead of sealing themselves in a room and engraving, they’d hit the streets and form vigilante gangs.

KeeperRL is not that game but it is one of my favourite current DF-lites, with a strong Dungeon Keeper vibe as the name suggests. I’ve written about it before and an updated alpha release and crowdfunding success are reason enough to return to the underground.

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In The Fall you play an item of clothing. Surprisingly, with this being PC gaming and all, you’re not a hat, a monocle or a different hat. You’re a futuristic combat suit, or at least you’re the artificial intelligence that has been loaded on-board the suit. When the suit’s occupant loses consciousness under mysterious circumstances, you must all of your simulated smarts to find safety and possibly discover a few home truths about your protocols and programming along the way. The first episode of the side-scrolling atmospheric point and click platformer is out on May 30th and a new trailer lays down some ground rules. Listening to music and wearing clothes is cause for suspicion.

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Given the way things have been going, I suppose this was basically inevitable. In the wake of some very serious John Carmack hardware-related allegations from ZeniMax, the Elder Scrolls, Fallout, and Wolfenstein publisher has dropped a megaton legal bomb. It’s suing virtual reality kingpin (and recent Facebook acquisition) Oculus Rift for “illegally misappropriating ZeniMax trade secrets relating to virtual reality technology, and infringing ZeniMax copyrights and trademarks.” Oculus, meanwhile, continues to claim ZeniMax’s claims are entirely without merit. Claim claim claim clamber clams. Now there’s an idea. Instead of duking it out in a legal cagefight, maybe everyone should just sit down around a nice, fresh plate of clams. Talk things out nice and civil-like while loudly slurping the precious flesh meats of a lowly sea creature.

But no, this is probably gonna be terrible.

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If I m going to be dull and reductive about it, playing videogames works like this: we tell a game something through an input device say, a gamepad, motion contoller, touch screen or keyboard and get a response back in the form of images or sound. It s like a conversation, but it s shaped by the devices we use to talk. Without the Wiimote, there is no Wii Sports. Without the touch screen, there is no Fingle or Bloop.

If I don t own the relevant controller, then I can t play these games. But what if the controller doesn t even exist? Many games are impossible to conceive of because we don t have the hardware to act as muse. Are we living on a junk diet of gamepads and mice or a rich land of controller plenty?

Let s have a chat with a few developers and see wot what they think.

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Association football is, in many ways, the greatest real-world PC game. It’s a squad-based real-time tactical co-op/competitive multiplayer game with over 150 years of lore and canon to obsess over. It has squillions of characters, each with their own stats, backstory, and internal lives right down to daily routines. The game is still updated, but some rules changes are controversial, and other rules are still often misunderstood. You can collect thousands of cosmetic items. That’s a Game Of The Year 10/10 PC Platinum All-Gold Classic if I ever heard of one.

All of which is to say that EA’s free-to-kick FIFA World is now in open beta.

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EVE Online‘s economy is unique among videogames in being truly player-driven; outside of the wildcard item of PLEX, almost everything in the game is constructed, hoarded and sold by players. The enormous complexity of this is why, seven years ago, CCP decided to hire a full-time economist. My name is Eyjolfur Eyjo Gudmundsson but no-one can pronounce that, he laughs, So I am known as Dr Eyjo. I have a doctorate in economics and in that capacity I am the lead economist for CCP, as well as the head of the analytics unit. I sat down with Dr Eyjo to talk about EVE’s economy, player manipulation, and why everyone isn’t leaving the United States.

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