The email I received about Stage Presence, an Oculus Rift game where you must keep an angry festival crowd happy with nothing but your microphone, contained a single sentence that convinced me to post it. “I promise not to rename it ‘Bez Simulator 2014′.” Think how fast I’d have posted it if developer Jon Dadley had promised that he would> rename it that.

Wonder what it’s like to stand on stage and dodge bottles being thrown at you by a mob? Watch the trailer below.

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“The talking tribe, I find, want sensation from the mountain–not in Keats’s sense. Beginners, not unnaturally, do the same–I did myself. They want the startling view, the horrid pinnacle–sips of beer and tea instead of milk. Yet often the mountain gives itself most completely when I have no destination, when I reach nowhere in particular, but have gone out merely to be with the mountain as one visits a friend with no intention but to be with him.”

I’m used to pairing games together with other mediums, but normally it’s music or television that sits alongside whatever I’m playing. Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain is the first time I’ve found myself mentally connecting a videogame to a book.

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Oof, what a dour Friday it’s been. I feel like every time I’ve opened a tab on this here internet and decided to clatter my fingers across the keys, I’ve been moaning and complaining about something or other. What a delight it was to see Shovel Knight in the Steam new releases. “This’ll dig out the dirt and cast away the cobwebs”, I thought to myself, not really worrying that I wasn’t making any sense.

Shovel Knight is from one of gaming’s oldest schools – it’s a side-scrolling, flip-screen platformer – and it’s a lovely wee thing.

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John is the man to ask about upcoming Warhammer 40K MMO, Eternal Crusade. Or at least he’s the right man to ask the questions of the people in the know, as he demonstrated last year when he interviewed Behaviour about their project. He discovered that Eternal Crusade is likely to be more Planetside than World of Warcraft, which makes sense. Space Marines don’t quest, they WAR. It will be a game of territorial control, against both player-controlled enemies and NPCs. The first footage is available below, along with a teaser trailer. It’s pre-alpha. The real kind, with grayboxes, stuttering and explosion animations plucked from 1952.

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We’ve cast our shared eye over Styx: Master of Shadows before (I’m scheduled for another five minutes with the eye before Adam takes it to look at a football), our collective mouth muttering that an open-level stealth game sounds nice but its heritage makes us sceptical (I’ve got 15 minutes with the mouth before Graham needs to “holler at a lad”). See, it’s a spin-off from Of Orcs & Men, a game which paired stealth bits with action stuff, only our Jim found the stealth “terrible.”

But that was then, this is now, and this game isn’t trying to do two things at once. What happens when Cyanide Studio focus on stealth? Have a gander in 13 of minutes of gameplay footage.

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Whee! A new Space Hulk game that converts the claustrophobic tension of the boardgame into some sort of action-packed shooty-punchy experience. I’m not deeply versed in 40K lore, although I could have told you a thing or two about the Codex Imperialis when I was a teenager. I made an army of chaos marines by gluing bits of toy animals onto my Space Wolves because I wanted a change of pace. Unfortunately, I’m not the most gifted person when it comes to modelling so the height of my achievements was a heavy weapons chap with a hoof for a codpiece. Let’s look at Deathwing.

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“German officer, your life force energy is fading.”

The screenshot made me hope for Treguard’s tones but sadly it was not to be. Sniper Elite 3 could have taken the series in a bold new dungeon-crawling direction but further inspection reveals another WWII organ-busting simulator. That’s not to say it’s not worth your time and precious pennies though. The game is out in Blighty now, having struggled through a staggered geographic release, and we’ll be taking a look through our critical scopes in the near future. Go prone and watch the trailer from afar.

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…is now open! I’d like to thank everyone who contributed images and recommendations. The Hanging Committee’s job was an absurdly difficult one. Beyond those burly security guards is a selection of exceptionally fine> simulator screenshots (Wargames will have to wait their turn). Grab a complimentary flute of fizz and an Avro Vulcan shaped vol-au-vent and go gawp at the enlargeable masterpieces.

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Refresher time: The Journey Down was a great adventure game that came out a while back and then got a strong (though not perfect) HD remake back in 2012. The tale of a Jamacian pilot and his dealings with a mysterious woman, an evil power company, and “The Edge” was quite something, but it rolled credits after it’d only just begun to take off. Thank goodness it’s nearly time for The Journey Down Chapter Two. The wait’s been lengthy, but consider me hopeful for one heck of a payoff.

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It’s sometimes easy to forget about poor ol’ PlanetSide 2 with all these Battleline Hardmen and Advanced Warfaces duking it out for our attention. And while the MMOFPS has still, even after nearly two years of being available in various forms, arguably not lived up to its full potential, there’s nothing else quite like it. That’s why we go there to ruthlessly bop PC Gamer’s legions on the nose so much. Come to think of it, maybe another eat/sleep/play/war-date is in order, seeing as SOE just launched a big update that includes an entire new continent, Hossin. You want swamps? Well, Yoda, you got ‘em.

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