I found Nested last night, led to it by a Quinns Tweet. Nested is a game/toy/program that generates infinite universes, nested inside one another, and filled with the physical elements of reality. At first I didn’t understand. Sure, this kind of thing is neat, but I’m not particularly excited about the chemical structure of an opaline interstellar cloud.

And then I found life, in the form of a couple of people driving a car into an alley. I read their thoughts and memories. They had seen something that led them to believe they’d die in that car and two pedestrians in the alley were blissfully unaware, one thinking ‘everything is going just fine’ and the other remembering ‘stargazing with my mother’. A tragic accident nested in a crab’s eye (really – that’s where the particular universe resided). This is my new favourite thing.

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FADE IN

INT. SKYSCRAPER - NIGHT

JONATHAN IRONS is hanging from a window ledge. We can see shards of broken glass, but the camera pushes in on his face. He looks like Kevin Spacey. Or a sort of facsimile of Kevin Spacey's head, smooshed on to a Vince McMahon wrestling figure.

This scene doesn’t appear in the new Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare story trailer, I’m just guessing at where this whole thing is headed. Trailer and more thoughts below.

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Behold, the glory of the mid-week headline slump. If I have to defend this one – and it’s positively ingenious compared to some of my previous work – then let it be known that Station is a point and click adventure set in an underwater facility. There are submersibles. That’s about all I’ve got. Actually, the Monkey Island reference is remarkably inappropriate considering that Station is aiming for tension and horror rather than comedy. If games and cartoons have taught me anything, it’s that people will always go mad if they spend more than half an hour underwater, which is why I don’t trust deepsea divers, hydrotherapy (it counts) or James Cameron.

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[I've been doing a series of Let's Play videos exploring old advetures, text games and lost design forms from the 1980s Apple IIe and Commodore 64 era. In a time when young men shout over new action games, I will talk softly over strange old ones. Come along on a visitation of a different era that's one part meditations on my childhood, one part adventure game criticism, and one part preservation effort. Bonus: Everyone says the quiet talk, lo-fi handmade feel and keyboard tapping triggers ASMR responses. Please enjoy>!]

In my excavations of text-based graphic adventures from the 1980s, one of my favorite discoveries has been the late Jyym Pearson’s “Apple Other-Ventures”. Each one begins with a dead-serious provocation: These are “state of the art”, with dynamically-changing, “breathtaking graphics”, “psychological realism” and “the plot quality of a fine novel.”

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I know how game development works. I know you aim to have something playable as quickly as possible, and then test, iterate and repeat for potentially years. That doesn’t stop me being reflexively impressed that Epic are already playing team deathmatch in the new, community-driven Unreal Tournament. They’ve got all the weapons in, there’s a couple of new maps, and heck it already looks pretty fun in this three minute video of the devs playing and chatting about what they’re playing.

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Freeware Garden searches the corners of the internet to highlight one free game every day.>

Itto and Diagoro Ogami, a heavily pixelated father-son team, can’t handle grief particularly well and have set out to avenge Ms. Ogami’s unfair death in the most brutal way imaginable: by sticking their katanas in as many men as possible. Evidently, they simply cannot understand that indiscriminant violence solves nothing and only serves in providing us with games like Shogun Assassin.

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If a certain mixture of screenshake and sound effects can make a game feel Vlambeerian, I think it’s time we cemented clumsy, barely-controllable floppy-physics as Foddyan. Stegersaurus Software’s Mount Your Friends would be Fig. 1 alongside the dictionary definition – and I mean this as a strong compliment. It takes the button-per-limb style of QWOP or GIRP and transports it into something directly competitive.

This is how it works: one player climbs atop a platform, reaches beyond a goal line, and hits a button to fix themselves in place. Player two then has sixty seconds to climb on top of them and reach further before it’s back to player one to climb higher still and so on. In each turn, players are both climber and climbing frame. It’s comic, tense and finally available through Steam as of today. There’s a trailer and some hands-on thoughts below.

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The screenshot shows the precise moment when I gave up for the night. You may be reading this on Wednesday morning but I wrote it late on Tuesday night. The first time I played Lexicopolis, which is free and browser-based, I abandoned my civic duties after a couple of turns but the picture above shows decent progress. Lexicopolis is Urban Scrabble, in that it’s a word game that’s also about building cities. The terrain has a grid of letters and bonus tiles scattered across it and placing a building captures the tiles beneath its foundations. Using the collected words, you must spell new buildings into existence, aiming for a high score. It’s simple but very well executed. But I’ve given up the majoral medallion for now.

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You can keep your Spec Ops: The Lines and Far Cry 2s. When I want ruminations on the futility of violence and war, I turn to Cannon Fodder. Sensible Software’s top-down tactics game was full of silly songs and cute sprites, but every time you returned to its menu screen you’d see white crosses representing your lost soldiers spreading across the hillside beyond your recruitment centre.

Are tiny sprite men the best way to explore the realities of war? Fritz, an RPG set during World War One, hopes so. It’s up on Kickstarter now, and the pitch video and more detail await below.

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Hello youse!

Sidibaba sidibaba. Sidibaba sidibaba sidibaba. Sidibaba. Sidibaba sidibaba sidibaba. Now, I know this looks like I’m just trying to flesh out my word count by repeating gibberish, the way a writer on Buzzfeed might do. But no, Sidibaba is actually the name of a board game. And it’s a really enjoyable word to say. Try it yourself!

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