How much of my love of citybuilding games is simply that I love looking at cities? Clean lines, bustling streets, each block a little ant farms to peer into and lose myself within. Concrete Jungle suggests you can twist the genre in whole new directions and I’ll still follow along. It replaces all the management and simulation normally associated with citybuilding and replaces it instead with deckbuilding. Ooh.> It’s on Kickstarter now and more than a third of the way towards a modest target.

… [visit site to read more]

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game recommendations. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.>

If the answer to the headline question is ‘no’, for many years your only way to change it was either car boot sales or wanton piracy. That changed yesterday, when GoG finally secured what is surely the ur-GoG deal: republishing a spread of 90s LucasArts PC games. Among them was TIE Fighter, the space combat sim that – extremely ambitiously at the time – placed you inside the helmet of a Star Wars baddie. … [visit site to read more]

The Swindle is dead, long live The Swindle. This Steampunk heist game was what Size Five Games planned on doing in lieu of another Ben & Dan / Time Gentlemen, Please point and click adventure, but lead dev Dan Marshall wound up quasi-cancelling it when he couldn’t find the fun, to borrow a line from Blizzard. Given that he’d also axed third Ben & Dan game Revenge of the Balloon-headed Mexican, he was in danger of developing A Reputation.

Instead, perhaps his reputation will be as the Uncanceller, for The Swindle is resurrected and rebooted as a quicker, simpler, gadgety action-stealth game, with its new form borrowing a few pages out of Spelunky’s high-speed procedural generation book. … [visit site to read more]

Life is just swings and roundabouts, innit? The Long Dark‘s early access just got an enormous update so it’s playable area is twice the size it was before, but the downside is that starvation now causes you to become fatigued more quickly making it harder to cross that territory. Your carrying capacity now decreases according to your fatigue, which is bad, but the game now contains bunny rabbits, which is good. A rifle is now guaranteed to spawn at Mystery Lake, but wolves predate upon you more aggressively when you’re weak.

Swings and roundabouts, see. Deadly and perilous swings and roundabouts.

… [visit site to read more]

I’ve been doing a series of Let’s Play videos exploring old adventures, 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>!

When I recently featured one of my all-time favorite adventures,The Colonel’s Bequest, for a quick Lo-Fi look, I thought it might be a good idea to revisit it later in a full-length video. I suggested it, and the response was overwhelming — you wanted more Colonel’s Bequest!

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The thrills, chills, and double kills of the fairground are now open to all mercenaries who aren’t afraid of being murdered in a wizard’s ploy to invoke dark powers. This year’s Scream Fortress Halloween update brings TF2 to a carnival not> built on an ancient burial ground – that’s the problem. Here, it’ll make more sense if you read the comic.

This year’s Halloween map is split into two halves: a one-flag CTF sorta thing about triggering a giant striker, then bumper car battles. It also has spells, costumes, and, of course, such… prizes!>

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“I am yourself and you are me. My name is Ego. My penis fell off… help me find it.>“

So begins Psyche E. A short, scatological and completely bonkers point-and-click adventure you can download for Windows. A game filled with weird sights and words that beautifully rhyme with rock.

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Adam thought The Evil Within was a fine game, but that its letterboxed screen size was a hindrance – a technique that would have been best used sparingly, rather than for the entire length of the game. Rich Stanton thought that the technique was well deployed, increased tension and was never put towards creating cheap jump-scares. Parts of the internet, meanwhile, thought that the black bars were probably a technical fault rather than a deliberately-employed artistic technique.

Whatever you think, you’ll have now have to make a choice: a patch has just been released that lets you turn the black bars off, change the frames-per-second cap between either 30 or 60, and other tweaks.

… [visit site to read more]

Good news, dinosaur fans! Soon you’ll be able to murder dinosaurs or murder people who want to murder dinosaurs, depending on quite how you feel about ancient reptiles reborn in the modern era, better than ever. Primal Carnage was already one of the finer dinosaur multiplayer FPSs around, and next month will bring Primal Carnage: Extinction – a sequel that’s really a remake.

Bad news, Primal Carnage owners! The long-promised “recode” that was supposed to be a free update has become a separate game. The devs do plan to offer y’all a discount on it, at least.

… [visit site to read more]

We recently published our first ever article about King of Dragon Pass, a feature in praise of the cult favourite tribal management game. If you haven’t read it, you should and if you haven’t played the game, you should probably do that as well. Originally released in 1999, it’s one of the strongest examples of emergent storytelling built around a strategic framework. Now, fifteen years later, members of the original team are getting back together to make a spiritual successor, which makes me think we should start writing about more games that deserve a sequel to see if we can control the fates again.

… [visit site to read more]