X-COM creator Julian Gollop did have plans for his own new version of the legendary strategy game, but abandoned them in the wake of 2K’s well-received XCOM. “I seriously considered that before Firaxis announced their XCOM,” he told RPS in an interview published today, “but of course once they announced it I thought, well it d be a hopeless cause because it s just not going to get the same traction.”

“I may have been completely wrong in thinking this by the way,” he added. When I suggested that he’d probably have succeeded nonetheless, he added that “I probably could have. I don’t know.” The Laser Squad and Chaos developer, who yesterday released wizard-battling strategy remake/sequel Chaos Reborn on Steam Early Access, hasn’t entirely ruled out an X-comeback of his own, however. “Well, we ll see. Got to finish Chaos first.”

I think it’s on all of us reading this to let him know below that that a new Gollop-made XCOMlike is far, far from a hopeless cause, eh? Also below: the game Julian Gollop almost made instead of Chaos Reborn.

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Part of a miscellany of serious thoughts, animal gifs, and anecdotage from the realm of MOBAs/hero brawlers/lane-pushers/ARTS/tactical wizard-em-ups. One day Pip might even tell you the story of how she bumped into Na Vi s Dendi at a dessert buffet cart.>

Last week YouPorn finally announced the name of the Dota 2 team they’re sponsoring. It’s Team YP now but was formerly known as Play2Win. I had never heard of them.

YouPorn have been snuffling about the Dota 2 scene for a while now and there has been a whole bunch of speculation as to who might add the YP logo to their branded jerseys. I want to run through why I think this is a bad move for pro-gaming, regardless of who ended up with the deal.

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“Wander around weird worlds looking at stuff then write about that” sounds like my job, but it’s also Elegy for a Dead World. Trapped on distant and dead alien worlds inspired by Romantic poets, our intrepid explorer wanders around, wondering what happened there and how they once were. Then we write little notes for other players to read, sharing our visions. Our John quite liked the build he played back when it was Kickstarting. Elegy launched today, costing about a tenner.

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Adventure games have been experiencing a resurgence this past year, but our favourite was by a developer that’s hit a creative peak of their own after grinding away at the genre persistently for years. It’s The Wolf Among Us.

Adam: Wolf-a-Mongoose, as my computer just autocorrected, pips a couple of other contenders to the post in this category thanks to its new-noir style. If the quality of Tales From the Borderlands keeps up after a surprisingly strong start, it might be Telltale’s best series since the first Walking Dead, but in the battle of Clem and Bigby, the wolf is king.

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Ludum Dare 31 entries have 19 days of judging left, and there’s already some gold to be found within. The theme this time is “Entire Game On One Screen”, and amongst the 2637 entries is The Entire Screen Of One Game by Tom 7. A platform game where the platform game is the character jumping about in the level of the platform game which is also the character, and that character is in fact the level of the platform game, which is the character in the game…

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Croteam’s The Talos Principle has a combination of neatly designed puzzles and philosophical pondering. It tickled my brainbuds and got inside my head in that way which sees you drawing diagrams of levels while on the tube or puzzling them out as you lie in bed pretending sleep might turn up at any moment. It’s one of my favourite games from 2014.

The game breaks neatly into two parts: there’s the Portal-esque first person puzzle element where you figure out how to reach and collect tetromino puzzle pieces which are used to advance you through the world; there’s also a philosophical/existential aspect which gradually feeds you scraps of text from a corrupted archive and asks you to consider things like the nature of consciousness and what it means to be human.

I’ll talk about the puzzles first.

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I’ve been looking forward to Team Fortress 2’s End of the Line update for over a year, not because I’m in love with novelty virtual clothing but because it’s built around a community-made, fifteen-minute short film. It’s out now, you can watch it below, and if you do> care for novelty clothes, a portion of the profits go to the creators who toiled away making the movie.

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

Point and click tale Sepulchre is a tiny slip of a thing, but that doesn’t stop it from being a curious and creepy story at the same time.

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Ultimate P t is a free walking simulator with a gun. It’s a big gun too, a double-barrelled shotgun. You can use it to kill exotic and whimsical animals like flamingos and unicorns. To process into cheap p t . And yet… I do think it’s a walking simulator rather than a hunting game. We wander around low-fi woods, follow skittish animals, and listen to soft music in sterotypical walking simulator ways, so I feel a giddy transgressive thrill whipping out a shotgun to blow away a magical horse.

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“Where do zombies come from?” my little niece asked the other day. As The Cool Aunt, I thought I could handle this. “Well, small child,” I said, “when two zombies love each other very much, and want to… ah.” Sweat poured down my brow. I started over, “The thing about flesh is… no, no. Okay, so, you may have noticed that people…” If only Dying Light‘s cinematic intro had arrived in trailer form a little sooner, I might be welcome at this year’s family Christmas dinner.

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