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

Admittedly, my experience of this lies far more with the boardgame than the PC adaptation, as the latter is a mixed bag – though very much recreates the key concept.

Ticket To Ride is a game about building railways. It’s extremely extremely extremely important to own the right railways. More important than anything you can imagine. … [visit site to read more]

The opening cinematic for Resident Evil Revelations 2 is below. Why am I posting an intro to a game that I’ll almost certainly never play? I think it’s because after watching it this morning, I moved from almost complete apathy to mild curiosity – I cannot imagine a single human being who would be the ideal target audience for this video. It suggests the game will contain all of the melodrama and convoluted corporate conspiracy nonsense that has accumulated on the series like barnacles on a hull, but will be entirely lacking in horror or humour. Unless you find the name ‘Barry’ particularly funny.

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The latter half of December belongs to Elite: Dangerous, but despite being perfectly gracious about that, Chris Roberts’ rival space game Star Citizen has made a play for a little pre-Christmas action. Its Arena Commander playable module has had a big, fat ‘1.0’ attached to it, and apparently triples how many ships you can burn money on fly. It’s billed as “the most significant update” yet to the playable aspect of Star Citizen. … [visit site to read more]

Steam sales are bloody confusing. That’s just a fact, as you’ll find listed in any Oxford Bumper Book Of Facts. Back in the olden days, when Steam had seventeen games on it, you could find your way around them, and come away with armfuls of games for 11p. And the best parts of it were the publisher bundles. Big name pubs would put together their entire Steam catalogue, and sell it to you at an extraordinary price. 50 for every THQ game, for instance, and you’d be set for months. But with Steam a wholly different, far busier place, this Christmas sees a terrifying 3859 games at sale prices. No, I typed that correctly. And the publisher bundles are few and far between.

So I thought it might be useful to find the publisher bundles that still remain, hidden in there, and not mentioned on the sales pages, as well as some of the highlights of game series collections.

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Y’know GSC Game World? Oh, you do! The Ukrainian studio behind spookyhard FPS series S.T.A.L.K.E.R.? Oh, you must! You remember – they seemed to close in 2011 but held on a bit longer, still working on S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 for a few months then cancelling it, and since only resurfaced to weigh in on confusing brand rights issues. See, I knew you knew them. Well, they’re back, baby! Boom! And other exciting onomatopoeia. They’ve announced a return to active game-making, and chatted a little about what went down, including about S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2’s fate.

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It’s been a couple years since I last used a portal to visit the magnificent and otherworldly Lands of Dream and I now realize just how deeply I had missed them. I had missed the amazing sense of wonder Jonas and Verena Kyratzes have poured into every locale, the giggling at dozens of little jokes hidden behind mushrooms and flowers, the clicking on every tiny detail, the exquisite writing, the wonderfully surreal characters, the glorious puns, the richness of ideas and that deep sense of hope and beauty.

Having just played through the brilliant Postcard from Afthonia I’m already missing the Lands of Dream even more.

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In the wake of Kickstarter and its crowd funding brethren, the last couple of years has seen a trend of asking communities to give feedback during development, and even to contribute ideas. But a phrase I haven’t heard a lot during all this is, “is it worth us continuing working on this game or not?” That’s the bold question being asked by Surgeon Sim creators Bossa Studios of their new project, Worlds Adrift. You can see the grapple-hooked, ship-building shared world in very early action below.

… [visit site to read more]

Psst, hey, here’s a fun idea for the holidays: make a thing. Not a vow to e.g. stop drunktexting – everyone finds that charming, I’m sure. Nor do I mean assembling a weird toy a young nephew received. Make a thing wot people can play and go “Coo I thought you were a worthless lump, but look at you now, some kind of literary giant with these fine words and lawks a lummy look at the clever design you’ve got going on.” Or keep it a secret all for yourself. Just make a thing.

After a fair while in beta, Twine’s update/remake/”sequel” Twine 2 has launched. You could use that. It’s a fairly big overhaul of the write-o-game-maker tool.

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Sometimes words aren’t enough.

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Secret Habitat is an artgame. Its procedurally generated islands are full of procedurally generated paintings, which have been created by (unseen) procedurally generated painters. Fascinating and fulfilling, it is without a doubt the Bestest Best WHAT of the year. Adam, Alice, Graham and Pip donned their finest berets and sat down in a procedurally generated Parisian cafe to discuss.>

… [visit site to read more]