Pip: Alice, you know the thing I like the least about Game of The Year Awards?

Alice: Is it the itchy gowns? The gift bag of tat? Developers straining to wring out tears at the podium? Walking the red carpet in the rain?

Pip: Yeah those are all pretty harrowing except the gown. The gown was fine this year but that might be because it’s actually a slanket with a belt round it. What I was ACTUALLY going to say though, was that I hate that you’re only supposed to talk about stuff from this year. I spent bloody ages working on my Steam backlog and I’m not letting that go to waste! We need to do a Games Of Whatever Year Awards so we can talk about the other things we liked this year and didn’t get a chance to bang on about because they were too old.

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2014 saw the release of three or four interesting and excellent card games, but it was Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft that most captured our attention and drew us back for match after match.

Alec: I’ve shied away from multiplayer in the last couple of years. Partly it’s self-consciousness, and partly because the constant background sound of bloodcurdling screaming* whenever my microphone was turned on didn’t seem fair on everyone else. Hearthstone was very much a way back, and not simply because it worked pretty well on my Surface Pro’s touchscreen (though that was very much a factor). Given it comes from a developer which once thought that making its players’ real names public was a good idea, the way Hearthstone strips everything back to anonymity is impressive. It’s about the deck you face, not the player you face. I needn’t worry about being scrutinised or humiliated – win or lose, I’d be out of there and never seen again by my opponent. And I don’t care about them, either. I just care about the cards.

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Chaos Reborn has been in early access for entire WEEKS now. Two (2) of them. That means it’s Christmas update o’clock and Santa Gollop will be wanging a single player mode as well as the ability to summon a rat pack down your digital chimney.

That analogy went wrong, but I’m kind of committed to it at this point.

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Kerbal Space Program recently entered beta, marking another step towards the stars for its mixture of spaceship construction, physics simulation and space agency management. The game has advanced lightyears since its early releases, where all you got was a quick tutorial that prodded you in the right direction (up) then left you to your own devices. While sandbox mode remains available for people who just want to build rockets in a physics playground, for over a year the actual game has been found in either career or science mode.

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You might have seen One Late Night doing the rounds on YouTube last year. A short, free horror game about trying to escape from your locked offices while uncovering a spooky story, it had a goofy ghost trying to find you to spook you good. Jump scares are big nowadays, you know. But, as Adam recently found with Five Nights at Freddy’s 2, that’s no reason to rule a game out (he quite liked the first One Late Night too). So here’s news that commercial sequel One Late Night: Deadline launched yesterday, looking bigger, branchier, and a fair bit prettier.

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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.>

As an accomplished and habitual liar, I take pride in my art and follow a simple rule: if you’re going to lie to someone, at least make it entertaining for them. So, dear video games, I’m not impressed when you set up an unreliable narrator to reveal gasp> I’m dead or gasp> I’m the killer or gasp> something something metaphysics. Call of Juarez Gunslinger‘s turns me into a gunfighter blowing away a dozen outlaws in the blink of an eye with my twin revolvers. Ayup, that’ll do nicely.

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Look, it’s the last day of term and we’re allowed to bring in whatever we want. Pip’s batting an avocado about, John’s cradling what appears to be a small hairless cat with opposable thumbs, Graham and Adam are kicking some kind of spherical egg between themselves, and me, I’ve brought in a video to watch. It’s about zombies and monsters and big guns and cool swords totally murdering zombies like schhhhing!> in Killing Floor 2 and before you ask, yes, my mum did say it’s fine if I watch it okay.

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Ignore the acronym if you possibly can because we shouldn’t dwell on an irritating title when there’s so much else to discuss. Space Pirates and Zombies 2 looks like it might be an absolute corker, an heir to the sensational Space Rangers 2, built around a living galaxy that exists and develops no matter what the player might be doing elsewhere. Read this and salivate:

Two hundred persistent Captains that are able to do everything the player can, including forming dynamic factions, building structures, controlling territory, and going to War.

If Minmax pull that off, Space Pirates and Zombies 2 might be an unexpected and unlikely true single player alternative to Elite: Dangerous. Space wars! There’s much more, including a trailer and details about randomised ship parts below.

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Continuing a short series in which I get to grips with the newly-released Elite: Dangerous and document my thoughts about the game as I do.>

I’d made this pledge to myself – that I’d learn this game without help. It has not been at all easy. Elite Dangerous only wants to impart a bare minimum of information to me, and while a large part of me digs working it out for myself, often I’m hitting brick walls. For instance: … [visit site to read more]

In a new beta release as part of Team Fortress 2’s Smissmas update, the game is getting grappling hooks! And as is well established, grappling hooks make any game’s score go up by 10%. On a site that doesn’t give scores, that makes TF2 now infinity/100.

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