Last week saw the return of World of Warcraft‘s most controversial server, Nostalrius. It’s a private server which aims to recreate the experience of ‘vanilla’ World of Warcraft – that is, WoW as it was at or shortly after launch, before being supplemented and re-shaped by a hundred updates and multiple expansions. Logging on, I’m told “Position in queue, 3801. Estimated time: 47 minutes”, before being ushered into a world of lag and people complaining about random disconnects. So, uh… yeah! Congratulations to the team for perfectly> recreating the vanilla WoW experience!

… [visit site to read more]

Space Engineers [official site] is still in early access but has now officially reached beta status. I believe means Keen’s software rocket is still risky enough that they wouldn’t send humans up but if a few monkeys explode in the name of progress, so be it. Perhaps one such monkey is you. The update blasting the space craft-o-build-a-sandbox into beta has brought new multiplayer netcode, a tutorial campaign, redesigned and rebuilt blocks, magnetic boots, improvements to rendering and physics, and other such neat-o improvements. … [visit site to read more]

We have long suspected that the gambling institutions of our planet are strange and silly places, where nothing makes sense. But for an alien race, these dens of coinage and colour might be stranger still. Alien Caseno lets you explore a meteoric establishment set up by extraterrestrials to mimic the betting behaviour of the “humens of Erth”. Notes inscribed on the wall explain these otherworldly customs. There’s “ponker” and “peetser” and that game where the small sphere travels around inside a tray. “humens get alarmed,” notes one scrawl, “if they don’t like where it stops on the tray.” … [visit site to read more]

Open-world dinosaur survival sandbox Ark: Survival Evolved is getting a virtual reality spin off, named Ark Park [official site]. It’ll offer a theme park to wander around gawping at dinosaurs, obvs, and players will even be able to import their own dinos from Survival Evolved to hang out. I don’t know why they haven’t gone with the clearly-superior name of Jurassark Park. Could’ve got a low-framerate Dickie Attenborough lookalike clipping into the terrain, a Jeff Goldblum rubberbanding as he pummels dodos to craft himself a damn shirt. … [visit site to read more]

You either surf, or you fight. And while there’s plenty of the latter in this multicoloured monster of an industry, there’s less of the former. The noble sport of surfing has been underrepresented by games, say developers Climax Studios, of Silent Hill: Shattered Memories fame. So they’ve decided to make Surf World Series [official site], an “arcade-style” wave-rider with five of the world’s best surfing destinations, such as Hawaii and Portugal. You can come and look at a trailer, if you like flickering edits and sloshy, salty water. … [visit site to read more]

The Resident Evil 7 [official site] demo ‘Beginning Hour’ is now out on PC after six months of haunting consoles. RE7 looks a curious one, ostensibly returning to the series’ roots in spooky mansions but with hillbilly horror and an Amnesia-ish, PT-y first-person style. Most of what Capcom have shown so far is set inside one derelict spookhouse, and now we can visit that place ourselves in the demo. Beginning Hour isn’t the game’s first hour but rather a mood-setting piece, confusingly. As our Adam has written, It’s certainly interesting to see such a bloated series stripped back. … [visit site to read more]

We certainly have lost track of Reset [official site] since its just-about-successful 2013 Indiegogo. Overwhelmingly beautiful in screenshots and early footage, then even beautifuller in a second trailer, it sank into a long stretch of development with multiple delays. And now, two days short of its most recent release date, the huge project from just two people has slipped again.

… [visit site to read more]

Ho ho, you’d thought we’d forgotten about you! (We did) But never mind, we’re here now, sweet friend, with the eighteenth door of our advent calendar, teasing it open like a silky gown, showing you its lacy stockings, its hairy chest, its coy grin. What could it be?

It’s 2016’s best multiplayer shooter, Overwatch! … [visit site to read more]

Oh, hey, is that Rise of the Bloodborn, the second expansion to free-to-play card-battler Duelyst [official site]? We didn t see you come in. Oh, what s that – you snuck in through patch 1.78, which went live a couple of days ago? Please, make yourself at home. I’ll just tidy up a bit while you get settled. … [visit site to read more]

Sundays are for stuffing your face with roast potatoes and other related foods. Before we’re bloated to the point of being unable to move, here’s a roundup of the week best writing about games.

Game developer Katharine Neil writes about how we design games now and why. This is about the concepts of self-conscious vs. unself-conscious design, or design via theory vs. design via making, and about why the industry should do more to establish tools and language to support theory. I do not agree with everything within, and I feel like it does not make its case strongly enough in some places, but it is interesting and about humans and you should read it.

… [visit site to read more]