The big silly sandbox of Just Cause 3 is a fine place to dick about, driving and gliding and exploding all over for giggles, but it was sorely lacking the option to muck about with your mates. That’s now resolved with the beta release of Nanos Just Cause 3 Multiplayer [official site]. The unofficial mods adding multiplayer with potentially hundreds of players per server, chasing and racing and exploding together. Just Cause 3 is chaotic with only one play so with hundreds, oh my! … [visit site to read more]

Yes, it’s that time again… give or take a week. 2017’s looking like a fantastic year for RPGs already, thanks to the second big wave of Kickstarters due to hit, and bringing sequels and brand new adventures with it. But, let’s not get complacent. Since I sadly cannot, and would not be so arrogant as to lay down resolutions for the industry without its will, instead there will be Commandments that are Law.

Which is a bit like lore, only harder to skip by hammering the ESC key.

… [visit site to read more]

The final episode of Dreamfall Chapters [official site] may have arrived in June 2016–also tolling the end of The Longest Journey–but developers Red Thread Games aren’t done with their adventure game quite yet. They’ve announced plans to revisit and tweak Chapters with ‘The Final Cut’, an update bringing extra prettiness and gameplay adjustments to bring the PC version in line with Chapters’ upcoming console releases. … [visit site to read more]

And they’re off! Those zippy, glitchy speedrunners are away in this year’s Awesome Games Done Quick, a solid week of non-stop speedrunning livestreamed to raise money for charity. Gasp at their mastery of games! Coo at their exploitation of glitches! Groan at how many rubbish NES platformers they play! Wince at their banter! But mostly, genuinely, it’s impressive how speedrunners know their games inside-out and back-to-front. As ever, they’re playing a grab bag of games from all systems, including a good number of PC games. AGDQ 2017 kicked off yesterday and run 24/7 until Sunday. … [visit site to read more]

Back in 2015, I quite enjoyed Crowtel, a small platformer starring a crow who manages a hotel. That’s why it’s called Crowtel: she’s a crow and she manages a hotel. But when the Health Inspector Cats come calling, Crow needs to quickly fix the hotel’s many problems by running, jumping, and violently cawing. Fighting laundry machines, accidentally freezing the place, arguing with lazy builders… it was cute and fun.

This isn’t just me confused and rambling about the past on a Monday morning: Crowtel has been expanded, fancied up, and released on Steam as Crowtel Renovations. It includes a new story, named Croaktel. You’ll never guess what. … [visit site to read more]

Any game that reminds me of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is welcome to take up a little of my time. I only wish there were more of them. Like Jim, who once wrote of such matters in this parish but now toils in the development mines, I’m sometimes baffled and dismayed when I realise how rare it is to see traces of GSC’s influence in modern design. Beyond Despair [official site] is a multiplayer horror game and that description led me to expect something along the lines of asymmetrical slasher sim Dead by Daylight, but it all looks very> S.T.A.L.K.E.R like, from the anomalies to the behaviour of creatures, as well as the gloomy mood and aesthetic. It’s coming to Early Access this month and you can see it in action below. … [visit site to read more]

Sundays are for visiting friends and beaches, and for in between catching up on some of the best games writing we missed during the Chrimble break. Onwards 2017.

I read a lot of articles which limply connect games to some personal trauma, but this Kotaku article by Coberly about the death of his father and the Civilization IV saves he left behind is worth reading.

… [visit site to read more]

Oh look, you re back. Last year was interesting, wasn t it? Hopefully 2017 has good things in store, both in terms of free games and the continuation of human history. We re off to a strong start on the games side, anyway. Come into our digital den of dastardly downloads as we explore some of the finer details of your personality, including but not limited to:

• Criminality
• False consciousness
• Bad diet
• Poor hygeine

… [visit site to read more]

Is it the future already? Doesn’t time fly! Abandon the past. Slip out of your old clothes, weigh them with rocks, and cast them into the sea. This is the future – we’ve no time for none of that. But do tell me: which futuregames are you playing this futureweekend? Here’s what we’re clicking on! … [visit site to read more]

Sethian [official site] came out, perhaps unwisely, in the midst of the annual November deluge. It s a little niche – a single-screen mystery about typing commands into an alien computer to find out more about the extinct race behind the device. But the computer functions only in the local extraterrestrial tongue. As an xeno-archeologist out to save your career from ruin, it s up to you to decipher and translate much of this language, a symbolic script that is inspired by Chinese, American Sign Language and other languages but also includes features which have no real world counterpart. At its heart is a central question: where did all the aliens go? … [visit site to read more]