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

If we imagine the internet as a physical realm, perhaps a futuristic city, with giant Amazon shops and Wikipedia libraries, then Salty Bet is one of the trashiest dive bars. It s a noisy den in the Squalid Quarter, full of loutish cackling and people throwing money at the bar staff. In the centre of the bar, an illicit cage fight is about to start, between an anime princess and a weird creature spawned from MS Paint. I feel dirty just walking into this place, so why do I keep coming back? (more…)

The sound of another year deploying its speedbrakes, dropping its flaps, and lowering its landing gear is the cue for me to switch into Regret Mode. Depressingly, my ‘List of Things That I Wish I’d Done More of in 2017’ is almost identical to my ‘List of Things That I Wish I’d Done More of in 2016’. The top four positions are still occupied by ‘Reading’, ‘Writing’, ‘Exercise’, and ‘Accordion Practice’. ‘Playing OMSI 2’ is still stubbornly clinging to slot #21.

(more…)

Hey-o. Very pretty isometric assassination game Tokyo 42 has just put out an update that aims to resolve one of the more common complaints about it – that its rather rigid camera was one of the main causes of death and/or frustration. Things’ll be different from hereon out.

Publishers Mode 7, of Frozen Synapse fame, have also explained exactly why, seven months on, they’ve kowtowed to feedback from whingey, bad-at-games hacks like me at this late stage – and why they didn’t until now. (more…)

The makers of creepy/lovely adventure game Oxenfree have announced their next game, Afterparty. It will send us on a pub crawl across hell with the ultimate goal of out-drinking Satan to save our souls. I’m in. That’s all I need to know. But wait, there’s more: every dialogue choice will offer the option to drink, and different drinks give different moods/social powers. If I’m focused on the laddish side of the game, it’s probably because I spent the night in a Brighton hotel room overlooking a kebab shop on the high street. The rest sounds good too, but we’ll need to wait until 2019 to play. (more…)

Adventure Time! Tell all your pals, let s travel very faraway!

I can sing the opening of Adventure Time perfectly because I enjoy it as a televisual experience. Good news for me and others like me: An open-world Adventure Time game with sail boats and voice actors off the telly is coming out next year. Adventure Time: Pirates Of The Enchiridion sees the land of Ooo submerged in blue wetness and nobody knows why. (more…)

Reminding us all that the term ‘indie’ is meaningless, Take-Two Interactive–the multi-billion-dollar owners of GTA devs Rockstar Games, Civ and XCOM studio Firaxis, and 2K–have launched an indie publishing label. It’s named Private Division and that combined with the logo makes me think: Twin Peaks-themed porn site. But they have gathered a fair number of big names for their initial lineup, including Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey from the new studio of Assassin’s Creed creative director Patrice D silet, a yet-unannounced RPG from Tim Cain and his Fallout cohorts at Obsidian Entertainment, games from fellas who worked on Battlefields and Halos, and Kerbal Space Program (which Take-Two now own). Hey, if leads to good games getting made, wank yourselves wild with your indie fantasies. (more…)

A whistle blows. Cracking rifles in the distance. The gentle thump of boots on snow. It all wakes you from a dream about granny s marmalade. Oh no, you think, I m still in the war. Squads of men are assembling for an inspiring speech. Go and kill the other men using these bullets, says the major, to the 80-150 assembled troops. A cheer rises up. This is it. The fear, the excitement, the courage of men with knives stuck to the end of their guns. Maybe, if you are brave enough, you can be part of this company . of heroes too.

Company of Heroes 2 is free today on the Humble store. (more…)

To The Moon is one of my favourite gaming experiences. No game has made me blub as hard, or as often, and it earned those tears through a funny, passionate, emotionally complex story. Finding Paradise, a direct sequel after a number of smaller asides, didn’t make me cry. It made me laugh, think, wonder, and finish with a sad smile on my face, but no tears. But games aren’t measured by how much they make you cry, people, come on. (more…)

This week s Premature Evaluation gives Fraser the highly coveted job of mucking around in the dirt while managing an ant colony in creepy crawly RTS Empires of the Undergrowth. It gets really dark down there.> The ants were weak and confused. We should start again with another colony.

Like so many nature documentaries before it, Empires of the Undergrowth looks like it s going to be an informative delve into the animal kingdom — specifically the tiny world of our pals, the ants — but instead unfurls into a cruel reminder that nature is terrifying and spiders are dicks. And even here, in this RTS set in a formicarium, the real villains are humans. Awful, awful humans.

(more…)

A minor makeover is coming up the good ol’ original Java version of Minecraft, keeping those same blocky looks but remaking textures. Touching up everything from blocks to items and enemies, the new textures look like Minecraft but a little nicer. If you fancy seeing for yourself, hey, you can download and test this today. This is all unrelated to–and quite different from–the 4K HDR fanciness and Super Duper Graphics Pack coming to Minecraft’s separate Windows 10 edition, which between them are adding all sorts of incongruous lighting effects.

(more…)