When I was a young lad, I primarily played on the Sega Mega Drive. Normally, my brother would be the one to introduce new games to the house, but Earthworm Jim was the first game I remember buying on my own without outside interference. I’d read about it prior to release in Sonic the Comic, of all things. Here was a colourful platformer that came from Shiny Entertainment, the makers of a very good interpretation of Disney’s Aladdin.

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Sundays are for getting home from a swim in the sea to discover young Matt is on holiday and nobody has nipped down the shops to get the papers in. Ah. Well. All the big’uns are gone so let’s see what I can rustle up from the magazine rack, a bit shorter and less gamesier than usual.

A ROM of prototype Atari arcade game Akka Arrh has appeared online, Ars Technica report. It had been known to exist inside only three arcade cabinets and was valued highly by collectors as a rare game that hadn’t been ‘dumped’ to play in emulators, so who’d even share it? Was it a heist in the name of posterity?

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Today’s Ritual Of The Moon opened with what I believe we millennials call a big mood. “Why shouldn’t I let them die? They don’t care about me.” Sometimes I idly like to imagine we can look at our parents generation as Rorschach in Watchmen looked unto, well, everyone. There will be wailing and gnashing of teeth as they realise they’ve ruined everything and they need us to save them and pay for their retirement homes. And we’ll look down and whisper “No.”

In reality what will happen is that we will never figure anything out because Silicon Valley has reached such a zenith of recursive doucheholery that they’re reinventing buses, and applying terms like “sustainable cost structure” to keeping hens.

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What makes an adventure? There is, of course, that romantic school of thought: the hero’s journey away from home and back again through peril and plight, death and rebirth, and all the rest. (Don’t forget to save the cat on page three.) But what else? What is “adventure” for the rest of us when we have no power to save the world from bosses and demons and zombies? Lacking any supernatural call to my true purpose, I’m pretty willing to call a trip to pick up the shopping an “adventure.”

Here are a small collection of games to reconsider what it means to undertake those grand escapades of danger and daring. You’ll find no swashbuckling vagabonds, nor Chosen Ones, nor daredevils. Here are games of the adventurous “just getting by.” Adventure is out there!

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They tell me it’s Saturday now but, after last week’s four-day weekend, I have lost all sense of time. Is it Wednesday? I’d believe it’s Wednesday. Monday? Sure, why not. I don’t know.

What are you playing this so-called ‘weekend’? Here’s what we’re clicking on!

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Mere months after declaring new company values for a brighter, more inclusive future, Riot Games – developers of MOBA monolith League Of Legends – are at it again. As reported by Kotaku’s Cecilia D’Anastasio, the company are attempting to force two of the women involved (and still currently employed) in a gender discrimination lawsuit into private arbitration, which would end the legal action. Riot’s attorney argues that the women agreed to arbitration clauses, preventing them from legally challenging their employer. Real impressive values.

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As many Jon Bois videos as I watch, there are few sports I understand less than American Football, but even I know that some folks will be glad to hear that Madden NFL 20 is PC-bound. Madden 19 was the first game in the series to score a PC touchdown in eleven years, so there was some concern that we’d never see the sequel, but it looks like EA have finally settled down. The new game is developed by EA Tiburon and launches on August 2nd. Below, a reveal trailer featuring the game’s new front-man Patrick Mahomes, and a brief glimpse of the game itself.

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There’s a major new Arma 3 expansion launching next Monday, April 29th, bringing the military sim back to its Cold War roots. Impressively large as it looks, Global Mobilization isn’t by Bohemia Interactive, but the first release from their “Creator DLC” commercial mod program and produced by small team Vertexmacht. Mods going commercial isn’t a new concept, but it has backfired for a few studios, including Valve’s own failure to get the idea off the ground with Skyrim, and Blizzard’s swiftly-abandoned premium mods for StarCraft 2. Still, Bohemia’s approach seems more structured, at least so far.

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Finally Marty Burnham the Moon Witch has broken out of her time loop into a never before encountered day! This diary is simultaneously two weeks and less than a week old. Yet with the dawning of a crisp new day six comes a revelation for me about Marty Burnham’s past: BETRAYAL!

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If there are two now-universal constants in PC games, it’s Warhammer and board game adaptations, and Warhammer Underworlds: Online is both. Based on the well-regarded Warhammer Underworlds board game and developed by Steel Sky Productions. It’s a two-player (plus AI, for the PC version) squad tactics game set in a haunted undercity, with a bit of deck-building and a lot of dice-rolling. The digital version debuts in early access some time this year, and looks to offer similar contents to the basic boxed edition, with an initial two warbands and more due later both free and paid. Below, a foggy and short teaser trailer.

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