Just outside of my hometown there s an air rifle shooting club owned and operated by large men whose disposition barred them from joining their local territorial army. You know the men, they smell like sawdust and are all named Colm and wear tattered promotional t-shirts from a local shotgun pellet and rat poison manufacturer called MAD DOG FIREARMS AND FARMING SUPPLIES and whose logo is a threatening looking cartoon bulldog holding a shotgun in one paw and a sack of premium cattle feed in the other.

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I m finally at a place in life where I can write about a space game Kickstarter without checking my savings account first. Sorry, Everspace 2. You might already be funded, but you won t be joining Elite Dangerous, Star Citizen, Infinity: Battlescape, or the sadly dead Limit Theory on my bank statement. But well done, Rockfish. You are now free to spread your wings and to build the open-world, free-roaming space blammer you promised everyone.

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It’s time to face the music. It’s time to light the lights. After a little under a month, Summerfall Studios’ mythical murder mystery Chorus has been successfully funded on Fig and announced a suite of stretch goals to shoot for in the campaign’s closing days. More than just another RPG with words from the bloke wot wrote Dragon Age, David Gaider, Chorus wants to be a toe-tapping musical, with stretch goals appropriately promising more songs, stories and smooching.

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You’ve got the moves, but have you got the looks? Aviary kick-flipper SkateBird might be gunning for Tony Hawk’s long-vacant throne (with an actual hawk, no less), but you’ve got to nail more than grinds to take on Pro Skater. It’s music, it’s attitude, and it’s fashion, baby. There’s not a 360 nose-grind to be found in SkateBird x Jazz Mickle’s Pro Cap Wearer Do A Spoopy Combo, but the free new spin-off will let you dress up a radical raven ready for the skatepark.

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It is so likeZach to release a Zachlike (just a Zach to his friends) about creating drugs in a small Romanian apartment. Molek-Syntez is now squatting on early access, trying to hook you in with the good stuff as you program your molecular synthesiser. Your goal is to turn chemicals into medicines and other substances with “various pharmacological effects”.

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Rockstar s Red Dead Redemption 2 is out now on PC, two years after it was first announced on consoles, and just one month after it was confirmed for PC. It’s on the Rockstar Games Launcher and Epic Games Store, and will mosey on over to Steam in December. So here we are, one of the largest games ever released and it’s treating Steam like a lame mule.

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I’m keen to see four day working weeks crop up in the headlines more often, so I’m doubly pleased Microsoft Japan have given me an excuse to write one. They conducted an experiment over the summer where employees were granted special paid leave on five sequential Fridays, who then reported greater happiness while the company reported a 40% increase in productivity. Everybody won, in other words, especially considering the employees reportedly worked no additional hours during their blessedly shorter weeks.

Of course the idea isn’t going to work for literally every employee in every industry, but this is one of many experiments that have successfully demonstrated the potential benefits of working less. Betcha can’t guess which British political party is currently pushing for the idea.

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Planet Zoo is a game where you can build your own zoo. It s buggy, intermittently opaque, frequently saccharine, and – barring an eleventh hour miracle – it s my undisputed game of the year. Because here s the thing: it s a game where you can build your own zoo>. And by thunder, it delivers on that promise.

Usually, by the time I review a game – especially one as savagely time-guzzling as this one – I m burned out on packing so many hours of play into a few days, and I m ready to say my piece and move on. This time, my instinct is just to nod distractedly, tell you it s good, and get back to playing. But here, for the sake of professional responsibility, is wot I think.

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Saddle up cowpokes, because Red Dead Redemption 2 rides out on PC at 1pm UK time today (5am PST). I must admit, I let out a big sigh of relief when I saw Rockstar’s PC requirements for Red Dead 2 the other week, as their recommended graphics card topped out at just a 6GB GTX 1060. Easy, I thought. However, Nvidia have just published their own list of recommended graphics cards for hitting that all important 60fps in Rockstar’s spruced up cowboy game, and all I can say is YIKES.

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Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge will always be among my favourite LucasArts games. The sequel to The Secret Of Monkey Island was where things got a lot more Pythonesque. But it’s a lot more than just a treasure hunt and a barrel of laughs, it was very clever for its time.

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