Streets Of Rogue let you get away with some pretty daft stuff. Want to make a profit on the zombie apocalypse? Sorted. Feel like possessing the clone of a scientist to kill his genetic source? Gotcha. But developer Matt Dabrowski reckons there’s even more mayhem he can throw into the Streets Of Rogue blender, and has announced plans for a sequel to deliver just that. After all, what if you could fit those five bloodthirsty gorillas in a truck?

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Screenshot Saturday Sundays! Pull up a nice armchair, pour yourself a hot cuppa, and spend an afternoon perusing the finest screenshots, gifs and video clips the game development landscape has to offer. This week: Secret alien worlds, 3D printed skyscrapers, the ultimate game of frisbee and whatever the hell the bloke from Jazzpunk is making these days.

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I really miss going to games shows, y’all. Fortunately, I’m not alone. With their usual Pittsburgh location shuttered during the Covid-19 crisis, experimental arcade-slash-arts gallery LIKELIKE have taken their show online with An Itsy Bitsy Crisis – a digital exhibition of works created in Adam LeDoux’s lo-fi game-making tool Bitsy, hosted in an online museum as pixellated as the works on show.

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Half Life‘s introduction is famously slow. Long tram rides and lengthy speeches from co-workers preparing Gordon Freeman for an experiment that would destroy the world. An atmospheric start, for sure, but it’s a pain for folks trying to beat the game as quickly as possible. For one speedrunner, though, those dead minutes aren’t an obstacle – they’re the perfect opportunity to start practising for a record-breaking Star Wars run.

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Sundays are for continuing to continue staying at home. Here’s the best writing about videogames from the past week.

For PC Gamer, Luke Winkie spoke to a dad who quit his job to run a Minecraft server for autistic children. I teared up a little, and that is rare.

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League of Legends spin-off CCG Legends of Runeterra is just about ready to play its hand. After kicking off its open beta in January and testing its deck for the last three months, Riot are ready to play for keeps – bringing crate of new cards, a new region and a new competitive season to Runeterra when the MOBA-inspired card game launches proper on April 30th.

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Did you know folks are already out here playing the Final Fantasy VII Remake? While the rennovated 23-year-old RPG isn’t technically out ’til next week, it sounds like some retailers couldn’t wait another six days. But even with their darling out in the wild, Square Enix are sticking to their guns with digital copies, and won’t be hitting launch till the scheduled release date of April 10th.

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Settlements of bugs and crashes burn behind them, but the campaign is not yet complete. This Friday, Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord developers TaleWords took the fight against the game’s crashing to a new front. Patch e1.0.4 purged the game of 17 more crashes, with a scant few performance issues and balance oddities finding themselves caught in the crossfire.

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Thursday should’ve been the highlight of the EVE Online calendar. But even with EVE Fanfest’s cancellation, the next few months are set to be big ones for New Eden with Eclipse, EVE’s second quadrant of the year. An extragalactic invasion comes to a head with star-snuffing starships, interstellar easter egg hunts, and a charity drive to use all those spacebucks you’ve amassed for real-world good.

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Now Play This, a festival for experimental game design, is one of the many games events either postponed or cancelled to stop the spread of COVID-19. The festival has been running for six years or so, celebrating the strange and unexpected in game design, and each year it brings together some truly spectacular art pieces and games. This year, the festival team has had to get creative with its lineup. The benefit, of course, being that now you can attend the festival wherever you are. From London to Dundee to Los Angeles, California.

I have never been able to go to Now Play This. For five years in a row I have tried to go, and then found myself unable to get all the pieces together. Year one, I was stuck in a library writing my master’s thesis. Year two, I was visiting family in America and only just missed it. Years three and four, I was in America doing a PhD and teaching undergrads and thought it unwise to just pop back over. This brings us to year five; this year, now, this very weekend. I was meant to go! I’d secured funding which meant I didn’t have to teach, I was looking forward to seeing my friends (former co-organisers and curators, Holly Gramazio and V Buckenham, as well as current curator, Marie Foulston). And then, well, you know.

Here are all the free games in and around the festival’s 2020 exhibits.

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