Ah, the internet. It might be a cesspool of fibre optic-fuelled hate and anxiety these days, but back in ye olde dial-up times of 1999 it felt like a new frontier of hot information. It was a place where people were just trying to share their art, thoughts, music and other assorted paraphernalia with like-minded folk half way across the globe, and where today’s trolls were but mere gnomes in a forest of cobbled together home pages and horrifically bad graphic design.

It’s this early version of the internet that Hypnospace Outlaw captures down to the pixel, only here you surf the web while you sleep via a special headband. Part museum piece, part detective thriller, it’s a wonderful reminder of happier times when all you had to worry about were turds called Zane and making sure your virtual hamster doesn’t die of loneliness while you solve online crimes.

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Sundays are for watching Million Dollar Beach House, marvelling at the golden sands, then switching on my electric heater because it is quite chilly. Let’s cosy up together around the 2000w hearth and read the week’s best writing about videogames.

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A Bloomberg report into the development of Cyberpunk 2077 has shared further details of the game’s troubled creation and launch. Journalist Jason Schreier spoke to twenty current and former CD Projekt Red employees, who shared stories of crunch, poor planning, the challenges of the studio’s rapid growth, and more. Among this was the detail that Cyberpunk 2077’s E3 2018 demo was “almost entirely fake”.

It’s tempting to dwell on this one fact, because it makes us, as players, the wronged party of Cyberpunk 2077’s development. Probably that should still be the developers who worked months of 13 hour days, though.

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If you’ve not played Dwarf Fortress, the staggeringly detailed fantasy world simulator, you can’t fully comprehend what a nightmare it is to play. It’s not the ASCII gaphics that bamboozle you, it’s the menus, which hide information and common actions across umpteen different enormous menus, each of which must be accessed with a different button press.

Look at the screenshot above, then. You might think it looks like the UI from an early 2000s Paradox game that’s yet to have an art pass. But to me, it looks like heaven.

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Sokpop Collective are a band of game development pals who release a new game every two weeks via their Patreon. The games are all cute, frequently physicsy, but otherwise cover a broad range of genres. Genres like space golf, skeleton brawler, and rock paper scissors MMO.

To celebrate the Patreon’s third birthday, they’re taking to Twitch tomorrow to stream all 77 of their games. Even if you’re a subscriber to the Patreon, it’s doubtful you’ve played them all, so watching the developers play and talk about making them sounds like a good time.

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I spend 90% of my life clicking on emails and websites, so in the evening I find I want to play games that involve a controller rather than a mouse. Rogue Heroes: Ruins Of Tasos has a demo that scratched that itch for me last night. It’s a top-down dungeon hack for up to 4 players which has just-announced a February 23rd release date with a new trailer below.

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