OK, I know this is my second Have You Played…? to find an excuse to start by talking about Age Of Empires 2, and I imagine Alice Bee is making a proper wolf noise out of frustration as she edits this. I am almost sorry. But like a smug schoolboy proclaiming he’s “home” in a game of “it” by touching a tree, I’ve got a cast iron excuse here. Because Offworld Trading Company‘s lead developer Soren Johnson told me himself that this cracking solar-system economics-’em-up was directly inspired by the simple yet robust supply/demand modelling behind the market building in AoE2.

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Bright and colorful platformer Balan Wonderworld isn’t too far away from its March release date now but you can try it out next week if you’re keen. Square Enix have announced that you can hop in and give it a go on January 28th. You can even try out the local co-op bits if you’re planning to play along with a pal when it launches.

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It’s been years since I’ve played Minecraft on a regular basis but I still really enjoy when new features and creatures start showing up in game. Without fail, it means that the always creative Minecraft players will come up with unexpected ways to use them. The newest Minecraft snapshot adds some more parts of the upcoming Caves & Cliffs update including the pretty glow squids and their glowing ink.

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While he’s spending quarantine in New Zealand, the national news channel has gotten Valve guy Gabe Newell to sit down and pointedly not answer some of his very favorite questions. They did their best to ask about all the games that end with threes, but Newell of course declined to say anything on the subject. He was willing to say that the company has games in development currently and also mentioned that launching Half-Life: Alyx had created the despire within the company to continue creating singleplayer games.

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The magic of AI-powered text to speech continues as Skyrim modders get their hands on an application that generates speech from text based on voice samples from Bethesda games. It’s already inspired a trailer with AI-only voice acting and a new mod that gives Skyrim characters lines to compliment your dragonborn’s naked figure. Oh, the things modders will do.

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