There’s a handful of films at home that the family and I very rarely end up watching. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The Revenant. The Imitation Game. Her. The Judge. Absolutely outstanding films, but they’re also what we call “heavy” – and we seldom have the emotional energy to sit through two hours of “heaviness” at the end of a long day. So we pretty much never bite the bullet and say “You know what? Let’s finally do this.”

Today, I’m biting the bullet. I’m gonna talk about something that makes me very sad to think about. It’s a game called Steel Circus, and last month the developers bit their own bullet, shut down the servers, and pulled the plug on their dying game. Which is such a gruelling shame, because Steel Circus was probably the most fun I’ve had in any competitive game since Rocket League.

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You said you d be here three hours ago, my friend barks down the phone. It s 5:30pm and I m wearing a Harry Potter dressing gown, nursing a lukewarm coffee, and entering my 30th consecutive futureball match. Sorry about that lad, I say, feigning remorse. I ll be there in a bit.

As you ve probably realised, I m not Steve Hogarty. I m just filling in while Steve s on holiday. Luckily, I intercepted quite a nice game. It s called Steel Circus and it s a futuristic sports em up in the vein of Rocket League.

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Steel Circus tickles the part of my brain that fills me with nostalgia for Speedball 2: Brutal Deluxe, and that’s enough to get me interested in it. Just announced and developed by Iron Mountain Interactive, it’s a multiplayer 3-on-3 ball-game. Looking more Space Jam than anything, there’s robots, knights, weird bagpipe-wielding Scottish stereotypes and some sort of masked businessman all trying to chuck a ball into the other team’s goal. The game won’t be ready for a while yet, but Iron Mountain are taking sign-ups for alpha testers here. There’s a debut teaser below.

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