Supporters

Welcome back. I see you're carrying a box of my hated rival's favourite supermarket brand chocolate cereal. Thus, I have no choice but to conclude that the dark deed is done. Also, I promise not to chase you down for my 50 gold back when I see my hated rival alive and well in the cereal aisle next week.

Each day, I am met with a new reminder that the Ultimate Gaming Experience will forever elude me. I'm fucking distraught over it, I tell you.

How can six products of the same type all offer the Ultimate Gaming Experience? I can't use six mice. I own a mouse. It's cheap, ergonomic, and I like it. Yet, as it made no promise to deliver the Ultimate Gaming Experience, I must conclude that it does not.

Blood in the Thames would probably be the least of your worries if you took a few big swigs of that mess. Blood On The Thames, however, is a murder mystery interactive fiction type of game, and you could swig a lot worse.

An audio book of Sarah Wynn Williams' Careless People accompanied my mopping up map markers in Assassin's Creed Shadows last week. It was a good listen! A bit of self mythologizing, allegedly some blind spots, some retrod ground, but it kept me interested; the right mix of entertained and horrified.

A smarter writer might springboard this tale of an ex-Facebook/Meta employee's revelations about her former company's greed, hypocrisy, and clumsiness into a valuable and insightful piece about the games industry's place in this disconcerting technocracy...

Anway, did you know that everyone in Meta's inner circle is absolutely terrified of beating Mark Zuckerberg at the board game Settlers of Catan because he'll just accuse them of cheating anyway, so they all let him win? Lol. Lmao. What a damp loo roll. What a lime flavoured melted jelly baby bitch. Here are some games I definitely wouldn't let him win at.

"Cat in the afterlife" as a premise has been coming up more often than you'd think these last few years. Are you doing okay, developers?

Like a fine wine made from the stupidest grapes you've ever seen - just incomprehensibly thick grapes - Revolution X grows more intensely ridiculous in my memory each year that passes. I got a press email about a game called Voivod: The Nuclear Warrior (Steam) this morning. Voivod are a real band. I don't have time to listen to their music, which I'm sure is lovely and important, because I'm busy thinking about Revolution X again.

Starting life in arcade cabinets by Midway, and later ported to MS-DOS in 1996 by Acclaim, Revolution X is a lightgun shooter that armed you with a chunky plastic SMG and had you shoot special ops bastards that were making the world bad with too many rules. You also shot CDs to collect them, and if you shot real good, you'd be rewarded with Steven Tyler of Aerosmith shouting things like "Hey babe!" and "Kablam!" at you. This might inspire you to shoot badly, depending on your feelings about Steven Tyler.

Calling a game "Luddite" was bound to get my attention, even if it's not about ambushing the mill owner who threatened you and shooting his dick off. You are a disgrunt engineer, cast out by the corporation once the robots you built became cheaper. So of course it's time to join a nascent revolutionary moment and use your skills to destroy the robots.

This means hacking puzzles. The utterly bewildering screenshots piqued my morbid curiosity, but like Dunc Imperium, it becomes comprehensible way sooner than you'd think. And I don't know why a dice-rolling puzzle game has such an excellently presented story, but it's a great motivator.

I'm not entirely sure what it says about Monster Hunter that its ostensibly humane solution for hunting monst is one I find more disturbing, on reflection, than the traditional lizard-braining alternatives. The shock trap presents a trade-off: the effort of set-up for a slightly more guilt-free hunting experience, and also more loot.

But the Shock Trap is not guilt-free at all. The shock trap is an object of infinite horrors. Unfortunately, I do not have time to list infinite horrors. Instead, we must put the Shock Trap on trial. I have so, so many questions.

In ancient times, there was a game called A Legionary's Life. It was an entertaining RPG/simulation about trying to stab dudes by training the right skills, and exploiting them with the right decisions.

Never Second In Rome is a similar concept: what if you were a centurion instead? Why, you'd have to teach a whole company how to stab dudes, lead them in a complex but minimally fiddly battle system, and still fight off the enemy dudes who keep interrupting with their spears and weird, French opinions. It would consume you for days when you really, really have too little time already!

The KFC Double Down is cheese and bacon sandwiched between two chicken fillets, and people lost their damn minds when it was first introduced. I am yet to eat one. Even so, this sandwich fascinates me.

The currently-available-in-the-UK Zinger Double Down is 705 calories. That's a hefty sando, but not worlds away from the chain's Fillet Tower Burger at 620. When The Guardian wrote the histrionic headline "KFC doubles down on artery-clogging bunless chicken burger", the sandwich that inspired them to quote a blogger calling it "the vilest food product created by man" was a mere 540 calories. That's slightly over a medium baked potato and a tin o' beans. It vastly outweighs that in fat and salt, of course, although also boasts over double the protein.

There's evidently something going on here beyond the macros. "The Double Down is clearly one of those products with a death wish appeal," a medical advocacy group wrote in an open letter to KFC parent company Yum brands at the time.

Dates & Wires is clearly not meant for me. I am not into dudes, I loathe clubbing, and the closest thing I get to a hookup is a low-pressure midday meet that becomes a reluctant "I should probably go home" about 36 hours later. I am not at all interested in humping randos, or even "dating" and its arbitrary rules and performances.

And yet, I've played a game about all those things over and over, enjoying it more with every go, trying to wring out every drop of dialogue and characterisation. It is absolutely meant for me, because it's about people looking out for each other.

Feels like a while since we've done an arcadey one, huh? We've all been too busy, is the problem. Doing our capitalist duty. But what if there was another way?

Die For The Economy immediately reminded me of Hijong Park's excellent semi-remakes of '80s arcade blasters (who's since been working on a 3D helicopter flight sim-arcade blend called Defender Patrol). Frantic Dimension, to be precise, which is itself based partly on Space Dungeon.

A trick for trying to stay human in an online ecosystem that informs you of several "it's enough to make you just give up on life" events every.single.day is, I think, not becoming numb to seemingly minor tragedies in the face of apparently bigger problems. Don't play tragedy math, basically. Don't let frequency diminish feeling.

It's easy for me to call parkour platformer Void Climber a minor tragedy because I didn't work on it for three years to then sell 46 copies, then lose my job over it.

It feels incredibly callous to admit to myself that I will soon likely never think about Void Climber again. But having just read about it in a post-mortem blog, I'm thinking about it now.

I've always liked the line Capcom walk with Monster Hunter's humour, given that Monster Hunter ought to be extremely unfunny. For you see, there are indeed monsters in Monster Hunter. There are fire-breathing dragons and squirrels made of lightning. There are vast, floral spiders. There are gargantuan mudskippers and sabre-fanged baboons.

Oh look, a shiny golden plate! You cannot see it from this angle, but upon it is engraved an eternal mystery: why would a game give you an item which can only be sold instead of just giving you the money? Why not cut out the middleman?

Last week, Brendy covered a video essay dissecting Heavy Rain through the under-explored lens of eroded urinal cakes. It's a Pulitzer Piss Prize worthy piece of entertainment that instantly shot creator Allie Meowy up my list of faves. I chased it straight after with another of hers: Investigating A Forgotten Edward Snowden Quote - nominally about the NSA whistleblower's assertion in a 2003 Ars Technica forum post that "some Hentai games are very good", but actually far more labyrinthine and human than just that.

It's here I discovered that Snowden had also once written a colorful 500 word review of Remedy's Max Payne 2 on those same forums in 2003 under his pseudonym TheTrueHOOHA. He enjoyed the writing so much he said he'd like to have "the most grammatically correct sex possible" with Sam Lake. He calls the final boss a "toothy little cockgoblin".

So, in case Mr Snowden ever fancied getting back into The Biz - which is how we on the inside refer to games journalism at those parties where we all spin around on our free Cyberpunk 2077 gamer chairs with those Halo 2 condoms on our heads - I figured I'd offer some helpful feedback. For clarity, I'll refer to to Edward Snowden as "Ed". I'll also mark my own suggestions with "Ed", as in "editor", to clear up any confusion.

Animals scare the shit out of me in the sense that I regularly find myself contemplating the sheer collective terror and pain occurring on the planet in any given ten second stretch as wild creatures hunt and gnaw and tear and paralyse and suck the fluids proboscishly from one another. I think Robin Williams said something similar in Jumanji and maybe also Schopenhauer in Jumanji 2 but this is a real and regular thought I have.

On the other hand, they also bring me quite a lot of joy each day both in the local (my cat, the dainty gremlin, her majesty shits-on-keyboard) and global sense.

I don't think Glitchpunk is capital-G Good. I don't even know if it's okay. It's showing several signs of not feeling very well, and I went back and forth several times on whether or not to send it over to talk to you.

It is, in a word, an intentional throwback to GTA 2. Drive to phones, do jobs for (noticeably less juvenile) colourful characters for cash and reputation change across three vying gangs. For a fresh spin, you're an android now, able to install special power doodads and do a hacking on some obstacles and people, Watch Underscore Dogs style. Which winds up less exciting than it was probably dreaming of, before cruel reality set in, and it had to settle for being sort of fun, in a janky, mildly masochistic way.

A long time ago there was a plague, and I have deleted 23 variations on the bitter, accusatory end of this sentence.

Wouldn't it be a jolly time to gather the dead from the streets, haul them to the graveyard, and bury them for what seems like relatively good money? Gosh, the government even provide a cart for free. In Plague Colon London 1665, you might be better protected proportionate to contemporary medical knowledge than BUT ANYWAY HO HO LAUGHTER GUFFAW.

Counter-intuitively, this is, if not quite jolly, a satisfying job simulation with a strong but unintrusive narrative and a slightly primitive low-fi charm.

Cyberpunk 2077’s scanner was a brilliant idea I wanted more from. I would happily sacrifice every traced ray outside the Afterlife bar to voyeur more deeply into the lives of Night City passers-by. I don’t think that’s how development works but I’d do it. I’d un-trace those rays so hard. Some of the game's best writing is in those short text messages fixers send you before gigs and I always wanted that extra layer of microfiction. As it exists now, the scanner tells you someone’s name, affiliation, crimes they're wanted for, and some truly, heinously boring wasted real-estate like "8% resistant to poison". What a shitty eulogy that would make.

Metroid-style platformers are common enough now to be a little tiring when you're a weirdo who pays too much attention to all the wrong things. In a year that included the excellent Biomorph, it's been difficult to give many a fair shake of the ol' scoutstick. There are more sprawling, more ambitious, more challenging contenders, but frankly, those often exhaust me.

Instead, lately I have been rather taken with the simpler, condensed, slower-paced cartoon planet exploring and befriending of Goodboy Galaxy.

As someone who is into games and works in the games industry, I desire that games push forward and try new things. And it's easy for my vision to narrow, as the nature of my work requires analysis of your indies and your blockbusters. My peers have takes. I have to have takes. I am surrounded by thoughtful writing and criticism here (well, most of the time).

Cut to my normie friend passing me the controller in Call Of Duty: Blacks Ops 6's campaign. It is out of sheer frustration that he's done so, because he simply doesn't have time for a stealth mission. He is angry that the game requires him to be patient and think, instead of waving him into a series of tunnels where soldiers will run at him, and he, a blender, will pulp them into oblivion. I haven't had my eyes opened in such a manner before.

I’m not entirely sure why I’ve never encountered one of Freewrite’s handsome but insultingly priced digital typewriters until this week. Having discovered them, I’m actually more surprised that there appear to be no real alternatives. Is there a patent here I’m missing? They have the vibe of a failed Nintendo peripheral - the sort of thing you’d find several of at any car boot sale. But no! My choices are either an old AlphaSmart with encrusted McDonalds cheese on the battery case, or a remortgage. I don’t trust you, Freewrite. I might have trusted you if you sold the premium version of a widely available product, but this feels vaguely sinister. Also, you said Hemingway was "the most iconic literary personality of the last century" - an accolade that rightfully belongs to Mary Rayner and her ketchup pigs.

Falsely accusing you of witchcraft, the crooked villagers burn you to death, inadvertently making you a witch. They compound this error by leaving an axe and several firearms unguarded, and further still by being made of delicious healing organs that, if consumed in great enough quantities, let you to spit acid like in Left ("for" - Not Letting It Go Ed) Dead.

Coven is a wonderfully pitched horror FPS. Dark and violent but too cartoonish to feel exploitative, edgy, or truly sadistic. Dramatic enough to motivate without being over-serious. Playful and excessive, but not quite camp. I was not expecting to enjoy this so much.

I have no nostalgia for the anime cartoon mangas. The few I eventually watched after school people insisted on their greatness were mostly terrible, and I generally consigned them to that bin of arbitrary things people assume you must like if you like games.

Rogue Flight isn't an exercise in nostalgia though. More knowledgeable anime sufferers may discern specific influences, but even I can identify a particular vibe that spacey 80s/90s animation sometimes carried. Action and explosions and agile ships doing dramatic turns, yes, but also a faint melancholy, and exactly the right, light touch of drama. And nobody even screams at each other, or stops mid-fight to cry about their dad, or becomes sexually obsessed with the blandest boy in history. It's as if they know what was good and what was bad, instead of copying everything wholesale? Weird.

Colony sims can be a little tricky to write about. Whether or not they grab me seems to come down to some unusual design details, or a vague sense of vibes. Goblin Camp has a bit of the first, but mostly I like it because it feels effortless. Not in a hollow or trivial sense, but in its lack of annoyances or hostility.

It's instantly familiar. Your mythical creatures build houses, catch fish, make tools and plant seeds. Animals and monsters occasionally pop in for a spirited debate on the merits of being eaten. You attract more residents, you don't bother to build a graveyard, you want to make nice clothes but it takes too many steps and feels like a waste of space. But I like it. I had to figure things out, but there were obvious possibilities, and room to be imperfect without everything collapsing. And there are hints of something more.

Oh, you like horrible metal do you. Oh, there are demons are there. Oh there's lots of gore and sadism is there. Yeah that's definitely why Doom was good, and also I can't just play Doom today for free very easily.

I usually scroll past this type of game. Caesar's Revenge is gory, sprinty Doom-style FPS with a metal soundtrack, but the premise was just silly enough to get me. Caesar probably had it coming, but so did the senators, and it turns out that resurrecting to kill them one by one is a pretty good laugh. Two wrongs make a right, probably.

Gorbad Ironclaw, the new orc warboss in Total War: Warhammer III Omens Of Destruction, has three unique skill tree buffs, which are named as follows: ’boyz to da front, ‘shootaz to da back’, and ‘riderz on da flanks’.

I love this, because it suggests this most renowned of Orcish tacticians is at tip two of a Ten Total War Tips For Beginners video, and he’s already a legend among his kind for it.

I support his fame. Game director Rich Aldridge told me that designing for roleplaying potential had been a priority recently, and it’s something I’ve definitely noticed in the past few expansions. There’s been an uptick in hero and lord traits that reward themed army composition rather than just stacking the biggest monster you can get your hands on. It’s an approach to game design in general that I can get behind, similar to the aging wisdom about reframing punishments as rewards - World Of Warcraft’s rested bonus being the primo example. Twarhammer hasn’t nerfed Doomstacks, it’s just focused on offering lots of more exciting options.

I often like to think of the winds of magic in Total War Warhammer 3, in terms of its more mundane strategic application, as 'mistake juice'. It’s not really a liquid, although it is contained inside a glass ball. So, juice it is. More juice should be sold in orbs, also. Maybe in pubs, too. “Just popping down the Sheep And Cabbage for a swift orb” has a nice ring to it. Is an orb still an orb if there’s a drinking hole in it? Does that shatter the sanctity of the orb? Will this incur the wrath of the orb police? So many questions. Nothing can be simple, least of all orbs.

A pirate must acquire gold to become a pirate worth the name, and so there’s nothing so perfectly Guybrush Threepwood as the first real treasure he acquires being a gold tooth stolen from an aging chicken restaurant owner. My vague awareness of The Curse Of Monkey Island’s place in history tells me it’s generally not as well regarded as its predecessors, but it holds a special place in my wooden heart, and this one puzzle always sticks with me. It’s very colorful, for one, and it’s also the first real bastard when you play the game again in the harder ‘Mega Monkey’ mode.