I don’t know about you, readers, but this past week’s gone by in a bit of a blur. Did I volunteer to take WAWAPs for today, or was I forced at Ziff Davis canteen sporkpoint? I can’t even remember, but perhaps relaxing with some PC games – and/or reading about what you’re all playing – will help lift the brainfog.
Centuries ago, before 2022, before the Good Darkness of 2020, before the Before Times of 2015, the ancient age before even that of 2013, and perhaps, some fringe scholars suggest, even before the beginning of this sentence, there was Arcen Games.
Band of soldiers + building. What does that equal, Civ 7? It's ok, stop panicking. I know you've been struggling with some late-game maths, and Firaxis have gotten you a tutor in the form of a fresh patch, which also rolls out 2K's teen accounts. The latter allow parents to cut off access to a few elements of the strategy game, in an effort to keep under 18s safer from forces that aren't nuke-happy Confucius.
To be a live service game, in any shape or form, is to seemingly make some kind of agreement to eventually make some kind of licensing deal. And it is happening again. This time with Phasmophobia and, to its credit, the quite thematically appropriate Alan Wake 2, which is coming to the co-op horror game as part of a limited-time event.
Hooded Horse and Eridanus Industries are finally adding a singleplayer narrative campaign option to Nebulous: Fleet Command, the outrageously nerdy space navy strategy game that makes Homeworld look like bashing rubber ducks together in a star-spangled bathtub. The first act of that campaign launches on May 29th, and puts you in charge of a fleet operating behind enemy lines in a wartorn star system, over the course of 17 missions.
You know what this means, don't you? It means I have to remember how to play Nebulous: Fleet Command, a year on from my last session. Let me experiment with pushing these dashboard buttons REACTOR PURGE INITIATED hang on, I've got this WARNING: TORPEDO TUBE BLOCKED, LAUNCH IMMINENT oh fak fak fak run! Run on through to the next paragraph, before they seal off the deck!
As you may have gathered by this point, I'm a sucker for a cool Cyberpunk 2077 mod. Hence, when I saw that the modder behind some of the RPG's most unique custom vehicles had dug up some of CD Projekt's abandoned models to bring to life a flying police interceptor that never made it into full game, you best believe I stuck that on my must cover list. It's called an and they've also put together a short quest to unlock it.
You may not be remotely surprised to learn that while making Black & White, the god game in which you can care for a three-story tall cow, many of the developers at Lionhead were smoking marijuana. As Peter Molyneux tells it in a recent anniversary piece for Eurogamer: "If there's any stimulant that aids creativity, it's weed."
The developers interviewed do point out that this wasn't everyone on the team. "It would get to six o'clock, which was the official end of the day, and the 'normal' people with families would go home, and we'd just skin up," says Mark Healey, who went on to found Media Molecule. "I'd just sit down in the office smoking a big fucking reefer."
While you may not be shocked by this revelation, I have to tell you, it's thrown me into something of an existential crisis. You see, in 2006, I spent a week doing work experience at Lionhead's offices and I was never once offered a toke, let alone a bowl of the weed-laced chilli con carne that apparently came out at office parties.
