Sundays are for catching up after a day of misadventure, and squeezing in a shortened Sunday Papers in between other activities. Onwards!
Dear free loader, if you are reading this it means I am either dead or safe in an undisclosed location in the Central American countryside. Either way, I am unable to communicate. Please find enclosed several free games for your clandestine purposes. I know that we have not always seen eye to eye, free loader, but I offer you these digital goods as a gesture of good faith. If used correctly they will inspire millions. Soon we will be free from tyranny. Free from the yolk of the dollar and the Great British pound. Soon, ALL games shall be free.
Except the ones on PSN. Those will still be £59.99.
There’s something very pleasing about the ritual of opening wine. Something dignified and calming. After a long week, it’s a moment to slow down and simply enjoy the sensations of opening wine. A civilised moment. (Pinky out.) Some will talk of the cheeky rustle of foil on a fine Champagne, or the yielding of the cork in a vintage Châteauneuf-du-Pape, but me, my favourite aspect is the force with which the first gush of plonk squirts out the goon bag. Slàinte!
Oh yeah, also something about video games?
I wanted to play Rise of the Tomb Raider [official site] more than I realised I did. It’s nice to not have yet another BrawnMan in the middle of my screen, sure, but for me it’s the idea of vaguely puzzley, vaguely sandboxy adventures in a not-too-fantastical wilderness which appeals.
Enthused by Adam’s review, I picked up the PC version, but it wasn’t long before I was hissing through my teeth at the bad balance of impossible escapes from death, relentlessly dour and earnest tone, mechanically-delivered dialogue and preposterous animal-massacre-based-crafting (because, once again, Lara had gone on an incredibly dangerous adventure without packing anything more than a glowstick and the first option you get if you type ‘bow and arrow’ into Amazon then sort by Price: Low To High). Fortunately, the Endurance Mode DLC turned out to be game I wanted.
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I don’t know when the best time to release a game about spending a lot of time toiling in fields is. In winter, many will find the idea of even a virtual outdoors loathsome. But then there are those of us who’ll be basking in front of lightboxes, longing to roam further afield. Who wants to spend summer indoors at a computer? Maybe early autumn, when people are mourning flora? Farming/country life RPG Stardew Valley [official site] is thinking February. February 26th, to be precise. Observe:
Back in the day, I’d often get asked whether PlayStation or Xbox was best. Helpless efforts to argue “well, actually, PC is…” aside, I’d defuse their concerns about which had the superior graphics by naming which games you would or wouldn’t get on each. It’s not going to be any different for VR.
But for now, when numbers are really all we have, I’m going to list some numbers at you below. It’s too early to say for sure which headset you should buy if you’re planning on buying one at all, but this should help you to determine whether one virtual reality headset or the other might have better image quality or motion tracking.
Fractured Space [official site] is free this weekend on Steam. It’s the early access cousin of Strike Suit Zero, which was from some of the same developers, and trades that game’s nimble space fighters for gigantic capital ships. It’s World of Tanks in space.
That sure sounds like a game that ought to exist and ought be good, but I haven’t played it. Maybe you could check it out this weekend and confirm for me whether either of those things is true.
I haven’t played anything like enough of sandbox building/exploration game Space Engineers [official site], but the recent addition of explorable planets looks like a solid gold reason to. They arrived back in November, but this new video makes a strong case for why they demand more attention.
Age of Mythology [official site] came out in 2002, a more innocent time when people spent their time pretending Half Life was actually going to get a sequel. “Valve can’t count to two,” guffawed the internet. “Ha ha ha.” More fool the internet, which failed to predict the appearance of Left 4 Dead 2, Dota 2, Portal 2 and, yes, Half Life 2.
The short-sighted global system of interconnected computers we now know as Charlotte’s Web also failed to predict Tale of the Dragon, an expansion for Age of Mythology, which came out yesterday, almost fourteen years after the game originally launched. Stupid internet.
Strategy games seldom come with a premise more creative than “what if aliens?”, or “what if robots?”, or perhaps “what if alien robots?”, and while this often works – their appeal tends to come from systems and details instead – it does leave a gap for more imaginative fair. Take, for example, Hostile Waters, Rage Games’ 2001 release inspired by the 1988 naval/aerial action strategy hybrid Carrier Command.
The central premise of Hostile Waters’ setting is essentially this: What if the Occupy movement had won?
Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.
It’s a little baffling that nobody’s tried to make Evil Genius [official site] again. A transparent derivative of Dungeon Keeper, it did more than enough to distinguish itself from that noble luminary of base building and evil overlording.
Last week, I visited Volterra, an Italian town that is home to the now-derelict Ospedale Psichiatrico di Volterra, a former psychiatric hospital. Upcoming game The Town of Light [official site] is set in that hospital and its grounds, and I had a chance to explore both the virtual recreation and the actual buildings. I also spoke to the team behind the game and Giampaolo di Piazza, a psychiatrist and Vicepresident of the Italian Society of Phenomenological Psycopatology about the history that informs the game.
This is the story of a game that brushes the tropes of the horror genre aside, and finds its sorrow and terrors in the history of a place and a way of thinking.
“GET IN THE SEA!” you’ll find people shout at things they dislike. They saw someone funnier than them do it on Twitter, y’see. But have you been in the sea? Get in the sea; it’s really nice. Tropical or icy, crystal clear or murky and even rash-inducing – the sea’s great. “GET IN THE SEA!” I yell encouragingly at those dearest to me.
Insomniac Games (them lot behind Spyro, Ratchet & Clank, and Resistance) agree, and their next game is an undersea Metroidvania named Song of the Deep [official site].
