Oh sure, it’s basically been pennies for years, for nothing motivates the merely curious like free-free-free. For that is the case for X-COM: UFO Defense aka UFO: Enemy Unknown, the 1994 alien-bothering strategy game that kicked off a series now made something of a household name by Firaxis’ remakes. Only until tomorrow, though. … [visit site to read more]
Card Quest [Steam page]arrived in my inbox billed as a card combat roguelike dungeon crawler; a genre combo which caused a chill of fear to run down my spine. That or I left the window open and it’s January.
Oh wait – maybe it was the window because I booted the game up and accidentally spent an hour-long phone call playing it in the background, trying to defeat the first scenario’s boss. … [visit site to read more]
Some dark cartoon necromancers have been at work. Avalanche Software, the developers who were shut down after Disney Infinity laid out its roadmap of slow death, marking an end for Disney as a games publisher, have been reopened under Warner Brothers. And they’re going to make the tie-in game for Cars 3. Why are Time Warner making Disney’s videogames for them? I don’t know. That’s just how the childhood dream barons work these days.
… [visit site to read more]
Whoopsie. I was at the beach last week and missed the release of Cayne, the short and free follow-up to isometric horror adventure STASIS [official site]. But I’m back to work today, so here I am to drop the freebie game bomb. Boom. I don’t know if it’s good or not, but Alec enjoyed the original in our STASIS review, even if it had the occasional daft puzzle. “STASIS is all about momentum rather than stop-start headscratching,” he said. “It flows.” This is just one half of my back-to-work newsing though. Creators, The Brotherhood, are also yodelling about a Kickstarter for their new game, Beautiful Desolation [official site], which is halfway to its funding target at this very mo, and has some new trailers to show off.
… [visit site to read more]
Every Monday, we send Brendan into the early access hangar with only a spanner and some big ideas. This week, the build-your-own-spaceship battler Galactic Junk League [official site].
Let’s see, we’ll strap on an uber cannon there… and another one there… paint this red and this bit black… plop another thruster or two back here… hide the shield generator in this alcove… plaster some armour plating here and here and, oh, here… yes! It looks like my new ship is ready to go. Sharkey the Shite is a giant destroyer-class cannon-platform. He’s not very fast and he turns slower than a bicycle wheel with a stick in it. But he’ll probably be better than my last ship, a rusting block of junk with ten missile batteries stuck to every side. I called that one the Barge of Rats.
… [visit site to read more]
Like a little ‘J’ in your RPG? Tales of Berseria launched last week, if you fancy a zesty new bottling, or if you want something you might be interested in Disgaea 2 [official site]. Eleven years after its PlayStation 2 debut, Nippon Ichi Software’s RPG launched on PC today. Expect to meet leet-speaking penguins, deal nine digits of damage (numbers, not fingers), and gag-o-laff with a lot of silliness. … [visit site to read more]
Game Swap is a new series in which one person recommends another a game they might like. This week, Adam suggests that Alec plays wilderness survival roguelike UnReal World [official site], still in active development after a quarter of a century.
Adam: Everyone enjoys roguelikes these days, or at least they refer to some of the things they enjoy as roguelikes. There was a time when I felt protective of the term, initially not acknowledging anything as a roguelike unless it had ascii graphics, then allowing graphical tilesets but drawing the line at interfaces that didn’t use every key on the board at least twice, and then, eventually, accepting that, hey, maybe Metroidvanias are roguelikes too.
I still go back to the first roguelikes I played though and they’re still among my favourite games. Unreal World particularly is closest to my heart.
