Previously: 2018 – 2019 – 2020 – 2021 – 2022 – 2023 I think I actually played enough games this year for me to curate some highlights rather than discussing absolutely everything for once. As usual I’ve skipped a fair proportion of the year’s big releases – I have been holding off on starting Astro […]

Previously: 2018 – 2019 – 2020 – 2021 – 2022 You know the drill by now. Aside from finally upgrading from a PS4 Pro to a PS5, my playing habits were broadly similar to last year – dipping into the (surprisingly decent) Playstation Plus offerings with minimal interest in new games released this year (with […]

Previously: 2018 – 2019 – 2020 – 2021 Once again the year draws to a close and it’s time to do my homework for the internet. I realise I managed to avoid playing nearly all the big releases this year. This isn’t a boast. I’m not really a Dark Souls guy so didn’t bother with […]

Previously: 2018 – 2019 – 2020 2021 was not exactly a vintage year for games. It felt like the big publishers were playing ‘wait and see’, and the none of the handful of tentpole releases that did make it out this year really piqued my interest. As with last year, I’ve mainly been playing established […]

Time once again for a round up of the notable games I played in the last year. 2020 was a pretty solid year for games (if nothing else), although lacking any decisive raising of the bar in the AAA space (except Half-Life Alyx I suppose, which I don’t have the kit to play yet). Still, […]

Here are some of the standout games I played in 2019. It wasn’t a particularly notable year for new releases, in part because the current console generation is winding down. I ended up playing a mixture of small scale indie games (mostly on Switch) and revisiting games I’d missed from the last few years – […]

I didn’t play a very wide variety of games last year: it was a pretty moribund year for big releases; most of my gaming time was dominated by three of the games listed below; and I don’t play a lot of new games per year in any case, not being a journalist, IGF judge, student […]

Eight years since its announcement and four years since its release I finally got around to playing Rage, the last game from id Software before they were absorbed into Zenimax and waved goodbye to John Carmack. If you want a single game that demonstrates all of id’s historic strengths (aside from multiplayer) in a modern […]

How do you follow up a game like Hotline Miami? Hotline Miami challenged whole chapters of conventional PC game dogma. It was an indie game that didn’t slavishly pay homage to one of the handful of games the developers grew up with. There were no fantasy, sci-fi or military trappings. The player had agency in […]

Some extremely welcome and long-awaited news came last week: Greg Johnson, designer of the original Toejam & Earl games, has started a Kickstarter campaign to fund the creation of a new game in the series. You can pledge to the Kickstarter here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1578116861/toejam-and-earl-back-in-the-groove The original Toejam & Earl for the Sega Mega Drive is my […]

Doom is a game that has left commentators struggling to come to terms with its impact for the last two decades. Retrospectives of the game first started appearing fifteen years ago. These days only a total plum would fail to recognise it as one of the landmark achievements of 1990s popular culture. Terminator 2, Nirvana, […]

For the past few months my team at AppyNation has been working with publishers 31X (Chris Sawyer’s company) and developers Origin8 Technologies to help bring Transport Tycoon to iOS and Android. Transport Tycoon is one of my favourite games of all time, and one that has always seemed like an obvious fit for mobile (particularly […]

Terry Cavanagh recently released his first mobile game, Super Hexagon. The game is notable for (at least) two technical reasons – firstly it is a conversion and expansion of the game Hexagon which sprung almost fully formed from a game jam, and secondly as it’s an iOS game coded in Flash (something of a rarity). […]

I can’t believe it’s been over six months since I’ve done one of these. I finally retired my trusty iPhone 3GS last week and upgraded to a 4S, so have revisited some more hardware-intensive games along with the more typical 2D fare. (This also means that the following brain flobs represent more rigorous real-world testing […]

I’d been looking forward to Supermono’s iOS arcade racer Forever Drive since it was previewed at the World of Love conference in January. So when I heard the other day that not only was it finally out but it was a free download to boot, I didn’t need any further encouragement to check it out. […]