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 […]

My most recent contribution to the Maraoke video game karaoke songlist – first performed 13/10/2023 by James Scott. Also co-written with James – well, he came up with the joke, I eventually wrote the verses to go with it. “Dwarf Fortress” – after “You’re Gorgeous” by Babybird Remember that laptop you bought me Installed Dwarf […]

Digital distribution of games (particularly on PC) is a mess. We currently have a situation where buying a PC game from a specific store often ties you into accessing that game through that store’s weird mini-platform, most of which were designed to pretend to be the ubiquitous standard (and stuffed with proprietary junk). To make […]

Valve have made an announcement about their review policy for the Steam store. This has resulted in several extremely angry editorials from the games press, who have (perhaps reasonably) interpreted this to mean that Valve intend to take an almost completely hands-off approach to moderating their platform, in the style of leading internet hellholes Reddit […]

The first of two new Marioke video game karaoke songs of mine to debut this month – first performed by @MazHem_ 10/11/2017. Thimbleweed Park is a neo-retro graphic adventure game by the creators of Maniac Mansion. If you liked Maniac Mansion and the first two Monkey Island games you’ll definitely get a kick out of […]

Editor’s Note: This is all insanely out of date now! The new quest lines introduced in the 2017 Atlas Rises update do a much better job of explaining all the game’s (now greatly expanded) systems during play. The information below is only of historical interest now. No Man’s Sky is a fantasy game about being […]

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 […]

I’ve been tinkering with PuzzleScript on and off for a few months now, but over the last few days I’ve put together a complete game with it, which you can play here (source here). It’s a Sokoban variant (which is what PuzzleScript is best at after all), based around having an ever-depleting stock of moves, […]

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, […]

Yesterday the first details of the industry’s worst kept secret, ‘Project Redlime’ – a.k.a. Starbreeze’s ‘reimagining’ of the Bullfrog classic Syndicate – started to dribble out onto the global infoweb. The scant information that has been revealed – a product description and some screenshots – has been met with howls of derision from people who […]

Yesterday, the second ‘World of Love‘ indie games development conference was held at Conway Hall in Bloomsbury. The day was packed with interesting talks from developers with disparate approaches and levels of experience. Participants brought practical advice and anecdotes, inspiring calls to action, and willy jokes. Here’s a run-down of the day’s events: Ricky Haggett […]