The First of the Forsaken
The older I get, the more abandoned game projects I leave in my wake. During the past fifteen years I’ve started work on dozens of video games and – if you ignore this trifle – failed to finish every single…
Category Other games
Frazzles underrated in unforgivable Top 100 gaffe
I still have contacts at Clock Draper Spudgun. One of them was so incensed by the blindspots in this recent Top 100 that he decided to go a bit Edward Snowden. Beyond the break is a leaked early draft of…
Dissenting Devs: Creative Europe’s grant scheme isn’t universally popular
Not everyone in the games industry is quite as positive about Creative Europe’s game development hand-outs as the three grant beneficiaries whose views I shared in Thoughts of the Thankful. It would be remiss of me not to give you…
Desperados 2 should have been a trendsetter
I might as well get my main Commandos: Origins criticisms in early (Playing games before castigating them is so passé). I miss inventories and Lupin the Thief more than I thought I would, and I wish Claymore Game Studios had…
A lacy lament (Where are the handicraft sims?)
I was raised in a region of Britain with a long tradition of commercial bobbin lacemaking. In her spare time my mother made intricate lace on a domed pillow fringed with beaded bobbins and festooned with brass pins, and in…
Find hidden objectors in Velvet 89
I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating. Every nation needs a developer like Charles Games. Passionate about transmuting Twentieth Century Czechoslovak history into memorable docugames, the Praguers’ latest project is a free hidden object game that tells the story…
Eleventeen reasons why the Commandos 2 demo tops the Commandos: Origins demo
The Commandos: Origins demo is reassuringly reverential, great fun, and très jolie, but while guiding Tiny and Fins to the mission objective – a coastal radar station in need of demolition – I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d played…
The Status One demo is tough but moreish
Imagine Door Kickers and SWAT 4 colliding in a gloomy tenement hallway, and after realising that their tac vests were hopelessly entangled, pressing on regardless. Imagine a sad fox playing a violin while drifting towards the lip of a waterfall…
Thoughts of the Thankful: EU grant recipients defend the programme
Having spent the last two Fridays mercilessly lambasting the EU’s attempts to boost the game development sector, I feel it’s only fair to let some beneficiaries of Creative Europe grants tell their side of the story today. Below the break,…
No Story, No Spondoolies – Creative Europe’s weird obsession with narrative
If the EU’s habit of co-funding vapourware doesn’t bother you, then I suspect you won’t be overly concerned by the fact that their grant granters, Creative Europe, openly discriminate against many of the Continent’s most talented, successful, and commercially minded…
Ghost Games – The EU-funded video games we may never play
This year the European Union will spend around seven million Euros on video game development. Is this sizeable sum likely to be expended wisely? Having looked at some of the games Brussels has helped fund in the past, I have…
A2Z (vowels edition)
A is for Abbreviated digest of game news. The only thing the following stories/games have in common is that they rubbed shoulders on the Corner on a breezy August day in 2024.