If I show you mine…
…will you show me yours? My Steam ‘Year in Review’ for 2024 contained a few surprises. For instance, I was somewhat taken aback to discover that I’d fired up Tabletop Simulator 208 times last year, and, for 49 consecutive days…
Category Other games
Sunlight is the best disinfectant
Creative Europe’s latest ‘call for proposals’ is just as daft and unfair as previous ones. For some reason the EU’s grant granters still feel the only games deserving of funding are ‘narrative’ games. Thinking of making an RTS, TBS, or…
Beware Urban Strife’s un-undead
While shambling cadavers are by no means the least of your worries in engaging turnbased team tactics title Urban Strife (Picking stylish headgear, or deciding whether to belt a melee opponent with a frying pan, monkey wrench, or rolling pin,…
Bash the fash in Only Lead Can Stop Them
The title of this Doomy demo-equipped Spanish Civil War FPS is great but not strictly true. Franco’s pixelated minions can also be stopped with bayonet, rifle grenade, flamethrower, and bundled dynamite.
Ace Amusements: Dark Spasm
If a game makes it into the Corner’s end-of-the-pier amusement arcade, you can be sure of four things. The entertainment in question will riff on a classic from the 70s or 80s, require quick reflexes, be cheap or free, and…
Isometric MP gaming: The Parliament of Hell 1796 demo is devilishly good
I’d love for the ‘Funded by UK Government’ claim on the Parliament of Hell demo title screen to be true. If some of my tax quids are going to be spent financing video game development then the games in question…
Meet Ghost Recon’s grandson, Black One Blood Brothers
Last night, Uncle Steam, noticing I was at a loose end, whispered in my shell-like: “Players like you love Black One Blood Brothers”. After I responded with a sceptical “Is that so?”, he realised he still had work to do.…
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…
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…