Chuchel, the next adorable adventure game from Samorost and Botanicula folks Amanita Design, is almost here. The eponymous tetchy fuzzball Chuchel will arrive on March 7, Amanita announced today, with a mission to simply get a cherry. He seems a wrong’un to me but I can’t help smiling every time I see his defeated little face. Bless. Here, point your peepers and lugholes at this new trailer: (more…)
Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day, perhaps for all time.
I was going to vote for Caveblazers as one of the best games of 2017. Then I saw the game’s ending. (more…)
It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog. That’s a useful motto, a pick-me-up for the smaller among us, but the truth is right now, I am a very small dog with very little fight left in it.
I’m the boss of Mide, a province in the middle of Ireland. The 9th century is drawing to a close and everything is in disarray. The coasts are saturated with Danes, there is no unification among my own people, and at the horizon’s edge, England is burning. Total War Saga: Thrones of Britannia has a cumbersome name but it might be the leanest and meanest game in Creative Assembly’s long-running strategy series. It’s a little dog with a whole lot of beautiful fight in it.
The cubes are black, and shiny, and mobile. They hover in a neat, impossible stack outside one of my colony’s larger domes, clicking delicately about one another, always returning to the same overall shape, harming nobody. My robot rovers form a cautious circle around them while my scientists scratch their heads and bicker. I look at the cubes, one of the many Mysteries of Haemimont’s deceptively by-the-numbers management sim Surviving Mars, and the cubes, somehow, look right back at me.
My colonists are also looking at the cubes, noses pressed against their reinforced dome walls. The cubes are giving my colonists some funny ideas. One group considers them a threat, and wants me to blast them to bits with high-energy ions. Others hail them as gifts from some alien god, and want them brought inside the domes where they can be worshipped. A third, undecided faction argues that the cubes should be stored for further study. Everybody is at each other’s throats, and everybody is looking to me for a decision.
The makers of Rocket League have laid out their update plans for the next few months and beyond, with the first big addition being a beta test of the new tournaments feature starting some time this month. The ‘bad’ news is that we need to wait longer for cross-platform multiplayer parties, which will let us team up with consoleers, but that’s like griping about waiting for Christmas chocolate coins while the shops are full of Easter eggs. Did you know Reese’s do chocolate eggs filled with peanut butter? I only just discovered this myself, and good lord! Right, anyway, carball. (more…)
Ahh, how I miss Dota 2 patch note parties. They were glorious affairs that could go on for several hours, where me and my Dota chums would hop on skype and pour over literally hundreds of major changes to the game that formed a major part of our lives. Those mega updates would arrive a couple of times a year, and they’d mix the games up so much that much of it would have to be relearned. Dota would still get tweaked throughout the year, but those changes would typically revolve around balance adjustments rather than new additions or major reworks.
It looks like those patch note parties are a thing of the past, to be replaced with patch note… nibbles? Lead developer ‘Icefrog’ has tweeted to say that instead of huge twice-yearly updates they’re going to try smaller, fortnightly patches for the next 6 months.
The cosmic ballet continues: just as MOBAs replaced MMOs in the popular consciousness, now battle royale games are flavour of the year, and sadly that, together with general multiplayer market saturation, means casaulties.
Not even a week ago, Epic’s MOBA/shooter hybrid Paragon faced the axe, and now that same is true of Gigantic. Motiga’s monstery multiplayer game was another lane-runner/face-shooter combo, and one whose development was lead by ex-StarCraft lead designer James Phinney. If you want to have a ball with it, you’ve got until July, when it’s walked off into a shady place forever.
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