Cyborg Day – JC Denton

Dome Keeper is an excellent little spin on the tower defense game, in which you play the role of a jetpacking miner defending his base from swarms of aliens, whilst searching for a hidden relic buried somewhere beneath him. And now, with this huge free update, you can play it with friends.

I want to talk about Cloudpunk, a game where you get to be a flying-car delivery driver in a futuristic cyberpunk city. Its world is an incredible achievement of environmental design, and while the gameplay itself may be basic, the city of Nivalis is a thing of beauty to behold. Nivalis is built out of hundreds of hand-modelled cuboid buildings; there’s nothing procedural about it. Apparently it took 3 years for the devs to design the city, and it really shows.

I do love me some quality pixel art, and it doesn’t get much better than this. Cast n Chill is a cozy side-scrolling fishing game by small indie dev team Wombat Brawler, with absolutely gorgeous visuals. It’s simple to play, and you you can dip in and out of it at your leisure, making it a fine addition to our collection of coffee break games.

Fighter Ace was a free-to-play Second World War dogfighting game. You just logged in, spawned in a big sky with about 20 or 30 other people and shot the shit out of each other. It taught me that the Japanese Zero was one of the greatest fighter planes of WW2. Sure, it was lightly armoured and went down easily with just a few direct hits, but it was so manoeuvrable, so fast and agile that it could take on pretty much any other plane and come out on top.

Format: Sega Mega Drive
Year: 1992

Another rare game in my long list of memories that include my brother, Sam, is Streets of Rage 2. It was the best in a trilogy of side scrolling beat-em-ups on the Sega Mega Drive. (Genesis in America). We would always play as the same 2 characters: I was Axel, and my brother would be Skate. He loved the agility and bombastic acrobatics that the tiny skater dude could pull off. Many of the boss fights would end with Sam leaping onto their necks and pummelling them in the back of the head. I liked Axel’s swinging flaming punch, and his multi-hit special combo. It’s a simple but satisfying game built around stylised hand to hand violence.

Format: PC
Year: 2001 – present day

If Return to Castle Wolfenstein was my first date with PC gaming, Battlefield 1942 was when she invited me to meet her parents, and the relationship went to the next level. My god, did I really just write that analogy?