So I finally got round to getting my First Access Club demo key for Duke Nukem Forever, but to be honest I was a tad unimpressed by the experience.
For some reason the resolution, despite being at maximum, is still kind of bad; everything is sort of fuzzy. The models of the characters are quite out-dated, and the gameplay itself feels like that of something released nearly 10 years ago. I still had some fun with it, though, and I never truly had any expectations of any groundbreaking gameplay or ideas. It’s a Duke-fest, with nostalgic comments and scenes that take me back to some of the memories of Duke 3D, but so far nothing more.
The highlight for me was writing ‘dick’ and ‘tits’ in varying colours of pen on the whiteboard next to a commanding soldier who then proceeded to praise my plan to take down the huge monster on the football field, so I did get at least a few laughs out of the typically immature-but-spot-on Duke humour. The demo is only about 30 minutes long so I can’t imagine it’s really enough time to get a great feel for all of the content in the game, but apparently the full game is going to be around 17 hours long. This is ample time for there to be a lot more to see and do, and maybe even redeem the let-down of the simple, rather empty demo. Pretty sure this won’t be a day-one purchase though, as I simply can’t afford to gamble at the moment; I learned my lesson about pre-ordering on faith alone when I bought Naughty Bear.
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.
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.
The successor to Goldeneye, Perfect Dark improved every possible aspect of the classic shooter and created an original masterpiece. 4-player multiplayer game modes, with the option of adding 8 extra bots made matches frantic chaos and endless fun. The singleplayer was fantastic at the time, featuring such state-of-the-art features as realtime lighting, blood spatter effects, and fully voice acted cinematic cutscenes. It even let you play the story in local co-op with a mate – player 2 got to be Joanna Dark’s weird-looking blonde sister – the first game I ever encountered with a co-op singleplayer mode.
Last summer, I collaborated with my mate Mark Vale to create our very first mobile game app. It’s all about pushing buttons as fast as you can. So, a great little time-waster when you’re on the loo, or waiting for your bread to toast. Mark came up with the concept, did all the programming in Unity, and I provided the art and music. There’s only one rule – hit the green light as fast and as many times as you can.
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