Scribblenauts was the only DS game I bought last year. I never use my DS these days, it’s only useful purpose is for train journeys home from London, or for some multiplayer Bomberman shenanigans at the airport with mates. I can’t recommend Scribblenauts enough though – essentially its a database of words, which then come to life. You can think of almost ANYTHING and write it down in the game and watch it come to life. Its truly bewildering the amount of stuff they crammed into this tiny game disc. Scribblenauts 2 was unveiled at E3 this year, and it looks like it’s gonna be even bigger…
The amusingly dull-sounding key feature this time is adjectives. The first game was all about the nouns – objects like chairs, swords, and bombs, as well as loads of animals like tigers, dinosaurs, and Jesus (writing ‘Jesus’ and ‘T-rex’ resulted in one truly epic battle). This time though you can add descriptive words to the beginning of those nouns. This opens up about a trillion new opportunities for crazy amounts of imagination. Perhaps you’d like a ‘Fat Badger’? Or an ‘Ugly Rocket Launcher’? The trailer below gives the hilarious example of a ‘Gentlemanly Red Raptor’, which spawns a rideable top-hat-wearing monster – the possibilities are totally mind blowing. It’s scheduled for an autumn release this year.
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’ve played many versions of Mario Kart, first on the Snes at a friend’s house, followed by my own copy of the N64 version. The Nintendo DS edition got a lot of play during the various anime conventions that I attended between 2006 and 2011, where you could LAN it up via Bluetooth with anyone else in the vicinity. But the version I truly have the fondest memories of has to be Mario Kart Wii.
I recently played through Cult of the Lamb, a satirical take on the concept of running a demonic cult. It turns horrific things like sacrificial rituals, cannibalism and straight up gaslighting abuse into hilarious amusements by filtering everything through its cartoonish lens. You are a sheep, after all, and all your followers are sycophantic anthropomorphic […]
Format: PC
Year: 2000
It may look clunky as hell thanks to the original Unreal engine, but Deus Ex was a pioneer in videogames because it gave the player so many choices to make. It resulted in one of the deepest gaming experiences of the time, because it went to great effort to show the consequences of those choices. The story was spread across many ‘hub’ levels, giving you total freedom to approach your objectives whichever way you wanted, aided by an RPG style upgrade tree that you invested in as you played. Wanna finish it without killing a single soul? That is entirely possible. Prefer to tool up with a rocket launcher and just murder your way to the end? Nothing could stop you. Your NPC allies would respond differently back in the Unatco base, depending on what you did out in the field. This level of responsiveness was unparalleled for a long time, to the point that even if you walked into the ladies toilets, your boss would scold you for it during the mission debrief later on. It was many little moments like that which made the game so memorable for me.
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