Max Payne 3 – First In-Game Trailer

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.

Now and then one can’t help climbing aboard the hype train. You work yourself up into a frothing frenzy in anticipation of some new game whose trailers and screenshots make it seem like the best…thing…EVER. That’s how I felt about Conker’s Bad Fur Day when I first read about it in N64 Magazine (before the internet butchered the magazine industry). They did several preview write-ups about it in the years before it was released, and it changed from being a cutesy 3D adventure, to merely looking like a cutesy 3D adventure plastered with a layer of adult filth. I couldn’t have been more excited to play it. Did it live up to my expectations? Hell yes.

Last night I finished Firewatch. It’s a first-person mystery game, being rudely dubbed a ‘walking simulator’ by some of the reviews I’ve seen elsewhere. While it’s true, the game has you fulfilling various tasks in a forest in which you navigate solely by hiking, that description completely ignores the beautifully told story and the reason you are there at all. Having completed it, I want to recommend it to everyone because it’s fantastic. I also would say that the less you know the better, so don’t read the rest of this review, just go and get it.