I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking ‘Why does that little Minecraft man look so sad?‘. That little Minecraft man is Matt’s, and I have to take this moment to congratulate Matt on his achievement earlier this week, the achievement of managing to accidentally wipe an entire (new) world of things that a bunch of people worked pretty hard on. How the hell did he do that, you ask? Well, in the attempt to update our server so we could enjoy the wonders of the latest updates from version 1.3 (including a new lighting engine and BEDS), he inadvertently reset the server, losing the entire world and setting us back in a brand new world to start again. Now, thankfully, all I had built was a pretty shit skyscraper, and all the spawns were completely buggered (10 creepers per day attacking my structures), but there was also a lot of other hard work done by other members of the server. So yes, Matt, you should feel terrible.
There were lava-pits, crumbling skyscrapers, stairways to heaven (seriously), and vast stockpiles of resources found in the most treacherous places beneath the surface, in the most deadly and dangerous caves, where brave souls spent hours – nay, days – marching through hell and back, just to find that one extra diamond they needed for the best tools they could craft, in their never ending search for.. well.. more diamonds. It was truly another sight to behold. But sadly, Matt clicked one tiny button and nuked the entire thing. Sure, he did it before, but this time it was completely unintentional…
The world is now a barren land of sadness. Luckily though, I’ve already built a house on it!
Matt now spends his days crying in this Minecraft bed, wishing for the days when the world was a simpler place. Technically, he already got his wish.
At least we have a whole new blank canvass to work from again, and the secksy new lighting! My addiction has just been reset.
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.
It’s safe to say that Fumito Ueda’s third game was one of my most anticipated titles of the previous generation. Announced in 2009, I eagerly watched every gameplay trailer and read up every snippet of information I could. Ico and Shadow of the Colossus remain two of my most beloved games, and I found the idea of another game by the same studio a mouth-watering temptation. A multitude of delays and long periods of silence from both Sony and the developers led many to believe it would never see the light of day, not to mention the troubling news that Ueda himself had left the project due to creative differences with Sony. The game lingered in development hell for several years and its fate was uncertain. Ueda and his team remained with the project as consultants and the game eventually had a release date set for December 2016. My excitement rekindled and I wondered how it could ever live upto 7 years of anticipation. So, was it worth the wait?
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?
Copyright © 2010 - 2026
Site designed and hosted by Tekamutt Media