Those sneaky bastards! Well, we waited with immense anticipation for today’s countdown timer on Aperturescience.com to hit 00:00:00, and most of the world – including ourselves – thought it would mean the early release of Portal 2. Sadly, we were massively mistaken, and the timer actually led us to let another timer. Good grief! Could Valve toy with us anymore?!
Anyway, the timer it led us to now is significantly more interesting, as it appears to be a page devoted to getting as many people playing a select handful of games, and gaining as many achievements as possible before the official release of Portal 2 on Steam next Tuesday. If the quota is met, then we seem to be promised an actual early release, instead of the fake one that we all believed was coming. Another suggestion has been that what is really being asked of us is that we merely play the games in one large coordinated effort, filling up the red meters on the new page, to produce enough fictional power to allow Portal 2 to release early.
Whatever the hell we need to be doing, we’re certainly going to put in some time on any of the required games that we currently own.
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.
VVVVVV is one of the only 2D platform games that I have completed from start to finish, which makes it special to me. I became obsessed with Veni Vidi Vici, an entirely optional sequence of deadly traps that teases you with a collectible orb right in the very first room, which is blocked off by a tiny box. You can’t jump in the traditional way as most other platformer’s, so the only way to overcome the box is by leaping up through the ridiculously cruel chambers above, navigating your way to the top…and then back down again.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is a depressing game. It’s epic and majestic, but undoubtedly bleak. Luckily, it also has some hilarious moments timed with comedic perfection, which somehow never feel out of place. It’s a credit to the writers, and the performances of the voice actors. These are my favourite funny moments of Expedition 33.
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.
Copyright © 2010 - 2026
Site designed and hosted by Tekamutt Media