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.
I’ve got an enormous backlog to catch up with, so my gaming time has been pretty varied lately as I jump from one thing to another. I’m squeezing every spare moment I can in between work, life, and fatherhood duties, and enjoying some side-scrolling platform action, blasting zombies in one of the best remakes around, and scaling a literal mountain.
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.
It’s difficult to describe the levels of hype that I felt leading up to the release of Half Life 2, and I know I wasn’t alone. This was a generation-defining moment in gaming, the likes of which has never really been replicated, and likely never will, for multiple reasons. Not only was HL2 a huge leap forward for its artistic and technological design, it ushered in an entirely new way to buy games and changed the gaming landscape forever.
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