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.
You might have heard of Pokémon. I can’t quite believe that date. 1996!? Holy crap. 21 years ago, apparently, I got well into this strange Japanese game about collecting made-up animals, stuffing them into balls and training them to fight each other.
Years: 1996 – 2003
To this day, the N64 holds my fondest gaming memories on a console. The PC may have stolen my heart eventually, but I’ll never forget the fun of my childhood, playing multiplayer games on my N64 with a bunch of mates after school, and during sleepovers.
Format: PC
Year: 1999
Here’s another game that was introduced to me by my uncle Dave (who to this day, does the best impression of the monk from the first game out of anyone I know – “WOLOLOOOH!”) Anyway, I learned more history from playing Age of Empires 2 than I ever did in school. I experienced the brutal horde of Attila the Hun as he ravaged old Europe. I followed the rise of El Cid, and helped Ghengis Khan flood across Asia. I can’t remember much else actually, because my mind always turns to making a plague of Persian elephants to send at my enemies, crushing all of their puny houses and stamping their cities into the dust, mwhahaha! Ah man, it’s an absolute classic game, the first strategy game I ever played and thanks to the recent HD remake, is still a lot of fun even 18 years later.
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