Portal 2 releasing early…

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.

Last summer, I collaborated with my mate Mark Vale to create our very first mobile game app. It’s all about pushing buttons as fast as you can. So, a great little time-waster when you’re on the loo, or waiting for your bread to toast. Mark came up with the concept, did all the programming in Unity, and I provided the art and music. There’s only one rule – hit the green light as fast and as many times as you can.

One of my all-time favourite gaming memories is playing Haunting Ground with my mates at the flat in Baldock for 16 hours straight. It was me holding the controller for almost all of those 16 hours. It’s a bit obscure, so if you haven’t heard of it, it’s a survival horror game by Capcom, in which you play as a pretty little fragile girl called Fiona, who must escape from a huge labyrinthine castle. Oh, and you can’t fight. Your only option is to run away and hide from the nasty people that are out to get you. You do have a companion throughout though, the best dog in gaming, a white German Shepherd called Hewie.

Is bingeing bad for us? It seems an obvious question, but I have been thinking about it lately, while revisiting Lost, the tv show that started 22 years ago (cripes, I feel old). Back when it was airing, my friends and I watched it religiously every week, talked about it in great detail, eagerly awaiting the next episode. It was the definitive show of its time, sparking debates and endless theories. It felt great to be a part of that, the sense of all experiencing the same thing together over a long period of time – most seasons had over 20 episodes, which is way more than most shows get these days – and they aired one by one, every week for several months. In today’s age of bingeing a show from beginning to end, I wonder what we are missing by not taking our time.