We haven’t mentioned id’s Rage around here yet, and with a new trailer out today which shows off some of the gameplay, nows as good a time as any to fix that. I’m pretty excited about the prospect of Rage – the makers of Doom and Quake know what makes a good FPS, and since this is the first new IP of theirs in over a decade I reckon that excitement is more than justified.
It looks like a cross between Fallout and Borderlands, set in a huge post apocalyptic wasteland. Not much is known about the story yet, but the technical bits and pieces it has going for it are very impressive. The most notable of these for me is the giganto-texture packs. id’s new engine is capable of using a single, giant texture which covers huge areas of the game’s maps, which means every single detail is hand-crafted and there are no repeated textures. It makes for shorter loading times and prettier levels, essentially.
I would love to ramble more about technical awesomeness, but it’s late and I’ll just leave you with this brand new trailer.
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.
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.
Doki Doki Literature Club has dug its way into my chest and ripped me apart over the last couple of nights. It’s a free visual novel game where you get to know a bunch of girls in an afterschool book club… except not really. It looks exactly like any other tropey Japanese dating sim type game, but what lurks underneath this cutesy exterior is something really quite sinister and thought-provoking. The game’s tagline does a good job of reminding you that all is not what it seems: “This game is not suitable for children or those who are easily disturbed.”
I’ve played many versions of Mario Kart, first on the Snes at a friend’s house, followed by my own copy of the N64 version. The Nintendo DS edition got a lot of play during the various anime conventions that I attended between 2006 and 2011, where you could LAN it up via Bluetooth with anyone else in the vicinity. But the version I truly have the fondest memories of has to be Mario Kart Wii.
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