You’ve crash landed on a strange planet and need a plan to survive. There’s a couple different ways you can go. There’s the Mark Watney way—eking out an existence thanks to potatoes fertilized by your own feces. Alternatively, you could build a massive, sprawling, and fully interconnected factory complex using your off-the-charts engineering know how. Which do you choose?
Another Commands & Colors game from the mind of noted designer Richard Borg has made its way to digital. No, it’s not Memoir ’44 or Command & Colors: Ancients, instead it’s his latest entry into the series, The Great War. It was released earlier today for PC/Mac with tablets coming down the road.
One of the things they don’t tell you before becoming a parent is that your kids will test the limits of your sanity. I’m not talking the sleepless nights, or worrying about them when they’re sick. I’m talking about the phase they all seem to enter around 3-4 years old called the Knock-Knock Joke Phase. “Prepare thyself for constant hilary, ma & pa!” is something that you’ll never, ever hear. In fact, I did some research and discovered that the words “knock knock” actually come from Latin and refer to a rather unfortunate form of ritual suicide. Your dinner table will be beset with knock knock jokes that, worst of all, don’t even make sense. Not one usable pun will be uttered from the back seat of your minivan following the words “who’s there?” With my youngest, I spent an entire year asking “Who’s there?” only to be answered with “baby butt”, which isn’t as funny as a 3 year-old thinks it is. Well, it’s kind of funny, but not the 4,378th time you’ve heard it.
Endless war, blah, blah, blah. It’s hard to write new stories about Warhammer 40K titles considering that they’re all pretty much about bashing your troops’ heads against other heads. Sometimes other marines, sometimes Tyranids, sometimes Orks. Regardless, the head bashing is usually a hoot, so we’re okay with Slitherine going back to the Warhammer well. Their latest title is called Sanctus Reach and it’s out today for PC.
If you’re only exposure to the Red Planet comes from visuals of Matt Damon pooping on his potatoes or mutant women with three breasts, I have some news for you. First of all, those are movies and, secondly, those weren’t real breasts. Don’t worry though, because Mars is an actual, real-life place and it’s only 140 million miles away. Best of all, according to Terraforming Mars from Stronghold Games, its surface is covered with a resource more valuable than unobtainium: Victory Points.
Wartile is an upcoming real-time strategy game that is styled like a tabletop miniature war game. [And looks a hell of a lot like Heroscape. That’s not a bad thing. -ed.] The game is currently in alpha-testing with a planned Windows release sometime in Q1 (and later releases for Mac and tablets) and I recently had a chance to give the whole thing a whirl.
Since the dawn of electronic handheld gaming, there has been conflict between mother and child. The mother wants chores or homework to be done, but there’s always “just one more level” or a high score just out of reach. At some point, the mother will resort to simply hiding the device in the hopes of boring the child into productivity. The child, of course, instead leverages their boredom into searching for their game. They inevitably find the device, and the cycle begins anew. Japanese developer hap Inc.’s free Hidden my game by mom (sic) series distills and translates this conflict into a delightfully absurd escape room puzzle game format.
In a shocking turn of events, Chris Cocks, President of Wizards of the Coast, recently announced that they’re doing something. The meat is here:
One of the greatest memories I have of my Good Ol’ DaysTM working at Pocket Tactics occurred in 2014 when Owen went apoplectic regarding Atari’s botched release of RollerCoaster Tycoon 4. Seriously, go read his review. It’s a beautiful thing. Not only did RCT4 fail to bring a fascinating simulation to mobile, it basically became the face of the free-to-play downfall of the App Store. Here was a classic title with promise that was retooled to wring as much cash out of players as possible, fun be damned. I had given up on seeing a decent RCT game ever make its way to mobile but then this week I spotted something else over at our old digs. A five-star review for something called RollerCoaster Tycoon Classic. What the hell?
Good news, everyone! Cyberstorm is back! And by back, I mean rescued from relative obscurity and decay in the wastes of abandonware.