Having seen this, I’d just like to make a couple of PSAs:

1. If you pre-order a game, you are a moron.
2. If you pay $100 for a game, you are a fucking moron.

I should probably start by noting that there are – extremely rare – exceptions to both of these rules. For example:

• I pre-ordered a couple of Zachtronics games. Because it was Zachtronics and they can do no wrong. But they’re not a AAA studio making billions off of their games, and they also have never released anything that was broken on day 1 and required a 60gb update.
• If you’ve put well over a hundred hours into a game, and you love and cherish it with all of your heart, and you love and cherish all the people who made it because you love it so much, and you want to support those people and give them extra money, or if you’re buying some collectors edition of some widely-cherished game, then it might be worth spending $100 or more. So for example if you’re buying a mint sealed copy of the original Doom, that might be justified.

But these are very rare exceptions, and in the vast majority of cases, the rules hold true. You should absolutely never under any circumstances pre-order a AAA game. And you should absolutely under no circumstances ever pay $100 for a AAA game.

Maybe it’s fair to change “game” to “AAA game” in the rules above.

Some tips on how to survive without preordering and paying $100 for a game

“But”, i hear you say, “I need GTA6! And if I don’t pre-order I won’t have it on release day! And all my friends will laugh at me!”

Wow. Such hardship. I feel your pain.

No, really, I do. I’d really love to play Civilisation 7. And it even supports Linux – they’re one of the few who haven’t dropped Linux support in favour of not really supporting proton. So I’d really like to give them my money. But I’m not paying $120 for a game. Not for any game, ever.

Once upon a time, I was pretty keen to play Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel. And it even supports Linux, so I’d like to give them my money. But it’s still listed at $60 for the base game without any of the DLC and expansions – i.e not the whole game. So I haven’t bought it yet. Maybe in another 10 years.

I fell for the trap once, a long time ago. There was a game that I waited, and waited, and waited for. A game that was going to change the world with it’s revolutionary approach to FPS gaming. That was going to be super-super interactive – one quote I recall was “you can play with everything”. And packed to the gills with humour and an awesome storyline about an old villain coming back for revenge on our hero. So when it finally came out, I pre-ordered the deluxe edition, and paid $120 for Duke Nukem Forever.

I was setting myself up for disappointment. By this point I had come to accept that there was no way the game could possibly be worth the wait – no game is that good. But… like… it would still be good, right?

Yeah, nah.

You should never, ever, ever pay that sort of money for a game that you haven’t already put at least 100 hours into. If you don’t know that it’s an amazing gaming experience then you don’t know that it’s worth that kind of cash.

I don’t care how much the billion dollar studio spent making it. That’s their problem.

If you spend that kind of money on a game, you’re normalising the practice of charging outrageous prices for games. And they’ll just charge you more for the next game.

If you pre-order a game, there’s no incentive for them to make it good. They already have your money.

There is an embarrassment of riches out there when it comes to games these days. Lots of them are super-affordable. And games always go on sale and get cheaper as they age. The ones that don’t, you shouldn’t buy, because they’re a rip-off. See also: Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel.

An interesting thing about Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel is that when it came out, I had just played and liked Borderlands 2, so I was keen to play it. But I held out because I’m not buying an incomplete game, and I’m not spending $70 on a game. I would maybe have paid $30 or perhaps even $35 for a complete edition with all expansions/dlc. But as time has gone by and this price/edition has not materialised, my interest in it has waned. Now I might consider paying $20 for it.

But as I was saying, there’s an embarrassment of riches out there when it comes to seriously amazing and very affordable games. For instance, you can buy Deus Ex, the greatest game ever made, on sale on GOG right now for $5.25, or on the humble store on a not-sale price of $10.45. This is a game I’ve put at least 200 hours into over the decades. Alternatively, you can buy what I think it probably the second-greatest game ever made, Kerbal Space Program, on sale on GOG for $14.99. Admittedly this one does have a non-sale price of $60, and there are two expansion packs which are about $6 each, so that’s at the pricey end of the spectrum – but I did call it the second-greatest game ever made. And in terms of hours it might be first, I’ve got at least 1000 hours of play time in KSP.

The trick with games like that is to add them to your wishlist and wait till they come up on sale at a reasonable price.

Play other games instead while you wait. This is very not difficult to achieve – I’ve got over 100 games in my steam library which I’ve never played. I pick them up when they’re cheap and if I think I’ll like the look of them. Some of them have been really amazing and huge time sinks. Super Hexagon is a great example of this, it’s currently on sale on GOG for $1, and it’s non-sale price on humble store is $4.50. Given the chance I’d pay $10 for super hexagon today and consider that a bargain. But I don’t have to because I bought it on sale a decade ago for like $2. There’s also widely-recognised classics out there for cheap these days: KOTOR 1 and 2 are on sale on GOG at the moment for $5.25 each.

(Disclosure: None of the above are affiliate links. I get nothing if you buy these games except perhaps a new multiplayer opponent and some smug self-satisfaction knowing I’ve deprived rockstar of $120)

(Note also: This is not an ad for GOG, or the humble store. My only recommendation is that you don’t buy things on steam. There’s excellent cheap games available in a bunch of places: itch.io has lots, and zoom-platform.com has tons of awesome, affordable games, too. It’s also the the only place you can get a good copy of Duke3D with Linux support these days, since gearbox decided to remove the excellent Megaton edition from steam and replace it with their worse version. And I’m sure I’ll think of 3 other great stores where you can get good games cheap as soon as I hit “post”)

And that’s before we start getting into free and open source games. And there’s heaps of those that are really excellent. I’m going to give a shout-out here to teeworlds, which I’ve posted about before.

If you’d like me to recommend about a hundred other seriously fantastic games that can be had for much less than $20, let me know, and I’ll write up a list for you. It’ll be long enough that you won’t have any shortage of games to play while you’re waiting for GTA6 to go on sale.

Side-Benefits of this approach

There’s a heap of little side-benefits that you get from taking my approach to games:

• You tend to buy and play games late, after they’ve been out a while. This means that you have a better opportunity to evaluate whether they’re even worth playing, because the hype has had time to die down, and you can evaluate the real critical reception of the game, if such things matter to you.
• Another benefit of buying games after they’ve been out for a while is that you get to play them without all the horrible day-1 bugs and broken/overcrowded servers that all the morons put up with. Instead you get a stable experience as the game was meant to be, before it was rushed to meet some release date.
• You tend to get the complete game, not some version where you pay $60 for two-thirds of the game, and play it through, and then pay more money for the rest of the game and some bonus hats, and presumably play it through again with a different costume on? At a certain point it tends to become more economical for the game devs to stop maintaining separate versions, and they’ll often just give all that “bonus” content to people who bought the base game for free to reduce the burden of maintaining the DLCs and addons as separate products.
• You become immune to the bullshit hype trains that surround modern gaming releases, and the toxic attitudes and cynical highway robbery business practices of modern games companies. This is maybe the best side-effect, if I’m honest.
• You stop doing the upgrade treadmill, where you’re buying new hardware every 18 months in order to play the latest shininess. Or running stuff at low detail because you haven’t upgraded your graphics card in the last seven minutes. I buy games when it suits me, and I play them when it suits me and when I have a machine that will run them. Sometimes I have to wait a bit on the second count because I don’t upgrade my machined very often. This sometimes leads to awesome moments where I get a new graphics card and can finally play something that I enjoyed but which could barely run at super high detail, or am now able to run something that I wasn’t previously able to run (but have bought because it was on sale for $4.99 a year ago)

As someone who was super into the whole thing two decades ago, I can tell you unequivocably that this is a superior approach to playing games. Do it on your schedule, when you want to, at your budget. Don’t let some marketer at epic or rockstar or valve tell you how to play games, do it on your own terms.

“But my terms are to play the latest thing today!”

You’ve just been conditioned to think like that. Grow out of it. I did. And it was the best thing that ever happened for me WRT gaming. I enjoy it much more now than I ever did when I was on the hype train.

And, frankly, games were better when I was on the hype train, IMO. They were less shit, and less marred by shitty business practices: When you bought a game, you got the whole game. Imagine that. And none of them ever asked me for $1.99 for a new costume. And all those games? They all still work today if I slap the disc into my machine and install them. But also I think there was more innovation, or something. Those games were more fun and appealing to me. Maybe that’s just me being an old man. I bought hardware to play Unreal back in the day. But I actually think Unreal was probably more worth buying hardware for than anything that has come out in the last ~10 years. There might be exceptions to that, but they’re rare IMO.

TLDR: Don’t play the game of the game-makers. Fuck them. They’re almost universally toxic and they’re just trying to rape you and squeeze every dollar they can out of you, while delivering two-thirds of a substandard product. Don’t pre-order games, and don’t pay the outrageous prices that they’re trying to normalise. If you don’t do it, they’ll have to readjust and be more reasonable.

Play games on your terms, not theirs.

Is “At Doom’s Gate” the most iconic video game music of all time? I feel like it just might be. I can’t think of many serious competitors. It’s certainly Iconic enough that I have previously spent hours retracking it:

Another of my favourite pieces of Bobby’s work is “waterworld”, from Duke Nukem 3D. Lots of his music from Duke3d is iconic, too, but waterworld is a standout for me. I took the time to retrack that years ago, too:

Bobby created many, many amazing musical pieces and sound effects for a huge number of groundbreaking and super-influential games. As the composer for Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Doom II, it’s fair to say that he is essentially the father of the sound in the FPS genre.

Finally I’ll leave you with MazeDude’s awesome remix of Bobby’s “Wondering About My loved Ones” from Wolf3D. This has been in semi-regular rotation for me for about 20 years now:

Bobby made a massive dent in video game music. I personally have spent hundreds of hours – at least – listening to his work. He was 81. RIP.

I adore Carrion, it is simply magnificent in every respect. I think probably the only thing I could fault it on is that it is too short, i.e it has an ending and less than infinity levels. Though to be fair it does have first-class mod support, a level editor, and several great expansions so in a way if kind of does have infinity levels.

The premise: you are a simple, innocent, multi-mouthed and betentacled polymorphic biomass, similar to but legally distinct from the creature in The Thing, intent only on sharing your special brand of love with the rest of the universe’s creatures by becoming one with them. You travel about a kajillion light-years to a small blue-green planet somewhere in the uncharted backwaters of a nondescript galaxy, only to be immediately captured and cruelly experimented on by their scienticians! Luckily, these “hunams” who have captured you are silly creatures and have critically underestimated just how flexible you are, so you manage to escape your confinement. Now all you need to do is make it out of the sprawling gubmint facility where you were being held. Along the way you will encounter hordes of enemies ranging from defenseless to terrifying, and puzzles ranging from simple to devious. You will also find several other captives similar to yourself, and take the opportunity to merge with their biomass, gaining new abilities from them and growing in size as you make your way to the surface.

Carrion is spectacular. It is resplendent. Where to begin?

The Graphics. Carrion uses a pixel-art style which might look simple at first glance, but is subtle in its complexity, and oozes atmosphere. In addition to the pixel-art style, you’ll also see some really great use of smoke/particle and lighting effects which fit right in and really look awesome, taking the graphics to the next level.

The Soundtrack is really fantastic. Think of every horror movie soundtrack you’ve ever heard, put them all in a blender, then add action cues and reactivity when battles break out. It’s really really great. If you listen, you’ll hear cues quite reminiscent of several classic horror movies, and the music always adds to the atmosphere of the environment you’re in. And then you’ll stumble into a room and find yourself forced to battle it out with a mech similar to, but legally distinct from, the one in aliens and you’ll hear the classic “bwah” hit, similar to, but legally distinct from, the one in every Christopher Nolan movie.

The level design is something special. Each level has its own feel and despite using a somewhat simple tiled pixel-art aesthetic, the design is distinct enough that you’re not going to get lost or confused, instead you’ll find yourself saying “oh I’m back here” as you explore the facility looking for your way out. This is helpful as the levels are inventive and tend to branch out from central hubs and get more complex as you open up more areas. You’ll also find yourself up against a series of environmental puzzles which will get more difficult as the game progresses, but which are never so challenging as to be frustrating – you will spend your time exploring more often than you’ll be scratching your head wondering what to do next. The level design also combines realy well with the special abilities you’ll gain throughout your playthrough, with previously inaccessible areas becoming accessible as you gain new abilities, and you’ll be rewarded for going back and exploring previous areas once you’ve gained a new ability.

The gameplay is really fantastic, with an innovative control scheme unlike anything I’ve played before. It has similarities to a twin-stick shooter, but it’s really not that. And the gameplay and level design has really excellent progression, introducing new abilities, teaching you their mechanics, and then introducing puzzles to solve with them, gradually getting more challenging and introducing new elements as the game progresses.

The violence, and the gore. Oh, the glorious, gratuitous, hilarious, pixel-art gore, and the hilariously over-the-top ultra-violence. It’s a sight to behold. Viscera will fly and paint the walls red as you rip the puny hunams in half, throwing them across the room into each other, or picking up desks, doors, grates, or whatever else is lying around and throwing them at the hunams fast enough to break them in two, and then you’ll devour them whole to recover your biomass. Laugh and enjoy as the defenseless scientician cowers in the corner whimpering while you force him to watch as you consume all his friends alive before finally consuming him, too. The best way to deal with a room full of hunams with weapons is often to launch into a paroxysm of ultra-violence. These never cease to be a delight as you create interesting works of art in shades of red on the ceiling, walls, and floor, turning an orderly laboratory into a scene of utter chaos in the span of ten seconds or so.

The story. Carrion has a minmalistic story, but it does have a story told through several “cutscenes” where you control one of the hunams. There is a story there, but I found it a little big ambiguous and thought it could perhaps use some more text dialogue or even some voice acting in these parts. Fortunately though this story isn’t hugely important, I don’t think, in much the same way that you don’t need to know The Thing’s backstory for it to be a great sci-fi horror movie.

The tropes. So. Many. Tropes. This is a love-letter to horror and sci-fi movies, particularly The Thing. But it also blends in elements from several other horror and/or sci-fi films, but does so in a way that they’re just generic enough to not be a wink or a nod to any specific movie most of the time. The game is not saying “hey look at me! Remember Aliens?”, it tends instead to use the devices and tropes from that genre of film to enhance the story and atmosphere of the game with very minimal visual cues. It’s glorious.

There are not many games which I have the patience to 100%, but with Carrion it was easy for me to do so – I wanted more game. This kind of comes back to my one criticisim – which is sort of a real criticism – the story mode was too short for my liking. i probably completed it in about 10 hours and 100%’d the game in 15 hours or so. But this is a slight criticism because as mentioned it has a level editor and great mod support. Not only did I 100% it, I then went and played the christmas DLC and a bunch of user level packs.

Carrion is one of the best games I’ve played this decade. I can’t recommend it highly enough. The premise and gameplay work together to create a really unique and supremely enjoyable experience. The graphics, music, and sound are pitch-perfect for what the game is trying to do. I didn’t encounter a single bug or crash or weird behaviour in the course of 100%ing it, or in any of the addons I played. I would buy a sequel in a heartbeat and will likely be watching for other titles from this developer. Highly, highly recommended.

Humble Store Link.

I’ve just finished my first playthrough, and here are my thoughts. They’re not easy to sum up in just 200 characters.

Let me start by saying it’s good. You’d expect it to be – they’ve done like 15 Civilization games so far, so they should have a good idea of what works and what doesn’t. You’d expect anything under the Civilization banner these days to be super-polished and addictive. And it is, with the usual caveat that the AI isn’t particularly smart. But I’m willing to let that one slide since we don’t have general AI yet – it’s a complex game and building an AI for it is not going to be easy.

Weirdly, I found it both more and less complex than Civ V (the most recent one I’ve played, I have Civ 6 but have only put in maybe an hour so far). For instance, the diplomatic options seem very cut-down – you can’t e.g surround an enemy with a huge army and then demand a “gift”, or even have any customised dialogue – the options are limited to making trade agreements and setting a cooperation level (ranging from war to allied). That’s it. This seems to be a curious change for a Civ game, given that the diplomacy is such a big part of it. So it’s less complex, but at the same time there are a bunch of new mechanics that make it more complex, e.g orbital units, which I think are cool but didn’t strike me as particularly useful – I ignored them for most of the game.

I haven’t played Alpha Centauri in a couple of years, but I remember being really really impressed with it. I don’t think this is as good. And it’s not as good as Civ V, which might be the ultimate version of Civilization – it’s super-super-polished, faithful enough to the older games that I didn’t notice anything missing, and yet has enough new stuff that seemed to fit in well that I felt like it was more than just a rehash.

It pains me to say that any of these are better than the original, Civ 1, but objectively speaking I’d say that all of these probably are – I still play Civ 1 occasionally and compared with these games it feels kinda simple, and the graphics are antiquated. It is still hugely fun and massively addictive and it’s undoubtedly one of the most important games ever made, but if you’re new to Civ you probably want to start with Civ V.

Another pet-peeve I had with beyond earth is the technology / science system – I feel like the tech web idea (it’s a web rather than a tree) precludes a logical progression of science, because the dependencies for any given item aren’t particularly deep. So you could theoretically go to the end of a particular branch of the web by researching only 4 or 5 prerequisites, as opposed to the more conventional tech tree where railroads require steam engines, which require alloys, which requires steel, which requires metallurgy, which requires bronze, etc etc etc. Granted, the tech web is perhaps more realistic and reflects how you could change the focus of your research drastically and that research in computing is probably not going to impact biology very much, but I think the deeper tech tree with less choices at each branch is a better game mechanic.

The other problem I have with the tech tree/web in this game is that I felt like most of the technologies and unit names were just made up technobabble – I’m somebody who knows his sci-fi and futurism and I didn’t find myself saying “oh I know what that is”. And in a few cases I did know where something was, and was disappointed that the game didn’t really give me that. For example, there’s a mass driver. I said “ooooh cooool, mass driver!”. And then I got an improvement that gave my city better offensive capabilities, no mass driver graphic or animation to be seen, no weeapon I can target enemies with to throw meteors at them. In my book this should have been a devastating orbital unit, but nope. Note that this doesn’t apply to all of the technologies or units – some of them are logical hypothetical technologies and some of them do just what it says on the tin. But a lot of it is researching inverse phase polarity infusers, which give you a temporal gyreforge improvement that for some reason gives your city +3 production, or whatever. It’s been a while since I played Alpha Centauri, but I seem to recall that having a more logical tech tree, and the units/improvements you get from each tech make more sense with regard to what each technology is. But I might be wrong about that. Maybe it’s just that I’ve played regular Civilization more recently, and it has a very logical tech progression where you automatically know what everything is, as per my rail example above (which is just off the top of my head, but is probably fairly close to the actual progression).

I found several things in the UI unintuitive. For example I was about two-thirds of the way into the game before I figured out how to assign specialists, i.e where you assign a citizen as a scientist or engineer to get a science or production bonus. At first I assumed it didn’t have them, and then I figured out that you have to check the ‘show buildings’ checkbox, and certain buildings give you slots for specialists which you can click to assign. Another example of the unintuitive AI was that at a certain point I noticed that the colour of the aliens had changed. At first it was blue and then at a certain point I noticed it was orange. It was only when I destroyed a nest and the aliens changed from orange to red that I realised that they were getting more and more hostile. This despite me having all the advisors turned on, and it telling me every 3 turns that I can change my personality traits, and me screaming “yeah I’m happy with the ones I have, shut up!”.

Don’t take all these criticisms as me saying that the game isn’t great, though – it still has that addictive “one more turn” thing going on that you expect from a Civ game. But I don’t think it’s as good as Civ V or Alpha Centauri. If you’re looking for a purchasing recommendation, here’s mine: Buy Civilization V complete when it’s on sale ($80?!? seriously?), then buy Alpha Centauri on GOG (Listed at AU$8 at the time of writing including the expansion, a fair price), and then buy the complete edition of Beyond Earth when it’s on sale. If you can get the complete edition for $10-15 it’s worth it. If you don’t already own Civ V and Alpha Centauri then I’d recommend getting those first. I’m just going to assume you already own Civ 1. Which strangely doesn’t seem to be on GOG at the time of writing. Luckily, I own a boxed copy for the Amiga. </bragging>

Note that, of course, all these games support Linux. You might think that Alpha Centauri doesn’t, but loki games did a port back in the day. Apparently it can be difficult to get it running on modern systems, and that may or may not be true for the GOG version, but this installer works just fine on my xubuntu 16.04 laptop with my original Alpha Centauri CD. The only issue I have with Alpha Centauri is that it insists on running at 1024×768, which means it’s fairly small on my laptop screen, which won’t actually switch to that resolution. If you have a way to make it run at 1920×1080 (or 1680×1050), I’d love to hear it – the only info i could find was for the windows version. But it doesn’t make the game less awesome.

Hugely impressive and ambitious, but not finished. ARK has the potential to be a really excellent game, if all the bugs are ever ironed out. At first the bugs will just be annoyances, but once you’ve put some real time into this game they’ll come to rule your experience and you’ll find yourself increasingly frustrated.

Two particularly big ones are dinosaur AI and building structures. You’ll find your tame dinosaurs getting constantly stuck while they’re trying to follow you, to the point that you’ll have to turn around every minute or so to count how many dinosaurs are following you and go back and rescue stragglers. This isn’t such a big deal when you have 3 dinos following you a small distance, but it becomes incredibly tedious when you have 15 and you’re on an epic 20km journey. As for building structures, I hope you like grinding to collect resources, because you’ll spend 20 minutes collecting stuff to craft a piece of a structure, and then the game will refuse to place it where you want it, so you have to demolish something and go out to collect the necessary resources to rebuild in the esoteric order the game wants. Or the game will place it in the wrong place, or in the wrong direction, and you’ll be left with no choice but to demolish the structure and go out and collect more resources to rebuild.

If you search around a bit, you’ll find that both of these issues have been problems for YEARS, and that no fix seems to be forthoming. It seems that the devs are busy building DLC rather than finishing the game. See also the fiasco where the scorched earth DLC was released while the game was still in early access. Apparently the solution to that was to just remove the ‘early access’ tag, to hell with the bugs.

I’d really like to recommend ARK, there really is a fantastic game buried under all those bugs, and perhaps one day these issues will be addressed and I’ll re-visit this review, but as it stands this game is regrettably not worth the AAA price tag attached to it. If you can get it for less than $20 with all the DLC then I’d say it’s probably worth it.

And all they had to do was refund my $2.49. They tried to tell me they were above the law. I told them they weren’t. Seems like the courts agree with me.

So in addition to not ever getting another cent from me, Valve got dragged through our courts and will now be fined. And they refunded my $2.49 plus fees (I did a chargeback).

It’s always nice when justice actually happens.

A screenshot:

This game is a brilliantly playable, amazingly addictive, and hugely fun blend of a 2D platformer (a-la Mario) and a multiplayer FPS (a-la Quake3 or Unreal Tournament).

It’s not complicated: It’s multiplayer only, there are only 5 weapons, and the levels aren’t big or expansive – you won’t spend long looking for your enemy, you’ll spend more time lobbing grenades at him, and then running away frantically because you’re out of ammo and/or low on health.

That’s if you’re playing with only a few others. If there are lots of people in the game, it’ll just be frantic carnage, like any good deathmatch.

It takes its cues from “proper” deathmatch games – the old run-and-gun style: cover systems and regenerating health are for sissies; precision aiming is for people who don’t know about splash damage. Standing still is a VERY BAD IDEA. None of this “modern FPS” crap. This is evidenced most starkly in the fact that you can double-jump, and, perhaps coolest of all, you have a grapping hook, which you can use to climb and to swing yourself to/from places very quickly. If you play in a busy CTF server, you’ll see just how effective the grappling hook can be – these guys are SO FAST!

And it’s gorgeous and has a great atmosphere: cartoonish graphics and sounds. The sounds really do it for me: the cutesy scream your tee will make when he’s hit in the face with a grenade makes it fun to die, the maniacal yet cartoonish laugh your character will emit when your opponent cops a grenade to the face. It’s a really really fun atmosphere.

And I mean that: this is one of those games which is so much fun that you rarely feel like ragequitting, even when you’re losing badly: you will get killed mercilessly and repeatedly, but you’ll have a big smile on your face during the shootout, and when you die you’ll laugh.

And it’s quite well-balanced: none of the weapons are over-powerful or ridiculously weak. This is probably helped by the fact that the weapons have (very) limited ammo, even though running out of ammo sometimes annoys me slightly.

Downsides:

• There aren’t enough teeworlds players in Australia, so I find myself playing on servers where I have a ping of 300 or more. This means you sometimes have a laggy experience.
• You’ll come across killer bots sometimes. These bots are inhumanly good and can drain the fun out of being repeatedly stomped on, but the game has a voting system which allows you to vote on kicking players, so these bots are rarely a nuisance for long.
• It has an ‘auto-switch weapons’ feature which switches when you pick up a new weapon, but it lacks a ‘weapon preference’ order a-la Unreal Tournament, and it does not switch weapons automatically when you run out of ammo. This is sometimes frustrating because you’re firing at your opponent but you only get an ‘out of ammo’ click, and while you’re trying to switch weapons your opponent kills you. But it’s one of those things you learn and it also serves to add tactics to the game – you’re always keeping an eye on how much ammo you have.

TL;DR: Teeworlds is a really really fun and addictive game which cleverly combines cutesy graphics and 2d-platformer gameplay with the frantic action of a golden-age FPS. It’s one of the better open-source games out there. Go and buy it now!

[EDIT: antisol.org now runs a Teeworlds Deathmatch server! ]

Everybody raves about Braid. It’s clever, with unique game mechanics, and very pretty.

But it’s too short – by the time you wrap your head around a concept, you’re not using that concept any more.

I’ve read reviews praising this, saying that there’s no repetition and not a single “wasted” puzzle.

But you know what? For all my complaints in the past about games being too repetitive, I can handle doing a couple of variations on the same puzzle if it means it’s going to take more than a couple of hours to get through the game.

Don’t get me wrong – Braid is a brilliant game, and the people who came up with those game mechanics are really clever, and the art style is very pretty… but it’s too short – it needs more levels or some different playmodes. It has near-zero replayability.

And Yet It Moves is a much, much better game – easily the most original and fun game I’ve played in years.

This game is fucking awesome in every respect – the game mechanic is deceptively simple – rotating the world, but it gets progressively more challenging and clever about how it uses it.

The game is a good length – it took me longer than Braid did. And it has different playmodes and an “epilogue” set of levels which you can play after you’ve finished the main game which will keep you interested. And achievements are always fun.

And it’s absolutely gorgeous. The “paper” art style is magnificent, and goes through enough variations to always be interesting.

And the music is fantastic – very distinctive and unusual. There’s one particular piece of music which usually plays in-game (usually when you’re jumping onto disappearing platforms) which is especially awesome.

Linux is supported. Steam for Linux is supported. I got it as part of one of the Humble Bundles. It’s going for $10 on Steam right now. You should buy it.

I’m trying to think back to the last time I loved a game this much. It was a long time ago – I’ve been bored with games for a long time. I think that probably the last time I was this impressed with a game was the first time I played Portal.

Here, watch the trailer:

Go and buy this game right now. You want it, you just don’t know it yet (or maybe now you do!). It’s cheap. And it’s a seriously awesome, awesome game.