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 of donations in aid of Prevent Cancer. GDQ announced the $2.6 million figure on <a href=)
Twitter after the event concluded, and thanked all the runners and those who’d donated.
A number of speedruns throughout the week-long event smashed world records for their respective games and categories too, including PC runs of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge and my own personal GOTY from 2022, PowerWash Simulator. You can watch the AGDQ 2023’s record-setting No Soap PowerWash Simulator run below, and weep into your coffee at the sheer cleaning ability on display.
SimCity 4 had its problems. Its huge cities would chug on even decent PCs, for one, and its traffic simulation seemed outright broken.
Twenty years later – thanks to faster PCs, the Rush Hour expansion, and a huge modding community – SimCity 4 is the best of all SimCity games. If what you care about is simulation, scale, variety, and the beauty of urban sprawl, it’s also the best citybuilder.
Against The Storm provided some of the most fun I had playing a citybuilder last year. That was in part because, despite being set in a dark fantasy world in which you must satisfy an unyielding Queen, and despite being in early access, it’s remarkably graspable. It’s the kind of citybuilder where, if you place a building in the wrong place, it simply lets you pick it up and move it at no cost.
As of its latest update, there’s now a new customisable game mode that lets you make your expeditions even more relaxed – or much harder.
Bloomberg report. The FTC opted last month to sue Microsoft to block the acquisition, arguing that the deal would suppress competition.
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Beyond Good & Evil 2, Ubisoft’s open world follow up to the cult classic I’m too young to have played. We haven’t seen hide nor genetically modified pig tail of it since 2018, but rest assured, it lives.
That’s despite the most recent swing of Ubisoft’s game-cancelling scythe, which was brought down on three unannounced games last week due to the company’s underperforming sales.
Desktop Dungeons is a morish puzzle game from 2010 that channels conventional dungeoning into fiendish headscratching. Every enemy sits still, waiting for you to come and whack it. Whack willy-nilly, though, and they’ll kill you in no time – so you have to tactically explore parts of each level to heal, while targeting foes in an order that lets you survive long enough to level up and take on the big bads.
Desktop Dungeons: Rewind is an upcoming “modern remastering” of the original, with 3D graphics and the ability to rewind time rather than start each level from the very beginning. It’s got a demo you can play right now, and it’s adding free daily challenges with a sharable leaderboard later this month. I am hyped.
Skull & Bones is still coming. A new developer video proves that, offering a fresh look at some sumptuous seas during a hunt for an Ungwanan renegade. The most interesting part of Skull & Bones is still its tortured history, with a recent sixth delay pushing it even further back from the original 2018 release date – but oh, maybe I do want to be a boat after all. At least for a bit.
The Anacrusis launched into early access in January 2022, its retrofuturist take on the co-op FPS instantly delivered on funky sci-fi fun. Yet it was also tempered fun: a brutal AI Director could easily tip manageable chaos into a fatiguing onslaught of fishy alien minibosses, and I still remember my will to persevere being sapped by connectivity issues and a general lack of weight to the otherwise enticing pew-pew gunplay.
Happily, following a year of tweaks and additions, The Anacrusis is in a much better place. Even if that place is still turtleneck-deep in extraterrestrial viscera. Ahead of the game’s first anniversary, I poked developers Stray Bombay for a chat on how their early access approach is working out, the impact of long-awaited mod tools, and what’s next for this most stylish of space shooters.
Katamari Damacy the first things that spring to mind are usually balls, and the rolling thereof. Computer scientist and custom controller kitbashing experimenter Dr Tom Tilley had the same thought and, erm, rolled with it. In a case of life imitating art, Tilley repurposed a trackball he’d made from roll-on deodorant and a soccer ball to play the game with (thanks, Time Extension). You can watch Tilley mucking about with the trackball to control an emulated version of the PS2-era Katamari Damacy in the video below.
