Our Week in Games – Week 46

Our Week in Games – Week 46

By the time you read this, you will know whether a great British sporting weekend has become complete. With the Lions having won Down Under, Chris Froome winning the Yellow Jersey we are waiting on Lewis Hamilton in the German Grand Prix and Andy Murray at Wimbledon. Oh and the Ashes start this week as well. Who needs football eh? Find out in Our Week in Games who does.

Chris

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The start of the week was full of Company of Heroes 2 action, and as such my Verdict will be live on the site tomorrow. I would have loved to play on longer, however I have been unable to play my Press build on Steam over the past couple of days due to a supposed missing executable. Just so slightly annoying, but it matches a similar problem I’ve had trying to play Pro Cycling Manger 2013, some things just aren’t meant to be.

Despite all the great non-football action going on, I’ve found myself drawn back to Football Manager and my beloved TNS. My return to the game, in November 2015, was inspired by some strong performances by the Welsh teams in the qualifying stages for the Europa League. My quest has for a long time been to get far enough in a Football Manager save to lead TNS to European glory. It won’t happen this season, maybe in another five. Hopefully I will manage it before the next game comes out.

Kevin

After playing for hours I still haven't found George.
After playing for hours I still haven’t found George.

Finding myself in possession of a new phone I thought it was high time that I sunk myself into the world of mobile gaming. Starting out with Pixel Dungeon and Jane Wilde I find myself having fun, but after a while losing interest. Whilst visually they impress me, the general gameplay and seemingly shallow overall game leave me wanting something more.

After playing and deleting a few games I come across Jungle Run 2, a game that makes use of my phones motion sensing. Tilting the phone left or right moves the character the corresponding way, whilst swiping the touch screen makes them jump or duck for obstacles. The speed the character runs as gets increasingly faster and you have to traverse small ledges and train tracks, collect power-ups and coins to unlock special features. These short bursts of gameplay have me rather hooked, playing on the bus to work, breaks and here and there elsewhere, attempting to beat my top score and pass weekly challenges. This is more like what I expected from mobile gaming.

Finally I have downloaded a few puzzle games. Bridges, Moron Test and Logo Quiz to name a few. These have provided a fair bit of entertainment but I feel as if I’m missing something really good. If anyone has any recommendations of any mobile games, please let me know in the comments.

Nick

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Once again, my modding urge has returned, so I spent a large portion of yesterday digging around inside OpenXcom’s code, prodding things here and there to see what I could make happen. In the majority of cases what I made happen was generally a crash, but after several hours I figured out what I’d been doing wrong and finally managed to introduce my first weapon to Microsoft’s classic alien invasion simulator.

Of course, what I’ve produced currently looks like absolute garbage. How pixel artists are able to produce stunning objects, often with absurdly small pixel counts and colour limitations, completely eludes me. ‘Practice makes perfect’, as they say, but at the moment I’d be happy to settle for ‘practice makes for not quite so hideous.’

Even so, it’s a start. Now I’ve begun learning how to bend a game to my will, the only limit is theoretically my imagination. That, and the fact that any requests for free time must first be passed through two small, very excitable young children. Still, it’s not all bad. Give it a couple of years and they’ll be old enough to start doing all the pixel work for me.

 

 

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