On Friday I completed the purchase of a lovely two-bed flat in Cardiff. It has been a long process, dragging its heels since January, but in the week ahead I get to play Sims in my own home. Just maybe without the whole locking your enemy in a room with no doors, windows or food until the Reaper comes for them. I can’t wait, but in the meantime why not take a read of what Week 51 of Our Week in Games held in store.

Chris

My past week has largely been about Beatbuddy with some, you guessed it, trucking thrown in for good measure. I don’t want to dwell on the music game too much, you can see my Verdict here but the good news is that my trucking business is progressing well. Last week I even did a ‘Let’s Play’ style video on YouTube for Euro Truck Sim 2.

Elsewhere I’ve just started to dabble in the new PC release of Spelunky which is gloriously fun. I might not be any good at it, I was dismal with the Xbox version, but it is great fun.

I wish I had the spare-time in the week ahead to play The Sims, but I really won’t. I am looking forward to seeing what everyone has to share in the special Our Week in Games next week though, should be a fun read.

Nick

Max Payne – A man directly responsible for perhaps 90% of all the bullets ever fired in slow motion, and a hero whose descent into an alcoholic stupor I have followed for well over a decade.

After picking up Max Payne 3 for a ridiculously cheap price early last month, it was only a few days ago that I managed to get around to completing the frankly absurd Steam download of nearly 30 gig. Despite seeming to consist of 90% cutscenes and only 10% diving very slowly through the air firing pistols, nevertheless I am enjoying myself, although I’m still not sure just why the game requires such a huge swathe of hard-disk space.

There are occasions where I want a vast, open ended game with unparalleled freedom. On those occasions I will reach for the likes of Skyrim or Just Cause II – games that allow me to go anywhere and do anything. Then there are the other times, when I just want to slap in a game for a quick thrill, when I want to be led through a linear narrative that asks nothing more of me than to plod from A to B,  occasionally putting a bullet through C.

I’ll be frank – Max Payne 3 isn’t much of a game, but it’s certainly proving to be an enjoyable movie that occasionally as a bonus allows me to take part.

Edcrab

So, The International 3 has begun in earnest! And that’s a big Dota 2 tournament if you’re not following it. Or rather, the big tournament.

My Steam had a few issues on the first night, which is a little like realising your TV has decided to retune all your channels twenty minutes before the first match of the World Cup is due to kick-off.

Since I missed the early in-game streams, being able to download recordings (complete with commentary) was really useful: and enabled me to actually tell what was going on. With replays I have the luxury of watching the same segment repeatedly until I finally figure out what happened. It can be a bit hectic figuring out what’s going on at any one time: heck, even professional commentators sometimes struggle.

Watching games as opposed to playing them still feels a little odd to me: I’ve never really followed eSports until relatively recently, if you discount things like YouTube clips of top plays.

I was mentioning this last night, in fact, when a friend surreptitiously informed me about a site called saltybet. Where you bet pretend money on the results of AI-on-AI Mugen fights. And now I feel like I’ve stumbled into the seedy underbelly of the livestream world…

Jon

Following Nick’s exploits in Kerbal Space Program, I decided to have a pop. So far, I’ve had thirteen rockets explode, ten of which were still on the launch pad. Four of those exploded ships had living crew. I’ve stranded three kerbals in orbit – two of which I rescued, and one, who after an ill informed EVA rescue attempt is now stranded in orbit, on his own, miles from a now empty spacecraft.

On the plus side, I’ve now got a fully working space station in orbit, one satellite and after over twenty flights, only one piece of debris.

Now if I could just figure out how to get that stranded kerbal back….