What you should play this weekend

Tell us what you are playing in the comments

The half-term holidays have arrived, which in my neck of the woods means all the kids are off school for the next two weeks. This is going to do wonders for my progress in Pokémon Pokopia, and serious damage to my progress in manshooter Marathon. I'm OK with this.

Here's three games you could be playing this weekend, although tell us what is providing you with sweet relief in the comments below.

Water flows through stone aqueducts in a green pastoral hillside.
Beavers and Romans differ mostly by their chosen materials.

Nova Roma

Last week, both Going Medieval and Timberborn left Early Access, but here's another citybuilder entering it - and another which offers new ways to drown your population. Nova Roma is about constructing, well, Rome, and doing so in a manner that please the Gods as well as your citizens. Expect aqueducts and lots of games journalists using "wasn't built in a day" straplines.

A TV/VCR combo displaying the league table on teletext. Derby have 12 points.
I'd like to force an American to play this.

Nutmeg!

I collected football stickers in the '90s, spent pocket money on issues of Match and Shoot, read sports scores on Ceefax and played Subutteo in my mate's loft. Nutmeg! might be a game for me, specifically. It's

I am The Thing from the Tower

Chaos ex machina

More of you need to be playing narrative strategy-RPG Heart Of The Machine. I don't care that you'll enjoy it. I just want to see what you do.

I love this kind of game. Take your wiki and your tiers and your meta and shove it up your tedious spod arse. Heart Of The Machine wants you to explore, to imagine, to play with its premise: that you're an (actual) artificial intelligence, newly sentient, in a far future dystopian city. Now what? What kind of being are you? What should you do about the world?

Don't look it up. Figure out who you are, you goddamn coward. Make a decision. Be someone.

A monochrome, humanoid robot and a human silhoutte stand either side of a text box offering two player responses: "Accept the Nuclear Device", and "Ignore her and scan the facility". Less relevant is the event itself, detailing the human, a manager, offering the player a nuclear bomb and asking them to use it on a third party.
You have been blanked. But have you been "offering a nuclear bomb" blanked?

This is not a game to win or (ugh) "beat", but to play along with its many choose-your-own-adventure style events. Its earliest paths can diverge pretty widely, offering choices in story events like "Ask to see her wares" vs "Murder her for some reason", at least unless you look further into the option to "Start Therapy". There are wonderfully evocative choices like "Befriend The Creatures", "Design Something

Ah, a job sim for people who like configuring their router

The bytes must flow

Do you know how the internet works? I don't. But it might have something to do with the nine billion ethernet cables coming out of my basement like a colony of suspicious worms. This is Tower Networking Inc, a hacky wire-crossing simulator where you run an entire internet service provider out of a damp cellar in an endlessly growing high-rise. 

It's also a roguelike for some god-forsaken reason, but you can turn that off in the options and just play it as a straight-up cyberpunk job sim about making sure people can read all the awful news through their smoking modems.

It hit early access in summer last year but only recently popped up in my Steam recommendations, like a 1st line support blister waiting to be popped. You can get an idea of how deeply IT-brained the game is by watching the trailer, which expertly fuses the synthetic beats of hacker-happy music with green-tinted command lines and the kind of router configuration jargon that makes normal people break out in a fearful sweat.

 "Administrate the network," it announces with all the glee of a corporate training video you

What are you running for?

One cannot survive on The Aesthetic alone

There is a loop of behaviour I get into when I see a game being highly praised by my peers. I try the game, I don't like it, I stew with annoyance, I see more praise, I decide I must be doing something wrong, I try it again, I still don't like it. I write a blast of vaporous thoughts about why I don't like it, but I'm only half-convinced by my own screed, and I see more people enthusing about the game. I think: this can't be right, I am missing something, I am not giving this its fair shake, a proper evaluation, I am playing it wrong, I must commit to it somehow, I must roleplay, or I must get deeper, it will reveal itself soon, surely. I play again, and I still don't like it.

This annoys me because I feel locked out of enjoying, even with great effort, something that others enjoy with no effort at all. This is a silly emotion, but a persistent one. I want to like the videogame. Why can't I just like it? Yes, I am talking about Marathon.

Some praise it as

Jank Mail: NVIDIA, corporate comedy and Elder Scrolls

This week in PC gaming

This weeks’ newsletter arrives late, with apologies: I thought I would be able to write it during my journey back from America, but overestimated the efficacy of in-flight WiFi and my own energy levels after slogging through two airports, three rail lines and a last-mile cab ride. You get the benefit of something written in the fuzzy-head/itchy eyeballs state of jetlag, rather than the exhausted-to-the-point-of-incomprehensibility one, and I hope you’ll be able to tell the difference.

Jank has rudely persisted in my absence. Brendy admitted he was wrong about Slay The Spire 2 and celebrated its co-op mode, Graham reviewed the videos he watched while playing Lost and Found and my podcasting partner/nemesis Alice Bell reviewed Esoteric Ebb. She made do without me for this week’s Total Playtime, which addressed the main issues of the week before pivoting to endorse furry art.

Chief among the former was NVIDIA’s debut of DLSS 5. This tricks out existing games to give “photo-realistic” visuals through the magic of aftermarket gen-AI and was loved by Digital Foundry and hated by almost everybody else, including a number of developers

The Lie-In

Our weekly roundup of links worth reading

Good morning, videogames. What a week it has been for blog posts. There have been good blogs, bad blogs, new blogs, and much discussion thereof across the internet. It's enough that you could begin to trick yourself into thinking that games media is healing, although I suspect this is in reality a consequence of its recent fragmentation. In any case, I am pleased to be able to link to so many independent writer-owned sites, of one kind or another, in the below roundup of good writing about videogames.

Duncan Fyfe wrote about lore for Remap by looking at the Elder Scrolls series, and talking to its fans and many of its writers about the often haphazard, contradictary way its world has been constructed, for better and worse.

During a dispute with his boss that a colleague remembered as about whether the world of The Elder Scrolls could accommodate Amazon women, Goodall quit the company. “I loved the original Elder Scrolls too much to stop arguing in their favor,” he said later. He had approached The Elder Scrolls full of zeal for the world and conviction in the stories that took place there. He had come into the world

Total Playtime: Stoatal Playtime; Our DLSS 5 Is ON

The slopping forecast

Total Playtime is a Patreon-supported podcast about videogames, hosted by Alice Bell, Jon Hicks, Brendan Caldwell and Nate Crowley. Jank has partnered with them and we'll be posting new episodes each week.

It's a news episode this week, and you know what that means: people getting cross about AI. The results are at least entertaining, though, starting with NVIDIA's DLSS technology which promises to yassify game characters regardless of circumstance or the artistic decisions of their creators. This is seemingly in service of photorealism, which has been the final goal of graphics card manufacturers since the days when they put weird CGI fairies on the boxes, but has never really been creatively interesting and never will be because we already know what reality looks like.

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Total Playtime Episode 31: Stoatal Playtime; Our DLSS 5 Is ON
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It nevertheless appears inevitable that the technology will be both widely available and widely used despite making the output actively worse, making it the videogame equivalent of TVs using motion smoothing by default, but in the meantime the memes have been pretty good and that's the best we can hope for in the

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