The original game ran at 800x600...

I assume they mean it was designed for 800x600. It runs in 1280x1024 here, although any bitmaps - fonts, for example - are clearly upscaled. I imagine that looks pretty grotty in 4K, to be fair.

... and they say they've now doubled this, with it now running by default in a widescreen 16:9 aspect ratio instead of the 4:3 in the original.

Uh-oh. I have a 5:4 monitor. I hope they keep other ratios as an option and it isn't going to letterbox.

Still, it's nice to see a developer who cares about its older games. And fortunately it's DRM-free, so I can keep playing the old version if I don't like it. :D

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Minecraft got the formula so perfect, has such a distinctive visual style, and has so many gameplay-altering mods, that it's really hard to differentiate other voxel-terrain games from it. You don't get the same impression that all the battle royale games which are so popular right now are just ripping each other off in the way you always hear with Minecraft clones. Possibly because they aren't more or less forced into looking the same, people recognise that each one brings something different to the party.

But even something like Voxel Turf - which is a very different game - has trouble shaking the Minecraft comparison, let alone a game that looks as if it's just trying to be a better Minecraft. There really isn't anything wrong with that - game developers have been taking others' ideas and running with them since the '70s... and let's never forget Infiniminer - but somehow when anyone does it with Minecraft, it's “just a Minecraft clone”.

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KidsCanCode (hey... if they can teach kids, they can teach me, right?) had some excellent tutorials for the 2.x series, although they were already slightly outdated even for later releases of that. Don't know if they've done any updates for 3.x.

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If the word "voxels" makes you think about Minecraft though, fear not as it's really nothing like it. Not only is it a completely different genre, the way they've created the world looks very different too. In Smith and Winston the voxels are small, sleek and make up make up everything.

It actually looks more like what I used to think of when I heard the word “voxels” than Minecraft does. As far as I can make out, each voxel there is a single colour, in other words the engine is genuinely extending the concept of pixels into the third dimension. There was a time - I'm talking about looooong before Minecraft, or even texture-mapped 3D - when voxels seemed to be The Future.

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Sounds awesome. I never really got all that far in SM when I first played it, and going back to it recently I realised there's a lot of stuff in there which I didn't expect that keeps your interest going once you've got a nice colony ticking along and it might otherwise start to wane (no spoilers for anyone who doesn't have it, but long-time players will probably know what I'm talking about). Absolutely brilliant game.

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Wait... the EU has concluded that Valve et al are in breach of a regulation it introduced in December 2018 with a policy last used in 2015?

It certainly sounds like the EU all right, but surely I'm missing something here?

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Quoting: fabertaweBorderlands 2 is quite possibly my favourite all time game. So good in fact, I haven't played the pre-sequel yet for fear of disappointment :wink:

One of my favourites too. Definitely in my top 10. I held off on the Pre-Sequel for quite a long time for similar reasons, but I don't regret finally buying it at all.

I was worried that the new gameplay mechanics would take away from the Borderlands experience, but they actually add to it. Granted, the story's all over the place, the first boss fight's easily the most frustrating pain in the #@%! of the whole series so far, overall the maps and gameplay don't quite feel as tightly-designed, and the jokes aren't as funny as in BL2, but don't let that (and all the lacklustre reviews you've probably seen) put you off: it really does have its moments. More hits than misses, I'd say. If it had been Borderlands 2, I don't think anyone would have had any complaints. But that game was always going to be a hard act to follow.

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Quoting: EikeAnybody remember Balance of Power?
"You have ignited a nuclear war. And no, there is no animated display of a mushroom cloud with parts of bodies flying through the air. We do not reward failure."

Blue-and-red Cold War maps always remind me of Theatre Europe on the C64 (which had a similar attitude to failure, alhough I do seem to remember a picture of a mushroom cloud... rather often, now I come to think of it), but yes, this one does sound more like BoP. Great game. One of the “breakthrough” titles for the 16-bit machines, along with Defender of the Crown.

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Quoting: linuxjacquesI'm glad to hear this. I was trying to install the texture pack last night and finally realized why it wasn't working.

Yeah, I thought, “It's only new textures, surely it'll work anyway?” before realising that no, it's an update to the game itself too. Still, good to see that it's coming.

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Quoting: seanbutnotheardIn SteamOS/Big Picture (yes I'm still a loyal SteamOS user), it's nice to be able to tweak your controller config on the fly. Though I suppose this bug doesn't necessarily affect that situation since the controller can do the work.

It's really annoying you can't open the controller config tool from the desktop overlay. Especially since you can bring up the main Steam client settings window. It'd be nice if a controller always opened the BPM overlay regardless of what mode the actual client's in.

For a developer so obsessive with level design in its games, it's weird that Valve is so terrible at UIs.

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