Due to a bit of a distractingly nightmarish month or so, I completely forgot to mention I wrote a short piece for Epic about the joys of Jetboard Joust. I’m definitely out of practice at writing like a perfectly normal human being and not a Rob but I appreciated – and took – the chance to write about a game I adore that no doubt has been overlooked.
Having had pretty much the pick of the store for stuff to write about, of course I’m going to go for the arcade roguelike that’s a sequel to an old and largely forgotten (and fun) Speccy game. That’s what you get when you leave me unsupervised! In my defence, it’s a great game and nowhere near enough people have cast eyes on it. There’s console versions too, by the way. I’ve been playing the Switch version and it’s a corking little handheld game.
Usual getting excited about a game stuff aside, it’s nice to see Epic trying something people have been asking Valve to do for as long as indie games have been on their store – giving over store space to writing and recommendations about the games on the store. When it’s so difficult to get people to even be vaguely aware a game exists, it’s good to see steps being taken to try and surface the good stuff.
Having a cracking set of writers (and me) rummaging through the store isn’t a perfect solution in itself but it’s part of the solution. An eclectic bunch at it with tastes ranging from the usual to the esoteric is a necessity and for now, that’s something they’re trying over at Epic.
Given the neglected and messy curation on Steam which I’ve spent years wishing Valve would overhaul, I’ll take this. I doubt it’ll be a kingmaker when it comes to translating into sales but if it gets a few more people to buy a bloody great videogame and gives someone the chance to be visibly excited about it too, yeah that’s lovely.
(usual reminder that I link to dekudeals for console stuff solely because it’s a nice, no fuss aggregator and there’s no affiliate links or hoodwinkery involved)