GOG are known for their dedication to making older games available in the modern day, because usually a number of those games are no longer being sold anywhere and even if you can find copies – they usually don’t work on modern PCs without a lot of tinkering. GOG are good at bringing you those games without hassle, and now they’ve announced that they’re bringing three Sierra classics to their service.

Caesar I and II, along with Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom are now available for sale on GOG, ready for returning players and new ones alike to come in and build their own historically inspired cities. This completes GOG’s collection with the first two of the Caesar series and letting you build your city into a big superpower of the early ADs. Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom however places you in the East, and has you working on construction of an empire which will last for 3000 years of China’s history. You start in a small plot on the shores of the Yangtze river, and build to rule the whole of China, dealing with political, social and economic upheaval along the way. Released in 2002, it was the last game that was a part of Sierra’s City Building series of games.

Each of these games is now available for $5.99 or £4.79 DRM-free and compatible with most operating systems. To celebrate GOG are currently running the Grand City-Builders Sale to celebrate the PC’s history of city building games. However, it’ll only last until 2pm UTC so be quick if you want to build up some city-building fun.

I love Starbound. It’s a nice chill game that lets you just get on with playing the game but also has a set of missions you can do if you choose to do that. If you’ve never played it, think Terraria but less complicated and with more species you can be. I like to play as the bird-like Avian race myself.

The game spent quite a while in development and Early Access before it released last year, but developer Chucklefish continues to improve the game and the next patch they’re going to be adding will add new locations for you to explore in between the planets you can hop between. This includes derelict space crafts, merchant ships and more.

To aid you in this (because as you might be able to guess some of these places are pretty hostile to life!) the game will be having giant mech suits added to allow you to engage in extra-vehicular activity, which means you can explore abandoned space stations and derelicts all you want. You’ll be able to customise these suits, adding weapons, painting them in custom paint jobs and much more. Updating it and keeping it repaired will be crucial to continue to plumb the depths of ever harder and more dangerous space wreckage.

To make travelling between planets, planetoids and locations between orbits, the navigational interface is getting an update too. Now you’ll be able to zoom all the way out to see what is orbiting around the star you’re currently in the system of, and the map is active which means you can see where everything is in their orbital paths – including your own craft. You can even watch other crafts moving around so you can intercept a merchant at where they’re going to be next. No word on whether this means we’ll get space pirates though – it’d be a logical next step I imagine.

Chucklefish haven’t given a date of release for this update yet, but keep your eyes on the Starbound website for up to date information.

I like stories. I love to evaluate the way they’re built, characters and especially those narratives that play with the typically accepted patterns and turn them on their head. It’s been done quite a bit, but I never get tired of flipping a story on its head and experiencing it from the other side.

So Nefarious, which is a modern take on the 2D platformer genre that has you play as the villain? Yeah, it got my interest immediately. The main character is villain Crow, who indulges in the time-honoured tradition of kidnapping the princess of his area, Princess Mayapple, as well as building doomsday devices and so on, so forth. Pitted against him is hero Mack, a Megaman-esque type who is in a relationship with Mayapple and is her ‘hero’. Only throughout the first level, which takes place in the city location the three are based in, you get hints in the dialogue that honestly the kidnapping thing has happened so often that Mayapple and Crow understand each other a bit better than Mayapple and Mack do right now. It’s wonderful to see the three play out their roles while still being believably the role they fit into.

The gameplay itself takes place over several different locations as Crow sets out beyond his usual boundaries to kidnap many princesses for an ultimate weapon. Enemies will be encountered and can be dispatched with punches or with grenades which have a timer of a few seconds unless they hit an enemy. Grenades can also be used to hit buttons and can also sometimes be found fixed into place to act as a jump booster for higher up platforms. Defeated enemies usually drop grenade refills, also they can also drop heart canisters if you have taken on some damage. Crow starts with 3 hearts and enemies can take a half or full heart on hit, while most enemies early on take only one punch or grenade. Different princesses grabbed also give Crow certain abilities, such as the Insektia princess letting Crow jump higher or further than before; and abilities can be upgraded in between location levels by spending accumulated currency that you pick up while in the location levels. Death will also leave behind a chunk of the current amount of money you are currently carrying too, and you can grab it again as you go past by touching, punching or blowing up the container left behind.

I really enjoyed this game, as I adored the characters, the use of tropes and the chance to take part in ‘reverse boss battles’ (you get to be the boss against heroes!) as well as the regular boss encounter type battles. My gripes with this game extend to one thing though – who thought it was a good idea to tie the punch to the right-mouse button and grenades to the left? Most games will tie a punch to the left and grenades to the right, so my muscle memory really played havoc with me (fortunately you cannot blow yourself up with your own grenades). We have a suspicion that this might be a game that plays better with the aid of a controller.

If you love 2D platformers, give this one a go. It’s not that expensive and it’s a lot of fun, with interesting characters and awesome music.

7.5/10