Every game released here, and the most recent significant update to each one, newest first. Games get reworked when playing them shows something wrong — a rule that could be exploited, a level that could not be finished, a screen too dark to read — so many of these notes say what was broken as well as what is new.
The mall has become a place with a past. It closed on the evening of December 19, 1998 and never reopened, and the run is now about finding out why: eleven photographs, each of which develops into a real print with a line of what you understood, and the paper people left behind. The food court has a second storey with a gallery, escalators and a glass elevator; behind the restroom alley there is a whole back of house — service corridor, maintenance, a stair up to the security office. Throw the main breaker and the building wakes up around you. Getting caught now walks you to the doors with your photos intact, and the run saves as you go. Since then: the management office, which could not be entered at all, now can; doors are solid when open and carry what is pinned to them; and the guards no longer slip outside the building during a chase, which is what made one seem to vanish and then see you through a wall.
Rebuilt from the ground up. The board now shows you the word before you drop: slide a letter across the well and wherever it would spell something, the letters light up with the word and its points. The dictionary is new — it used to clear abbreviations like ABC and ADJ as words — and a Q always arrives as Qu. There is real depth now: a hold slot for awkward letters, a flow multiplier for clearing again within four drops, chain combos, a wild tile earned by long words, and gold tiles that double a word. The daily is 72 letters, the same for everyone, rolling over at midnight UTC, with a bonus for every empty row at the end, and it survives a refresh. Endless speeds up and then starts pushing rows up from the floor. Plus a thirty-second lesson on the board itself, sound and music, and proper touch controls on phones.
Three new arenas, and all of them are places you know. Tranquility puts the fight inside the glass dome on the Moon and out through the airlock onto the regolith, where a jump is three metres high and your suit only reaches the survey beacons. The Showroom turns Cherry Lane’s model homes into a fast, close street fight. Tallowmoor is the fen town at night, all alleys and corners. There is a map picker, a vote in multiplayer lobbies, and a next-map vote on the results screen. And eight competitors now, four of them from those worlds, each with a look of their own that other players see too.
The whole programme can now be flown start to finish — every mission from the first hop to the landing on Titan has been flown from the pad in the rocket the game suggests. Crew capsules finally have the parachutes and heat shield their description promised, every completed objective leaves a checkpoint you can resume from after a crash or a closed tab, and the map now shows your closest approach to the target so you can see whether a correction is helping. Also fixed: rockets that looked fine on the pad but fell back once their boosters burned out, engines that lost most of their power on Mars, and landings that exploded on steep ground with no warning.
A full pass over the daily round. Every course is now proved before it ships: a flood fill over the space the ball can actually occupy checks that the cup is reachable and that there is a route to it that does not go through the water, and a bot plays all nine holes through the real physics before anyone sees them. Par comes out of that — it is fitted to how many strokes the round actually takes rather than to how far apart the tee and the cup are, so holes range from a two you can ace to a six that earns it, instead of the flat par 4 everything used to be. The course itself now rolls over at midnight UTC for everyone at once; it used to key off your own clock, which quietly handed players in different countries different courses on the same day. Your round saves as you go, so closing the tab on the sixth hole no longer throws away the first five. Plus a streak, a record with a 35-day calendar, eight course themes that never repeat two days running, sound you can mute, and full keyboard play.
Rebuilt from the ground up as the remaster of a 1994 game that never existed. Every pixel is hand-authored against a locked palette and dithered rather than shaded, the text is a bitmap font drawn a pixel at a time, and the whole interface — panel, menus, sliders, cursor — is now drawn inside the game instead of sitting on top of it. New: a boot screen, a title, a score that plays live through two-operator FM synthesis, ambience that changes room by room, and a save that picks you up where you left off. The game got bigger too: right-click now looks at anything and everything answers, there is a storm drain under the street with a story in it, and there are three endings instead of one. Also fixed: the results screen had been throwing an error on every single completion.
A full pass over the sortie. Three Cinder airframes now fly the war instead of one: the Interceptor crosses and forces you to lead it, the Lancer stands off and lobs missiles that flares answer, and the Warden is a shielded wall you have to go around rather than through. They break off a gravity well instead of chasing you into a planet, and every airframe is faster than your cruise and slower than your afterburner, so running is a decision that costs something. Between operations there is a refit — hull, deflectors, ordnance and targeting, three steps each — bought with requisition the last sortie earned, and the run now survives a reload: the campaign is saved at every briefing and the title screen offers to resume it. The sector itself is rebuilt, from the banded planets and their atmospheric limbs down to the lit windows on a freighter, and the effects layer is pooled, so a capital ship coming apart no longer costs a garbage collection. Audio is synthesised end to end — a panned mix where a Lancer firing off your port side is audible before it is visible, over a generative score that rises with the fight. The difficulty dial now reaches the relay and the convoy, not just your own hull.
The storm is a real system now rather than a countdown. The cell builds through four stages before anything touches down — you can watch it darken, hear the wind rise, and see the trees start to bend — and the sky finally does what the sound always said it was doing: lightning that lights the whole street, rain you can see, and hail that will hurt you if you stay in the open. Tornadoes come in five shapes now, from a narrow rope to a wedge wide enough to take the road and the houses either side of it, and the county sends warnings as the storm organises. Also fixed: the game had been rendering a blank screen since 4 September.
The whole station has been relit. Every deck now runs on a real power system — the mains fail shortly after you arrive, the corridor drops to red emergency lighting, and somewhere on the level is the junction that brings it back. Enemies patrol when you are not looking, hear your gunfire from the next room, and search where they last saw you instead of forgetting you the moment you break line of sight. Doors slide instead of vanishing, shots throw sparks off whatever they hit, and there are three hidden maintenance panels on every deck. Dying now puts you back at the start of the deck you were on rather than the top of the station.
A driving pass, top to bottom. The rival field had two faults in how it steered — a cross-track correction that pushed the wrong way, and a command computed in a space whose meaning changed with speed — and between them the cars ran wide without ever asking for the lock they had. Measured over a full race, the field now spends 4% of a lap off the road instead of 28%, spins 0.4% of the time instead of 9%, and needs no emergency reinstatements at all. The solved racing line no longer asks for corners no car can take, and its speed profile respects the friction ellipse — a car at its cornering limit cannot also accelerate, which is what used to slide the whole field off the same two corners every lap. The start is rebuilt: engines idle and blip on the grid, the field launches on a traction-limited throttle instead of lighting up its tyres, and nothing darts sideways when the lights go out. Rivals now catch a slide properly and brake off the pedal when they are sideways. Keyboard steering ramps rather than snapping to full lock. Traffic keeps its lane, avoids the blind crests and tight corners, eases over for a car coming up behind, never appears in front of you — and the rivals can finally see it.
The Moon is now real ground. The surface outside the dome is a proper lunar heightfield — bowl craters with raised rims and ejecta rays, a long fault scarp, a highland ring on the horizon — and you walk on it, climb it, and slip on the steep parts. Boulders block you instead of letting you through, boots leave prints in the regolith and kick dust that flies on a clean ballistic arc because there is no air to slow it, and hard sunlight throws real shadows. Six landmarks give the plain a shape you can navigate by: a survey mast, a toppled rover, the base solar farm, an old landing site, a field cache that refills your tank, and a station on a crater rim. Three optional survey relays are scattered among them — bringing them up costs oxygen and buys nothing but the record. Plus a mission briefing, radio calls that stage the run, a compass with waypoints, the base dropping to emergency power when your suit seals, an ascent-stage escape you actually watch, settings for volume, look sensitivity and reduced effects, and a personal best. Running the tank dry no longer teleports you without explanation: it blacks you out, tells you why, and recalls you to the airlock with the clock still running. Same four lockers, same codes, same controls.
Presentation overhaul: a lot full of wrecks and burning barrels, real darkness with a torch to carry, five zombie types with hit locations, a crowbar for quiet kills, and a proper front end
The Gentleman can be put down, but it takes a strategy: only the blow that lands while he is ALREADY reeling hurts him, and after each wound he shrugs off everything for a moment and comes at you. Or seat the smith’s blessed nail in the flintlock and end it in one shot — at the cost of the relic, and of the rite. He now paths around buildings instead of giving up at them, hears discrete sounds (a gunshot carries across the whole town, a crouched step barely leaves your feet), and every surface underfoot has its own volume. Placing the third relic starts a real sequence: the lamps go out street by street, the fog closes in, and you have to stay with the candles until they burn down.
One art direction instead of three. The invaders are hostile machines now, not insects, and the carrier that drops them is built in the same language; the emplacements you deploy are hard-edged gun platforms rather than glossy discs; the ground is dithered pixel shading; and the HUD is flat panels with hard edges. Supply Lines no longer pays interest on your whole bank, so banking can never out-earn playing.
The back half of the campaign is new. The flamingo is abducted to an alien planet and works its way out through the underground base beneath it, and the last two levels are not a platformer at all — it steals a ship and flies it out, first ahead of a collapsing tunnel and then up through the crust. Same bird, no neck: thrust in any direction, no brake, and rock that takes a heart every time you touch it. It ends the only way a lawn ornament can end a flight, which is in a city, at speed, through a billboard.
The valley now scales to your screen — on a large monitor the whole farm used to shrink into a small patch of empty background with a barely visible farmer, and it now grows to fill the window at any size. The buildings are also furnished: the market has stocked produce shelving, crates and checkouts with shoppers browsing between them, the processing plant has vats, presses and sacks, and the upgrade depot has workbenches, an anvil and tool racks.
The mansion now holds a consistent zoom on any screen. On a large monitor the whole floor used to be visible at once, which rather defeated the point of carrying a flashlight through a dark house — you now see about the same amount of the place whatever you play on, and the dark does its job again. The grand staircase also reads as one flight instead of three narrow ones side by side.
Five weapon tiers that each fire differently (twin bolts, piercing lances, scatter fans, a phaser beam), auto-turrets that fight for you, regenerating shields, salvage crates you tow home with a tractor beam, and a station that raiders now attack — defend it with station guns and hull.