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14 reviews · 2 essays
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Gunparade March (2000) - allies who live and die on their own, and a game that won a science fiction prize
Episode 67 of "Today Is Release Day": Gunparade March, developed by Alfa System and released by Sony Computer Entertainment for the PlayStation on September 28, 2000. Its 22 allies run on Karel 2, a colony-type AI modeled on ant society, so who you grow close to and who dies is never fixed in advance. It sold slowly, vanished from shelves, took an Award for Excellence at the 5th Japan Game Awards, and in August 2001 won the Seiun Award in the media category. Today it turns 26.
Cai et al.: Bringing the Authoritative Server into Learned World Models — Fukai Reads
A paper on multiplayer world models by Cai and eight colleagues at Alaya Lab, Peking University and Institute of Science Tokyo. It ports the authoritative-server contract of online games into a learned model, splitting it into a Logic Engine that advances a typed shared state and a Rendering Engine that draws each camera from it. On matched multiplayer Snake it reaches 0.764 state recovery against 0.128 for the best video-based baseline, with cross-view disagreement of 0.000 by construction, and advances 1,024 player entities for 10,000 ticks. arXiv preprint, submitted 6 August 2026, not yet peer-reviewed.
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Not For Broadcast
On the night a new party wins the general election, the editor of a national news programme walks out — and you, the janitor, take his chair. A live-action editing simulator where you cut between camera feeds, bleep what cannot go out, and choose which stories run, all while the broadcast is live. Made by NotGames, published by tinyBuild.
observationsimulationnarrative-puzzleGNOSIA
A single-player take on Werewolf: find the Gnosia hiding among the crew using nothing but discussion and votes. Up to fifteen crew members are redealt into different roles each loop, and a time loop sends you through the same voyage again and again. From Petit Depotto.
deductionnarrative-puzzlevisual-novelMHRD
A text-only puzzle game that starts you with a single NAND gate and has you write hardware in a small description language: ANDs, adders, and finally the design of a working CPU. You play a new hire at a fictional company called Microhard, filling twenty-odd specifications in order. Made by Funghisoft.
puzzleprogrammingsimulationHypnospace Outlaw
An observation adventure set in 1999. You patrol Hypnospace — a virtual internet people browse in their sleep — as a volunteer Enforcer, wandering personal homepages and digging out rule violations and hidden pages with nothing but a weak search box and thin clues. Designed by Jay Tholen at Tendershoot.
observationnarrative-puzzlesimulationAutonauts
An automation puzzle in which you land on an empty planet, chop and quarry by hand, and then teach robots the steps you just performed so they can do them for you. With short Scratch-style scripts and one small memory allowance per bot, you grow a production line from farming to industry. Made by Denki, in Scotland.
puzzleprogrammingautomationBridge Constructor Portal
A 2D physics puzzler in which you build bridges and ramps across 60 Aperture Science test chambers and thread vehicles through fixed portals and gels to the exit. ClockStone's entry in the Bridge Constructor series, built with Portal's own art and lore on loan from Valve.
puzzlephysicssimulationMini Motorways
A minimalist 2D puzzle game in which you draw roads, one at a time, through a city that keeps sprouting colour-coded houses and destinations. Each week you are handed a motorway, a roundabout or a traffic light to spend, and you keep redrawing the network until the traffic finally seizes up. From Dinosaur Polo Club, the New Zealand studio behind Mini Metro.
puzzleminimalistsimulationMini Metro
A 2D minimalist puzzler in which you draw subway lines between circle, triangle and square stations in a growing city, allocating the carriages and tunnels handed to you each week, and keep the city moving until the platforms overflow. From New Zealand's Dinosaur Polo Club, grown out of a game-jam prototype.
puzzleminimalistsimulationNauticrawl
A turn-based first-person puzzle game in which you climb into a stolen alien machine and learn to fly it with no manual and no tutorial, decoding a wall of unlabeled levers and switches while a hostile world hunts you. Spare Parts Oasis makes the control panel itself the puzzle.
puzzlesimulationadventureOrwell: Keeping an Eye On You
An adventure in which you operate a state surveillance system, assembling citizen profiles from fragments lifted out of social posts, news articles, private messages and tapped calls, and deciding who gets flagged. Osmotic Studios' five-episode surveillance drama, where submitting or withholding a fragment is your only move.
observationnarrative-puzzlesimulationWilmot's Warehouse
A 2D organisation puzzle: push the delivered goods into your warehouse and file them however you decide. No rule governs the shelves, and when the service hatch opens you retrieve orders from memory alone. By Richard Hogg and Ricky Haggett, who previously made Hohokum, with 200 kinds of pictorial tile piling up.
puzzleobservationsimulationwhile True: learn()
A visual-programming puzzle themed on machine learning: you drop nodes on a canvas, wire them together, and sort nine kinds of data (three shapes in three colors) into the right outputs. A handful of parts named after real algorithms—decision trees, perceptrons—build up a cat-to-human translation system. By Luden.io.
puzzleprogrammingsimulationMOLEK-SYNTEZ
In a cramped 2092 Romanian apartment, you program a home-built synthesizer to turn benzene and acetone into small pharmacological molecules — a Zachtronics optimization puzzle you operate only from the edges of a finite board.
puzzlesimulationDo Not Feed the Monkeys
A digital voyeur simulator: watch strangers - 'monkeys' - through surveillance cameras, pick clues from their rooms and talk, and pin down who they are with a notepad and a search engine. Blackmail, help, or look away, all while juggling rent, food and sleep. A game by Fictiorama Studios.
observationdeductionsimulation
