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Long read: The beauty and drama of video games and their clouds

"It's a little bit hard to work out without knowing the altitude of that dragon..."

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Download Games Roundup

Shuggy! Puzzle! Helicopter! Tacticolor! Bunker!

Tacticolor

Move over Chuck Norris: Eric Woroshow is in town. He works. He kick boxes. He climbs. He codes excellent real-time Risk-alike Tacticolor and demands that you buy his game. No arguments.

As with Risk, greedy land-grabbing is the name of the game. Each player starts off with a set of territories, a finite number of units, and has to go out and do battle with their three opponents to try and dominate the map.

The difference is that everyone's going for it at the same time, so if you snooze, you lose. No room for careful consideration here - you just have to decide how many units to slap down and juggle the demands of defence and attack on the fly.

Colour me impressed.

The best thing about Tacticolor is that you'll be able to forgive the American spelling almost immediately. Thanks to its stylish minimalism and complete absence of droning backstory, you can fill in the blanks. You're fighting for the pyramid head warriors of the future on a mission to lock all abandoned hospital doors.

But despite the shoestring budget, Mr Waroshow has thoughtfully included a three different-sized maps and bothered to include both local and online multiplayer. So what are you waiting for? All your abstract territorial strategy needs are catered for.

8/10

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Bunker Buster

When the June skies are as fed up as tired eyes, and there are men stalking the Devon countryside with murder on their minds, sometimes the only answer is to blast your way through 32 levels of destruction madness.

That's Magiko Gaming's inelegant solution to the summertime blues, anyway, and I'm certainly not going to argue with the perpetrators of the wondrously evil Platformance: Castle Pain.

This time, the indie mischief-makers cop a feel of knackered old VIC-20 game Blitz - but in a good way. Sadly, you'd have to be about 40 and a former owner of the seventh best home computer of the early 1980s to get that reference, so allow me to explain.

Don't bomb when you're the bomb.

Now, as then, it's basically single-screen Scramble, where you guide your aircraft precariously around the sky and attempt to bomb all of your ground targets without incurring any damage yourself.

With the forces of gravity and a limited fuel supply to contend with, you wobble precariously between merciless obstacles and try to dispense your payload with precision. Of course, it's never as easy as it looks, and once the environments get more elaborate and innocents enter the fray, just one slip-up and that's your lot. Back to the start.

Such an obstinate stance will either drive you potty or send you into one-more-go nirvana. Join the OCD brigade and show us what you've got.

7/10

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