Comedy News, Tips, Tricks & Ideas

Today I learned that ‘Wanko’ is Japanese for dog, rather than just being Aussie slang in the vein of ‘smoko’ or my favourite, 'bottle-o', which is what they call an off-license. I learnt this because of Doronko Wanko, a lovely free game about a dirty pomeranian where you try to score as high as possible by doing actual, financial damage to your owner’s home.

Your feelings on Funko Pop probably fall into one of two categories: you either hate the black-eyed, copy-paste figures modelled on pop-culture characters with a burning passion, or you own enough of them to construct a small fortress and defend your newfounded Funko nation from the government. Either way, it looks like the first video game starring the ubiquitous toy collectables might somehow scratch your itch.

I often regret that I didn't get into football as a kid (note for people across the pond: football is what we call soccer in these here accursed, eternally post-imperial isles). The trouble was, all my friends liked football and I have an abiding hatred of popular things, a hatred that has obviously served me well during my later career as an online news journalist. I played hockey instead, which is the superior sport in that you get a big nasty stick, but also relatively niche because you need more equipment.

Today is Tuesday, statistically the day of the week least rife with wacky hijinks, whimsical calamity, or even, dare I say, madcap antics. However, if you want to buck tradition, you could do worse than playing What the Car?, the upcoming absurdist physics game from What the Golf? and What the Bat? devs Triband. You can do it right now, actually. It’s just gotten a free demo on Steam, alongside a proper release date of September 5th 2024. Don’t do it if you’re actually driving, though. That’d be lunacy. We only promote the fun kind of lunacy here, like the type shown off in What the Car?’s trailer at the Triple-i initiative.

Tropes aren't actually bad, right? Like, I'm not actually mad that a lot of games use 'the world is ending and you have to save it' as an inciting incident. When people complain about something being 'tropey' I think often what they're complaining about is that the work isn't putting any kind of interesting spin on the tropes. Great God Grove is a weirdo puzzle game where you have to stop the world from ending, and the only way you can communicate is by sucking up things people say to you and then firing them back out of your news cannon. It's coming to PC in 2024. Jolly good.

Chymicalia is an adventure game and/or visual novel "about causing chaos in a small Yorkshire town with unlicensed alchemy". Hey, I'm from a small Yorkshire town originally! I recognise that chip shop with the palsied neon sign! And hey, that looks like the underpass they told us kids to stay away from! And the textile mill they eventually turned into an old folks home! And the teleporting sentient potion shop where we used to hang out and play pogs! Wait, scratch the last one.

It's GDC week, and conversations are being had about AI. Ubisoft have blundered into this, in classic Ubi style, by revealing that they've had an R&D team beavering away on a project called NEO NPC. It's the usual pitch. "Have you ever dreamed of having a real conversation with an NPC in a video game?", asks Ubi's official post about it. And what all people who make this fail to understand that the answer most normal people give if they think about it is "Erm, probably no, actually?"

I've done some elementary study of the planet Jupiter for various creative research projects/dead-ends. It's probably a symptom of my failings as an astronomer, but I have to say that at no point have I noticed any gigantic, depressed clowns. In new platformer Clown Meat, one such gigantic, depressed clown has swum through Jupiter's atmosphere, drifted to Earth and kicked off some kind of meatpunk apocalypse, saturating the surrounding countryside with circus-themed abominations.

What the Car? is a zany racing game in which you are a car with legs that must race around various courses to get the best time possible. Except sometimes you’re not just a car with legs, you’re also a car with a jetpack. Or with wings. Or swimming. Or singing. It’s from the folks behind the similarly absurd What the Golf?, and it’s coming to Steam this year.

What the Golf? developer Triband is bringing its absurdist racing game What the Car? to Steam later this year, following its debut last May as an Apple Arcade exclusive.

One game I heard and saw a lot last year but absolutely did not play was Pizza Tower, a fast and fiendish platformer inspired by the Wario Land games. A lot of people seem delighted to rocket around in the colourful adventures of pizzeria proprietor Peppino Spaghetti. People who are younger than me. People whose hands aren't gnarled claws. People who don't have one foot in the grave. It'll happen to you too. In the meantime, I hope you've enjoyed it, and suspect you might be keen to see more of the new playable character coming free in a future update.

Viewers of are wondering how many episodes are in the series and when each new episode comes out. Based on Vivienne Medrano’s widely acclaimed 2019 YouTube animated pilot, this television series centers on Charlie, the Princess of Hell. She explores the seemingly impossible task of peacefully rehabilitating demons as a means to address the overpopulation issues in her kingdom. Though Charlie is mocked by most of Hell, she is determined to give demons a chance at redemption.

As we all know, I like vampire stories, and I like different takes on vampire stories. Yesterday Edwin dangled an upcoming visual novel called Vampire Therapist in front of my nose. I am intrigued, also because I appreciate a Ronseal approach to titles. In Vampire Therapist, out on Steam this June 17th, you play Sam, a vampire who becomes a therapist to other vampires. So the title works twice!

Brought to you by the decadent intellects behind Incredibly Fast-Paced And Very Rogue Movement Shooters, Completely Fictional Story About A City Inside A Whale is a gentle, comedic exploration game in which you steer a wind-up boat through the guts of a leviathan. It was announced this week and there's a demo on Steam, which I think will tickle the cockles of Psychonauts 2 players and A Short Hike fans alike, though I do wish developers ln404 and akinat0 had taken their own work just a little more seriously.

Othercide from French developer Lightbulb Crew is one of my favourite recent tactics RPGs. It's an atmospheric and rewardingly meticulous experience that typically pits you against overwhelming numbers, where victory comes about by carefully exploiting reaction abilities, positioning your troop of weary warriors just-so, and manipulating the initiative bar. At times, for me, it's up there with Into The Breach.

The Day Of The Devs showcases are always some of the brightest spots in the biannual trailer'thon gauntlets, and this year's inaugural edition for The Game Awards is no exception. There were 20 fresh-faced indie games highlighted in tonight's 90-odd-minute stream, and cor, there are some right old gems in here, too, with brand-new game announcements from the devs behind Genesis Noir, Kind Words and Tangle Tower to name just a few. We also got more in-depth looks at some of this year's most intriguing indie games that previously only had an enigmatic teaser snippets attached to them. So come and join us below, where you'll find a digest of all 20 announcements from this evening's showcase, as well as the stream in full if you'd prefer to watch it all as it happened.

If you feel sorely in need of a ray of sunshine, you enjoy same-screen multiplayer games such as Towerfall, and you’re unfussed about murdering slimes, consider Bopl Battle. Out today, it’s a jolly 2D arena brawler in which each player is a smiling ball of gloop, equipped with pre-selected special abilities that cover an amusing range.

Talking gun comedy shooter High on Life has launched on PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 after seven months’ of console exclusivity on Xbox.