Civilization isn’t so much a computer game as a wonder of the world, and has consumed more person-hours. The latest update adds an array of new victory conditions:

Irony Victory

Make Genghis Khan the most bullied person in history by always pre-emptively annihilating him, then get nuked by Mahatma Ghandi.

You Have Work In The Morning Victory

The game detects that it’s 4 am, that you have an alarm set for 7 am and surrenders in self defense. Because you won’t be able to afford electricity if you’re fired.

Multilingual Victory

The game realizes that you could have learned another language in the time you’ve been playing and starts switching to it. You’re so familiar with the options and structures you don’t really notice and become fluent.

Meta-Victory

Your civilization researches Computers, masters the Commerce tree, fills out the Freedom ideology, invents the game of Civilization, then ignores all the problems of their virtual world to distract themselves in a virtual-virtual world. You aren’t sure how you feel about the analogy.

The greatest vertical shooter ever made is now available on PC. “Bullet hell” shooters fill the screen with waves of instant death and it’s your job to kill it all. They’re such pure expressions of arcade joy that ten pence pieces start forming in my pocket even when I’m playing it at home. They’re based on awareness and reflexes and a wonderfully important shift in priorities: you might want to detonate everything, but you definitely need to stay in one piece to do that, and every time you die it’s because you let your destructive impulses win. It’s the Force applied to arcade games.

Games like 1942 may be Bullet Hell, but Ikaruga takes Dante’s Inferno and selects “Flatten All Layers”, squeezing nine hells into one beautiful hellish vision but one wise player can still get all the way through unscathed. Just like the Catholic sinner version, the most important part of a bullet hell is knowing that it’s all your fault. It’s easy to fill a screen with dots. It’s hard to arrange those dots in a way which will kill people without really upsetting them. The game lives or dies based on whether your deaths are “bullshit!” or “aughh, next time!” Which is where Ikaruga’s incredibly simple genius comes in: it has a “don’t die” button and it’s your fault if you didn’t press it.

All enemy fire is either black or white, if you’re the same color it charges your superweapon instead of shooting you, and you can flip any time. This releases the game from wimpy constraints like “ever having a single spot of the screen which isnt’ covered in laser fire”, and it embraces this newfound freedom with the fury of a thousand killer suns. It is amazing. Later levels are like being inside three competing fireworks displays, a murderous Mandelbrot set, and a killer crossword, simultaneously, and it’s always your fault if you die and it is glorious.

It’s Buddhist reincarnation as a game mechanic. You don’t get upset about dying, you know what you did wrong, and you know you can do better and reach a higher level next time. And you’ll keep going until you finish it and break free of a cycle you now see is only an incredible game. A game wrapped in gorgeous giant mech design, stirring music, and scraps of scene text giving the impression of an entire intelligent world adding depth to your two-dimensional quest to get up and end everything you meet. Even the level intro text paragraphs understands the gameplay, because you don’t have quite enough time to read it all at once. They know you’ll be back.

And when you’re done there’s the insane difficulty mode where you can only fire out bullets you’ve absorbed first. You wonderful lunatic.

Ikaruga is available on Xbox and Steam.

More glorious games with

• The Retro Gaming Drinking Experiment: Behold one man versus the Manic Miner, Battletoads, and more!
• New Classes for Counter-Strike.

This article first appeared on Lowpings.net. They offer excellent game hosting, but no longer offer article archives.

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The Banner Saga is turn-based tactical grid combat linked by an Oregon trail where you’re either Vikings or Giant Vikings. I sort of don’t want to say anything good after that, because I’m only writing for people who didn’t immediately leave to play Banner Saga, aka not my kind of people.

Pictured: my kind of people. At least four of them by mass.

The first joy is the writing. Halo and Gears of War spending millions of dollars rendering their new alien enemies, but you’re no more moved to hate them than a sewage worker hates toilets: they might have to clean away all these brown and grey lumps, but that’s just their job. But one of Banner Saga’s events brought me to such hatred that I would pull down the sky to crush the Earth if only it would be sure of killing that one villain, and they did that with a few lines of text.

You’re watching small pixels plodding along a one-dimensional path when suddenly shit gets realer than it does on your side of the monitor. I won’t say exactly how, because the whole point is playing games is to gain new experiences, but they’ve mastered their new perspective despite being the only people using it.

The second part is the joy of working out a new gaming system. The innovative combat mechanics turn several established isometric combat tactics on their heads. And then cuts yours off if you don’t adapt.

Sides Always Alternate Turns

Alternating between sides means an outnumbered side gets more turns per character. So if you’re used to using circle-stomps to quickly cut down the enemy numbers, your weakened troops will now be facing totally healthy enemies who are now turbocharged to boot. Instead you have to take all enemies into account every turn, and you realize that makes much more sense than every other game you played.

Armor and Strength

You can choose to attack an enemy’s armor or strength (which is also their hit points). If your strength is less than their armor, your can only chip away at that armor as any other attack will probably be deflected. But they suffer the same problem, so your strong character should power through and cripple as many enemies as possible, leaving them weak as a kitten inside their perfect armor. That way your weaker allies can safely wear them down without being annihilated.

Kills Count For Everything

It’s a warrior culture:  there are no XP increments for assists, so even if you helped with a thousand kills, if you can’t claim any for yourself then you won’t get any more famous. And soon you won’t be able to help anyone at all. If you don’t want your squad to end up looking like a mother duck leading a lot of fluffy little vol-au-vents into the enemies’ maw, you must avoid favoritism, sharing kills when you can. Especially since the cost increases exponentially per level – you can upgrade four people from level 1 to 2 for less than one person going from 4 to 5. The “pillage” round is useful for this: when either side is down to one survivor, it no longer alternates, every character gets one turn per round, and the winner should use this to decide who takes the kill.

The Banner Saga is more powerful and playable than the Gjallerhorn, leads to more epic battles, and is available on Steam.