As a child of the '90s-era pocket monster craze, I had what I suspect historians will call Monster-Taming Madness. A not-so-terrible, but sort of annoying affliction that meant I always had a Tamagotchi in my pocket, a handful of Pokémon cards, and the entire Spice Girls discography on standby for summoning creatures from discs in Monster Rancher. Need to KnowWhat it is: Pokémon: Survival Evolved, a few of them open...

Weird WeekendWeird Weekend is our regular Saturday column where we celebrate PC gaming oddities: peculiar games, strange bits of trivia, forgotten history. Pop back every weekend to find out what Jeremy, Josh, Ted, and Rick have become obsessed with this time, whether it's the canon height of Thief's Garrett or that time someone in the Vatican pirated Football Manager.One of the beautiful things about the PC—about open, general-use computing on...

Expansions should be improvements on the base game, you say. The whole point of them is that they're adding cool new stuff, and the same game with a bunch of cool new stuff added should always be better. Except often that isn't the case. The list of add-ons that feel like they misunderstood what made the original good, or dragged it out unnecessarily, or were just sort of fine in...

I'm about to say something controversial—I don't actually think grinds in MMOs are all that bad. There's a bit of a wider resistance to the idea of having to grind for anything in a modern online game, a resistance to the very concept, even. We've all certainly got less time than in the days of attunement questlines.But that doesn't mean an MMO can be entirely grindless, right? Depending on how...

In a new interview with PCGamesN to mark Owlcat's 10th anniversary, studio co-founder and creative director Alexander Mishulin talked about Owlcat's history and upcoming projects. Two things really caught my eye: Owlcat's still got hardcore CRPG fans covered, and the studio's bulked up to the heavyweight division."We will continue to make CRPGs because we love them," Mishulin said of the action-RPG versus CRPG question. "We do not want to become...

Last week PC Gamer's Andy Edser highlighted an article tracing a seeming massive drop in Steam Deck sales. I'm not entirely convinced by the maths involved—which was conducted by Boiling Steam—but whether the numbers are accurate or not, it does capture some of the anxiety around Valve's hardware and what kind of future it might have.When Gabe Newell donated a smidge over $20 million to OpenAI back in 2018, he...

Disk Cleanup(Image credit: Future)Welcome to Disk Cleanup, our regular weekend feature delving into the PCs of PC gaming luminaries. Come back every weekend to read a new interview, digging into the important questions, like "How tidy is your desktop?" and "What game will you never uninstall?"Felipe Falanghe got into PC gaming by playing Flight Simulator 4 on his dad's laptop. "I remember having no idea what I was doing," Falanghe...

Things haven't looked great for Dragon Age since its latest entry, Dragon Age: The Veilguard was released to a mixed critical and muted commercial response back in 2024. EA subsequently laid off dozens of BioWare's staff, and numerous former developers have recently said they believe the series is probably dead.Yet, while there's little hope of a new Dragon Age game anytime soon (if ever), might there be a chance EA...

Another week, another fun tidbit learned about our new favorite gamer turned movie star, Inde Navarrette, who creeped us all the hell out in the smash-hit horror film Obsession earlier this year.We already marveled at Navarrette cooly streaming her Call of Duty killstreaks on Twitch while wearing a Toad hat, and we were charmed to hear she (in part) learned to build PCs by watching Henry Cavill do it on...

Last month, as it continued to navigate the PR craters left by its thousands of layoffs and IDF patronage, Microsoft announced that it was bringing four original Xbox games to PC through a new Backward Compatibility for PC program. Now, it seems Microsoft has bigger PC port plans in store, expanding its backwards-facing content strategy.According to reporting from The Verge, a leaked document sent to developers indicates that Microsoft is...