Fantasy RPGs have become too comfortable with delivering the expected gaggle of familiar character concepts. Archers, monks, paladins, you know the drill. I've seen it all before! Give me, I don't know, a Viking that shoots triple-barreled laser guns out of its dual shields, which also have metal claws, you know? Final Fantasy 14 knows what I'm talking about—down to the last detail, in fact. Indeed, the first new job...
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...
Let's take a look at the scoreboard: A 1TB Steam Deck costs $1,000. A top-of-the-line gaming PC costs $7,000. A PS5 starts at $650, an over 50% increase from its launch six years ago. A modest hard drive goes for rent money. The RAMpocalypse continues unabated. The Steam Machine is a hard sell out of the gate. The reasons for the slow, suffocating death of the hardware market are well-documented...
Games about cleaning are the rage. The recent success of House Flipper, Power Wash Simulator and Unpacking demonstrates there's a mainstream-sized appetite among PC gamers for making messy places neat and tidy. But the micro-genre goes back way further than that. The 1982 arcade game Bubbles was about using a bubble to clean a filthy sink. Cosy foundational text Harvest Moon—like its descendant Stardew Valley—has you gradually transforming a forgotten...
It's been nearly seven years since the release of the Xbox Elite Series 2, which means we're well overdue for a new one. It sure looks like that's set to happen soon, as one Redditor just posted the motherlode of information on the unreleased pad—then their account mysteriously vanished and the thread was partially wiped with it.The internet tends not to 'lose' things, so you can view all the leaked...
While union members outside Bethesda's Maryland office celebrated a recent Microsoft visit by positioning a field of red flags representing laid-off workers and a giant inflatable rat on the lawn, inside the building CEO Asha Sharma was apparently having a delightful time watching a playthrough of The Elder Scrolls 6. So that's nice."The scale and grandeur are incredible", Sharma said, referring to the game and not the huge blow-up rodent...
Ultra-thin and compact, space-conscious minimalists will want to give this keyboard a look.
Vincke kicked off an uproar earlier this week when he said that Larian makes use of generative AI "to explore ideas."
Fewer than I thought, but more than one person could feasibly count by hand.