August 6th, 2026 was the 40th anniversary of Metroid, one of the few videogames in history to be so influential it has a whole genre named (at least partially) after it. You'd be forgiven for not realizing last Thursday was such a significant date because Nintendo seemingly forgot itself—and not for the first time.But the anniversary didn't go completely uncelebrated. Posted to the Metroid subreddit last Thursday, a new fan...

We all know the cost of RAM is ridiculously high these days thanks to the global memory shortage. But it can be useful (and depressing) to put these prices into context historically. To that end, scientist, developer, and software performance expert Daniel Lemire commented on X that "On a historical basis, computer memory has been falling at an exponential rate for decades. But we just undid about 20 years of...

You won't win any prizes for guessing that Grand Theft Auto 5 has sold well since its initial 2013 release, several lifetimes ago, but on a recent Take-Two earnings call, CEO Strauss Zelnick revealed the up-to-date, astronomical figure: 230 million copies."The Grand Theft Auto series once again exceeded expectations, and to date, Grand Theft Auto 5 has sold over 230 million units worldwide," Zelnick told investors on the August 7...

If you've looked at memory prices recently, you've probably seen Corsair DIMMs selling for astonishing prices. The 32 GB Vengeance DDR5 RGB kit sitting in my PC right now is selling for $480 at Amazon, whereas I bought it for $90-$100 just a couple of years ago. Corsair RAM can still be some of the cheapest comparatively, but it's very pricey nonetheless.So, Corsair must be raking in money hand over...

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...

I can turn an overgrown property into an industrial vineyard in a single year no problem. I've done it in the valleys, islands, and fields of countless farm sims. Usually it's just as easy to pluck one of its provincial hotties out of town to become my spouse (the overworked leader type, ideally), but magical girl-inspired Fields of Mistria has given me a bad case of choice paralysis. I love...

Critical Hit(Image credit: Future)Welcome to Critical Hit, where Mollie (or someone else on the PC Gamer team) celebrate and lament all things videogame music, audio design, and the ways our favourite games make our ears tingle. This week I'm that "someone else", and I'm here to talk your ear off about time signatures!So I've recently given in and decided I won't be waiting for Deltarune's final chapter before I played...

Fantastic new puzzle game Big Walk drew some early complaints over the volume of its proximity voice chat, which was too quiet for some players and mic setups, and developer House House has now released a patch that it hopes will resolve the issue while respecting the spirit of the game.The studio has a fine line to walk, because Big Walk's primary source of friction is the challenge of communicating...

During Take-Two's latest earnings call, CEO Strauss Zelnick said the current computing hardware crisis—you know, the one that's making it more economical to fly roundtrip from the UK to buy an MSRP GPU at Nvidia's QuakeCon booth than it is to buy one anywhere online—is, to quote the man directly, "not a good thing."But while the skyrocketing costs of consoles and components are threatening to price customers out of the...

Causality Chain is a series at PC Gamer exploring the unlikely links between history, culture, and videogames. And ocassionally hedgehogs. The arc of history curves in mysterious ways. Beloved actor Keanu Reeves—Ted, Neo, John Wick himself—may not be Buddhist, but he does, in fact, owe the existence of one of his blockbuster roles to the teachings of one of Buddhism's most important figures.How, you ask? And what exactly does this...