Innholdsfortegnelse for December 2019 i PC Gamer (US Edition)

HIGHS Orcs Must Die 3 Robot Entertainment is back to their tower defence best with a sequel. Yakuza 7 An old April Fools gag turned out to be a stealth announcement, heralding a switch to turn-based combat. Cyberpunk 2077 CD Projekt Red has removed fixed gender options from its RPG to make it more inclusive. CS:GO Australian police arrested six Counter-Strike players after alleged match fixing. It’s a disappointing knock to esports’ credibility. Ion Fury Developer Voidpoint walked back an apology for homophobic content found in the FPS. This isn’t what ‘throwback shooter’ should mean. Nutaku The adult gaming platform wants to see even more porn games on Steam. Is that possible?…

1 SPARE CHANGE “Mutations kind of go hand-in-hand with an apocalypatic setting, I’m always very interested in a player character whose identity is shifting over the course of the game, and mutation seemed a really interesting way to explore that.” 2 BEYOND HUMAN “One of one of the early things we said was, it was really interesting to see that as the world is somehow getting a little bit better the player character, although getting more powerful, is becoming something less than human.” 3 LIVE A LITTLE “You’re sort of adapting to survive in this environment. And we wanted the mutations themselves to kind of be surprising as well, thematically and visually, so that maybe how to get the most out of them wasn’t all on the surface.” 4 MORPH…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE 2020 DEVELOPER Romero Games PUBLISHER Paradox Interactive LINK empireofsingame.com I’ve just shot up a mob business and, under the laws of Chicago in the 1920s, it now belongs to me. Ownership is straightforward in Empire of Sin, and corporate takeovers are bloody. Within a few moments it’s up and running again, and I can get on with the real dirty work of this crooked management sim—making cash. PLAYED IT My time with the game is fleeting, and I have a criminal empire to forge, so I quickly start hiring some employees. Not bartenders or croupiers, but gangsters. The first is a muscular gentleman called Baby, and the other is Maria, who I am immediately informed has become an alcoholic. What a gang… Gang members develop traits…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE 2021 DEVELOPER Rockfish Games PUBLISHER In-house LINK www.everspace.game The first Everspace was a great roguelike, blending fast-paced space combat with a compelling upgrade system that let you inch closer to victory every time you died. It was also very pretty, with some of the most incredible sky… sorry, spaceboxes on PC. FIRST LOOK The sequel, developed by the same team at Rockfish Games, is taking those sumptuous visuals and everything else that made the original great and expanding the scope massively. No longer limited to a linear path, you can now travel freely around the galaxy—albeit with a few subtle loading breaks hiding the joins. Straying true to the accessible combat of the first Everspace, this isn’t a deep sim like Star Citizen or Elite Dangerous. You won’t be carefully…

The VHD, or Video High Density, is actually a vinyl disc inside a plastic shell. It could hold an hour of video, and was a competitor to the LaserDisc, read by a stylus instead of a laser. “There is only one big issue with the VHD. Like VHS, every time you watch it, the quality degrades. But when you have a brand new VHD, you have the highest quality possible at that time,” Redon says. Dragon’s Lair used a LaserDisc for its video, and in Japan some games used the VHD for the same thing. You’d need a VHD player for the MSX or Sharp X1 PC, but that disk only housed the video. The program would live on a tape that also came in the box, but some games…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? A survival RPG set 10 million years ago EXPECT TO PAY $40 DEVELOPER Panache Digital Games PUBLISHER Private Division REVIEWED ON Intel i5-6600K, GTX 980 8 GB RAM MULTIPLAYER No LINK ancestorsgame.com The aroused moaning of the prehistoric ape I’m trying to bang is getting to be a bit much. She’s really into this backrub I’m giving her, but I’m having trouble feeling the mood myself. We’re squatting in the freezing rain, my leg is broken, I have an orphaned toddler clinging to my back, and another member of my clan is enthusiastically picking his nose in my sightline. It’s not even a tiny bit romantic, but hey—I’m trying to save our species. Listening to an ape get horny as I rub her hairy…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? A cooperative slasher movie where anyone can die EXPECT TO PAY $30 DEVELOPER Supermassive Games PUBLISHER Bandai Namco REVIEWED ON RTX 2080, i9-9900k, 32 GB RAM, SSD Multiplayer: Two-player co-op MULTIPLAYER Two-player co-op LINK bandainamcoent.com Man of Medan isn’t particularly scary. If it were a movie, it’d be the kind that releases direct-to-video, one of those schlocky DVDs lining the convenience store displays. The usual character archetypes are there: The nerd, the hunk, the blonde, the stranger, the horny creep that no one should put up with but do because at least one death should be cathartic. Queue up the ghost ship, pirates, and cheap jump scares galore. As a film, it would be fun, but familiar and forgettable. But as co-op adventure game,…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? A third person looter-shooter that takes blends Division-like gunplay with Dark Souls-style bosses EXPECT TO PAY $40 DEVELOPER Gunfire Games PUBLISHER Perfect World REVIEWED ON Nvidia GTX Titan, Intel core i5-3570K 3.40 GHZ, 16 GB RAM, MULTIPLAYER Yes LINK www.remnantgame.com/en This odd genre mash-up looks like it was coughed out by a game development algorithm. It’s equal parts a third-person looter-shooter and a Dark Souls-inspired boss rush, with a cooperative emphasis and a dynamically generated campaign. Stylistically it’s inspired by fantasy, science-fiction, Westerns, post-apocalyptic worlds, and various kinds of horror fiction. Even the title reads like it was generated by a Twitter bot. And it gets off to a rather underwhelming start. Its introduction sees your character washed up on an island with nothing…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? Bash mutants until you become a mutant EXPECT TO PAY $20 DEVELOPER Double Fine Productions PUBLISHER Bandai Namco Entertainment REVIEWED ON AMD FX-4130, GTX 1060 6GB, 8GB RAM MULTIPLAYER No LINK www.bandainamcoent.com/games/rad Are you sick of the ’80s yet? We’re in a peak cultural flashback. Bad clothes are back, baby, and everyone’s trying to be the kid with the wildest leather jacket. Rad, Double Fine’s post-apocalyptic mutant-basher, is no poser. This kid’s deeply in love with the decade of loud hair and louder guitars. They’ve done their homework, for sure. Thing is, I’m kinda sick of the ’80s. I kinda wish that passion went into making Rad a better game. Fortunately, these are some good ’80s. Double Fine has poured lavish detail into every…

Dying Light is the opposite of Dead Rising in one very specific way, in that it’s a zombie game I remember being far worse than it is. It all felt very 70 per cent the first time around—like a seaside undead experience cobbled together in someone’s living room—but there’s a strong chance I’m merging it with Dead Island. Instead, I’m surprised by how dense and detailed and sporadically beautiful it is. There are tumbling shanty towns, wafting trees, and flocks of birds framing wistful sunsets. Even a viral outbreak can’t ruin it. And the Tower, the hub location in which I begin the game, feels like a real place full of actual people. It takes a while to get back into the flow of things. The parkour feels especially tricky.…

We’ve had some horrible zombies in this month’s They’re Back, so let’s finish with a nice one. Here you play as Ed, a limber, athletic corpse who has to compete in a murderous game show to rescue his human friend, Ben. In practice, this means speedrunning a series of lethal assault courses, hopping, crawling, and rolling to the next checkpoint as Ed gets sliced up like a radish in an infomercial. It’s silly, exhilarating fun, predicated on an enjoyably erratic physics engine. 74…

ANDY KELLY THIS MONTH Took over the galaxy, one planet at a time. ALSO PLAYED No Man’s Sky Half the appeal of Amplitude strategy games for me is how they feel. They really are astonishingly pretty, and nowhere is this more evident than in the process of colonizing a planet in Endless Space 2. But it’s more than just aesthetics, it’s everything from the music and sound effects to the UI animation and typefaces. When you discover a fresh, uninhabited system the camera sweeps down into it, over each world, and it’s wonderfully cinematic. In one system I find a giant volcanic planet, an arid desert world, and a tiny jungle planet battered by storms. If you have the proper technology to colonize a planet, and a colonization ship, you…

I stand on a ledge hundreds of meters above the ground, looking out beyond the precipice. Below lies not Arkham City nor Metropolis, but an enormous en suite dominated by a toilet that could double as a skate park. Pink toilet roll hangs from the holder, the size of hay bale, and white tiles cover every surface except the ceiling, which extends all the way up to my vantage point. The aim is to hit the one spot that will safely break my fall—the rancid swimming pool right in the middle of the toilet bowl. Without enough momentum, I’ll splatter all over the mat, which is already patterned in a bloody red and orange, as if the owner were expecting the stain. If I overshoot, I’ll smack my head on…

1 SANFIERRO Rockstar’s version of San Francisco. Landmarks include San Fierro Bay, the Gant Bridge, and the Big Pointy Building. There are a lot of hills in the city and the weather is often rainy. 2 BAYSIDE Cross the Gant Bridge from San Fierro and you’ll end up in Bayside, a small town modelled after Marin County. Alas, other than the Bayside Marina, there isn’t much of note to find here. 3 BONE COUNTY The largest continuous landmass in San Andreas. Here you’ll find the Sherman Dam, a few small desert towns, and Area 69, a heavily guarded military base where you can steal a jetpack. 4 LASVENTURAS Rockstar’s take on Las Vegas. Like its real-world counterpart it’s a city of sin, with a number of large casinos including the…

CRUCIAL $117 The best SSD for gaming among the SATA options 3 The ideal SSD for a gaming PC strikes a perfect price/performance/reliability balance, which is more difficult than it sounds. Crucial’s MX500 is one of the few drives that really has no weak points, and with game install sizes getting larger, buying the biggest SSD you can afford is becoming increasingly important. The MX500 is one of the top performing SATA drives, and perhaps more important, it’s one of the more affordable SSDs. It ends up delivering an incredible value, and the only way to get meaningfully faster results is to move to an NVMe drive. Crucial’s random IO read and write speeds are pretty much on a par with those found in the Samsung 860 EVO model, if…

After years of pre-production, pitches, and prototypes, then 25 months of solid development, Glasgow-based developer No Code finally released sci-fi adventure Observation in May, 2019. I reviewed it for PC Gamer, calling it a “stylish, understated, and subtly chilling psychological thriller”, and other critics shared my enthusiasm for the game, which sees you playing as an artificial intelligence aboard a stricken space station. That’s a long time to work on anything, and I’ve always wondered: What does releasing a game feel like? So I asked Observation’s writer/director Jon McKellan, founder of No Code and former UI designer on Alien: Isolation, about the immediate aftermath of releasing a new videogame to the world. “We were so guarded during development because we didn’t want story spoilers getting out,” he says. “Then on release day…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE November 2019 DEVELOPER Frontier Developments PUBLISHER In-house LINK planetzoogame.com Swinging the camera over my zoo, I watch throngs of people wander between enclosures, cooing at the animals and slurping soda. But then there’s a ripple of panic. I see several guests fleeing in terror, and the fear spreads. Something is happening in my perfect zoo. I heave the camera into the air and locate the source of the rumble—an escaped rhinoceros. PLAYED IT Rhinos are dangerous animals, but it’s lucky for my guests that Planet Zoo is a family friendly game. In Frontier’s other park builder, Jurassic World Evolution, an escaped animal usually leads to people being eaten alive. But here it just makes them upset, which in terms of running and managing a successful (and…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE April 16, 2020 DEVELOPER CD Projekt RED PUBLISHER In-house LINK cyberpunk2077.com Cyberpunk creator Mike Pondsmith describes Pacifica, a district of Night City, as the “playground by the sea that didn’t work out”. I’m talking to him after seeing a new demo of Cyberpunk 2077 set in this part of the game’s metropolis—a forgotten, lawless community built around the half-constructed ruins of abandoned luxury hotels. NEW DETAILS “The way I looked at it, it was supposed to be like if Atlantic City had gone tragically wrong,” says Pondsmith, whose tabletop setting is being turned into an open world RPG by Witcher developer CD Projekt RED. Pacifica is very different from Watson, the vibrant, bustling commercial district seen in earlier Cyberpunk 2077 demos. After beginning to construct massive skyscraper hotels,…

Total War is delving into mythology. For the last couple of historical games, myths and legends have been creeping into the war-torn sandbox, but in Total War Saga: Troy, Creative Assembly Sofia is taking things one step further, honing in on a conflict where our best source is an epic poem about petty gods and a giant wooden horse. This isn’t Warhammer, though, and history hasn’t been entirely abandoned. So there are gods, mythical heroes, and even a minotaur. The team’s drawn on yarns like The Iliad and The Odyssey, along with other myths, but then squinted at them through the lens of history. Maps and archeology have been used to give cities and armies an air of authenticity, and the minotaur is really a bloke wearing a bull’s head,…

“WE DECIDED TO MAKE A DIFFERENT COMPANY TO MANAGE EVERYTHING WHICH IS DEAD CELLS RELATED” What’s next?’ For an independent studio riding high after a big hit it’s an exciting question, and a daunting one. After the success of its excellent action roguelike Dead Cells, Motion Twin is in the process of deciding what to do next. In a normal studio, the higher-ups would get together, make a decision, and then tell the rest of the studio what to make. Motion Twin is different. Visit their website, and you’ll see the message “NO BOSS” proudly displayed on the front page. No-one at Motion Twin has a job title, and everyone has an equal share in the company. That’s great for staff members who get to take home a share of…

Redon and a small group founded the non-profit in 2011, and most of the money spent to acquire and archive the games comes from its members. Each game component is carefully stored separately. Glossy paper covers are flattened in protective portfolios. Manuals and disks are stored separately, in special envelopes that won’t damage the paper. It’s all meticulously catalogued in a temperature-controlled archive, with a digital database full of information on every game. Most of that information isn’t available online, yet, but a public database is in the works. Visit GamePres.org for more.…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? A colorful combat-focused space western EXPECT TO PAY $30 DEVELOPER Double Damage Games PUBLISHER Double Damage Games REVIEWED ON Windows 10, Intel Core i7, 16GB RAM, Nividia GTX 1070 MULTIPLAYER No LINK rebel-galaxy.com The boundless promise of space exploration is a precarious asteroid field for a developer to navigate. It takes the luxuries of time and funding for galaxies like those of Elite Dangerous or No Man’s Sky to reach their potential. But if you’re an indie developer bereft of those resources, then it’s vital to know your limits—to condense the cosmos into something manageable, lest your game get swallowed up by its seductive vastness. Rebel Galaxy Outlaw knows its limits, restricting its galaxy to 40-odd solar systems named after cities in the US.…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? An investigative thriller set on a computer desktop EXPECT TO PAY $20 DEVELOPER Furious Bee, Sam Barlow PUBLISHER Annapurna Interactive REVIEWED ON GTX 1080, Intel i5-6600K, 16GB RAM MULTIPLAYER None LINK www.annapurna. pictures Telling Lies is a series of one-sided conversations. You play as a woman whose motives are initially unclear and who has been given access to an archive of secretly recorded video calls taken from the laptops and mobile phones of four very different people. When the game begins you know nothing about them. These troubled souls are complete strangers to you and their lives are a mystery. But by the end you’ll know them intimately, and will have uncovered a series of shocking truths about their lives. Well, in theory. Because…

I always assumed I’d manage brilliantly in a zombie apocalypse scenario. Project Zomboid is here to tell me how wrong I am. This savage survival sim holds a mirror up to your inadequacies, proving that even a can of beans could defeat you if you don’t have the tools. All the cooking, reading, and mood management elements make it feel like a festering version of The Sims, albeit one where Mortimer Goth has apparently been devoured and Bella is banging her rotting head against the toilet door. I could blame the shock of this for the fact I only last a few days, but it would be a lie. Project Zomboid scores extra points for being the first game to terrify me into learning carpentry. 78…

TOM SENIOR THIS MONTH Turned his eyeballs off and on again. ALSO PLAYED Warhammer: Vermintide 2 I suppose I should move at some point, but the dark basement is full of furry naked men with stag heads. This has put me right off the idea of going around another corner. I’ve found a large backlit fan—every sci-fi corridor has one—and I’m going to bask in its meagre light until the universe ends, or my eyeballs recharge. Whatever comes first. Apsulov: End of Gods is a grim time. You wake up on a stone operating table being sliced up by a crab-like machine with a face, gurgling as your character tries to speak through the mess of their own throat. For a second I get a powerful visualization of what that…

SAMSUNG $250 The best SSD for gaming for speedy SATA performance 4 Do you want a fast SATA drive with the highest endurance around? If so, look no further than Samsung’s 860 Pro line. It doesn’t win every benchmark, mostly because of margin of error and the higher capacity 2TB and 4TB drives, but you can pound the drive with writes all day long without killing it. The five-year / 1,200TB warranty translates to more than 650GB written per day, every day, for five years. I’m not even sure what you’d be doing that would require that many writes per day, probably a server workload rather than anything you’d see on a desktop PC. Given that it’s dropped in price plenty over the past 18 months, you can easily pick…

MUSHKIN $57 The best for those shopping on a budget 6 Mushkin just released a new Source line of SATA drives, which use 3D TLC NAND to help reach even lower prices. The 500GB model currently sells for as little as $57, and the 1TB drive goes for quite a bit more, representing a big saving over its nearest competitors. While performance is relatively modest (the older Reactor beats the Source in several tests, including the overall metric), this is an easy upgrade for any budget system currently lacking an SSD. Mushkin releases surprisingly reliable drives, for the price, so you’re getting an SSD that will perform for a good few years here. The manufacturer itself lists the endurance as ‘three years’, which is a little vague, but that seems…

What’s in a name? Less than you might think. A company called LCG Entertainment announced the return of Telltale Games to the US press this month, just under a year after the venerable adventure game studio was shut down. This new doppelganger plans to sell games from Telltale’s back catalogue and to work on new entries for some of its episodic series. “We’re still evaluating, but we definitely want to continue some of the stories,” Jamie Ottilie tells Polygon. Ottilie was CEO of a mobile developer behind licensed takes on Duck Dynasty and Power Rangers, while his business partner, Brian Waddle, marketed the Havok physics engine—the same one that’s been adding splash screens and wobbly objects to PC games for two decades. THE COMPANY IS STARTING SMALL AND HOPING TO…

LEMMINGS This puzzle/platformer was developed by DMA Design in Dundee. Since its release in 1991, Lemmings has sold over 20 million copies worldwide across multiple formats. GRAND THEFT AUTO V One of the best-selling games in history, generating an eye-watering $6 billion in revenue since its release in 2013, was developed by Edinburgh, Scotland-based Rockstar North. CRACKDOWN This open world shooter was developed by Dundee, Scotland-based Realtime Worlds, and sold over 1.5 million copies, becoming a valuable exclusive for Microsoft and its Xbox brand. MINECRAFT This is, of course, a Swedish game, but Dundee’s 4J Studios was responsible for porting the game to consoles, including the hugely successful Xbox 360 version.…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE TBA DEVELOPER TaleWorlds PUBLISHER TaleWorlds LINK taleworlds.com/en/Games/Bannerlord I’m determined to own a castle. A big fortress with thick walls and tireless guards willing to throw their lives away for me. Good thing, then, that Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord’s demo plonks me in the mid-game, with loads of gold to spend on warriors. Finally, this humble writer is going places. PLAYED IT First order of business—build an army. Instead of recruiting individual troops to take with me on my grand adventure, I hire captains, each with their own wee army. Prior to being hired, these mercenaries wander around the map and do their own thing, so it takes some time for them to merge with my growing horde. With the extra time, I search for a…

MINOTAUR He’s really just a guy who is super into scary costumes and axes. He’s about as tough as a real minotaur, however, and has a penchant for charging at enemies, knocking them back or into the air. HECTOR Hector is Troy’s big hero. He’s a defensive warrior with tanky units and a dad that he needs to impress, at least if he wants to rule Troy. He eventually gets killed off by Achilles, but maybe not this time. ACHILLES Best known for having a dodgy heel, Achilles is the greatest hero of the Greeks, and can recruit the largest amount of elite warriors, but he’s also hot-blooded, moody, and isn’t the best diplomat.…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? A third-person shooter set in a paranormal funhouse EXPECT TO PAY $60 DEVELOPER Remedy Entertainment PUBLISHER 505 Games REVIEWED ON RTX 2080, i9-9900k, 32 GB RAM, SSD MULTIPLAYER None LINK www.controlgame.com The omnipotent Finnish janitor of the Federal Bureau of Control really wants to go on vacation, but can’t until I’ve vanquished his old nemesis, The Clog. In what we’ll call the ‘bottom’ of The Oldest House, an impossible building in the middle of New York that’s infinitely larger on the inside than the outside, The Clog takes up residence near the coolant pumps, a swirling mass of brown slop that moans like a T-Rex roaring bubbles into a glass of milk. I shoot the wriggling tendrils peeking out of the body, and the…

Rebel Galaxy Outlaw pretty much offers a light Photoshop suite when it comes to designing your own spaceships. 1 LAYERS Divvy up your work, see specific layers in isolation, and delude yourself that you’ve a talent for graphic design. 2 OPACITY Opacity changes the intensity of your paint tool, allowing for more subtle effects than just plain old splodges. 3 3D PRINTING Once your ship is painted you can even print a 3D model of it… if you have a 3D printer knocking around.…

1 SOLITAIRE There’s a fully functional digital Solitaire built into Telling Lies if you’ve had enough of solving mysteries and fancy playing some cards. 2 EXTERNAL DRIVE A drive given to you by… someone. Whoever it was, they have connections, because it contains some highly confidential files. 3 DATABASE This is the archive of phone calls you have to search through. When you get a hit on a keyword, you can view five related videos. 4 GUIDE A handy guide to CASTLE, the game’s fictional operating system, designed for people to hide their tracks, which has some plot relevance. 5 IMAGES A folder of old paintings found in the recycle bin. Do they have some significance? This is one of the game’s many enigmatic mysteries.…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? A crossbreed of CCG and roguelike dungeon-crawling EXPECT TO PAY $15 DEVELOPER Terry Cavanagh PUBLISHER Terry Cavanagh REVIEWED ON i5 6500, RTX 2080 TI, 32GB RAM MULTIPLAYER No LINK diceydungeons.com A lazy journalist would call this Hearthstone meets Yahtzee, and just as a stopped clock tells the right time twice a day, sometimes lazy journalist comparisons are bang on. Dicey Dungeons rolls you a few dice, presents you with cards which harness those dice in damage-dealing or character-buffing fashion, then pits you against a series of opponents in a dungeon-crawling RPG setting. It feels like playing a CCG while wearing X-ray specs Because while the roguelikes and card games that Dicey Dungeons is referencing with its visuals and mechanics would hide away their RNG elements, Terry Cavanagh’s new…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? Arcane zombie action game starring a sentient pork knuckle EXPECT TO PAY $20 DEVELOPER Capcom PUBLISHER Capcom REVIEWED ON Intel Core i7-7700 CUP @ 3.60GHz, 16 GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070, Windows 10 MULTIPLAYER No LINK store.steampowered.com/app/427190/DEAD_RISING If you want to start an argument on Twitter (and apparently, who doesn’t?) try criticizing the time mechanic in Dead Rising. It’s a challenging design choice that makes it entirely possible to miss huge chunks of the story. And it’s representative of a game that’s fun to return to precisely because its systems are so bizarre. It’s gently thrilling and unfamiliar, like finding foreign currency in a drawer. The intro of Dead Rising is a legitimately great bit of storytelling. You take photos as you fly…

I’d love to get through this review without mentioning a certain game from Psygnosis, but let’s save some time instead—this is Lemmings with corpses. The goal is to spread infection by using specialist tools to create more undead. The basic ones turn humans into zoms, and later mutations allow you to direct the horde or attack faster. As well as your basic task of eating humans, you have bonus goals, which keep me doing the same levels repeatedly. The aesthetic is wonderful, too—a pure John Carpenter score plays over utilitarian presentation punctuated with glowing greens and schlocky reds. Also, getting to be the zombies feels like catharsis after Dead Rising. 80…

ROBIN VALENTINE THIS MONTH Broke his moral compass ALSO PLAYED Guardians Of The Galaxy: The Telltale Series If there’s one thing almost all videogames are good at, it’s making you think like a sociopath. Whether you’re giggling as you mow down guards, callously calling entire nations into all-out war, or making someone love you by working out exactly the correct things to say, your morality almost always takes second place to objectives, rewards, and progression systems. I’m not sure any game, though, has turned me into quite as much of a creep as My Lovely Daughter. Cast as an amnesiac alchemist desperate to raise his daughter from the dead, I’m charged with creating life-like simulacrums of her, raising them to maturity, and then murdering them for resources and their ‘soul…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASED 2005 PUBLISHER Rockstar Games DEVELOPER Rockstar North LINK www.rockstargames.com/sanandreas You can fit San Andreas into Grand Theft Auto V several times over, yet the former still feels bigger. That’s the most surprising takeaway from my time revisiting Rockstar’s ’90s crime epic, which has sold a staggering 21 million copies in its lifetime. Released on PC in 2005, a year after the PlayStation 2 version, it’s a massive step up from the previous game, Vice City, in pretty much every respect. In the early-to-mid 2000s you couldn’t move for GTA clones: True Crime, The Getaway, Scarface: The World is Yours, Saints Row. But while these games were largely, or entirely, set in a single city, Rockstar used its unmatched financial might (and, some might say hubris) to take…

SAMSUNG $138 The best for gaming, balancing price and performance 1 If there’s one company that tends to rule in the SSD market space, it’s Samsung. The 850 Evo was a long-time favorite, which remains viable even today, but the 860 Evo line has largely displaced it. Samsung currently trades blows with Crucial for our top pick, depending on capacity and current prices, but both are excellent drives with proven reliability and performance. The 1TB 860 Evo hits the sweet spot for price and performance, but the higher capacity models are also worth a look, especially as they’re relatively cheap and dropping in price. These are great SATA drives, so you’re unlikely to have compatibility issues. The newer 970 Samsung drives are great, if you’re looking for an NVMe alternative,…

SAMSUNG $580 The best SSD that mixes capacity and performance 5 We’re giving the 860 Evo a second shout out in this guide, to highlight the 4TB model. It’s currently the largest widely available (and still somewhat affordable) SSD around, priced at $580. Endurance is also an impressive 2,400TB, and performance is as fast as you can get with a SATA drive. That’s thanks to the high capacity, which will almost always have some ready to go NAND available for use, avoiding periodic slowdowns. The prices of the Samsung drives have dropped significantly over the past year, so you can pick up bigger units for almost half the price. What we’d say about this one is that it’s about as good as SATA gets, and while you’re making a big…