Innholdsfortegnelse for November 2021 i PC Gamer (US Edition)

HIGHS Gabe Gear A pleasant surprise about the Steam Deck was the reasonable cost of $399 for the basic model. Doggone Snoop Dogg’s Twitch stream was muted for days without him realizing. Fighting Fantasy Final Fantasy XIV is on a tear, with Square-Enix even briefly running out of digital copies. Crypt-no Reports from China indicate crypto-miners are beginning to try and sell used cards in bulk. Bad code Microsoft employee Volodymyr Kvashuk exchanged Xbox gift codes for $10 million in Bitcoin over 2017-2019: He’s just been jailed for nine years and fined $8.3 million. Last-gen FIFA FIFA 2022’s PC version lacks the ‘Hypermotion’ animation system. LOWS…

PLAYED IT Dating sims are weird. I’ve courted pigeons, wholesome fathers, monster prom hopefuls, ’90s velociraptors, sacrificial goats, Colonel Sanders, and now, thanks to Kitfox Games, I can date hot people that can transform into deadly weapons. What a world we live in. Boyfriend Dungeon combines dating sim mechanics with hack-n-slash dungeon crawling, the idea being you meet human hotties and then use their transformational powers to fight monsters. The game’s title focuses on boyfriends, but you can also date women and non-binary folk if you prefer. You also pick your own pronouns, making for a super-inclusive take on the genre, which is what we like to see. The only thing that stays the same across all games is your character being a big ball of dating anxiety. Hopefully, a…

When Capcom announced that The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles would be coming to Steam on day one of its overseas release, the eruption of joy PC players felt was like hearing the words ‘not guilty’ after a long, fierce trial. The original trilogy released in the 2000s only made their way to Steam in 2019, so we’re used to waiting a bit longer. Not this time, though. The international versions of The Great Ace Attorney: Adventures and The Great Ace Attorney Adventures 2: Resolve are available right out the gate, neatly bundled together in this double feature. The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles keeps up much of the melodrama and flair from previous games in the series. If you want backstabbing, tragedy, and lawyers slamming their hands on desks, aggressively pointing and shouting—it’s…

Scenes of Britishness are a largely untapped gaming resource. Aside from the leafy apocalypse of Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture, few games accurately capture the damp-bunting disappointment of the British experience. And until someone makes a savage economy management sim set during a Women’s Institute charity bake sale, we’ll have to make do with Untitled Goose Game: The world’s first mild inconvenience-’em-up. There’s something nice about playing a game where my goal isn’t to break necks or save worlds or amass boundless wealth. As a goose, I’m more concerned with stealing hats and trapping people in garages. It’s worrying how happy I am to go along with this seemingly meaningless list of things to do. Firstly, because it suggests the only call to action I need is a to-do list, no matter…

This is the most relaxing and stressful game I’ve ever played. On the one hand, I can set the camera mode to orbit and sit and watch baby hippos for hours on end. And I can zoom so close to lion paw puds that I can practically reach out and touch them without the danger of being mauled. On the other hand: There’s disease everywhere, I’m not making enough money, and all my animals keep having too much sex. More than this, the degree of freedom is so high it’s almost paralyzing. Even with the excellent and detailed tutorial system, there’s a nagging sense that I shouldn’t be left in charge of the welfare of all of these delicate animals. Just ask my chronically depressed bears and bulimic antelopes.…

THIS MONTH Watched an unhealthy amount of Marvel movies. ALSO PLAYED Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, Legends of Runeterra Superheroes are a particularly difficult thing to get right in a videogame. They shouldn’t be, in theory—power fantasy is gaming’s bread and butter, and loads of game protagonists have supernatural abilities anyway. But in practice it requires a delicate balance. Marvel’s Avengers perfectly illustrates the potential pitfalls, sadly by falling afoul of most of them. The game begins with an attack on the Golden Gate Bridge—the Avengers swoop in to try and stop it. I first get to charge into battle as the mighty Thor, whirling Mjolnir. The thing is, the enemies aren’t aliens, super-soldiers, or robots, they’re just… guys. Dudes in body armor with guns. Understandably for a tutorial level, they go…

It’s not often you’ll hear a PC gamer admit that the combo of keyboard and mouse is ill-suited for gaming. It does happen, though, and there are oodles of adventure games, sports games, and brawlers that play better on a controller. So, you’ll want one of the best controllers close at hand for when you run into one. There are many schools of thought on what makes one controller better than another, though, and the biggest divide undoubtedly comes down to thumbsticks: Do you go for two parallel sticks, as is customary for Sony, or instead offer an asymmetrical approach? The latter championed by Microsoft, yet also an approach used by a good few more. Even if you firmly believe one layout is best, you’ll want to consider other potential features,…

ELBO This chair was generatively designed using Autodesk’s Project Dreamcatcher. It has an organic look to it. ARUP These components by Arup are designed to carry the same loads and forces, and can be 3D printed. ART This ‘dog’ was created by a GAN—a Generative Adversarial Network. See more at aiartmedia.com. WRITE The GPT-3 language generator produced an article published on the Guardian website in September 2020.…

Boomerang X is an arena shooter that shouldn’t work on a gamepad. You’re able to toss a mystical bladed boomerang like its an extension of your body, dragging its wide arc through multiple enemies, recalling it whenever you like, and even magnetizing yourself to its current location. This is a game where you can’t stop moving, where success is found dancing through the air, whipping the camera around to poke at half a dozen goo monsters from across the map in a single leap. Mouse-aim is almost required. Even with decades of experience with my trusty mouse and keyboard, I found it pretty demanding. So in an effort to bring Boomerang X to as many people as possible, the team at Dang! turned to an emerging, experimental gamepad control scheme as…

PLAYED IT Emperor Gary Spacetimes is in a heap of trouble. Not only has he inherited the Imperial Space Throne at the tender age of 18, but soothsayers across the galaxy are predicting civilizational collapse within the next 20 years, as resources grow scarce and planetary populations reach breaking point. Gary’s only hope is to reunite the six great houses. Such is the premise of Alliance of the Sacred Suns, which is what you’d get if you crossed the novel Dune with Crusader Kings, and then beat the resulting hybrid to death with a kaleidoscope. It’s a game with grand ambitions, but a few of its design decisions left me a little concerned for the final product. While Crusader Kings is the most obvious comparison point for Alliance, there are…

PLAYED IT If you were to fling the last humans to a distant planet and raise them on a spaceship for 250 years, you’d end up with some weirdos. Harold Halibut is about just such a group, and turns out that humanity’s last hopes are indeed a quirky bunch. Mr Halibut himself is one such resident of this city. He’s the ship’s handyman and lab assistant to lead scientist, Jeanne Mareaux, who is trying to find a way to get humanity’s metropolis unstuck and back into space. Turns out after leaving Earth the space vessel’s residents hoped they would find another planet, but accidentally crash-landed, leaving everyone trapped underneath the waves of an alien world. Not that they seem to care much—many of the inhabitants have found peace with their underwater life.…

Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney 2001 Phoenix’s origin story. It’s the game where a parrot takes the witness stand. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney—Justice for All 2002 The introduction of whip-happy prosecutor Franziska von Karma. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney—Trials and Tribulations 2004 A game with the best guilty breakdown in the series. Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney 2007 New main character, Apollo, takes over as Phoenix’s apprentice. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney—Dual Destinies 2013 Capcom Capcom discovers that psychology is ripe for courtroom drama. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney—Spirit of Justice 2016 Set in a country where law and spirituality meet.…

Otus, the hero from Owlboy, is terrible at everything. His fellow villagers seem to hate him. Everything he does seems to go wrong. He’s even mute, the poor lad. And that’s probably why guiding him to some degree of success is so pleasing. However bad he is at the start, I take comfort in knowing I can’t make it worse. That said, even the earliest attempts to fix things go wrong. The first beat of the The first beat of the story sees Otus and his soldier friend Geddy chasing a ‘troublemaker’, only to miss the entire fleet of pirates that descends on the village. The lovely animation just makes things worse: Otus’ simple sprite is still capable of expressing fear and doubt, and I just want to pat him on…

We’ll top off this month of me shitting on games people pretend to love by finishing with Goat Simulator—a title that defines our knees-up, clown shoes, rumpitty pumpitty, oopsy-daisy Mr Grimble lackwit obsession with games being ‘hilarious’. It doesn’t work, never did, and the positive Steam reviews suggest nobody cares. It’s the same weak joke your dad tells wrong every Christmas—the game equivalent of an airbag that doesn’t stop you from being maimed, but does feature a picture of a kitten wearing a pineapple hat.…

V alheim is an easy game to fall in love with. The exploration, the crafting, the basebuilding—all of it had me hurrying through real-life tasks so I could get back to the Viking afterlife as quickly as possible. I honestly didn’t think I could have been any more excited about it—and then I found out that not only are there wolves in the game, but you can tame them too. To say I got a little carried away may be a bit of an understatement. Two wolves became three, became ten, then suddenly it seemed like my entire base—and the surrounding countryside—was inundated with the goodest of boys (and, apparently, girls). And they aren’t limited to my base either. I’ll often be sailing down a river and see a wolf on the…

The Steam Deck isn’t going to be another Steam Machine. Well, OK it literally is. As a full gaming PC that runs purely on SteamOS, and aims to wrestle gamers away from Windows, it feels like a new generation of that failed idea. But where the Steam Machines were ultimately evidence of Valve’s initial naivety around PC hardware, the Steam Deck is something far more assured, far more believable, and far more timely. The most basic, and obvious comparison when you first clap eyes on the Deck is the Nintendo Switch. After all, it’s another handheld gaming machine with an attractive price point. While the Steam Deck is most certainly that, it’s also something else entirely. This is handheld PC gaming with the same benefits and pain points we all recognize as…

DOTA 2 I’m afraid none of us play it. And if you don’t all stop being so horrible, we never will. Besides, if we’re all being honest with ourselves, League of Legends is just better, isn’t it? TEAM FORTRESS 2 In spot 100 last year, Valve’s enduring shooter clung on for dear life this time round, but couldn’t stand in the face of a barrage of new entries. Goodnight, old friend. EURO TRUCK SIMULATOR 2 It was at 62 last year, but this year got booted off in favor of American Truck Simulator. Clearly the US team is rubbing off on us a bit too much these days. PLAYER UNKNOWN’S BATTLEGROUNDS It feels thematically appropriate to only let one battle royale game fight its way onto our Top 100 list,…

The Challenger 2 is a British tank that’s been in service since 1994, and has seen service in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, and Iraq. It’s also found in War Thunder, Gaijin Entertainment’s free online game. There’s a commitment to accuracy in War Thunder: Realistic vehicle and weapon physics, which players partake in spirited discussions about in the forums. The Challenger 2’s debut, for instance, sparked a thread 319 pages long (and growing). Things got out of hand in early July, however, when one player demonstrated slightly too much commitment to realism. The player, who claims to be a Challenger 2 commander and formerly of the British Army’s Armored Trials and Development Unit, complained the in-game model is inaccurate and more vulnerable than in reality—then, to prove it, posted classified images from…

Back in the ’90s, everybody told Bioware that the western RPG was dead. “That’s the best news you can hear,” cofounder Trent Oster laughs. “That means that there is absolutely nobody looking at your market space, and you can roll in and do fun things.” It also meant, however, that the studio was short on good examples to follow. Bioware’s model for a great D&D game, Pool of Radiance, had come out in the late ’80s and looked dated. By 1995, the studio was instead playing Warcraft, the pioneering real-time strategy game. That’s why, when you click on a Baldur’s Gate party member, you often hear a funny, fourth-wall breaking quip in the style of early Blizzard—a “Yes, oh omnipresent authority figure?” or “Stop touching me!” Warcraft is also why…

NEW INFO What convinced me Weird West is a true immersive sim had nothing to do with the carefully prepared talking points from a recent 30-minute hands-off demo. It was a small dust devil, a random weather event, whipping through the scene. While former Arkane founder Raphael Colantonio explains the finesse of the physics system, showing off by tossing a bottle and shooting it out of the air, a better, if less elegant example comes along. The dust devil skirts around the edge of our bird’s-eye view of a destitute barn and gunslinger protagonist, first picking up some wooden debris, then passing over a campfire. It then transforms into a raging cyclone of flame and despair, a swirling monstrosity carrying a dozen flaming planks which then light the adjacent farmhouse ablaze and…

The story of my first campaign in Old World, where I led my Greek civilization to global domination, is equally the story of Rome, my nemesis. When I first encountered the Romans, they were friendly, offering us goodies and hospitality, but it was a poisoned chalice—quite literally. A sickness spread, and Roman gifts were the source. I demanded justice and compensation; Rome only wanted war. It would take nearly 200 years until I got my revenge. It was not a single continuous war, but rather an eternal grudge. The first conflict ended without much resolution, with the distance between our empires and the massive mountain chain that separated us creating some logistical difficulties. There were still battles, certainly, costing both of us more than soldiers. Family members, revered generals, and close…

Along with thousands of other galactic migrants, your character in The Ascent pays a small fortune for a ticket to the planet Veles, looking for a better life. The moment you step off the ship, however, the price of the ticket becomes a debt so astronomical that you’ll die before you can pay it off. Even so, the company that owns the city you now call home, the Ascent Group, wants its pound of flesh. You are now an indent—slang for an indentured servant—working dirty, dangerous jobs to pay it off. The Ascent’s setting, a mix of neon-flecked ’80s cyberpunk and grimy science fiction, is magnificent. The story takes place in an Arcology—a self-contained city squeezed into an immense skyscraper. Think Hong Kong’s Kowloon Walled City, crossed with Akira’s Neo Tokyo, and…

I’ve always been a distant admirer of the Monster Hunter series, with its lush worlds and vicious beasties, but no matter how many times I’ve tried—be it the early PSP forays or the more recent Monster Hunter World—it’s never clicked for me. As much as I want to love the series, I’ve been unable to get past the five-hour mark. There are so many systems to learn and aspects to juggle that it can be overwhelming. Monster Hunter Stories 2 has been my way in. A spin-off of the main series, Stories focuses on, er, story, and uses a turn-based battle system and monster-catching mechanics in place of the usual hunting action. While it’s a sequel to Monster Hunter Stories, you won’t need to know anything about the first game—which is handy, as it was…

You know when spring arrives, and you see the mommy ducks with their trails of fluffy yellow ducklings, and the only thought that springs to mind is, ‘half of you are going to die’? That’s how it feels playing Shelter. There’s an overwhelming sense of looming disaster, and no matter how many radishes I pick or groundhogs I butcher, I know it won’t be enough to keep all five of my precious badger children alive. I’m so committed to failure, in fact, that I almost leave one of my offspring behind because I assume they’re already dead, as a means of the game warning me how grim things are going to get. In fact, I’ve never been more glad not to be a badger, and that’s saying something.…

THIS MONTH Liberated Minsk but burned down a lot of villages. ALSO PLAYED Ghost Recon Wildlands, Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak In the tension between childhood in the WWII-mad ’70s and having German relatives, I developed a life-long horrified fascination with the whole thing. Not for me are the superficial delights of Battlefield-style shooters though. I need huge, sweeping simulations of the Eastern front, dripping in appropriate misery. My brain hums with counter-possibilities. What if the 2nd & 3rd Panzers had continued onto Moscow in August? And I want receipts. So, I see a game like Steel Division II and I want it. I want to be good at it, I want to have time for it. It’s the kind of game that I acquire during a Steam sale, carefully hoovering…

We have previously suggested that a robot-controlled future in which humans are hunted for sport is a likely one, but we’ve had a bit of trouble with our blood pressure lately, and have decided techno-utopianism is just as reasonable, in the style of Iain M Banks’ Culture novels. The crucial difference here is that, while the murderous AI of the Terminator is a human invention, the benevolent Minds that oversee the Culture are AIs built by AIs, and it seems to work out better that way. There’s a step in microchip design known as floorplanning, in which the building blocks of a chip are marked out before they go anywhere near a silicon wafer. You put some processing cores here, a touch of cache RAM there, top it all off…