Innholdsfortegnelse for January 2018 i PC Gamer

1 Tom Francis took a trip under the sea to dig into the secrets of BioShock’s Rapture. Over the course of the feature he tries to answer the question, “What the hell is going on?” before imparting advice about double-photographing everything you see with the Research Camera, pitching three perfect builds and demanding you explore the comedy potential of Cyclone Trap. 2 Speedball 2 Tournament netted 52% from Jon Hicks: “The servers are dead and the only signs of life are all the people bitching about performance in the forums.” 3 Environmentally responsible gaming was Alec Meer’s subject this month as he investigated how to ensmallen your PC’s carbon footprint – as well as offering a six-step how-to guide. The feature itself is an interesting snapshot of tech functionality and…

1 ROLEPLAYING GAMES Including everything from wildly varying builds to extensive economy simulations, RPGs are one of the most intensive genres to balance – and the most likely to have something slip through the cracks. 2 MULTIPLAYER SHOOTERS How fast are players? Whats the DPS of each weapon? How do variable connections affect things? When you throw in characters with asymmetric abilities, balancing a multiplayer game is more complex than ever. 3 DIGITAL BOARD GAMES Many digital board games streamline rulesets players would otherwise find complicated or tedious. Balancing is critical, here. Developers want players to focus on the experience they’re having, not a rulebook. 4 ALL OF THE GAMES, BASICALLY Every game you can imagine has been balanced somehow – including narrative projects, which consider pacing, how the player…

BOYFRIEND DUNGEON HAS A MESSAGE AND A MEANING BEHIND ALL THAT KNIFE-KISSING Swords are sexy. Swords are dependable. Swords are familiar and comforting.” There may be some of you who don’t agree with the words of Tanya X Short, self-described ‘captain’ of Kitfox Games, but you can’t deny that the team behind Moonhunters and The Shrouded Isle is making a damn good argument for the ‘sexy’ part with its upcoming game, Boyfriend Dungeon. This is the latest in a string of niche dating sims over the past few years: Hatoful Boyfriend’s pigeon loving, MyHorse Prince’s take on centaurs, Dream Daddy, which has you dating dads – though a bit of how’s-your-father with a father isn’t that weird when the alternatives…

In the Warhammer universe there are few sights more heroic than that of a screaming dwarf being repeatedly slammed against the floor by the tentacle of a rampaging Chaos Spawn. I used this distraction to slip behind the mutant and stab it repeatedly in the back with my spear – a classic elfish move. In its surprise, the Chaos Spawn lets go of the dwarf, who screams and starts battering the creature with his axe, completely unfazed by what just happened. The Chaos Spawn is one of Vermintide II’s new bosses. It towers over the Rat Ogre – previously the biggest special enemy – and is just one of the terrors the new Chaos faction brings to the series. The sequel stays true to the first game’s take on the…

Chris Livingston: Sim Settlements is sort of astounding to me. It gives Fallout 4 players an entirely new way to build settlements by, essentially, allowing NPCs to build their own. Designate zones for residential, commercial or industrial buildings and then sit back and watch your settlers erect their own buildings, randomly pulling from pools of assets so each building is unique. As your settlement grows the NPCs will add on to their buildings, adding more features and even second storeys. Each time you visit a settlement, you’ll be able to see their progress, which gives your settlements a feeling of real life, and gives your settlers some agency. They aren’t just standing around waiting for you to place every last door, bed or stick of furniture. The really great…

Tom Senior: In just five years Firaxis has successfully resurrected XCOM and explored a bunch of different takes on the formula. War of the Chosen is the most inventive yet, filling out the world with new friendly resistance factions and bitter rivals in the form of the Chosen themselves. The blue bad guys are obviously a focus point, but I love the resistance heroes even more for their amazing, almost game-breaking abilities. The Reapers get the cool long coats, but I came to love the Templars the most because they look like they’ve dived out of Mass Effect to stab absolutely everything in sight with electricity. Bo Moore: War of the Chosen took one of the best games of 2016 and made it even better by adding campy, moustache-twirling…

November 1996 Ion Storm Dallas is founded. December 1996 Mike Wilson is hired as CEO, Ion Storm closes its deal with Eidos. March 1997 Jake Hughes is hired as producer of Anachronox. April 1997 Daikatana’s “make you his bitch” advertisement runs in magazines. November 1997 Dallas receives Quake II source code. December 1997 Mike Wilson is fired. June 1998 Dominion: Storm Over Gift 3 launches. August 1998 Texas Monthly Article is published, world thinks John Romero is dead. November 1998 Will Loconto and seven other designers depart Ion Storm. March 1999 Daikatana’s dev team finishes implementing Quake II’s source code. June 1999 Todd Porter and Jerry O’Flaherty depart. October 1999 Eidos buys majority stake in Ion Storm. May 2000 Daikatana is released. June 2001 Anachronox is released. June/July 2001 Eidos…

Divisions are classes that specialise in different weapon types and come bundled with their own perk, and you can level up for more. Here’s what you get at the start. INFANTRY Can sprint and stab enemies with a bayonet. AIRBORNE A suppressor silences your primary weapon. ARMORED Bipods for LMGs make for sniper-like accuracy. MOUNTAIN Sharpshooter allows aim assist with scoped weapons. EXPEDITIONARY Incendiary Shells make shotguns do damage over time.…

Boss fights are prolonged tests of patience and dexterity I’ve been down this cursed mountain path more times than I care to count. I’ve dodged away from nothing, falling to my death. I’ve been knocked off the side by a bandit with a spear. I’ve anticipated spear guy, but too early, leaving me a wide-open target and letting him jab with a fatal blow. Finally, though, I make it to the end. There’s a small hole in the cliff face to the left that I’ve been eyeing. I’m too thrilled to hear the ominous squeaking. A cloud of bats fly right in my face and I’m stumbling off the cliff again. The time after that, I manage to lure spear bandit in front of the bat cave and he’s the…

This month in the corner of the page where the twin-stick shooters live: a twin-stick shooter. Really Big Sky stands out for a couple of reasons: it is unusually pretty and the soundtrack is great. Its pleasantly weird, too: there’s traditional space geometry to blow up, but also laser-spewing dragon heads and churning cloudbanks and stuff like that. There’s also a British man who won’t stop talking, who calls you a tit when you die while sounding like he’s talking quietly enough that he doesn’t wake up the dog. In pure game terms Really Big Sky is merely okay, but here’s a confession: I only play these things for the music and the lights.…

MOTHERBOARD Z370 Tomahawk MSI £133 This is a nice-looking bit of kit at a good price. Couple that with two M.2 slots, and it’s the perfect place to house that Core i5. PROCESSOR Core i5-8400 Intel £190 Intel’s latest boasts six of its Coffee Lake cores, with great single-core performance. It even gives last-gen’s i7 a run for its money. GRAPHICS CARD GTX 1070 SC Gaming ACX EVGA £395 Trying to balance prices, we’ve opted to drop down to an SC Gaming card. Don’t worry, you only lose out on a very minor overclock. COOLER Kraken X31 NZXT £66 To get the most out of a good CPU you need a cooler to match. The Kraken X31 is powerful, quiet and great for overclocks. MEMORY Fury 16GB (2x8GB) DDR4 @2666…

EVERYTHING ABOUT THE MODE IS SET UP TO LOWER TOXICITY Dota 2 ’s 7.06 patch arrived in mid-May and has persisted with increasingly minor tweaks denoted by lettered patches for nearly half a year. Players were definitely ready for something new by the end. In fact, the last few months reminded me of those wet weather weeks where kids are stranded indoors and get increasingly restless and crabby. The Dota world was more than ready for patch 7.07. Version 7.07 was a big one. It offered two new heroes, a Turbo game mode and a seasonal ranked play element. Those changes alone are huge, but the notes offer up dozens more. Ten heroes per day get a free mango, the neutral monsters have naptime and…

I MIGHT NEED TO ROMANCE SOMEONE. POSSIBLY A SOCIAL WORKER Lured in by the promise of bee costumes and ball pits, I have decided to raise my very own child in The Sims 4 . Squillions of people have raised babies so it can’t be that hard, right? Also I was a child once so I’m basically an expert. This diary is going to be a walk in the park. I wasn’t actually that interested in a Sims child until I saw the Toddler Stuff pack for The Sims 4. As in real life, the children get all the best toys and all the best clothes. Suddenly having a digital child made sense. Obviously, raising this human might be easier said than done. The Sims universe’s social…

I’m on the highway between Phoenix and Santa Fe, with 18 tonnes of furniture hitched to the back of my truck. This is not an exciting journey. In Holbrook I miss a turning – not ideal when a double trailer full of end tables makes reversing nigh impossible. I consider a manoeuvre, but my GPS updates with a new route. Sorted. I’m deep into Gallup before I notice that I’m driving 20mph over the speed limit, but there are no patrol cars around so it isn’t a problem. I’m running out of fuel as I near Albuquerque. I open the map and reroute the GPS to the nearest petrol station. Problem solved. On the radio, blue-collar men sing about the ways in which, metaphorically speaking, their lives resemble that of…

THE DISCUSSION IS OVER, BUT WHAT WERE YOUR FAVOURITE MOMENTS OF 2017? LET US KNOW AT LETTERS@PCGAMER.COM Phil: You’ll find PC Gamer’s official Game of the Year awards over on page 45. Those pages are reserved for the best of the best, picked from games released between January and December, 2017. But between Steam backlogs, GOG sales and Humble Bundles, the year of a game’s release is rarely the most important consideration when people are choosing what to play. So I ask: what did you enjoy this year, regardless of when it came out? Pip: I’d say this year ended up being a year of small delights. I’m actually far closer to being up-to-date than usual, so a bunch of those games are even from this year! First…

ARTIFACT WEAPONS ARE BEING RETIRED AND REPLACED WITH A NEW SYSTEM World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth is coming in 2018. Set on high seas full of trolls, pirates and troll pirates, the expansion renews the focus on the conflict that started everything: the monstrous Horde duking it out with the noble Alliance. The expansion will offer two new continents and a level cap of 120, several new races to unlock, ten new dungeons, and exciting new activities, like the real-time strategy-inspired Warfronts. At the centre of Battle for Azeroth isthe raging conflict between the two factions at the heart of World of Warcraft. With the Legion defeated and the external threat to Azeroth now gone, the Horde and Alliance are turning on each other and seeking new…

Wes Fenlon: In a genre built around backtracking and finding new paths as you gather abilities, Hollow Knight took a big risk by filing away at its critical path until its guidance was eroded to the bare minimum. Its underground world is massive and labyrinthine, and it’s almost entirely up to you to figure out how to explore it. It pays off because that world is so smartly laid out and mysterious enough to spur you ever onward, looking for the next new sight or secret passage. The joy of Hollow Knight is the joy of discovery, always hard-earned and never handed to you on a plate. James Davenport: Talking about Hollow Knight was difficult when it first came out. A few PCG editors and I were playing it around…

HOW WE REVIEW We review each game on its own merits, and try to match it to a reviewer who’s a passionate expert in the field. The main aim of reviews is to help you make buying decisions. ALPHAS & BETAS This means we’ll review any released alpha, beta or otherwise unfinished game that you can currently buy. For these games, we won’t assign a score, but we will tell you whether they’re worth your time in their current state. DOWNLOADABLE CONTENT DLC might be hours-long new missions for a game, or it might be a single new item. Either way, if we think you want to know about it, we’ll review it. THEY’RE BACK Whenever there’s a bargain or re-release of a significant game, our expert will revisit it…

+15 You’re going die before you can even run away. +10 You’re gonna die. Run away. +5 I wouldn’t try it, unless there’s just one of them. +2 Doable, but plan ahead and leave yourself room to escape. 0 At your same level: not much to worry about – as long as there aren’t too many of them. -2 Try new skills. Test new weapons. Be cocky and flashy. -5 Take on a crowd! Their damage against you will heal almost instantly. -10 You are a living god. One swipe from your weapon will kill multiple foes... and their mounts.…

1600 William Adams, Nioh’s protagonist, is the first Englishman to visit Japan, eventually declared a Samurai. 1980s Akira Kurosawa begins work on ‘Oni’, a script he did not finish before his death in 1998. 2004 Kurosawa’s son, Hisao, tries to finish Oni in partnership with Tecmo, which will produce a game based on it. 2005 The film is cancelled, but the game is still planned for release, now titled Ni-oh. 2012 Team Ninja takes over development and tweaks the title by killing off the hyphen. 2016 Release delayed by demo feedback. 2017 Nioh is released on PC.…

Every explosion sends you boinging into the air like a moon man There’s just about one Team Fortress Classic server left and honestly you’d be lucky to find more than 11 people on it at a time. Even so, I’ve written before in these pages about the delight of discovering that someone somewhere is at any given time still playing a game you loved almost two decades ago. It’s like going for a nostalgic wander past your old primary school only to see your mate Dan running towards you, except Dan’s still ten years old, time is a lie and the last 20 years were just a fever daydream. I digress. There are people still playing TFC but they can’t really play proper TFC any more.…

This is a platformer where you’re a scavenger living in a big box in space. You can pull a lever to activate a magnet that drags cargo containers to you, at which point you can crack them open, fight monsters and attempt to get out again before a wormhole swallows the ad-hoc level your magnet has created. Now that I’ve done my due diligence, I can tell you that I wanted to mention this to say that you can press ‘F’ to bellow ‘fuck you’ with increasing force for no reason. This is called the ‘taunt’ action and it serves no purpose because there’s no multiplayer except you can tell a leaderboard to fuck off. Except now: you can.…

INTEL CORE I7-8700K  www.intel.com £400 CPU Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Coffee Lake. Intel’s mainstream retaliatory blow to the might of Ryzen. A second optimisation of Intel’s 14nm process, but is it enough to beat back the big red beast? With Coffee Lake, I think it’s fair to say that tick-tock is dead. Coffee Lake’s main focus is to bring the fight back to multi-core mainstream dominance by the inclusion of two additional cores across the vast majority of its range. And for the most part it succeeds. The Core i7-8700K, now features a hefty six cores and 12 threads, the Core i5 has six cores and six threads, and the Core i3 comes with four cores and four threads. And that’s about it, there’s little else new so far…

MOTHERBOARD Crosshair VI Hero Asus £221 The best Ryzen board out now. It provides a stable backbone for any early adopter looking to join the red core revolution. PROCESSOR Ryzen 7 1800X AMD £392 The 1800X, combined with 32GB of 3200 MT/s, dominates both single and multi-core tasks with ease. GRAPHICS CARD GTX 1080 Ti Strix Asus £799 This is the height of efficiency. Silent and well equipped to dissipate heat, the 1080 Ti GPU will power any title you throw at it. COOLER Kraken X62 NZXT £140 The Kraken is the culmination of three of our favourite things: an infinity mirror, a 280mm radiator and slick braided cooling. MEMORY Vengeance LED RGB 32GB - 3200 Corsair £390 Ryzen is the one processor that does benefit hugely from higher frequency…

STEPPING INTO THE HUB, THE COMPLEXITY OF YOUR SURROUNDINGS IS STRIKING If you thought Quake ended with the defeat of Shub-Niggurath, think again. Arcane Dimensions is a fan-made campaign with the polish of an official expansion, containing maps that push the game’s tech to its limits. So far, in fact, that you need a modified version of the engine to even run the thing. Like id’s official campaign, Arcane Dimensions opens in a hub map that lets you select your desired level and difficulty setting by jumping through portals. This is one of Quake’s coolest ideas, and I like that they’ve implemented it here, giving the mod a sense of continuity with the main game. Stepping into this hub for the…

“A big publisher probably wouldn’t touch it today” You forget how many talented people worked on Enslaved . The story was written by screenwriter and novelist Alex Garland, who wrote the films 28 Days Later, The Beach and Ex Machina. It stars Andy ‘Gollum’ Serkis, who also helped develop the story and characters. And the game itself was designed by Ninja Theory, a studio with a knack for storytelling and action that would go on to boldly reboot the Devil May Cry series. Interestingly, Serkis’ relationship with Ninja Theory was a complete accident. “Tameem Antionades’ brother was a mortgage advisor,” he told the Telegraph in 2010, referring to the game’s creative director. “I was looking for a mortgage and he said his…

SAMUEL ROBERTS Empires fall, economies collapse, nations declare war on Twitter and here I am in my pants, enjoying some fine computer games. STAR WARS: BATTLEFRONT II www.gog.com/game/star_wars_battlefront_ii I’ll be honest, I’d rather have a bot match in the old Battlefront II from 2005 than a multiplayer game in the new one. While it looks rough by today’s standards, it feels more sandbox-y than its counterpart, and you don’t have to see a depressing crate ticker on the menu screen every time you boot it up. NIER: AUTOMATA www.niergame.com This offbeat action RPG from Platinum is unlike anything else that came out this year, and I’m pleased to see it land a coveted PCG game of the year award. I found its surprisingly sincere story, fantastic music and curious world…

DEFINITELY NOT ON THE CHRISTMAS LIST IS A NEW PLANESCAPE RPG Did you know that Mariah Carey celebrates Christmas all year round and in every room of the house? The Spy can exclusively report this is so, thanks to a cramped fortnight in July spent masquerading as a giftwrapped puppy under a tree in the singer’s tertiary broom cupboard. In more up-to-date festive tidings, The Spy will also be appearing in your local pantomime. No further details on times or roles as The Spy refuses to compromise the integrity of this mission further, but just know that there’s an ex-EastEnders star out there whose rider includes 46 Curly Wurlys and a selection of Craig David fanzines ahead of every single performance. The Spy also can’t divulge…

THE GAME PLAYS OUT AS A SERIES OF PROCEDURALLY-GENERATED CONTRACTS Dystopian cyberfuture megacorps are good if you’re a dystopian megacorp CEO or a dystopian finance reporter who enjoys dystopian quarterly earnings calls. But they’re great if you’re a mercenary looking to make a quick buck exploiting dystopian corporate rivalries for futurebucks. Lucky, then, that Hollowpoint focuses on the latter. You might remember the name because Hollowpoint was previously being published by Paradox and turned up at the Paradox Convention in 2015. With the termination of developer Ruffian and Paradox’s relationship, the future of Hollowpoint and its neon-outfitted gunfolk was uncertain. The game has now changed hands and is being developed solely by Red Kite – a Huddersfield-based team who have worked on…

Phil Savage: Here’s a new category for this year’s awards, designed to recognise an older game that nonetheless had a great 2017 through patches and free updates. And whatever you originally thought of No Man’s Sky when it released last year, this year marked a period of significant growth and improvement. Andy Kelly: At launch, No Man’s Sky felt like a shell of a game. I squeezed 20 hours out of it, which is not insignificant, but in that time I felt like I’d experienced everything this supposedly infinite universe had to offer. But over time, thanks to a procession of hefty free updates, the game has evolved into something much deeper and ultimately much better. Whether it’s base building, vehicles, new biomes or the story’s clearer, more hand-crafted structure,…

Chris Livingston: Some worlds you explore for loot or collectibles, some for secrets or bits of story, some for beautiful scenery. Open world stick figure RPG West of Loathing will have you scouring the world for jokes (there’s plenty of loot, too). Even with the main story and sidequests complete, it’s a world to linger in until you feel certain you’ve uncovered every last scrap of humour, read every last item description, absorbed every last line of dialogue. The writing is clever and fun, packed with both referential humour and big, broad laughs – even the options menu has a few jokes in it. Truly funny games are exceedingly rare and hard to come by, and West of Loathing is the best comedy I’ve played in years. Jody Macgregor:…

Philippa Warr: The thing people generally refer to as a game’s story is, in Tacoma’s case, a relatively straightforward mystery tale set in space. But the bulk of Tacoma’s actual storytelling resides in its artefacts, in its interactions and in its set dressing. Sure, I’d probably like to know where everyone on the space station has got to, but, far more importantly, I’ve just discovered a message which links up with the orchid I found in the doctor’s room and fleshes out a relationship in a tiny but touching way. These spaces aren’t just curated to give a cursory sense of character, they bubble and glow with echoes of the people who lived there. You can dig in and realise who they spent time with or what they preferred to…

Jake Hughes was working as a model designer on Starship Troopers when he received a call from Peter Marquardt. Marquardt was an actor – he played the bad guy in Robert Rodriguez’s first film, El Mariachi – but he also had a passion for games. The pair originally met on the set of Wing Commander IV, where Marquardt was shooting for the game’s cutscenes. “He calls me up and he says, ‘Hey, John Romero is making a company and they’re looking for associate producers, come on out,’” Hughes says. “Peter was working on Daikatana, and Tom Hall was needing an associate producer. So I came out and I met Tom, and we connected instantly … because they all knew about Starship Troopers.” A week later, Hughes was offered the job…

Strap yourself in: I’m going to talk about loot crates. A lot of people are angry about them – as EA recently discovered – and we’ve even had emails asking us to “come out hard on the side of the consumer.” Personally, I’m not a fan of loot crates – I don’t like to deal with random chance when I’m spending money. But I also dislike the mentality of ‘consumers’ versus creators. These issues usually require a more nuanced approach, and blanket condemnation is rarely of use. As usual, we’ll do what we always do: judging each game’s value on a case-by-case basis. Some loot crates, while they may not improve the game they’re attached to, don’t harm it either. See Assassin’s Creed Origins on the next page. Others do:…

MEDICAL CENTRE The new medical centre details players’ match loads, training loads, and injury susceptibility with the aim of better explaining why players come a cropper. SCOUTING Scouting has been overhauled with staff now providing streamlined snapshot report cards. A new scout recommendation score replaces the old star rating system. DYNAMICS FM 2018’s best feature has you managing players on and off the pitch – considering social relationships and influential players’ authority over their teammates.…

TIE/LN FIGHTER Makes hands-down the best spaceship noises of all time. Looks like a tiny sandwich made of two thin crackers and a single olive. Blows up often. 10/10 T-70 X-WING Someone cut all the engines in half. Stupid. 3/10 T-65B X-WING Named for what it looks like, which is efficient. It gets points because it allows me to exclaim, “X gonna give it to ya,” when I lock on with a proton torpedo. 9/10 FIRST ORDER TIE FIGHTER Brooding. Has frosted tips. Absolutely ruined. 1/10…

MOTHERBOARD Z370-A Pro MSI £100 What better place to start than with MSI’s Z370-A Pro. With plenty of expandability, it’s perfect for any entry rig. PROCESSOR Core i3-8100 Intel £109 Intel’s new Coffee Lake processors add an additional two cores to the lineup. Think of this as a Core i5 processor, but cheaper. GRAPHICS CARD GeForce GTX 1060 3GB EVGA £223 Its prices are haywire due to cryptocurrency mining, but this is still the best deal you can get right now. MEMORY Fury Black 8GB @2400 HyperX £92 DDR4 packs higher speeds, better energy efficiency and larger capacities. 8GB is still perfect for most games, too. POWER SUPPLY 500BQ EVGA £53 It may be cheap, but this 500W PSU is more than enough to handle any budget build. This rig…

SPIKES Big, deadly, blood-covered spikes. A great centrepiece and ice breaker if you decide to hold an unholy dinner party. ARCANE TOMES Ancient books filled with dark, forbidden knowledge. Read out a random spell for a laugh, like a deadly lucky dip. ASSORTED GUTS Bring a splash of colour to a tired old room with these bits of old guts, gibs and festering, bloated monster corpse. SKULLS No, they aren’t just for goths. The skull is the hot new item this season, giving any room a subtle hint of death.…

THE WITCHER Geralt of Rivia first came to life in 1993, in the stories of author Andrzej Sapkowski. A hit in Poland, it wasn’t until the Witcher videogame that the rest of the world fell in love with the White Wolf. SPEC OPS: THE LINE This brutal shooter is, like the film Apocalypse Now, based on Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella Heart of Darkness. It sees you hunting a rogue colonel in the sandstorm-blasted ruins of Dubai. METRO 2033 Based on a 2005 novel of the same name by author Dmitry Glukhovsky, Metro 2033 imagines a post-apocalyptic Russia where the survivors are forced to live in the city’s labyrinthine metro system. DYNASTY WARRIORS Another one based on an ancient Chinese novel, this time Luo Guanzhong’s Romance of the Three Kingdoms, written…

LUCY THE HEDGEHOG A world-famous influencer who, when she’s not saving the world from Eggman’s robot army, is entertaining millions of subscribers on her popular SonicTube channel. NOTE TO MARKETING May increase chance of streaming community engaging with product potentially decreasing , advertising spend. NOTE TO DESIGNER Teens will love Bozo’s edgy, rebellious persona. Maybe he could have a tattoo or a backwards baseball cap? BOZO THE SLOTH Bozo is a sarcastic sloth with a ‘screw you’ attitude. He’s famous for mocking Sonic and the gang, but is fundamentally good-hearted, using the power of memes as propaganda against Eggman. DAMON THE AARDVARK Damon is an Aardvark with a taste for the finer things, whether it’s butterscotch vape juice, herb-infused craft ale, or organic beard oil. And he rides a rocket-powered…