Innholdsfortegnelse for November 2021 i PC Gamer

ROBIN VALENTINE Twitter @robinlvalentine This month Held all sorts of things in his hands without Valve’s assistance. Well now, it’s not often we get to put a console on the cover, is it? OK, technically it’s more of a handheld PC, but whatever it is, it feels like it could be a huge step forward for this hobby of ours… or a very costly stumble. Across our huge feature, we’ve broken down absolutely everything you need to know, informed by a hands-on at Valve’s offices, a chat with the device’s developers, a full run through the technical specs, and a dash of expert opinion. I just hope that in a world where you can play your entire Steam library on the bus, you’ll still find time to read a magazine……

HIGHS Epic Spend Epic’s spent $500 million on the Epic Store so far, and doesn’t expect it to turn a profit till 2027. EA Does Good (Really) EA made an Accessibility First Patent Pledge so other developers are free to copy them. A Grande Old Time Fortnite saw players enjoying an Ariana Grande concert. So that’s nice. LOWS Stranger Deals Dead by Daylight’s Stranger Things crossover will be removed from the game in November. Cyberfunk CDPR continues to doggedly patch Cyberpunk 2077, but patch 1.3 faced a backlash at the lack of changes. PlayerUnknown Battlegrounds: ’s Battlegrounds PUBG has now been officially renamed as PUBG: Battlegrounds.…

After long getting by with the ported mobile versions of the early Final Fantasy games, at last Square Enix announced it would treat PC players to proper remasters. When we finally got a look at the Final Fantasy Pixel Remasters though, the reactions quickly got chaotic. What fans focused on in the first trailer wasn’t the refreshed pixel art or newly arranged classic songs, but the tragically condensed sans-serif font that left awkward amounts of blank space in menus and text boxes. It was indeed difficult to ignore. A dozen font-replacement mods were online just days after launch. How does such a small (but clearly vital) decision go wrong? And who actually chooses the fonts that games use? “It really depends on the game and the team,” says John Ricciardi,…

Pictures of the Steam Deck couldn’t prepare me for seeing it in person. After working on the Steam Deck in secret for years, Valve invited us to its offices to be among the first to test out the handheld gaming PC, before game developers have even gotten their hands on it. And wow, is it big. This is the full tower PC case of videogame handhelds. Once I actually picked up the Steam Deck, though, the size didn’t seem to matter much. At 1.47 pounds it isn’t too heavy to hold comfortably. It’s wide, but the inputs are close enough to reach naturally. The button arrangement may look a little odd, but it fits how you grip the device. The Steam Deck is as big as it needed to be…

1 D-Pad Valve says one of the Deck’s key designers is a diehard fighting game fan, so this d-pad got a lot of love. It’s clicky and, most importantly, rocks from the centre so you can pull off sweeps and quarter circles with ease. 2 Grips The Deck’s top-heavy button placement makes sense as soon as you hold it. The sculpted sides encourage you to cradle it near the top, and give you a lot more to grip onto than the Switch’s flat joycons. 3 Steam button The Steam button gives the Deck the console-like power to suspend games and jump back to your library or go into sleep mode. Think of it as a supercharged Steam overlay. 4 Display With a 1280 x 800 native resolution the Valve has…

There’s something weirdly mythical about the historical 4X and the dominance of one series, Civilization, for 30 years. Amplitude Studios has been working on a challenger for a decade, preparing to rewrite the myth. Humankindis the result: a behemoth that’s kept me on its hooks until sunrise a few times. But in trying to make its own Civ, Amplitude may have sacrificed too much of what made its games such compelling weirdos. It’s good to make enemies early on and know where you stand This is not to say that Humankind doesn’t have any bold ideas. It’s clear that isn’t the case as soon as you hop into a campaign. Normally you’d need to pick a civ, faction, or race of nerdy dragons first, and then plonk down a city,…

1 TARGET LOCKED The new hacking device isn’t a gun – it’s a field that will latch onto any enemies or switches in range. You’re given multiple options, for instance: to slow down enemies or disable weapons. 2 BAR NONE It’s probably not called MP, but some hacks cost more of the game’s new MP bar than others. You can extend it by spending skill points, which are hidden around the world. 3 WHY BOTHER Hacking is one option – but you could also whack the enemy a few times instead. It’s a sophisticated system, used occasionally during puzzles, but combat feels too brief to ever require it.…

I’m stuffed into a motorcycle sidecar with a bag full of cash, and two bank robbers wearing balaclavas are on the main bike beside me. We’re travelling well past 200mph and the cops are hot on our tail, so I’m tasked with picking up wads of the stolen money and chucking them at the tailing police car. As the cash hits the cop’s windscreen like a burst of green confetti, I can’t help but reflect on how I got myself caught up in this ridiculous situation. Young people have started to flee the country, scared of the regime This exhilarating motorcycle chase is one of the many scenarios that Road 96’s procedural system has thrown me into. It’s a road trip adventure about hitchhiking across Petria, a country slowly being…

Hell Let Loose is the sort of game that convinces me we’re in the golden age of the multiplayer FPS. No matter what kind of first-person shooting you’re into, there’s probably a good game out there designed to scratch your specific itch. For military sim fans, Hell Let Loose is one of those games. It answers the question, “What if there was a truly hardcore Battlefield?” The main game mode is basically one huge match of Rush with one team pushing and the other defending, but you can’t just respawn on a squadmate every time you die. You can only respawn on Outposts placed by a squad leader or at larger Garrisons that have to be built from scratch. Let the enemy overrun your Garrison and you’re forced to run…

1 when Tug on a the message telephone can be intercepted and you’ll get a set of dials to turn to start breaking codes. 2 to Open send the out hatch your ships for combat, and land in cities. 3 interface Pulls up another for launching planes. 4 select Here’s your where ships you forsneak attacks. 5 why Missiles not, ? there Yes sure are also missiles! 6 button The SOS . 7 where The actual you move map, and enemy information is documented.…

There’s perhaps 1/5th of a cult hit in Postbird in Provence, a game about delivering mail around a picturesque French village. Despite being a bird – creatures that notably have wings – you deliver packages by bicycle, pootling through the narrow streets, skidding round corners and hurtling up ramps like Evel Kn’eagle, and fingers crossed I get away with that terrible pun. I say ‘1/5th’ because, like so many free games, Postbirdis very short. Just as I was finishing what I thought was the tutorial – consisting of just a few deliveries to a clutch of villagers – the game unexpectedly wrapped up. Thankfully, you can load your save file and continue exploring, and you should, because it’s like being on holiday. There’s a journal that fills in with every…

Going back to an old game is like waking up on New Year’s Day. You erupt out of bed with fresh drive and purpose. Then you realise it’s March and you’ve spent three months watching the same video about cranial nerve examinations instead of Unity tutorials and the only book you’ve read is about vegetables that look like celebrities. It’s still possible to lose hours faffing about in its homicidal toybox This is the thought that occurs to me as I try, for the second or third time, to kill a man by flushing his head down the bog. You always go into Hitmanpredicting a degree of efficiency. You expect to sashay your objectives and escape while your target’s body is still warm. But Hitmanis a dark temptress, beckoning you…

There’s always one game in these lists that removes all doubt when it comes to the theme. This time: disguises. It’s also a month-appropriate game, because Halloween waddles toward us like an insulin-resistant child in a pirate outfit. Costume Quest is the warmest, most autumnal slice of American seasonality you can play on PC. And if it feels like a Pixar spin-off, there’s a good reason: director Tasha Sounart worked there for years before joining DoubleFine, then returned to become associate creative director of theme parks, a job title so nice it sounds like it was made as a reward at the end of a Muppets movie. And it’s likely why Costume Quest feels like a cosy ghost train.…

Just over a year ago, a friend messaged me with an idea. Halo 3 had just hit Steam via The Master Chief Collection, and he was planning on getting a bunch of pals together to play a few rounds of Slayer like it was 2007 all over again. Fifty-two weekends later (give or take) and we’re still going, testament to the fact that this wasn’t just an experiment in nostalgia. Every weekend we’ll gather for an evening of Halo 3shenanigans. Here’s how a night usually goes. It starts with a small free-for-all on Guardian to warm up, waiting for folks to finish up their dinner and jump in. We’ll move onto our staple of bigger maps as the gang arrives – The Pit, High Ground, Ghost Town – and maybe…

I got drunk once and an expensive, PC Gamer recommended steering wheel showed up a week later. I rationalised that it would help my wife to overcome her driving anxiety, but it turns out Euro Truck Simulator 2 doesn’t really help with that. British roads are already too narrow for an American who hit another car on her driving test, let alone when you’re backing up a lorry. So, after a brief honeymoon, the wheel, gears and pedals started getting in the way and were stored, temporarily, back in their box. The weeks became months, and you can guess the rest. Haunted by their presence, and after rolling F & 1 in my unused Steam library lottery – a fairly unambiguous sign from the gaming gods – I plugged them…

TALL STORY 1 you When ’ll be you stuck first on arrive the in island Inazuma of , Ritou. To unlock the ability to explore the rest of the region, and gain access to the Adventurer’s Guild, continue with the Archon quest line until you’re sent to Inazuma City. MAPPED OUT 2 of Find the and Seven activate across the Inazuma three Statues to uncover the complete map of the entire region. You’ll find one statue on each of the three main islands, and locating each will make getting around the area that much easier. LENS FLARE 3 Sacrificial Make sure Offering you complete world the quest to pick up the Memento Lens. This is a new gadget in 2.0 that can reveal hidden objects at various locations across Inazuma…

SERIFS A font’s fancy feet. Sans-serif fonts don’t have them (the French for ‘without’ is ‘sans’ don’t you know). TRACKING The standard space between all letters. Not to be confused with the kerning between just two letters. MONOWIDTH A font where every letter is designed to take up the same amount of space, even an ‘I’ and ‘m’. FILLED COUNTERS When isolated negative space within a letter such as ‘O’ or ‘P’ is filled solid. But not ‘A’ for some reason.…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE First half of 2022 DEVELOPER Bulwark Studios PUBLISHER Kasedo Games LINK dolos.org You just test-fired the experimental engine on your orbiting space station and, well… it kinda blew up the moon. That’s not even the worst bit of news you’ll get today. In Ixion, you’re managing a space station and its crew as things quickly go from bad to worse to utterly unthinkable. The developer and publisher of Ixion, Bulwark Studios and Kasedo Games, walked me through the first half-hour of the city building and colony management sim, which serves as a tutorial and sets the stage for the calamity that will change everything. You’re the administrator of the space station orbiting Earth, charged with getting things up and running: managing the power supply, maintaining the…

Why stop your Steam Deck gaming with your Steam library? Dream bigger: Valve’s handheld PC will also be able to play retro and modern consoles games thanks to emulators, most of which run natively on Linux. It has the potential to be the greatest emulation device ever made. “Everyone I know has relatively high hopes for the Steam Deck,” said JMC4789, a contributor to GameCube/Wii emulator Dolphin. JMC4789 is optimistic about how well Dolphin could run on the Steam Deck, and so are the developers of Switch emulator Yuzu. “We believe that the hardware should likely be capable enough to run some games pretty well right out of the box, and potentially run Yuzu very well with optimisations to the emulator,” the developers said. EMULATORS MAY NEED UI OVERHAULS TO…

DIFFICULTY Empire is the first difficulty level to provide a proper challenge, with aggressive leaders and cultures. MAP SIZE Each map size is recommended for a specific number of players, and is relatively balanced for that number, so choose wisely. SPEED Normal is fine, but I recommend picking slow, which lets you spend more time with each culture. AI I like playing against six opponents. The AI hasn’t made much of a difference in my games, so I just go with who has the most punchable face, as usual.…

Aliens: Fireteam Elite is dumb explosive fun – a swarm-based action game that’s derivative of both Left 4 Dead and Gears of War, but with a few nice touches of its own. It has that competent mid-budget feel that’s becoming identifiable as publisher Focus Home’s house style, with sparse story and cheesy dialogue and NPCs who talk without opening their mouths. It’s also very co-op dependent, and how good a time you have will be dictated by whether you play alongside real people or the voiceless bots that stand in for them. Who knew that there was so much diversity among xeno species? Set across four chapters of three missions each, the Fireteamcampaign is a slideshow of distinctly ‘Alien’ environments. There’s the occasional pretty vista, but your traversal of these…

King’s bounty is an odd series, always more strategy than RPG, more a game of tactics, cash upkeep, and combat manoeuvring than one of epic roleplaying and exploration. In theory, King’s Bounty II wants to change that, to make it a story that follows a main character whose choices affect the world. King’s Bounty II does just that, and it sucks the fun right out of it. Though it has the occasional joy, it simply wastes far too much of your time. In King’s Bounty II you pick one of three characters to take through the main story, each of which follows the same plot. Having been released from prison your character takes on a bog-standard fantasy magical apocalypse because a wizard told you you’re the chosen saviour. It’s nothing…

Warhammer 40,000: Battlesector is the latest attempt at putting some of the scale of tabletop 40K onto our screens. Which is to say, it’s another turn-based tactics game about the Space Marines. But rather than generic armoured lummoxes it features one of the more interesting flavours: Blood Angels, the marines you get into if you watched too many horror movies when you were young. It’s a vivid portrayal of manly but doomed space vampires Blood Angels suffer from Red Thirst, making them literally and figuratively bloodthirsty. In Battlesectorthis means they get more momentum points, which are normally earned for kills, the closer they are to their enemies – the enemies in this game being the dinobug alien Tyranids. When a unit gets 100 momentum they ‘surge’, getting a movement bonus…

Colorfiction makes games that transport you to another time and place. For instance, Becalmis a boat ride, while Nightlineevokes a city subway. They’re walking simulators, I suppose – sometimes without any actual walking – instead allowing you to be, as the city passes around you, or the water laps reassuringly at your sailboat. Nodomusis going for an emotion other than serenity or quiet urban contentment. Awe, perhaps. And with a splodge of horror thrown in too. This time, rather than being somewhere from a first-person perspective, you’re viewing the camera feeds of several drones, which are fixated on some possibly dreadful event. You can’t move the drones, but you can zoom in and out, and turn the volume up and down. My best guess is we’re watching an alien entity…

You have to feel sorry for Chuck Greene. It’s bad enough that he looks like the reflection of an Easter Island statue on the back of a spoon and his daughter is a probably-zombie. But then Case West comes along and retcons him from his own game. That’s like spending ages reviewing a game, only for some berk to shamble up years later and change your scor… oh. Yes. Lack of Frankness aside, Dead Rising 2 is an absolute riot. Working against the clock is still a thing, but there are fewer of the maddening frustrations that damaged the first game. Plus, among many other things, you can dress up in a hula dress and blend zombie heads with a murder bucket.…

With the expert timing exhibited by all great comedians, we wrote in these pages earlier this year about cryptocurrency mining and encryption, only for the whole crypto landscape to suddenly change. At a time when Norton is launching crypto-mining antivirus software, Nvidia has taken steps to reduce the mining hashrates of its latest gaming GPUs, and yet crypto prices remain high, and low, and high again. It can sometimes feel that trying to keep up with this sector of the tech market is an impossible task. Not only does it move fast, but it can surprise you with every new twist and turn. Especially where its environmental viability is concerned. Enter the president of El Salvador, a tiny Central American country with an area ever so slightly greater than that…

With its surreal, creepy visuals, distinctive combat, and solid metroidvania level design, Grime was a lovely indie surprise for me this month. I just wish it wasn’t trying to be Dark Souls. I like the Soulsgames well enough, but for me their influence on the indie scene has been pretty tragic. It feels like these days any time I spot any kind of action game with a cool, attention-grabbing art-style, it turns out to be burying its best features under borrowed ideas. Grime’s world is so intriguing – a bizarre alien landscape inhabited by malformed rock people and worse. It somehow evokes an unsettling atmosphere of body horror in a setting where everyone’s made out of minerals, and you can’t help but want to know what it’s all about and…

Even though Minecraft has gotten new monsters, new blocks, new biomes and even new planes of existence over the last ten years, some things have stayed consistent. And one of these golden rules I never thought would be broken is the fact that the world was 256 layers tall, from the depth of the deepest cavern to the highest point you could place a block. With the Caves and Cliffs update (part of which is already out and the rest is slated for later this year), that’s finally changing. A lot. With the new world generation code, the underground portion of Minecraft is doubling in size. If you like to dig too greedily and too deep, this is amazing news. Before the update, layer zero was where the game would…

1 SKY-HIGH Summoning an Electrogranum lets you use Thunder Spheres to travel quickly through the air and get to hard-to-reach places or collect impossibly high Electroculi. 2 BARRIER ISLAND You’ll find Thunder Barriers dotted around the region and you’ll need an Electrogranum to get past them. Upgrading the Sacred Sakura Tree lets you get through the higher-strength barriers. 3 THUNDER STRUCK There are various areas around Inazuma affected by Balethunder. Summoning an Electrogranum will temporarily nullify its damaging effects and let you get across small areas in relative safety.…

“Leaving Karaz-a-Karak. Is it too early to send a postcard? Also, I forgot my lunchbox, what am I going to eat now?” “Athel Loren. Hate it. Hard to breathe the fresh, leafy air and the trees keep giving my axe funny looks.” “My first trip in a Dreadnought! It’s like being inside an Ironbreaker who can float. Not as bad as it sounds.” “Sailed past Ulthuan, where even the mountains look weak and elfy. Don’t bother unless you’re invading.” “Finally arrived! It’s flatter, hotter, and greener than expected. Can I come back home now?”…

During the frigid Canadian winters, the forest behind my house became a battlefield. Every night I’d meet my friends there and distribute our collection of toy guns and then we’d reenact the scenes we had seen in war movies. I vividly remember sitting in the snow, back against a tree, pretending I was pinned down by my friend who was now a German sniper. I was ten years old and blessed with an absurdly active imagination. Immersion was everything, so crawling for an hour through freezing slush just to get to safety was not out of the question. This was just one of the ways my childlike fascination with war manifested itself. Between gory drawings of battlefields or watching what few WWII documentaries I was allowed to see, ten-year-old me…

Digital Extremes’ Warframeis a live service game which makes money largely through cosmetics, and the developer embraces community content. In 2015 it started a competition called TennoGen, where artists can submit cosmetic designs for inclusion in the game. If the work makes it, the artist gets a 30% cut. It can result in a life-changing amount of money. Lendel Fajardo (LED2012 online) is one such creator who has spent six years working on Warframecreations. Fajardo’s first submission was rejected, which only made him more determined. “I started reading and watching tutorials on the processes in making 3D assets,” Fajardo says. “I kept trying but I couldn’t seem to handle how to properly design helmets and full skins so I focused more on Syandanas [capes].” I WAS EARNING TEN TIMES, SOMETIMES…

THERE’S A SWEET SPOT FOR STORYTELLING THAT STRADDLES THE PRESENT AND THE FUTURE Have you ever fallen down a ‘wiki-hole’? Or played Six Degrees of Wikipedia, finding the shortest hyperlink path from, say, Denzel Washington to the page for Boring, Oregon? The truth is, we’d gamified online encyclopaedias long before writer Joannes Truyens got to them. “There’s an immediate literacy there,” he says. “Wikipedia as a medium lends itself to non-linear storytelling.” The goal of Truyens’ game, Neurocracy, is to solve a murder by digging through a near-future version of the site – bouncing between pages, unpicking the revision history as events unfold and finding the human drama hidden between the lines of dry, matter-of-fact prose. The tagline of the fictional Omnipedia is ‘building your world’; Truyens’ own touchpoint for…

After months of rumours about just what’s going on with Call of Duty this year, Call of Duty: Vanguard has been confirmed as the next mainline game in the series. This new entry takes the series back to WWII with a campaign that lead developer Sledgehammer Games hopes will feel new to the series. Sledgehammer, which hasn’t led development on a CoD game since Call of Duty: WWII, is shaking things up by setting most of the campaign after the official end of the war. Hitler is dead, the Nazis have lost, but the Allies learn of a troubling plan (called Project Phoenix) to somehow facilitate Hitler’s successor. What the heck does that even mean? Your guess is as good as mine. Vanguard’s main villain is the fictional Heinrich Freisinger…

VALVE STEAM DECK The Steam Deck is a whole gaming PC that you can hold and control in two hands. That’s both its biggest strength and potentially its greatest weakness. It means there is a huge back catalogue of games available to the Deck, starting with Steam itself, but stretching out to every other PC gaming store front out there, all delivering games to your handheld machine. But there’s the potential issues with Linux game compatibility for its SteamOS, and the fact that it feels like a genuinely hefty system to hold for a long gaming sesh. IN SHORT Access to the biggest game catalogue around Impressive-looking AMD APU LPDDR5 could be a game-changer Some games not optimised for Deck or SteamOS Likely less accessible to use Bulky and heavy…

I can remember the last time I felt excited about a Metroidvania. It was Axiom Verge, a game inspired more by the original Metroid than the other half of the equation, Symphony of the Night. Its standout feature was a device that let you ‘hack’ the world, by turning foes into friends or clearing glitched-out obstacles. In truth, the Axiom Disruptor was just a power-up like any other, but it gave the illusion of letting you mess rebelliously with the game code. I mention the Disruptor – such an iconic element of the original game – because it’s absent from this daring sequel, replaced by a similar hacking tool that’s perhaps more versatile, but less exciting to use. It’s emblematic of a game that has changed almost every aspect of…

5% ALIEN Distilled horror and avuncular androids gone bad? Nope, not really, but there is the occasional cheap scare. 60% ALIENS Squad-based action and a steady strum of radar plips, but lacks the solid action story. 0% ALIEN 3 No prison-break tones or Charles Dance in Fireteam – a shame for those of us who enjoyed this series outlier. 25% ALIEN: RESURRECTION Fireteam has some of the silly dialogue of this late ’90s mishap. 10% ALIEN: COVENANT No homoerotic androids, but brings in some interesting Engineer lore.…

You can tell a lot about a game’s soul by what it deems a ‘perk’. In Psychonauts 2, Double Fine will sell you a ‘beastmastery’ pin badge modifier that allows Raz’s psychic fist – usually used for thumping and tossing – to stroke woodland animals. You spend money to hurt fewer things. Another pin makes him groove when left unattended; dance like no is watching, when no one is playing. Honestly? It’s a tonic. Feels like The Incredibles and The Muppets chucked in a blender As headlines go ‘Tim Schafer game favours silliness over sadism’ is hardly a shocker. But it’s been 15 years since the original; time enough to forget how silly Psychonautscan be, and the startling places those jokes can take us. Of course, for the game’s inhabitants,…

The Forgotten City is a time loop game, one that makes excellent use of its magical reset button. You begin the adventure in the present day, stumbling into some ancient Roman ruins filled with golden statues before being whisked back in time through a portal. You arrive in the same Roman city, but now it’s pristine and all those statues are living people. What happened to them? Why were they turned into gold? Began as a mod for Skyrim before being recreated in the Unreal Engine The answers to those questions require lots of conversations with the citizens, who are almost without fail well-crafted characters, many with troubling secrets and interesting stories to tell. And the time loop is your best weapon, transforming you from a confused newcomer to a…

HighFleet, is a far-future action-strategy game involving airships fighting a civil war during the death of an empire. It all feels like it’s the product of a singular vision, consistently styled and with systems that all seem to fit together and channel players into its mindset. Under most circumstances, this is the kind of game I’d happily recommend as unique and exciting. There’s just one small problem: I hate this game. Controlling the ships is a constant tug-of-war with gravity The narrative of what you do in HighFleetsounds mesmerising. You negotiate with local warlords for alliances! Crack codes! Design new ships! Fly them around in intense combat, dodging bullets and launching missiles! All presented as their own little minigame or mechanic. It’s also cleverly put together, with an interface that…

I probably spend most of my time with retro-styled shooters being distracted by the pixel art: appreciating the cardboard-thin enemy sprites, and textures that (hopefully) warp when you get up close. The illusion is difficult to conjure, and all too easy to break, but Killspiracy TV feels pretty authentic to first-person shooters of the late ’90s, even as it ditches their typical level design for procedural mazes. In each, your goal is to rescue a bunch of cultists – cowl-wearing types with televisions for heads – before hoofing it back to the entrance portal, if you can find it. I like the outlandish enemy and weapon designs, and the stages themed around graveyards, pyramids and other atmospheric settings. There are some impressive visual effects, including a low-poly mist I could…

A2011 study by psychologists Jonathan D Leavitt and Nicholas J S Christenfeld of the University of California showed that humans don’t actually like surprises. Each group read three mystery stories. Some had the twists ruined, others went in cold. Across all conditions, people enjoyed the spoiled stories the most. And that’s perhaps why Prey is such a nerve-shredding experience. There’s only so many times a bar stool can turn into a scurrying intergalactic meat-spider before you stop going ‘oooh, you got me!’ and start gobbling Xanax. There are few other reasons Prey’s constant state of unseen threat is troubling. Firstly and most damningly, the combat is slightly unsatisfying. If I want to effectively waft a wrench around I’ll stop writing and become a car mechanic. The speed and surprise of…

Sure, you could stick to making TikTok videos on your phone, but if you’re serious about making a professional impression on the web, a quality webcam could be your first step toward internet fame and fortune. In fact, a world without webcams doesn’t bear thinking about. Without them, the well-loved world of Vloggers and Twitch streamers would be all but diminished, along with your chance to make a name for yourself as an internet personality. If that thought has you excited, or if you just need to appear less pixelated, or prove you’re out of bed in online meetings, it’s time to have your face witnessed by a crystal-clear, high-definition webcam. The main considerations in choosing a camera are image quality, ease of use, software utility, and whether the built-in…

WUDONGDE HYDRO STATION CHINA Fully operational this year, this dam is expected to generate 39 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity a year. INGA III DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO A third dam (Inga I is pictured) tapping into the power of the powerful Inga falls would generate 4,500 MW of electricity. KEEYASK HYDRO STATION CANADA Opening this year, the generator on the Nelson River (pictured) will have a capacity of approx 630 megawatts. HORNSEA WIND FARM UK Phase Two of this English development should provide 1.2GW of energy via 165 turbines in the North Sea.…

Man, Night City left me cold. As a fan of dark future cities, I was excited to explore the streets of Cyberpunk 2077’s setting. But the closer I looked the more I stopped believing in it as an actual place. Which is the opposite of the experience I had with The Ascent, a new action RPG made by a tiny 11-person indie team made up of veteran game designers. The Ascent is set in The Arcology, which is essentially an entire city squeezed into a monolithic skyscraper. It’s a vast, multi-tiered metropolis. It’s derivative, sure, but rendered with such fidelity and style that I found it hard to care. It’s honestly mind-blowing how good it looks, and the sheer depth of detail impressed me way more than Night City ever…

It can be hard going back to play a game you loved years ago. Sometimes nostalgia is strong enough to overlook things like ageing graphics, tinny sound and fewer of the features we’ve become accustomed to with modern games. But sometimes no matter how much you enjoyed a game in the past, it’s just too difficult to get back into it again when so many years, or even decades, have gone by. And it can be especially hard convincing other people to play a game from a couple decades ago. I can tell people until I’m blue in the face that LucasArts’ 1994 dogfighting simulator TIE Fighter isn’t just the one of the best Star Wars games ever, but that it’s one of the best games ever, full stop. It’s…