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The PC remaster of Halo 3 is another beautiful, robust polish job that shows just how well Bungie’s bombastic shooter series has aged. I recommend it heartily. Yes, it’s marred with some baffling narrative choices, bungled ally AI, and a few instances of phoned-in level design, of course. But then, in the immortal words of that astronaut meme, “always has been”. And at this point,…

Tagged with 343 Industries, brutes, Bungie, feature, Ruffian Games, Saber Interactive, Halo 3, Halo: The Master Chief Collection.

It’s taken time to build up a decent collection of Half-Life: Alyx mods, but not as long as I thought it would. People were building them before Valve released the proper SDK, and now it's out there are hundreds of levels, weapons and experiments. I had a great time sneaking through forgotten areas of City 17, or taking time out from Combine harvesting to toss…

Tagged with feature, Modder Superior, Valve, VR, VR games, Half-Life: Alyx.

I've only ever played bits and pieces of the Half-Life games, but it's been a delight learning the ins and outs of their creation from Half-Life: Alyx - Final Hours. It's a multimedia documentary on all things Valve - their (many) cancelled games, a close look at life during Alyx's development, and the ups and downs the developers went through in making sure Half-Life returned…

Tagged with feature, Geoff Keighley, Valve, Half-Life, Half-Life 3, Half-Life: Alyx, Half-Life: Alyx - Final Hours.

There's just four weeks to go now until Horizon Zero Dawn does a massive electric roar and charges towards us through our PC screens, and as RPS' resident HZD obsessive, I'm excited. And to my own surprise, possibly the thing I'm most excited about is the chance to just drink in the look of the game again. In fact, no. I don't want to drink…

Tagged with feature, Guerilla Games, Sony Interactive Entertainment, Horizon: Zero Dawn.

People in Fallout 76 are decent enough, in my experience. I forget whether I've related my first encounter with another player, where I accidentally blundered into their camp, then backed away in the panicky assumption that they'd attack me, only for them to instead drop a gift bag with a level-appropriate hunting rifle and some ammunition in it. I still have that rifle.Most people I've…

Tagged with Bethesda Game Studios, Bethesda Softworks, feature, hermit, Fallout 76.

I really like Project Winter, at least in theory. It's a classic hidden role multiplayer affair, where you're ostensibly Doing A Survival: there's a bunch of you stuck somewhere arctic, trying not to freeze or starve in a log cabin while also accomplishing tasks like repairing radio transmitters, with the eventual aim of summoning an escape helicopter. But as Matt put it in a recent…

Tagged with feature, Have You Played, Other Ocean Group, Other Ocean Interactive, Project Winter.

Playing a big ol' chunk of Assassin's Creed Valhalla made me realise how much the series has changed since the first game in 2007. If you played Altaïr's first adventure and then skipped straight to Valhalla, where big buff blonde viking Eivor is running around 9th century England, you probably wouldn't realise they were in the same series. Assassin's Creed Valhalla doesn't feel like an…

Tagged with feature, preview, Ubisoft, Ubisoft Montreal, Assassin's Creed Valhalla.

I don't go round singing "Maybe It's Because I'm A Londoner!" or anything, but out of all the places I've lived so far, London is the one I think of as home. And this so happens to be the setting for hacktion-adventure game Watch Dogs Legion, which is definitely not called Watch Dogs London despite how often I accidentally say that. It's a dystopian near-future…

Tagged with feature, preview, Ubisoft, Ubisoft Toronto, Watch Dogs Legion.

NotE3 resumes this weekend with both Ubisoft and Devolver Digital hosting their own announce-o-blast streams. Six weeks into whatever the hell we're calling this summer games marketing-o-rama, man, I miss E3. Bring back E3. While I've expressed some frustrations with it over the years, I didn't realise the alternative was an endless sprawl of endless streams largely showing the same games over and over. At…

Tagged with Playing This Weekend.

From an early age, humans know that if they want to be taken seriously, they must learn how to deliver a convincing car noise. Vrrrrummm, they might say. Or perhaps: brrrrrr-bp-brrr. These are the nascent efforts of the budding speed freak, and they must be respected. But once again the realm of videogames encroaches upon the germinal life of the human with pitiless velocity. Car…

Tagged with feature, One Off The List, Batman: Arkham Knight, Burnout Paradise, Far Cry 4, Grand Theft Auto V, Halo: Combat Evolved, Jalopy, Mad Max, My Summer Car, Rocket League, Satisfactory.

Fallout 76 recently kicked off its new seasonal update system. The opening season is called "The Legendary Run", and gives the game another new arbitrary point-tracking system, this time called "S.C.O.R.E.". More significantly, it's also opened up the option for players to create and join teams with unfamiliar players. I've been giving that a go and it's... well, an improvement. A bit.

Tagged with Bethesda Game Studios, Bethesda Softworks, feature, Fallout 76.

My favourite Thomas the Tank Engine book is 'Zlatko the Shunter', the one where Thomas travels to Yugoslavia for his holidays, makes friends with a Series 621, and becomes a committed market socialist. Sadly, the little orange Zlatkos that are everywhere in Derail Valley: Overhauled have nothing to say on the subject of planned economies, worker self-management, and the perils of unchecked incentivisation. If they…

Tagged with The Flare Path, Derail Valley.

I appreciate a good brute. I like the word itself, apart from anything else. It just sort of falls out of your mouth like a lead ball, that'll probably break your toe when it lands. It's a dim, mean-spirited word, like "fruit", but too preoccupied with simplistic violence to know how to spell itself. "Brute" has the same sort of mouthfeel as "dunce", "thud", "trudge"…

Tagged with brutes, feature, Mojang Studios, Minecraft.

In Democratic Socialism Simulator, a turtle will pop up and ask what you want to do about the housing crisis. Fox News will slander you, and the New Pork Times will demand your comment on "the blackface incident". You're the newly elected president of American, see, and it's your job to bring about socialism. Clock's ticking.

Tagged with feature, Have You Played, Molleindustria, Democratic Socialism Simulator.

The content battlecruiser that is World Of Warcraft has been sailing for the best part of two decades. I’m almost thirty-two. I started playing this game when I was seventeen. It’s surreal to type that out - and it’s also one of the reasons why the people I try to introduce to this behemoth of an experience often tap out.Thankfully, this may change. With the…

Tagged with Blizzard Entertainment, feature, World of Warcraft, World of Warcraft: Shadowlands.

Ever since the Night City Wire the other week, CDProjekt Red seem to have opened the dam on Cyberpunk 2077 info. The slow drip-feed of news about their upcoming action RPG, based on the famous TTRPG and set in a futuristic neon dystopia of high-tech body modding and greedy megacorps, has increased, and now we're getting a steady trickle of new art and ray traced…

Tagged with CD Projekt Red, feature, Cyberpunk 2077.

There was a period about two years ago where I'd play a few games of the digital version of Race For The Galaxy every single day after work. It's a very fiddly board game about conquering space by building planets and industrial developments, as represented by your tableau of up to 13 cards. The game ends when that thirteenth card goes down, at which point…

Tagged with board games, feature, Temple Gates Games, Race For The Galaxy, Roll For The Galaxy.

You have probably not played Ptarmigeddon. I mean, I can promise you upfront it does exist. It was a VR game from 2017, where you played as Wayne Discipline, a CIA agent embedded with Afghan Guerillas during the proxy war against the Soviets in the 80s. As a Russian force advances on the pass he's stationed in, Wayne curses the poor equipment available to his…

Tagged with feature, fictional games, Have You Played, Rebellion Developments, ptarmigeddon.

There are many reasons you should be playing Hardspace: Shipbreaker. It is full of so many details that my idle thought of "I wonder if I could write five things about it" became a list of a dozen within ten minutes. The basic idea is that you fly around disused spaceships and gradually cut them apart for scrap and salvage, in a full 3D simulation…

Tagged with a lovely list feature for you to enjoy, Blackbird Interactive, feature, Hardspace: Shipbreaker.