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(Image credit: Wizards of the Coast)
Great moments in PC gaming are bite-sized celebrations of some of our favorite gaming memories.
Magic: The Gathering Arena(Image credit: Wizards of the Coast)Developer: Wizards Digital Games Studio
Year: 2019Magic: The Gathering can be a harsh game to master. I've been playing for longer than some of you have been alive, and I've enjoyed the highs and lows that come with any game that's based on luck as well as skill. You can play perfectly but still come up short, or you can throw your cards down with reckless abandon and somehow pull a win out of it. I'm certainly no master, but I still enjoy it.
The best games are those where you're ripping cards at just the right time, playing to your deck's strengths, and trying to fathom what your opponent can draw to beat you. Those are the games you remember. And they don't have to be in-person either, as Magic Arena proved during the lockdown. Just the game, a good expansion, and a decent interface is enough to create these memories.
Magic Arena supports plenty of formats, including mini-tournaments that play far quicker than they ever can in real life. Quick Draft is the easiest of these to get into, where you draft against bots instead of real people. There are no time limits on your picks and the next pack is passed to you the moment you pick a card, which is great, although on the downside the bots can make some weird choices, so it's not always the most realistic draft.
Still, once you've got your pile of cards and made your deck, you then get to play against real people, and this is where those memories are made. Ridiculous bombs, beautiful deck synergies, last-minute rips, disconnects, and outrageous aggro plays can all make for a fun drafting experience. It's a shame you can't enjoy a scattering of trash talk at the same time, but that's probably best left to face-to-face tournaments anyway.
Ideally, at the end of it all, you'll hit seven wins before you amass three losses. That way you cover your entry fee and then some and, importantly, can do another draft. There are seven players between you and this goal though, and they want the same thing.
It can be tense and more often than not frustrating too. You're generally matched based on your current season ranking, so at the start of each month it's pretty easy to pull out a win or two, but as you progress it gets tougher and tougher to string those wins together. Winning a draft is never simple, even if you have a brilliant deck. All of which contributes to making that first win feel good, like proof you've got a bit better at Magic—one step closer to mastering it.
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Strange Horticulture sets you up to think it's another cozy game about running a shop—a puzzle game where you flick through your book of plants, examine the fungus and ferns and find the right medicinal herb or decorative flower for each customer. Slowly, as it goes on, Strange Horticulture trowels a layer of creeping dread over this wholesome setup. A narrative grows out of it, a story of mystery and ritual murder that plays out through the customers, no less strange than the horticulture, who keep returning to your shop.
Though Strange Horticulture didn't come completely out of nowhere, having a demo at Steam Next Fest in 2021 that made everyone's list of favorites, it was still a surprise just how good the finished game turned out to be. Chris Livingston gave it a score of 90 and called it "the best detective game I've played in years".
Development studio Bad Viking is two brothers, Rob and John Donkin, who actually have over a decade of development history behind them. Nobody noticed because almost all of it happened in the world of Flash games.
On an ancient internet without social media, with prohibitive download limits and legions of students with nothing better to do, websites like Newgrounds, Miniclip, Armor Games, and Kongregate were the places to go for free games. You didn't need a lightning-fast connection speed to play Line Rider or The Last Stand. And you didn't need to be an expert programmer to make one of your own. Rob Donkin was still a university student when he made Pondskater, a game about eating flies and dodging bees, collecting power-ups like a mounted machine gun to shoot bees with. In the cartoon games that dominated Flash, that kind of thing was pretty common.
"I had fun making it," Rob says, "and it was fun to be able to just release it and people would actually play it straight away, which you kind of can't do anymore. But that was the good old Flash days—you just chuck stuff online and people start playing it and tell you how silly it is."
His follow-up, Panda Tactical Sniper, was equally silly. "You were a sniper and the panda would tell you stuff to shoot. It was pretty weird, but people loved it. That was quite a successful game, and that got me a sponsorship. I suddenly realized, 'OK, you can earn money from this,' and went straight into doing that full-time out of uni."
Sponsorships meant adding a given web portal's branding to your game, usually a pre-loading logo and a "play more games" link that led to their site. For several years Flash sponsorships were a decent way to earn a living as a bedroom coder. When Rob's brother John lost his job in the film industry, Rob invited him to try his hand at game design too.
(Image credit: Bad Viking)Their first joint release was The Adventures of Red, an adventure game where you solved puzzles on a quest for a chocolate muffin. It racked up a decent player count and suggested they made a good team. "We just sort of stuck with it and started making more Flash games and then set up our company together," John says. "We're still here 10 years later, which is remarkable really."
...we didn't really know how to put a game on mobile and have it grow organically
Rob Donkin"In those days it was so much easier," Rob says. "Now, if you want to make money from games, starting out, I don't know how you do it because there isn't that model of 'make stuff in a couple of months, put something out there'."
Pondskater took only weeks to make, and even the more advanced games the two made together were completed and released quickly enough they could pay for themselves in a short amount of time. "There's nothing comparable really to that now," Rob goes on. "I guess you can look at the mobile market and, yes, you can churn stuff out quickly there, but to actually compete with anyone…"
Bad Viking's first "big success" was Bad Eggs Online, a multiplayer game about eggs at war, "an artillery game based on Worms, essentially," John says. They followed it with a sequel for mobile, Bad Eggs Online 2, and despite Rob's comment about the difficulty of competing in the mobile market, John notes that people "are still people playing it to this day."
They were motivated to look at other platforms when, as Rob puts it, "the Flash game market started drying up." Adobe and Microsoft stopped supporting it at the end of 2020, and Chrome stopped supporting it at the start of 2021. Though the brothers could have continued making mobile games, they attribute the success of Bad Eggs Online 2 on phones to the fact the first game found an audience on Flash. "We brought them over to mobile and then it grew from that," Rob says,"but we didn't really know how to put a game on mobile and have it grow organically, or market it or anything like that."
What they knew was PC gaming, which also seemed like a perfect place to attempt something a little more ambitious. "I guess we wanted to do something a bit bigger as well," Rob says. "We wanted to try to handle a PC game for the Steam market, because we hadn't released anything on Steam." Their first attempt was another artillery game, this time with a straightforward military theme, called Broken Ground. "It was basically like Bad Eggs, but a bit more grown up."
(Image credit: Bad Viking)It launched in April of 2018, and exactly five months later they announced they were shutting down the servers. Broken Ground was their first real failure. "We took what we'd learned from Bad Eggs and we tried to apply it to a Steam market," John says, "and the backlash there was huge. They don't like microtransactions." A free-to-play game, it featured weapon packs for sale, which made players accuse it of being 'pay-to-win'. "We tried to just make it variety-based, rather than 'you can buy overpowered weapons'. It wasn't like that, but people didn't see it that way."
The experience turned them off making another game in the same vein. "After Broken Ground we were very jaded with multiplayer in general," John says. "It's a lot of work. You don't get much positivity in the community. It's very toxic, is multiplayer."
"Especially competitive multiplayer," Rob adds. And so they made a singleplayer game instead. While Flash had been forgiving, with its low cost and short development times, now they were facing the dilemma common to indie developers: finding a project that would be creatively satisfying and sell enough to make it worthwhile. "If you look at the Venn diagram," Rob says, "you've got: what you would like to make; what you're capable of making; what your skill set says that you can make; and then what is gonna be commercially viable. The overlap of those is this tiny little dot in the middle."
(Image credit: Iceberg Interactive)When I was playing Strange Horticulture, at first I thought it was taking place in a pseudo-Edwardian fantasy world. Some of the plants had magical properties, and the place names on the map, which you use to find new plants, seemed impossibly whimsical. I didn't realize it was a real part of England until an hour or so in. Turns out, Scafell Pike and Bootle are perfectly real locations in the Lake District—though Undermere is called Windermere in the real world.
I couldn't name half the flowers, well, 90% of the flowers in my garden
John DonkinThe area had personal significance for the brothers, being "a place which held a huge nostalgic appeal because that's where we went on holidays as kids," John says. "It's a beautifully romantic, rainy, green, lush, mountainous, strange and uplifting place. But also spooky, dark and mysterious at the same time, with the potential for fairies and goblins and all sorts."
"It's quite a magical place," Rob says. "In hindsight, it's obvious that people from other countries aren't gonna know the Lake District."
(Image credit: Iceberg Interactive)While they chose a setting they knew intimately, they paired it with a subject they didn't. "I couldn't name half the flowers, well, 90% of the flowers in my garden without looking them up on the internet," John admits. He struggles even to remember to water his houseplants. "They don't like to stay alive do they?" adds Rob, who doesn't have a green thumb either. "I need houseplants that need very minimal attention," his brother replies.
They were actually inspired by a book. Breverton's Complete Herbal: A Book of Remarkable Plants and Their Uses, which modernized the work of 17th century botanist Nicholas Culpeper. Both of the brothers have copies near at hand. "We just found this in a library one day and were like, gosh, how good is this?" says John. "It's got all these cool plants and they've all got these amazing weird properties and uses. Some for I guess witchy things, others more as medicinal things. It's just so inspiring. We just thought, well, let's do that, but make them a bit more magical."
Strange Horticulture's plants are fictional, though names like Bishop's Parasol, Farmer's Worry, and Gilded Dendra evoke real herbs. "The main reason we didn't do real plants is that we needed more control over exactly what they looked like," Rob explains. Inventing plants meant they could ensure each puzzle only has one solution—even if sometimes plants are deliberately similar enough to make you think twice.
(Image credit: Iceberg Interactive)Strange Horticulture's story has a structure anyone who has played a tabletop RPG will probably find familiar. It's oddly common in RPGs for players to fixate on the act of shopping, and if an NPC shopkeeper interests them they'll return to their shop time and again. (Entire episodes of Critical Role have ended up being devoted to shopping trips because the store-owners had personality quirks the players enjoyed.) Strange Horticulture reminded me specifically of Call of Cthulhu, an RPG where paranormal investigators uncover cults and foil rituals. Only while the investigators are off having their adventure, we see it through the eyes of a shopkeeper they keep visiting to ask about a specific poison or the mystical properties of whatever herb they found at a crime scene.
"People are coming from this grander story happening all around you and you're just sitting in your cozy shop with your cat," John sums it up. "You're sort of interfering with the story and can nudge it in certain directions, but ultimately, yeah, you're that NPC."
(Image credit: Iceberg Interactive)Hellebore, the aforementioned cat in your cozy shop, seems like a vital and obvious element, but was only added late in development. The two were discussing what a particular character could do that would suggest they were a bad person. "We had this idea of them doing something to a cat," John says, before Rob interrupts. "Hang on, I'm staying out of this. You had this idea."
"We were just discussing ideas!" his brother replies. "Anyway, that's the first time we mentioned a cat and almost immediately we decided, 'Well, of course this shop has a cat. Yeah, the cat owns the shop almost.' It made absolute sense, and it was like the gel that brought everything together."
The kooky shop with a resident animal is definitely a thing. I used to live not far from a bookstore whose cat had a permanent home in the window display, and now I'm near a second-hand clothes shop where customers have to step over two dogs who sleep in the aisles. "It's kind of a witchy game as well," says Rob, "so it seems pretty obvious that it was going to be a black cat."
(Image credit: Iceberg Interactive)With Hellebore and other final touches, Strange Horticulture was released in January, 2022. The early feedback was so positive that Rob describes it as "uplifting". His brother points out, "The difference between releasing a multiplayer game, all the emails of people just moaning about stuff, and the almost overwhelming positivity that Strange Horticulture has gotten—for motivation, for mental wellbeing, for everything, it's just so much nicer to be on that side of it."
We certainly didn't expect it to have done as well as it has
John Donkin"Which is not to say that 'oh, yeah, singleplayer games are all happy and rosy, everyone gets nice feedback,'" Rob says. "Like, we know that's not the case. We're very lucky to be in this position."
(Image credit: Iceberg Interactive)Strange Horticulture's varied puzzles and hint system may have benefited from the brothers' background making Flash adventures, but it's such a step up from Bad Viking's previous releases you wouldn't know their history was in Flash if I hadn't told you. With its desk full of books, notes, and informative letters to keep track of, Strange Horticulture feels more like part of the tradition of UI games like Papers, Please, or the kind of brain-bending board game that comes in a box full of booklets and maps like Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective. It was a territory far away from anything Bad Viking had released before.
"We honestly had no idea how strange Horticulture was gonna be received when we launched it," says John. "We certainly didn't expect it to have done as well as it has. When it got to I think 120 reviews on Steam without a negative one, we were just like, 'This doesn't happen to us. Is the game that good? We like it and everything, but can't believe this many other people like the game.'"
"Our mum liked it," says Rob.
"That was it. My wife liked it, Mum liked it, that's the feedback we'd had."
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In 1994, my mom, a working interior designer, decided to jump on the home computing bandwagon and get 3D Home Architect. The Broderbund program was part of an awkward, curious wave of computer-aided design (CAD) software adapted for the burgeoning home market—the average joe looking to redecorate and remodel in an exciting new digital world. I was already familiar with floor plans and architectural drawings from watching my mom at her drafting table. My mother made a valiant attempt to get used to the program, but as a diehard traditionalist, she eventually returned to working with her trusty pencil and paper. Suddenly 3D Home Architect, which my parents didn't consider a videogame (and therefore not something to worry about), was all mine.
It was a cultural appeal, asking users to imagine one's life as available for expansion through computing.
Dr. Laine NooneyDecades later, I've sunk oceans of time into arranging furniture in Animal Crossing and laying out my free company room in Final Fantasy 14. In games, especially life sims, interior design can be a dangerous road to a place where time stops. But in the beginning, the world of digital home design was a very different animal: easy-to-use consumer CAD programs that shaped a generation of home computer users.
(Image credit: Broderbund)"When these products first came out in the 1990s, people wanted to play with them because they literally allowed you to do things on a computer that were impossible before… it felt like being part of the 'future'," says Dr. Laine Nooney, who specializes in the historical, cultural, and economic analysis of the videogame and home computing industries. Like me, Nooney has strong memories of their mother playing with 3D home design and landscaping programs in the mid-to-late '90s when their family was going through a period of upward mobility.
"Even into the mid-90s, only about a third of US households had a computer. Journalists, investors and innovators put tremendous effort into convincing people a home computer was something you should want or not," Nooney explains. "The idea of home computing was not simply about having a computer at home. It was a cultural appeal, asking users to imagine one's life as available for expansion through computing."
Even with its blocky, unsophisticated graphics, in my eyes 3D Home Architect was a gateway drug to the pure uncut idea of a fantasy home. Some of its software siblings, like Sierra CompleteHome, had cost estimation tools, which I blithely ignored. After all, I was a kid, and if I could build a vast and physically impossible mansion with the finest materials available, by god, I was going to do it. It was the first time I could experiment with a digital space without limits—a far cry from the physical limitations of my Barbie Dream Cottage, which never seemed to have enough room.
In the realm of games, I'd already blasted through 1991's Jones in the Fast Lane, Sierra Entertainment's bitterly funny social life sim where you started off in a crummy, run-down apartment and worked up to a luxury condo. It offered a basic screen showing your home, replete with hard-earned furniture and electronics, but there was no control over where to place items or modification options.
While 'playing' 3D Home Architect, I treated it as a freeform game to envision hypothetical homes of the future for myself and fictional characters. Maxis began trotting out more focused Sim games that took a more granular approach to life simulation on a smaller scale, like SimTower—the first Sim game that really prompted me to get psychological about how and where I placed different amenities in the titular skyscraper.
Unlike SimCity 2000, it was both a literal and figurative close-up of modern life, exemplified by the glitz and futurism of the high-rise format. There was also a much more visceral, emotional connection between the inhabitants pictured on-screen and the environment—for the first time I had to really think about where I was placing restaurants and entertainment amenities, as well as the elevators in the building (if the residents waited too long or got too impatient, they would simply blip out of existence in a red rage).
(Image credit: Maxis)The psycho-spatial, psychogeographical aspect in social/life sim games really came to a head when Maxis released The Sims in 2000. It was, admittedly, a bewildering time for grown-ups struggling to parse this new cultural phenomenon, including the idea that you had to make a comfortable space for computer people to thrive in. For kids like Sophie Mallinson who had grown up with home design programs, it was a no-brainer.
It's funny to think I used to play with interior design software, and now I'm using a videogame to plan out my own home
Sophie MallinsonOne of Mallinson's earliest computer memories were the free CD-ROM demos of home design programs that came with her mother's home decor magazines. "While these products were obviously aimed at adults, with bland aesthetics and built-in cost estimates, at eight years old everything on the computer was a game to me," says Mallinson, who now works as a simulation game designer at Maxis. "I remember being bowled over by the ability to navigate a realistic 3D environment, my imagination running wild as I created rooms for imaginary characters and invented a backstory for each home."
(Image credit: EA)In 2000, drawn to the allure of home-making and the imaginative power of home design, Mallinson decided to get The Sims, which quickly became her favorite game. "Not only could I design homes using a wide catalog of furniture, from heart-shaped beds to inflatable chairs, but everything was interactive," she says. "I could see my Sims use each item I'd thoughtfully picked out and live their lives in the space I'd created for them."
Mallinson, who recently bought her first home, recreated the floor plan in The Sims 4 to play around with renovation ideas. "It's funny to think I used to play with interior design software, and now I'm using a videogame to plan out my own home," she says, adding that she constantly thinks about better, more accessible ways to integrate The Sims' core components—architecture and home design—into gameplay.
(Image credit: Witch Beam)Now, concepts of home, home decor, and customizable habitation have become familiar features in everything from fantasy RPGs and chill puzzlers to dedicated interior design mobile games. The role of 3D home design programs in cultivating this standard, as well as their impact on a generation of game designers and simulation fans who grew up fascinated with things like 3D Home Architect, remains largely unexamined. While there hasn't been much research in this area, Laine Nooney believes there are some "interesting resonances" between the way games approach room or unit composition, and the way 3D home design programs presented us with homes as units of divisible space.
"I think we seriously misunderstand videogame and computer history when we draw very firm lines between games and other types of software," says Nooney, who suggests that these programs might be considered one of the first "sandbox" 3D rendering tools available to the average home computer user. Ultimately, in our search to understand human fascination and the cultural appeal of computers, early novelty software like 3D Home Architect hasn't received nearly enough credit for their influence in modern game design. "Interestingly, I do think we are seeing a return of these kinds of tools in the form of augmented reality provided by furniture and home decor retailers," adds Nooney. "In its own way, novelty never seems to get old."
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You know how Kiryu, protagonist of Yakuza 0, is super strong and can throw people at other people and generally deliver an unspeakable beatdown on all those he encounters? You know who else can do that? Superhuman Spartan John-117, the Master Chief, protagonist of the Halo series.
Now, one modder whose favorite two video game series are Halo and Yakuza has given us a mod that swaps one for the other and honestly it's not that weird and kind of works. Videos of the work in action on both YouTube and Twitter
Modder Kashiiera warns that the models aren't rigged with similar armature, so there's bound to be stretching and warping and misaligned body parts. However, seeing as you're the kind of person who's going to download a mod to put Master Chief from Halo into Yakuza 0 as the protagonist I have a feeling you're comfortable with a bit of jank.
Image 1 of 7(Image credit: Sony and Microsoft respectively via Kashieera)Image 2 of 7(Image credit: Sony and Microsoft respectively via Kashieera)Image 3 of 7(Image credit: Sony and Microsoft respectively via Kashieera)Image 4 of 7(Image credit: Sony and Microsoft respectively via Kashieera)Image 5 of 7(Image credit: Sony and Microsoft respectively via Kashieera)Image 6 of 7(Image credit: Sony and Microsoft respectively via Kashieera)Image 7 of 7(Image credit: Sony and Microsoft respectively via Kashieera)You can download the Yakuza 0 - Masterchief from Halo 3 Mod at Nexusmods. So go out and let the Master Chief get some R&R at Karaoke or pachinko or whatever else. You can also find the modder, Kashiiera, on YouTube, Twitter, and Patreon.
Bless you, Liv Ngan, for sharing this mod.
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THE PCG Q&A
Find all previous editions of the PCG Q&A here. Some highlights:
- What do we want from Fallout 5?
- What's your favorite PC Gamer magazine cover?
- How many save files do you keep per game?Humble Bundle had a Boomer Shooter Bundle, and games like Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun proudly wear the label by choice. Maybe it's time to give in and accept the '90s-style retro FPS subgenre is going to be stuck with a silly label because it sounds funny. (And it does sound funny, no argument here.) Or maybe it's time to get prescriptive. At the risk of resembling the kind of person who argues run-based permadeath games aren't roguelikes unless they're full ASCII, here's a chance to make your case for an alternative.
What should boomer shooters be called?
Here are our answers, plus some from our forum.
Phil Savage, Editor-in-Chief, UK: Sure, Boomer Shooters, why not? No, it is not a great name, I will grant you that. But do you know what else is not great: basically every genre name that has ever stuck around. We have a subgenre of RPGs, CRPGs, where the C stands for computer. It excludes a whole bunch of RPGs that are also on a computer.
And massively multiplayer online game may have made sense back when the internet was new and this was all very exciting, but the implied sense of wonder just feels quaint nowadays. As for MOBAs, where do you even start? Multiplayer Online Battle Arenas? That's just all PvP games. Sorry, Quake is a MOBA now. I don't make the rules.
So yeah, whatever, we collectively gave a genre a silly name. But maybe that's better than pretending there's any actual logic to this.
(Image credit: id Software)Evan Lahti, Global Editor-in-Chief: What's next, Gen Z RPGs? Millennial MMOs?
I know we all enjoy a good rhyme, but "boomer shooter" misinterprets history and creates confusion about who actually played these games. As someone who spends most of each day thinking about how to describe games with words, you can imagine how this gets under my skin. My dad is an actual baby boomer, someone born between the end of WWII and 1964. If you were 32 or younger when Doom released in 1993, you're not a boomer. It's that simple. I'll gladly call them retro shooters, '90s FPSes, or anything else that isn't mildly ageist.
Fraser Brown, Online Editor: In the same way millennial became shorthand for 'young avocado fans', boomer has become a catch-all term for ''frack' that's old'. Conveniently this means we'll be able to keep using it even once the actual boomers are all dead. It's a practical evolution. With that in mind, it seems fair to call these things boomer shooters. It's also fun to say, and a pun to boot, which puts it leagues ahead of nearly every other genre. It's evocative in a way that matches these bombastic relics, and while it might be a bit silly, so are boomer shooters. I say let it live!
(Image credit: 1C Entertainment)Robin Valentine, Print Editor: I'm honestly really surprised at how much 'boomer shooter' has caught on in recent years—as Evan says, it has very little grounding in the actual age of the audience for them, and the vibes of affectionate nostalgia don't really marry up with how the word 'boomer' is usually deployed (as in, to dub something out-of-touch bullpucky).
I don't understand why people don't just call them 'Doom-likes'. People love calling everything a '-like' these days. And it has some nice symmetry with 'Doom clone', which is what a lot of games were dubbed in the original game's wake, before 'first-person shooter' caught on.
To be honest though I've long since come to terms with the fact that gaming is always going to be full of absolutely dreadful genre names. 'Metroidvania'? 'Soulsborne'? 'MOBA'? 'eSports'? We shouldn't be allowed to name stuff at all.
(Image credit: Nullpointer Games)Jody Macgregor, Weekend/AU Editor: It's a shame that Twitch is called Twitch, because you used to be able to call old school fast-paced shootybang games twitch shooters and everyone knew what you meant. Now it sounds another name for people who've just done a hatecrime.
I've been using Gen X FPS. It'll never catch on.
From our forum
Zloth: We stopped calling them Doom Clones?
Brian Boru: Fogey Fraggers! Geezer Gunners. Assisted Aimers.
(Image credit: New Blood Interactive)JarlBSoD: What even is a boomershooter? I kinda doubt that many, even if they existed ofc, started playing shooters in their 30s - 50s back in the '90s. Kinda get the feeling that most people playing games in the '90s were born in the '70s or '80s IE NOT boomers So lets just call them Doomclones as usual. Move along, nothing to see here! If anything it should be called Retro shooters if one does not want to use the term Doom Clone.
Alm: I am a millennial and 90s shooters were a golden age for me. I guess I would call them Disk Dynasty Definitives. But Boomer Shooters rolls off the tongue better.
WoodenSaucer: The early FPS games were my generation. I'm Gen X, not a boomer. Call them X-Games.
(Image credit: Apogee)McStabStab: DOOM clones was always the name for these... even though they're really all Wolfenstein 3D clones. Corridor Shooter is another name I've heard a lot.
redmark_: Seriously, boomer shooters just reminds me of a bunch of old geezers wielding boomsticks a'plenty...
CParson: Arthritis Inducers.
ZedClampet: Crap Graphics Action Shooter.
Sarafan: I believe that this genre was called "ego shooter" in the past in some countries. Not that I think that it's a good idea to practice necromancy over this phrase, because it was mediocre to say the least. I'm trying to take the question seriously, so I would prefer the term retro shooter. It's self-explaining. The phrase is better for people who are new to the industry. Everyone can say right away that it's a shooter made in the old style. We can of course discuss that not every boomer shooter is a retro shooter, but I believe we should simplify things not complicate them without a serious reason.
Pifanjr: I think DOOM clone works best. Video game genre definition seem to get broader and broader and/or video games combine aspects of several genres, meaning the best description is usually to compare it to specific other games instead of/in addition to slapping a genre label on it.
(Image credit: Trigger Happy Interactive/Apogee Entertainment)flashn00b: I think I like the "Doom Clone" nomenclature more, but that will likely have my age showing.
Hell, Boomer Shooter more or less seems like a general categorization of FPS, and I think games like Ultrakill, Turbo Overkill, and to a lesser extent, Doom Eternal helped pave the way of an offshoot of the Boomer Shooter known as the movement shooter. I think for more traditional old-school-style FPS games, Doom Clone would probably be more appropriate, whereas the new-school boost-dashing/wallrunning/etc. would probably fit more in the "movement shooter" category.
Steyn: Killer boomer.
(Image credit: Interplay)Volley: I'd call it 'Golden Era FPS' or 'Golden Era Shooter' which was the 90's and early 00's.
However, I am going through some of my 90's PC Gamer magazines and the term "Doom clones" was used by PCG a LOT to describe any FPS that wasn't Doom, yet came out after Doom, even System Shock and Descent, which were nothing like Doom other than having a first person perspective, haha.
(Image credit: Bethesda Softworks)Krud: Dang, my perspective on this went on a roller-coaster as I read the posts. First confused as to the existence of "boomer shooter" in general, then thinking it was about explosions, then the notion that it's a reference to Baby Boomers? I mean, my dad was a fairly young Baby Boomer, and he had zero interest in FPS's. Which is anecdotal, I know, but I really think 2.5D/3D gaming was primarily the purview of Gen X.
I'm just a handful of years away from being lumped into "Millennial", but I still have very clear memories of the release of Wolfenstein3D, Doom, Quake, Heretic, etc. And most of the programmers were fairly young (though older than me.) Heck, I was programming (mediocre) text adventures when I was 14-18. (By the time I was 19 the genre was seemingly dead and buried, only to resurrect several years later under the name Interactive Fiction. Or maybe it was always there and I just didn't know where to look. But I digress.)
If I were going to assign a label to any games as "Boomer," it would be the early arcade games (Galaga, Donkey Kong, Pac-Man, Asteroids), pinball, and text adventures. And Solitaire.
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From 2010 to 2014 Richard Cobbett wrote Crapshoot, a column about rolling the dice to bring random games back into the light. This week, adventure legends Sierra present a dark vision of one of the strangest alien invasions ever. And you thought your boss was a monster.
In 2002, the Orbs invaded. They looked like giant floating eyeballs. Despite that, humanity's attempt to fight back with a big pokey stick didn't work out so well, and two years later, Earth is theirs. Humanity is now crushed under their... uh... lower squishy bits. Now, under the hellish scarlet skies, only one man has a chance of turning the tide. There's only one problem; or two, if you count the entire world having been nuked into a monstrous parody of civilisation. He works for them. And he's pretty good at his job, when he's not being randomly murdered by everything from street punks to dinosaurs.
This happens a lot. Manhunter is one of the weirdest SF adventures ever made.
Honestly, it's a bit of a surprise that it's taken this long for Manhunter (no relation to the Hannibal movie, incidentally) to show up here, because in the great list of weird and variably wonderful games, it's had a little red cross next to it since it came out back in 1988. It's one of Sierra Online's lesser-known games, with none of the recognisability of, say, Space Quest and Leisure Suit Larry. It's also not one of its best, honestly. It retains a cult following though, partly because cults appreciate a hero who knows how to rock a spooky-looking cloak, but mostly because there's nothing else quite like it.
Here's an example. You're a nameless Manhunter, which means that your job is to do the Orbs' dirty work and investigate human-related incidents around New York. You have a computer, which the Orbs can use to contact you at any time. Being the Orbs though, they don't actually use that to send new missions. No, instead they prefer to burst into your room while you're sleeping and—
And to think I jump when I'm woken by my phone.
As if there's any doubt whatsoever that they're completely screwing with you, the Orbs can fly. When this guy leaves, after waking you up with nothing more than "THERE WAS AN EXPLOSION AT BELLEVUE HOSPITAL! INVESTIGATE!", you see him flying past the window. Why then did he use the elevator to come into your room? Because Orbs, 'witch'! Orbs! They're basically an entire species that wishes they were sentient flying bottoms rather than eyeballs. Even their kids get in on it. Look.
No, look closer.
They're also carnivorous, and as well as using humans as convenient baby-incubators, even their babies are capable of eating you alive if you hang around gawping when you should be running screaming and yelling "OH DEATH, FREE ME OF THIS MEMORY!"
You can't actually do that, though. In fact, you can't talk at all. Nobody can. The Orbs, having listened to one too many minions responding to their orders with "Eye-eye, sir!" have banned all speech, which means humanity has to communicate with nothing more than facial expressions. They've also banned any clothes that aren't a full-length monk habit thing, which looks very itchy—though on the plus side, at least it's an outfit that will still fit after Christmas dinner, and has forever banished the plumbers' bum crack. So overall, it could be worse, though the itchiness does explain why everyone is so damn cranky.
While Manhunter pretends to be a detective game, it's really more Try to Stay Sane: The Adventure. The basic gist is that every day, the Orbs wake you up with a "SURPRISE, HUMAN! EYEBALL RIGHT IN YOUR FACE!" alarm call, and tell you to go sort something out. You track the suspect's movement via your computer, follow them around and try to work out what the hell they were doing in each location. On the first day for instance, we see the suspect going to a bar, a church, a park, and then just... vanishing. When you go to the bar, the only thing to play with is an old arcade machine, but as soon as you touch it, everyone in the room angrily jumps on top of you.
How do you prove your worthiness to play on their arcade cabinet?
Knife-throwing. Obviously.
Somewhat unfairly, if you miss during this minigame, the guy then pops your head like a champagne cork before you can actively not say "Dude! This was your idea!" Win, and everyone just vanishes, on the grounds that clearly nobody who works for the Orbs can have basic motor skills.
Why won't they let you touch their arcade machine? Oh, you'll love this.
This game is actually a map for later on, showing the location of 12 keycards—yes, twelve—that you need to find in a maze. Every one you collect also knocks down one of the dolls, knocking them all down showing a picture of Coney Island. The Orbs having apparently decided that we're not allowed proper clothes, speech, dignity or freedom of action, but that shutting down our funfairs would be a dick move even for them. After seeing what the resistance thinks is a good idea though, to say nothing of their real security later, I'm starting to warm to the little buggers.
But it gets even sillier than this! Having gotten the codes, you need to keep following the suspect, who disappeared at the park. As a trained Manhunter, we can probably assume that there's some kind of secret door. And... well... yeah, there is. Kind of. More or less.
Most games wait a while before hitting this level of craziness. Manhunter has you literally flush yourself down a toilet on Day 1, into an endless sewer maze full of grape juice that has to be mapped out by using a map from an arcade game that you're not allowed to play until you've proved yourself a master of knife-throwing. This is a thing that happens, about five minutes into the game.
And no, it's not even remotely done being weird yet.
At Coney Island, showing a medallion found in the sewer to a truly hideous-looking guy is deemed proof of your loyalty, or perhaps he just wants you to get the poop-smelling thing out of his face and go away, and the first day wraps up with essentially nothing whatsoever solved or resolved.
Have you actually joined the resistance? It's difficult to tell, given that literally the only humans in the game with the power of speech are the designers, and they only really use it to take far too much pleasure in your death.
It's not that there's no internal logic to the game, just that it's a constant battle to work out how big a bottle of absinthe was used to come up with it. Manhunter is a super linear game where you're not allowed to go anywhere unless you have a confirmed reason to be there, and there's not a lot to do once you arrive except stumble around until a solution presents itself. And die, a lot.
One of the worst examples of this comes on Day 2, with a minigame about getting into a nightclub where another resistance member was tracked going to. Outside, you face off with another angry, knife-obsessed human who's so rebellious, he's not even wearing his hood.
It's not enough to just very, very, veeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeery slowly make your way across the screen and punch him though. That would be too easy. You have to very, very, veeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeery slowly make your way across the screen and punch him, then deal with two more guys in exactly the same way. Manhunter is merciful enough to put you back where you were after death, but skip minigames? Heresy! At times like this, it's almost like it's trying to push you into ending it all for real.
Most of the investigation early on is about collecting roughly a billion keycards for no reason, with the resistance being pretty careless about who it hands them off to. "Oh, you've got a picture of an orb with a cross through it?" one might say, if they could talk. "Good enough for me. Here's my card." In the nightclub, a lady resistance member spots you following her and smacks you in the face with her purse, leading to her card falling out for you to collect. My general feeling that the Orbs deserve to win this one and do whatever they want with humanity's festering corpses only keeps getting stronger.
At this point though, the game starts getting a little confused about what you're doing and why. The big villain of the game is a guy called Phil, which... I think speaks for himself. It's about this point that you start stumbling across his handiwork, which he politely signs by writing the letter P onto the victims.
Like this!
Ordinarily, going after a serial killer would seem like a sensible idea, but in Manhunter, Phil pretty much works for the same aliens that you do, so professional courtesy would seem to involve just leaving him to it. While we don't hear the character's thoughts on working for a sadistic army of overlord eyeballs, he sure as hell sleeps soundly at night and it's not as though the people he's helping to oppress are exactly a bunch of charmers. I'm just saying. At least with the Orbs, you know where you are.
As do they, of course. All the time.
All of the keycards you collect during the first couple of days... all 13 of the damn things... turn out to be for doors in the Museum of Natural History. Manhunter's speciality is blending the mundane with the what-the-hell though, so obviously it's not going to be that simple to track down the day's targets.
Remember when I said that you could be killed by dinosaurs in this game?
If all of this seems a little chaotic, that's because it absolutely is. As I said, Manhunter is more about being led to stuff than really investigating it, and doing things because they're there. It's what's sometimes known as reverse-design, or more colloquially, 'crap design'. You don't collect 13 keycards because you know you need them for the Museum, for instance; you get to the Museum and find you need 13 keycards.
It's obviously OK for things to turn out like that occasionally, especially when you're carrying around something mysterious like a card from a corpse or an artefact like Planescape's bronze sphere. Generally though, it's considered a good idea to let the main character have some kind of plan guiding their actions, rather than just simply stumbling across everything. In the case of Manhunter, at least having nigh-omniscient eyeballs telling you where to go and tracking everyone in the city means that you always have a reason to visit key locations.
What you eventually pick up, aside from the resistance being far too fond of bullpucky puzzles, is that they were working on a plan to take out the Orbs once and for all. Unfortunately, Phil—oh, by the way, this is Phil:
Phil has managed to murder them all before they could actually pull it off. That means that you're the only one with a chance of striking back, and the game just assumes that you're in the mood for that after discovering the Orbs' greatest secret—that they're mulching up the citizens of New York for their meat. Again, normally I'd be against that kind of of thing... but these citizens specifically?
I'm going to have to call reverse-design here again, in that it makes you decide to strike back before giving you a genuinely compelling reason to go all-in with the resistance. Specifically, Orby the Mission Eyeball turns up and essentially orders you to investigate yourself, the mysterious person who broke into their files, and doubles-down by saying that after this assignment, you're going to be "Transferred to Chicago".
Now, that might sound OK. I gather it's been at least five days since its last jazz-related fatality. In Manhunter though, it's code for 'about to spend the rest of your life being glad that the rest of your life at least isn't going to be very long', and then becoming an alien hamburger. So, yeah. Probably best to stop these guys, as long as it doesn't involve more insane, out of place minigames.
The Orbs, loving their drama, have based their plans out of the Empire State Building. Luckily, despite their armies of robots and meat-mulching machines, they are no match for one guy who psychically decided to sabotage their security systems in advance. The resistance's plan? Steal an Orb bomber ship and consult Sun Tzu's The Art of War, Chapter 3: Nuke All That 'frack'. Sounds like a plan!
But first... even more minigames!
Great. You know your aliens are intergalactic losers when their plans involve live-action Frak.
Stealing an Orb ship, all that remains to be done is to take out their four New York bases—made only slightly trickier by the fact that Phil also has an Orb ship and is coming to get you. There's the Hospital, where they feed on the dead, the Statue of Liberty pumping noxious chemicals into the air, the Empire State Building where they run their schemes, and a small newsagent who once short-changed the Manhunter and he's still bitter about. Or Grand Central Station. One of the two, anyway.
Even this isn't enough to conclusively stop the Orbs, who have after all conquered the planet. It buys New York its temporary freedom though, and everyone is quite happy about that.
Look how happy everyone is about that. Their happy faces.
Then everyone remembers that Phil is still flying an Orb ship around. Then this happens.
And this is Phil's face after that happened.
So, yeah. That was totally worth it! And so the game ends, with the Manhunter getting back aboard his stolen ship and giving chase to the second game, Manhunter: San Francisco. In that one, he's officially with the rebels from the start, though spends most of the game masquerading as a loyal Manhunter after stealing a new identity. It's also a very strange game, though second time around, the quirkiness wasn't as surprising. There were plans for a third adventure, Manhunter: London, but the series ended there—in true Manhunter style, very strangely, with him literally hanging onto Phil's spaceship as it took off.
These were not particularly good adventures, but it's easy to see why people remember them so fondly. They manage to make looking hideous work for them, with a ton of detail. The surreal situations mean you never have the slightest clue what's coming next, whether it's being killed by a dinosaur or trying to make it through a minefield in Central Park.
Even when something seems like it's relatively sane, there's usually a twist—a shopkeeper working for the resistance won't simply open a door to a base when given the code, but a trapdoor, with the Manhunter's cloak blowing up to reveal comedy boxer shorts as he falls. It's a weird mix of genuinely gruesome and ludicrously silly that's actually really entertaining, even if the puzzles and minigames are generally a pain in the neck.
While there are a couple of LPs out there, the best way to check out the complete investigation—from the start of New York to the end of San Francisco—is over on the LP Archive. It's got animated gifs for some of the more interesting moments, and even comes up with an epilogue to replace London that's probably about what it would have turned out to be given the designers' sense of humour.
And now, excuse me. After repeating some of these puzzles, I need to go and apologise to the Towers of Hanoi for ever complaining about them. Don't however expect this mood to last longer than... oooh... Sunday, though. Next time I see them, I'm still bringing the wrecking ball.
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High-profile Harry Potter game Hogwarts Legacy has been delayed to a new release date of February 10th, 2023. That's for PC, PlayStation, and Xbox, with a Switch release on a launch date to "be revealed soon." It's the second time the open-world action RPG set in the 1800s of the Harry Potter Wizarding World has been delayed, first from 2021 into 2022, then pinned for a holiday 2022 release, and now a delay into the first quarter of 2023.
"The team is excited for you to play, but we need a little more time to deliver the best possible game experience," said an announcement posted to the Hogwarts Legacy Twitter. A second statement, delivered by Avalanche Software community manager Chandler Wood, was also posted to Twitter. "You may be disappointed that the game's been pushed out of 2022," said Wood, "but we're excited to finally give you a release date you can look forward to."
Hogwarts Legacy will launch on February 10, 2023 for PlayStation, Xbox, and PC. The Nintendo Switch launch date will be revealed soon. The team is excited for you to play, but we need a little more time to deliver the best possible game experience. pic.twitter.com/zh0EsOvDb7August 12, 2022
See moreWe've kept up with Hogwarts Legacy's development from its earliest days as a skeptically-eyed leak through to announcement in 2019. You can find more about Hogwarts Legacy on its official website, but we've also compiled everything we know about Hogwarts Legacy if you don't want to fish around the net for details. (Which is weird, I guess, since you usually use a net for the entire act of fishing.)
A message from Avalanche Software. pic.twitter.com/7MnIJ2p9wOAugust 12, 2022
See moreHogwarts Legacy has had a long, eventful development history. Publicly, that kicked off in 2018, when leaked video implied a game called Harry Potter Magic Awakened was in development at WB's Avalanche studio. Things actually got wild a few years later Harry Potter creator J.K. Rowling added her own complexity to the mix with some quite outspoken transphobic views in 2020—and apparently the developers of Hogwarts Legacy fought to include a trans-inclusive character creator in the RPG. The studio also contended with a PR battle around a producer who had a history of posting anti-social justice videos to YouTube. That producer later resigned.
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When you've splashed out on one of the best graphics cards around, naturally you're going to want to push it to its limit with the flashiest looking games. You want those freakishly realistic textures, ray-traced reflections you can stare at all day and lighting so good you'll wear down your screenshot button.
I managed to snag a 3080 Ti this year, inspiring me to download all my most fetching games just to gawk at. My PC has transformed into a showcase of stunning worlds where I've become a tourist, just taking snaps and trying to justify the expense of a GPU in this era of shortages. If you're in the same boat, allow me to lend you a hand with some recommendations. Here are the best games to show off your new GPU.
Assassin's Creed Valhalla
(Image credit: Ubisoft)Release date: November 10, 2020 | Developer: Ubisoft Montreal | Epic Games Store, Ubisoft Store
Britain (and a bit of France and Norway) has never looked this good before. Assassin's Creed Valhalla could almost trick you into thinking it's a nice place to live. It's a technical and aesthetic marvel, offering up some of the most striking vistas you'll see on your PC. As you run and ride across the sprawling map, you'll see absurd distances while maintaining a surprising amount of detail, with the views made all the better by too-good-to-be-true lighting.
Despite not taking advantage of all your GPU's bells and whistles—there are no ray tracing options, for instance—it's still a singularly striking game that depends on a powerful GPU to get everything out of. With my old 1080 Ti—still a great card—I had to make a few concessions here and there to get a stable 60fps at 1440p, but with my 3080 Ti there aren't really any hurdles.
Battlefield 5
Release date: November 20, 2018 | Developer: DICE | Origin, Steam
While Battlefield 5 is no longer the newest game in the series, the poor response to Battlefield 2042 means its predecessor is a more tempting offer, and thankfully still looks exceptional. It was one of the first games to take advantage of ray tracing, which brings the carnage up to a whole new level, letting you admire the way that the fire reflects off the chassis of a ruined vehicle, or the way the light hits the bombed-out battlefield.
DLSS uses machine-learning magic to create an image close to the native resolution but with far fewer pixels, potentially giving you a significant performance boost with a low visual cost. It wasn't available in Battlefield straight away, but it was eventually patched in, letting you enjoy the flashy effects without a huge performance hit even if your RTX card isn't a powerhouse. Because it's from the early days of ray tracing, the effect is subtle, but if you've got a capable card you won't want to be without it.
Control
(Image credit: Remedy)Release date: August 27, 2019 | Developer: Remedy | Epic Games Store, Steam
Control is often cited as the game that sold people on ray tracing. The minimalist aesthetic of the Oldest House, all concrete and shiny floors, really lets you see the impact immediately. It's a lot more noticeable than it is with other games on this list, genuinely having a transformative effect on the eerie building. With fewer visual distractions, you can really see the power of your GPU.
The moody lighting also really benefits from ray tracing. So much drama and tension are created by just a single bright light in a dark room, and Control is full of scenes like this. It's still a looker without ray tracing, if you want to achieve the highest possible fps, but if you've got an Nvidia GPU you can find a nice middle ground with DLSS.
Cyberpunk 2077
(Image credit: CD Projekt/Petri Levälahti)Release date: December 10, 2020 | Developer: CD Projekt Red | Epic Games Store, GOG, Steam
Despite its incredibly rough launch—something that CDPR is still reckoning with more than a year later—there's no denying that Cyberpunk 2077 is a game bursting with eye candy. Night City is a place like no other videogame location, full of shining, monolithic skyscrapers, huge holograms, and an atmosphere so thick you could cut it with your cyberknife.
This incredibly busy open world also really puts your GPU to work, especially when you turn on ray tracing. Like Control, this is a game that really shows off the impact of this setting, but for very different reasons. Here, it's the big number of light sources, the contrast between gloomy alleys and glamorous sky palaces, and the countless reflective surfaces that makes it stand out. This does make it harder to notice individual improvements, though. It's a lot, and that also means there isn't a card out there able to handle it smoothly without DLSS or FSR.
Dying Light 2
(Image credit: Techland)Release date: February 4, 2022 | Developer: Techland | Epic Games Store, Steam
Dying Light 2 presents one of the most picturesque post-apocalypses around, packing a surprising amount of beauty into its zombie-infested city. It's a high-fidelity parkour playground that's busy and vibrant, regardless of the settings, but looks significantly better when the ray tracing settings are activated, which punch up the depth and realism of every scene.
While Nvidia's RTX cards were heavily promoted, non-RTX cards can still take advantage of ray tracing in Dying Light 2, as well as alternatives to DLSS. FSR and linear upscaling options are both available, and a necessity even if you've got a new high end card. Even the 3090 struggles to get 60 fps with ray tracing and no DLSS. With one of the upscaling options on, however, you'll see substantial FPS gains. The image quality is slightly compromised if you use the DLSS alternatives, but this is less noticeable at resolutions higher than 1080p.
Far Cry 6
(Image credit: Ubisoft)Release date: October 7, 2021 | Developer: Ubisoft Montreal | Epic Games Store, Ubisoft Store
Crysis showed us that a really good way to push GPUs was just covering the game in foliage. Forests: they look pretty, and boy does that have a cost. Years later, this remains the case, making Far Cry 6 the perfect showcase for your new card. Yara is a lush, gorgeous island, and just a bit demanding.
Few GPUs can handle the game at 1440p on the ultra preset and still get 60 fps, and its AMD cards that see the best performance. The ray tracing implementation isn't the best, unfortunately, though it does include one of the best implementations of FSR. If you just bought a new Nvidia GPU, Yara is a good place to put it through its paces, but it gets an even stronger recommendation for AMD users.
Hitman 3
(Image credit: IO Interactive)Release date: January 20, 2021 | Developer: IO Interactive | Epic Games Store, Steam
Agent 47's final (for now) mission sends the stoic assassin to striking locations all over the world—complex spaces filled with dynamic crowds, dramatic lighting, realistic reflections and some of the best rainy weather around. If you're wanting to test your new GPU, turn on super sampling, jack up the space screen reflections and then enjoy the eye candy.
The Glacier Engine has proved to be a real feather in IO's cap, especially as it's evolved, bringing the earlier games up to the standard of the latest. While ray tracing isn't currently supported, it is coming in 2022, along with DLSS, FSR and XeSS support. Until then, Hitman 3 still looks impressive, and has several options that will let you push your latest hardware acquisition.
Metro Exodus
Release date: February 15, 2019 | Developer: 4A Games | Epic Games Store, Steam
It's a few years old now, but Metro Exodus still paints a memorable, moody picture of the post-apocalypse. With this sequel leaving the titular metro behind, we get to explore the world above ground, traipsing through gloomy marshes and idyllic autumnal forests. Each big area has its own vibe, with the atmosphere elevated by the addition of ray tracing, included in the Enhanced Edition that everyone gets access to.
Though not as dramatic a difference as you get with some other games, ray tracing does noticeably improve Metro's forlorn environments, especially when you're near water, snow and other reflective surfaces. And if you'd like all the bells and whistles on while still maintaining a stable fps, then you can fire up DLSS.
Microsoft Flight Simulator
(Image credit: Microsoft Flight Simulator)Release date: August 18, 2020 | Developer: Asobo Studio | Microsoft Store, Steam
Ah yes, the first game to make my poor 1080 Ti (RIP) weep. And my CPU. And my RAM. Microsoft Flight Simulator is a demanding sim. Which also makes it a great game to put your new card through its paces. On the highest settings, this thing looks like real flight footage at times, with the world below you recreated with an absurd level of detail.
MS Flight Sim will continue to be a good test of a new GPU (or a broader hardware upgrade) for a long time, too. Even now, a decent, stable framerate at 4k with the ultra preset is largely unattainable for all but the most future-proofed setups. Thankfully, the long list of graphics settings means that you can still get plenty to gawk at without sacrificing too much performance.
Red Dead Redemption 2
(Image credit: Future)Release date: November 5, 2019 | Developer: Rockstar Studios | Epic Games Store, Rockstar Store, Steam
Red Dead Redemption 2 could come out today and still be hailed as a visual feast, able to satisfy even the most graphics-hungry cowboys. The PC version is a few years old now, but still stands as one of the flashiest games outs there, with vistas of sprawling plains, intimidating storms and lush forests unmatched by any other open world.
It looks incredible with a range of graphics settings, but if you're reading this list you're probably not interested in making concessions. Thankfully, you only have to make one. You can turn on every bell and whistle and then use DLSS, added last year, to claw back some performance. Regardless of what RTX GPU you've got, you'll need to do this if you want the highest fidelity and a reasonable framerate.
Shadow of the Tomb Raider
Release date: September 14, 2018 | Developer: Eidos Montreal | Epic Games Store, Steam
Shadow of the Tomb Raider was already a visual treat back in 2018, with its thick jungles, atmospheric ruins and Lara's trademark billowing ponytail. The quality of the tessellation, HDR and ambient occlusion add life and depth to the already moody locations, and it only got better after launch.
Ray-traced shadows were eventually implemented, amping up the realism and giving scenes—especially darker ones with multiple sources of light—even more depth and making those forests and ruins much more dramatic. DLSS and FSR are also supported, if you don't want to sacrifice any frames for those fancy shadows.
Total War: Warhammer 3
(Image credit: Sega)Release date: February 17, 2022 | Developer: Creative Assembly | Epic Games Store, Steam
Total War has always been the perfect series to test a big hardware upgrade. The gargantuan battles full of extremely detailed, extremely animated troops can be equally demanding, which is why there are options to turn down things like troop numbers or reduce the time corpses remain on the battlefield. But you've splashed out on a new GPU because you don't want to worry about that.
These days, even the campaign maps can strain older hardware, and even otherwise solid GPUs can struggle with the ultra settings. So Total War: Warhammer 3, which ups the ante when it comes to the scope and fidelity of its fantasy conflict, is one of the best ways to show off your upgrade and see how far you can push it.
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Battle Royale craze progenitor PUBG: Battlegrounds seems pretty happy with its free-to-play release, as parent company Krafton says it has picked up more than 80,000 new users per day since it went free in January. Revenue from PUBG is also up, with average revenue per user up "more than 20% [quarter over quarter]." This news comes courtesy of the company's revenue report for the first half of 2022.
PUBG: Battlegrounds got a name change last year ahead of its transition to free-to-play, circumstances which have also opened the floodgates to brand collaborations, most recently with Assassin's Creed, which we thought was kind of weird to be honest. Either way, revenue for Krafton is overall up, though it's not clear how much of that is coming from PUBG Mobile or Krafton's other mobile PUBG-adjacent shooter, New State Mobile.
The publisher's earnings report reiterated its commitment to Unknown Worlds' new IP, which will be revealed at GamesCom, as well as Striking Distance Studios' The Callisto Protocol. It also reiterated the recent announcement of a game project based on the Korean fantasy novel The Bird That Drinks Tears, which I'm sure is very exciting if you can read the Korean source material.
A great spot by Vikki at Eurogamer.
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Jeepers creepers folks, we've known that Total War: Warhammer 3's Immortal Empires map was going to be absolutely massive: But actually seeing it is something else entirely. In a new video posted to YouTube, the gravelly-voiced narrator of the Total War series narrates a 13-minute flyover of the Warhammer Fantasy world.
It's a map of frankly shocking scale for a strategy game of this scope, complexity, and visual quality. It's the kind of thing you would never expect to work, or assume could never exist. I know it's releasing into beta, but Immortal Empires is the fulfillment of a game design dream that the developers at Creative Assembly have been working towards for well over six years now. The trailer's cope shows this as it rolls through character and soundtrack themes from three full games and dozens of prior DLC.
Either way, the video swoops from place to place across Warhammer Fantasy's sprawling Old World and beyond. It showcases the daemonic southern and northern wastes, the southlands, the eastern wastes, Grand Cathay, Norsca, Albion, the dark elven Naggaroth, Ulthuan, Lizardman domain Lustria, sweeping southlands deserts, badlands, and north into Bretonnia and The Empire. In the official description, in case you somehow miss it in the flyover, Creative Assembly makes it clear that this map has "86 Legendary Lords. 23 races. 533 Regions. 278 starting factions."
Last month, we got a look at the map as a whole, but only now has Creative Assembly shown off a flyover of the map in-game. Here's what you're looking at from above in the video:
(Image credit: Creative Assembly)The Immortal Empires beta will release for everyone who owns Total War: Warhammers 1 through 3 on August 23rd. Anyone who owns any one of the games will be able to join a multiplayer campaign hosted by someone with all three games, though.
You can find Total War: Warhammer 3 on Steam, Windows Store, Epic Games Store, PC Game Pass, and on its official website.
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For every game like Elden Ring that smashes the doors off sales records and gets the gaming world abuzz, there are dozens of smaller games that don't make quite as big of a splash. Here in the sluggish summer months, which you might call The Lands Between in terms of big game releases, it's a good time to look back at the first half of the year and see what hidden gems you might have missed.
Below you'll find five games that flew beneath that radar but are still well worth your time. There's a wonderfully funny FMV game, an immersive sim from veteran developers, a couple of puzzle games (one that will make you laugh and one that will absolutely do your head in), and a sim that'll make you believe running a collectible card shop is sexy as hell.
Here are 5 hidden gems from the first half of 2022.
Not for Broadcast
Release date: January 25
2022 kicked off in a bizarre way if you played this FMV television studio simulator. And if you didn't, you owe it a look now. In Not for Broadcast you're a custodian at a TV studio who makes the mistake of answering a ringing phone, and now you're in charge of deciding what viewers across the country see and don't see when they turn on their televisions. On the fly you manage different news feeds, switch to commercials, keep the camera on live broadcasters, cut to different angles, attempt to bleep swear words, and eventually start making decisions on how much propaganda to feed the rapt television audience.
While it sounds like it could hit a bit heavy with social commentary, Not for Broadcast is far more silly and slapstick than serious, though it does satirize issues like wealth, political parties, the police, and even the pandemic (though in this game the lockdown is due to killer toy robots). The writing and performances are sharp and there's lots of laughs as you struggle to keep viewers from changing the channel.
Kardboard Kings
Release date: February 10
Running a collectible card shop doesn't sound like it'd be super sexy, but oddly enough your little store in Kardboard Kings is frequently visited by hotties. As the shop's new owner, guided by an extremely helpful parrot, you buy cards online, put them out for sale in your shop, and try to turn a profit by buying low and selling high. Along the way you meet and flirt with characters through branching text-based conversations.
And don't let the sexy customers overshadow the fun of the business sim, either. A daily news feed can tip you off to trends in the card market, letting you capitalize on scandals or events that boost or crater the value of certain types of cards. The cards themselves are all beautifully done, too, making me wish the fictional games they're made for actually existed. There's romance, humor, intrigue (a mysterious masked visitor sometimes appears), and the day-to-day bustle of managing customers and your shop's appeal. I don't play card games, but I love this game about card games.
Patrick's Parabox
Release date: March 29
There's no shortage of Sokoban box-pushing puzzle games, but Patrick's Parabox pushes its boxes inside other boxes, and then pushes the boxes inside the boxes inside other boxes. Yeah, it's gonna break your brain at some point, like when I accidentally pushed myself out of the box universe and wound up in a void outside time and space.
Solving the puzzles requires solving the puzzles inside the puzzles, and then sometimes pushing those puzzles around inside other puzzles. In the 350+ levels contained in the game there's some real stumpers, but also plenty to breeze through without getting stuck. You'll get the hang of the concept quickly, though there are still plenty of moments where your mind will freeze because you're pushing a box you were just inside while watching yourself push the box you're currently inside and you'll wonder: wait, which box am I currently inside? It's great mind-bending fun.
Weird West
Release date: March 31
While the world was gripped tightly by the furled finger of Elden Ring, this immersive sim from the makers of Dishonored and Prey didn't get a chance to make a real stir. In the top-down stealth sandbox of Weird West you're a bounty hunter coming out of retirement to track down her missing husband, sneaking or shooting your way through ghost towns and abandoned mines.
But the weirdness of Weird West begins in act two when you're a pigman—yes, part pig, part man—tracking down the witch that cursed you. And it only gets weirder in the game's five chapters as you become a werewolf, meet sentient trees, and do battle with ancient supernatural entities. Your decisions follow you from story to story—you can even recruit former characters you played as companions—which really makes it feel like the world is responding to your actions.
The Looker
Release date: June 17
My first thought was that The Looker was simply created as a quick joke, a goofy parody of Jonathan Blow's puzzle game The Witness, which is both a creative collection of puzzles and a little too full of itself. But The Looker is, legitimately, a great puzzle game in its own right. It succeeds in double duty: poking fun at The Witness with sharp bits of humor, while coming up with some legitimately fun and challenging puzzles of its own.
I'm not sure how it pulls this off, but whether you loved The Witness or hated The Witness, somehow I can guarantee you'll enjoy The Looker. It only takes an hour or so to finish, but it's an incredibly funny game and is clearly not just a weekend project made on a whim. It's inventive and clever and clearly took a heck of a lot of work to pull off. Plus, it's free. So there's no reason not to give it a look yourself.
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Genshin Impact codes are a big part of the livestream that airs every couple of months. People tune in to find out what's coming in the game, but also to get some free Primogems they can use to wish on the upcoming characters. This time we're getting our first fully-fledged look at the Sumeru region and its new Dendro-element characters, so you can bet a lot of people will be watching.
If you're a no-spend player hoping to grab either of the Dendro characters, Collei or Tighnari, you're going to have to save some Primos, and the three livestream codes will help pad out your current Primogem savings. Genshin Impact livestream codes usually expire after only a day, so you'll want to redeem these as soon as they air so you don't forget.
Here I'll add each Genshin Impact code as it appears in the livestream so you can do just that. I'll also explain how to redeem the codes a little lower down, just in case this is your first time grabbing the freebies.
Genshin Impact codes: All current livestream Primogems
- 8ANCKTWYVRD5 - 100 Primogems and ten Mystic Enhancement Ore
- EA7VKTFHU9VR - 100 Primogems and five Hero's Wit
- KT7DKSFGCRWD - 100 Primogems and 50,000 Mora
How to redeem Genshin Impact codes
First thing's first, you'll have to be at least Adventure Rank 10 to redeem any codes, so if you're a new player who wants the free stuff, make sure you've hit that. Either way, you can't redeem these in-game so you'll have to head over to HoYoverse's website to redeem your Genshin codes:
- Head to the Hoyoverse redemption website
- Log in and choose your region
- Enter your code and press redeem
- If it was successful, log into Genshin Impact
- Check your mailbox and claim your rewards
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Whether you need the answer for today's Wordle or you're just looking for some general tips and hints to improve your daily game, I'm here to help point you in the right direction. There's even a hand-crafted clue for the August 13 (420) puzzle a little further down the page.
Ah heck, can I have just one more guess? Just one. Please. Today's Wordle played out like the dictionary definition of "I know it now I've seen it", but at the time I just couldn't get the letters I'd found into the right sort of shape for a win.
Wordle hint
Today's Wordle: A hint for Saturday, August 13
We're dealing with an informal term today, one typically used to describe a certain sort of physically attractive man. Think of muscular guys with perfect smiles and even better hair—the sort you'd find in a leading role in a superhero movie—and you're on the right track. There's just one vowel to find today.
Wordle help: 3 tips for beating Wordle every day
If there's one thing better than playing Wordle, it's playing Wordle well, which is why I'm going to share a few quick tips to help set you on the path to success:
- A good opener contains a balanced mix of unique vowels and consonants.
- A tactical second guess helps to narrow down the pool of letters quickly.
- The solution may contain repeat letters.
There's no time pressure beyond making sure it's done by midnight. So there's no reason to not treat the game like a casual newspaper crossword and come back to it later if you're coming up blank.
Wordle answer
(Image credit: Josh Wardle)What is the Wordle 420 answer?
You deserve to start your weekend with a win. The answer to the August 13 (420) Wordle is HUNKY.
Previous answers
Wordle archive: Which words have been used
The more past Wordle answers you can cram into your memory banks, the better your chances of guessing today's Wordle answer without accidentally picking a solution that's already been used. Past Wordle answers can also give you some excellent ideas for fun starting words that keep your daily puzzle solving fresh.
Here are some recent Wordle solutions:
- August 12: LABEL
- August 11: GLEAN
- August 10: CLING
- August 9: PATTY
- August 8: UNFIT
- August 7: SMEAR
- August 6: ALIEN
- August 5: BUGGY
- August 4: RHYME
- August 3: YOUTH
Learn more about Wordle
Every day Wordle presents you with six rows of five boxes, and it's up to you to work out which secret five-letter word is hiding inside them.
You'll want to start with a strong word like ALERT—something containing multiple vowels, common consonants, and no repeat letters. Hit Enter and the boxes will show you which letters you've got right or wrong. If a box turns
️, it means that letter isn't in the secret word at all. 
means the letter is in the word, but not in that position. 
means you've got the right letter in the right spot.You'll want your second go to compliment the first, using another "good" word to cover any common letters you missed last time while also trying to avoid any letter you now know for a fact isn't present in today's answer.
After that it's just a case of using what you've learned to narrow your guesses down to the right word. You have six tries in total and can only use real words (so no filling the boxes with EEEEE to see if there's an E). Don't forget letters can repeat too (ex: BOOKS).
If you need any further advice feel free to check out our Wordle tips, and if you'd like to find out which words have already been used you'll find those below.
Originally, Wordle was dreamed up by software engineer Josh Wardle, as a surprise for his partner who loves word games. From there it spread to his family, and finally got released to the public. The word puzzle game has since inspired tons of games like Wordle, refocusing the daily gimmick around music or math or geography. It wasn't long before Wordle became so popular it was sold to the New York Times for seven figures. Surely it's only a matter of time before we all solely communicate in tricolor boxes.
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Hello HAM,
Welcome to UnityHQ Nolfseries Community. Please feel free to browse around and get to know the others. If you have any questions please don't hesitate to ask.
HAM joined on the 08/13/2022.
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Today's THQ Nordic Digital Showcase included another look at Jagged Alliance 3, which we haven't seen since last year. It's a bit of recap of what we saw last year, but there's also a few minutes of new gameplay footage that evokes the old series pretty heavily. In it, we can see the mercenaries shooting bursts, single shots, firing on the run, and diving from cover to cover.
The biggest shock for series fans? Probably that Vicki grew out her hair. That's a joke but also I'm 100% serious, she had a short buzz before and it was kind of a Grace Jones vibe and that was neat, but now she has dreads. Either way, I expect she's still the dual-wielding classic car enthusiast that won my admiration in the prior games, and if she's not I say we riot.
Why do I care? Because much of the best stuff in the now 23 years out of action Jagged Alliance series was in recruiting weird mercenaries to take on oppressive regimes, and in how those mercenaries had a web of complex relationships with each other in this bizarre alternate world of international super mercenaries. No joke, the series had two draws: Really weirdly detailed tactical gun combat and dozens of uniquely voiced mercs who all liked/hated/loved each other in spades. Most of the mercs in the new gameplay trailer are ones we've seen before—we'll see if they add all 60-some of the old mercs on top of some new ones, since I see at least three names I don't recongize—Omryn, Fauda, and Smiley.
You can find Jagged Alliance 3 on its website and on Steam, where it's still listed as "Coming Soon." Chalk me up as cautiously optimistic, because there are a lot of ways that this fictional Central African country schtick could go real wrong, real fast.
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Twitch has changed its mind about health provisions at TwitchCon 2022 following over a week of sustained public outcry from both attendees and in many cases its own streamers. New policies ask that attendees both wear masks in indoor spaces and provide proof of vaccination, or a negative Covid-19 test, to attend.
The updated policy is, in part, as follows: "All attendees (including exhibitors, guests, staff, streamers, etc.) must verify that they are fully vaccinated against COVID-19 OR provide proof of a negative COVID-19 test to attend TwitchCon. Regardless of vaccination status, all attendees will also be required to wear approved face coverings to enter and remain at TwitchCon. We will also have hand sanitizer stations throughout the venue." Twitch also specifies that those who have already purchased tickets will be able to fully refund them through August 19th. You can read those policies in full on the Twitchcon website. Masks won't be required in outdoor spaces.
The updated policies were posted both to the TwitchCon blog and to Twitch's social media. They were immediately, of course, met by backlash from both those angry that Twitch had gone back on its previous announcement and those who oppose public health policies like vaccination and mask-wearing.
TwitchCon San Diego will be held October 7-9th, 2022, at the San Diego Convention Center.
We’ve heard from many of you that you want a safer TwitchCon, so we’re updating our policy.Masks will be required indoors, as well as either proof of vaccination or a negative covid test.Let’s make the ultimate squad up safe & accessible for everyone: https://t.co/RKeBF6oVzd pic.twitter.com/MI4lMZ1JdhAugust 12, 2022
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First spotted by our peers at PCGamesN, a user by the name of FluxCapacimoose has created a tribute to Bioshock's underwater utopian experiment Rapture in Fortnite Creative, and the result is pretty impressive.
Flux has uploaded a video walkthrough of their creation, and you can also try it out yourself in Fortnite with the code 3885-0261-7529. I really appreciate the skin Flux opted for in their walkthrough—a vintage diver suit reminiscent of the Big Daddies—and I'm genuinely shocked at how well they nailed the Rapture vibe with Fortnite Creative's restrictions.
Everything's suitably deco and the lighting especially is spot-on: deep sea bluish-green from outside contrasting nicely with the warm and sumptuous interiors. Fortnite's own goofy adverts do a good job of standing in for Bioshock's kitschy alt-history marketing, and Flux even mimicked the classic Andrew Ryan banner tableau with a more generic Greco-Roman bust.
You can find just about every media property under the sun recreated in Fortnite, though I'll gladly take a fun fan DIY project over an official Subject Delta season pass skin. I've just received a cursed premonition of Booker DeWitt and Elizabeth skins with a paired "patricide" emote. Oh, uh, spoilers for the worst Bioshock game I guess.
FluxCapacimoose has a selection of other Fortnite Creative maps showcased on their channel, including a few for Goldeneye and a fantastic Ghostbusters tribute.
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Hello pacosal619,
Welcome to UnityHQ Nolfseries Community. Please feel free to browse around and get to know the others. If you have any questions please don't hesitate to ask.
pacosal619 joined on the 08/12/2022.
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One of the more exciting games revealed at THQ's showcase today was Wreckreation, a racing game in the style of Trackmania or Hot Wheels Unleashed with an emphasis on custom content and editing courses on the fly.
The game's announcement trailer features befuddled local radio chatter about the gravity-defying race tracks that have suddenly appeared in the sky, before cutting to some cinematically-shot gameplay of racing and vehicular destruction on the aerial loop-de-loops. The trailer demonstrates the game's capacity for track building and customization with a player placing and resizing obstacles and track features as other players/NPCs race.
The car-on-car violence certainly has my interest. The Trackmania series has been offering "Hot Wheels but life-sized" racing action on roller coaster-looking courses for a long time now, but with a focus on pure time trial gameplay. Wreckreation looks to offer something a little bit messier, with progressive damage wearing down the cars and the ability to run your opponents off the road. It's like a Smash Bros. four player free-for-all with items to Trackmania's Fox-only, Final Destination.
Wreckreation's sandbox building also holds a lot of promise. The Trackmania games have a more traditional level editor, while Wreckreation seems to have something more akin to Halo's Forge mode, with on-the-fly editing of the world occurring alongside active races. Additionally, developer Three Fields Entertainment boasts veteran talent from the Burnout series—these people know their arcade racing. Wreckreation does not yet have a release date, but it has gone live with a page on Steam.
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Alone in the Dark is officially coming back. Revealed today at THQ Nordic's digital showcase, the new game will be a "reimagination" of the 1990s survival horror trilogy featuring the characters, locations, and themes of the cult-classicsin "a completely original story."
Released in 1992, Alone in the Dark was a groundbreaking survival horror game that's widely credited as one of the earliest and most influential examples of the genre. But the series spiralled badly over subsequent releases: The most recent, Alone in the Dark: Illumination, was released in 2015 and holds a remarkably bad 19% rating on Metacritic. THQ Nordic acquired the series from the shambling corpse of Atari back in 2018, but then sat on it—until now.
Image 1 of 5(Image credit: THQ Nordic)Image 2 of 5(Image credit: THQ Nordic)Image 3 of 5(Image credit: THQ Nordic)Image 4 of 5(Image credit: THQ Nordic)Image 5 of 5(Image credit: THQ Nordic)Developed by Pieces Interactive, a THQ Nordic studio, the reboot will tell an all-new tale about the unfortunate adventures of Emily Hartwood and private investigator Edward Carnby, who go searching for Hartwood's missing uncle at Derceto Manor, a home for the "mentally fatigued." They find a whole lot more than they bargained for, though, including strange residents, dangerous monsters, portals to nightmarish worlds, and evil in the Lovecraftian-tinged Deep South of the 1920s US. You'll be able to play as either Emily or Edward, with completely different cutscenes and levels for each. Combat and puzzle-solving will form the backbone of gameplay, which unfolds across "a deep psychological story that goes beyond the realms of the imaginable."
That's obviously marketing hype written for the press release, but I'm inclined to give it a chance, or at least not dismiss it outright. The new Alone in the Dark is being written by Mikael Hedberg, who previously had a long run with Frictional Games as the writer on games including Penumbra: Black Plague, Amnesia: The Dark Descent, and SOMA. The guy has real credibility as a horror storyteller, in other words, and while recent Alone in the Darks have been very different from Frictional's games, there's nothing saying that Hedberg can't take it in a new, more gut-level-horrific direction.
A launch date for Alone in the Dark hasn't been announced at this point, but it will be playable at Gamescom 2022, which runs August 24-28. Given that, I would expect (or at least hope) that a release can't be too far off.
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Space for Sale is a funny looking isometric survival game with a twist I've not heard before: Your goal here isn't to just build-up a cool base, it's to parcel out, build up, and sell your unoccupied extrasolar paradise. Why? Because apparently you got a whole solar system on the cheap and there's some kind of universal housing shortage. (Even in the future, some things will not change.)
In today's THQ Nordic Digital Showcase, the publisher described Mirage Game Studios' upcoming release as an "open-ended build-up simulation game" about a "cute little astronaut who just bought an entire solar system." Your job will be to explore and survey terrain to find perfect locations for homes, which you'll then sell to an array of eccentric alien clients. While you do that you'll go out to gather resources, research new tech, and interact with/get killed by/tame the local fauna and flora.
Space for Sale will release on PC, and it'll be playable both solo and cooperatively.
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Devotees of the old ways might well remember the Command & Conquer series, those beloved progenitors of the RTS. Well, Slipgate Ironworks, 3D Realms, and THQ Nordic do, so here's a game that reminds me more than anything of some kind of Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun from an alternate reality. Tempest Rising, announced during today's THQ Nordic showcase, is an extremely classic looking RTS coming in 2023.
With three factions total, two of which have a campaign to play, Tempest Rising focuses on a conflict over a nuclear-fueled plant that produces pure liquid energy, or somesuch technobabble. As good a reason as magical space rocks to shoot at each other, is what I'm thinking. The self-styled Global Defense Forces are a peacekeeping organization with advanced tech. The Tempest Dynasty is a resistance alliance against GDF occupation with "overwhelming firepower and impressive defenses." The third faction isn't yet announced, but my money's on nuclear radiation eating plant monsters and/or mutants.
Image 1 of 9(Image credit: Slipgate and THQ Nordic)Image 2 of 9(Image credit: Slipgate and THQ Nordic)Image 3 of 9(Image credit: Slipgate and THQ Nordic)Image 4 of 9(Image credit: Slipgate and THQ Nordic)Image 5 of 9(Image credit: Slipgate and THQ Nordic)Image 6 of 9(Image credit: Slipgate and THQ Nordic)Image 7 of 9(Image credit: Slipgate and THQ Nordic)Image 8 of 9(Image credit: Slipgate and THQ Nordic)Image 9 of 9(Image credit: Slipgate and THQ Nordic)Tempest Rising has that classic RTS gameplay you may be familiar with. You'll build up a base and produce an army by pulling resources from fields using extractor units. That means a focus on micromanaging your units to both protect and harass enemies' economies and map control. It's definitely got the classic stuff you want, like explosive red barrels, but has some more modern conceits like call-in abilities and connected side-goals between campaign missions to get bonuses.
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I like Renata, Frogun's chipper child protagonist. If Sesame Street ever needs an adventurer archetype, cliché khaki outfit and explorer's hat in tow, Renata's their girl. She even has a frog. That's a gun. Sort of.
A gun in the sense that said frog shoots bullets? No, the frog (which can also talk) sends its sticky tongue out in the way cartoon frogs do, latching onto enemies or walls as Renata wanders around floating ruins.
See, Renata loves her parents. She says as much in the introduction. They too investigate ancient temples and the like, but they went missing. Out Renata goes, trying to navigate these puzzle-esque levels that recall not only the earliest 3D platformers, but something more recent like Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker.
Even though she's a kid, there's little sympathy for Renata's struggles. Frogun doesn't even employ familiar quality-of-life improvements common to modern platformers. At times, it can be downright cruel. Fall off a ledge—that happens a lot—and the level resets unless a checkpoint was reached. By reset, that means everything. Frogun is littered with collectible objects, but if you take a risky series of leaps to secure a valuable item and tumble on the way back? You'll need to recollect that prize.
Each level is typically miniscule in scale. Frogun was born of crowdfunding, the promise being a chunky, pixel-textured, low polygon nostalgia rush, and the well-contained levels replicate olden-style challenges. Virtual fog even hides things in the distance, further complementing the retro vibes.
(Image credit: Molegato)It's generally chill, though, and while it can sometimes provide a childish sense of danger it's not really scary. When Renata slips into water she doesn't drown, just floats on her back and smiles as she enjoys the warm pools. The focus is typically on exploration, scouring levels for coins, treasure, and goodies. Combat is secondary, Renata's frog companion snagging foes then spitting them into oblivion (or into other foes) as needed. The handheld critter also helps navigate chasms, sticking to walls to pull Renata over otherwise impassable pitfalls.
Mostly, Frogun is about discovery, swinging the camera around to spot secrets hiding in the simple geometry. Do be aware that failure inside a bonus area is a failure outside in the main stage too. Everything resets, which feels unfair and unusually punishing. This is even worse during racing scenarios. Renata meets competition on her quest, a guy who challenges her to reach the treasure before him and his companion (which is a snake that is also a gun). Forget casually strolling through these ruins; now it's a panicked rush where colliding with the opposition means taking damage, and on thin platforms, that's tough.
Good thing Renata is just so damned nice. Her attitude makes those irritating, frustrating patches smoother because she's always smiling and ready to try again. Maybe it's sarcastic taunting like a masochistic demon doll from a Conjuring movie, but given Frogun's tone, Renata never looks defeated no matter how many deaths or falls claim her.
(Image credit: Molegato)The retro aesthetic helps too, knowing Frogun isn't made with contemporary ideals in mind. Simplistic polygons and rugged textures renew those "one more try" urges that used to be the norm. With no limit on lives, the only true difficulty is personal time. I had mental throwbacks to Sega's long forgotten Bug (and its sequel), but Frogun offers more freedom in its movement. Levels might be boxy, but Renata has an advantageous third-person camera that doesn't restrict how she approaches these caverns.
If there's a game perfectly designed with speedrunners in mind, Frogun might be it. Each stage is set to a clock, and there's little doubt a community will find the compartmentalized levels ideal for competitive racing. Frogun's satisfying hook comes in finding solutions to each twisting maze, conquering the moving rocks and illogical tombs. The best levels offer multiple paths, shortcuts, and other possibilities to cut the time down.
As far as I'm concerned, Renata is welcome to return in sequels or even other genres. She's a positive force who is out to do the right thing, either totally ignorant of the danger or unwilling to accept it. Her fantasy world matches her personality, persistently saturated, cheery, and wholesome. If Frogun is truly retro in any sense, it's in the smiling and wholly good heroine with a simple goal.
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Looking for some Tiny Tina's Wonderlands Shift codes? Tiny Tina's Wonderlands well underway and there are all-new Shift codes to redeem. There's a big ol' chest in Brighthoof, home of Queen Butt Stallion, and you'll need a Skeleton Key to open it, which you'll get from a Shift code. There's no telling what loot is stashed away in the chest but rest assured, it'll be some powerful stuff. With that in mind, let's take a look at the latest Shift codes and how to redeem them.
Tiny Tina's Wonderlands Shift codes
As of August 12, 2022, there are two active Shift codes for Tiny Tina's Wonderlands.
- 5ZWTJ-XXBT3-FXWRZ-XJJJT-96XZ6 - Three Skeleton Keys
- TBXTT-9H6W9-KC35C-BBTJT-35CJ5 - One Skeleton Key (expires August 18, 2022)
New Shift codes typically appear weekly, or even more frequently on some occasions, so check back here for new codes, or keep an eye on the @dgSHiFTCodesTTW Twitter bot that retweets Wonderlands Shift codes as they're available. Here's how to redeem them.
(Image credit: Gearbox)How to redeem Shift codes
There are two ways to redeem Shift codes: in-game via the Shift menu, or through the Shift website. To redeem in-game, open up the Social menu either from the start while playing and tab over to Shift. Input the code and hit redeem and voila, you've got a Skeleton key. You can collect it from the Mail tab in the same menu.
Alternatively, you can go to the Shift website and input it there. After that, head to the Mail tab in the Social menu to retrieve it. Once you've got the key, head to Brighthoof to unlock the chest and claim your reward.
Expired Shift codes
- JJ63T-FS659-KWTKC-B33JT-3C663 - One Skeleton Key
- TBRT3-KZ6C9-5KBCC-JBT3J-CKJRH - One Skeleton Key
- BJR3T-THR59-CCJKW-TBJJB-BTZS5 - One Skeleton Key
- JB6BJ-SR6WS-5WJ5K-JBBT3-FK9TK - One Skeleton Key
- T3FJT-F6RCH-WWJKW-B33BT-KRRHB - One Skeleton Key
- BBFJB-W665H-5W35C-JTB3J-55H6B - One Skeleton Key
- BBF33-TFFWZ-KC3KW-3JJJJ-WCXZR - One Skeleton Key
- J3RT3-9W6W9-WCJ5C-333J3-5CJRF - One Skeleton Key
- 3J6BT-6CFWH-W5T5W-BJJTB-RKZ3W - One Skeleton Key
- 3BRTJ-5K659-K5355-BTB3T-633F3 - One Skeleton Key
- TBRJJ-TW659-W5B5C-T3B3J-3BTBK - One Skeleton Key
- W9CJT-5XJTB-RRKRS-FTJ3T-BTRKK - Three Skeleton Keys
- T3R33-9BRWH-KKBKW-B3TTB-36TBF - One Skeleton Key
- JJRJB-CS3WZ-WWTW5-33BJT-JZ9RJ - One Skeleton Key
- B3F3J-3S3KZ-CWBWC-BTT3T-SHF5F - One Skeleton Key
- BTX3T-6RTWZ-K5BW5-3BBB3-3TFCZ - One Skeleton Key
- JBRTT-BZH6F-CC3W5-3TTTB-XB9HH - One Skeleton Key
- BTFTB-RSJKZ-WWB5C-T3JJT-BS36S - One Skeleton Key
- TB6BT-SWJCS-WKTK5-3B3B3-5BJW9 - One Skeleton Key
- B36T3-KSZ6F-K5TKK-JJ3B3-B6B3J - One Skeleton Key
Once there are more codes available, the expired ones will appear here so you don't waste your time and efforts trying to redeem them. Don't say I'm not good to you! If you're just getting started with Tiny Tina's Wonderlands, check out our guide on which is the best starting class.
Here are all the free games you can grab right now
in Gaming News
Posted
There are lot of free games floating around there right now, from Epic's weekly freebies to publisher promos on Steam, GOG sale giveaways, and more. But staying on top of them all can be a real chore, and you might be missing out on some good stuff.
So we here at PC Gamer have decided to help, with this running list of every free game that crosses our screens. The goal is to help you find and claim games that usually cost money, so free-to-keep and temporary promotions will be included and noted as such, but free-to-play games and others that are normally free won't be—for that, be sure to take a look at our categorized breakdown of the best free PC games.
So, here's what we've got:
Time-limited:
Free to keep:
Prime Gaming:
The games on Prime Gaming aren't technically free, since you need to be a subscriber in order to take advantage. But there's a lot on offer if you are, including in-game loot and starter packs for free-to-play games, so it's worth keeping tabs on.
Prime Gaming is included with Amazon Prime at $13 per month, or $120 per year; links to all included freebies are available at amazon.com.
We'll keep this list as comprehensive as we can, but if you spot something we haven't, let us know in the comments.
View the full article