If you’ve been searching for new games to try out, but don’t want to break the bank, you won’t want to miss Steam’s Tiny Teams sale. Live until August 14th, this sale spotlights games made by small dev teams, from cozy deckbuilders to haunting psychological horror thrillers. It’s also a great chance to take a…
In a recent episode of Nightdive’s Deep Dive podcast, Looking Glass Studios programmer Marc LeBlanc shared his recollection of how the team came up with the audio logs in System Shock, which are now a ubiquitous game design standby. LeBlanc came to the topic after describing why Shock 1 eschewed RPG stats, unlike Ultima Underworld…
On September 30, AOL’s dial-up hold-outs will need to finally move on to another internet service. AOL announced this week that it will be discontinuing its dial-up service next month, which probably isn’t as surprising as the fact that AOL was still offering dial-up in 2025 to begin with. Dial-up usage has plummeted over recent…
Steam’s beta program for Chromebooks is officially coming to an end on January 1, 2026. As reported by 9to5Google, Chromebook users will now see a pop-up warning when attempting to install Steam, announcing that the beta app will no longer be available at the end of the year. The notice states: “The Steam for Chromebook…
Promise Mascot Agency was already wonderfully weird when it released back in April, so when I saw that its latest update adds Tony Hawk-style grinding tricks into its bizarro Japanophile delivery sim, my instant reaction was, “Oh yes, of course.” If anything, I’m surprised the game launched without the ability to propel your van along…
I’ve never met a ghost in the machine, but I remember every time an AI enemy surprised me by doing something deeply human. I know where in the church rafters I was standing when a Wolfenstein paratrooper started bunny-hopping on the spiral staircase, so that he could get a better look at me. And I’ll…
An existential crisis courtesy of the Game Boy. I recently started playing Metroid II: Return of Samus for the first time. I’m not sure why. Maybe it was a way of staving off my intense cravings for Metroid Prime 4: Beyond, which as of writing still doesn’t have a launch date more concrete than the…
It’s one of the great ‘What ifs’ of PC gaming. What if Duke Nukem Forever had not stumbled onto Steam in 2011 looking tired and confused in a washed-out Doom 3 engine, but had released as depicted in its legendary E3 2001 trailer, where it looked set to steal Half-Life 2’s thunder with its cinematic…
The AI future would be bad enough on its own, eroding the human spirit and upending the economy in the name of a homework cheating revolution, but I find it especially galling that Microsoft is spending so much money trying to get me to turn on Copilot in Windows 11 and not fixing basic features…
Like a diabolical shopkeeper awaiting his first victim—sorry—customer of the day, I’ve been eagerly anticipating the release of Strange Antiquities since it was announced last year. The follow-up to 2022’s Strange Horticulture lets players get their Needful Things on, selling eldritch antiques to an array of weird townsfolk. And it turns out the Lake District’s…