PC Gaming
Weird Weekend Weird Weekend is our regular Saturday column where we celebrate PC gaming oddities: peculiar games, strange bits of trivia, forgotten history. Pop back every weekend to find out what Jeremy, Josh, Ted, and Rick have become obsessed with this time, whether it’s the canon height of Thief’s Garrett or that time someone in…
Dungeon Master (Image credit: Future) Welcome to Dungeon Master, PC Gamer’s regular RPG column, where Online Editor Fraser Brown delves into PC gaming’s most beloved and enduring genre. Grab a seat in our badly-lit tavern and please ignore the goblin puke. Videogames have always struggled a wee bit—and I’m being generous here—with the subject of…
What is that quasi-critical darling and pillar of K-content Crimson Desert even about, anyway? The answer becomes less clear by the day, as now it’s something of a full-blown trading simulator—given this is the developer behind Black Desert Online, a game where you can breed and sell horses when you get tired of adventuring, I’m…
I’m about to say something controversial—I don’t actually think grinds in MMOs are all that bad. There’s a bit of a wider resistance to the idea of having to grind for anything in a modern online game, a resistance to the very concept, even. We’ve all certainly got less time than in the days of…
With videogame budgets ballooning and competition ever intensifying there’s a huge amount riding on whether a modern videogame succeeds or fails. As such, publishers are increasingly turning to the safest bets possible, like sequels in proven series or shiny remakes of classic games. It’s the exact strategy that Xbox has said it’s falling back on…
Things haven’t looked great for Dragon Age since its latest entry, Dragon Age: The Veilguard was released to a mixed critical and muted commercial response back in 2024. EA subsequently laid off dozens of BioWare’s staff, and numerous former developers have recently said they believe the series is probably dead. Yet, while there’s little hope…
James Bentley, hardware writer (Image credit: Future) This week I’ve been: recovering from testing Halo: Campaign Evolved and playing far too much The Binding of Isaac. I have an experiment for you. Right now, as you stare at this article on a phone, monitor, PS Vita, whatever, spin your head around. Oh, probably don’t do…
Students of first-person shooter history will likely know that the technology Half-Life runs on—GoldSrc—is a heavily modified version of the Quake engine. It’s one of many, many branches of id-tech’s ancient technological tree. Indeed, you’ll still find tiny fragments of Quake code in Valve’s modern successor to GoldSrc—Source 2. Now, nearly three decades on from…
As a child of the ’90s-era pocket monster craze, I had what I suspect historians will call Monster-Taming Madness. A not-so-terrible, but sort of annoying affliction that meant I always had a Tamagotchi in my pocket, a handful of Pokémon cards, and the entire Spice Girls discography on standby for summoning creatures from discs in…
Well well well—what a difference, uh, 30 years makes, huh? While the Sony of 2026 is insisting that it should, or must, carry on with the execution of physical media for its forthcoming PlayStation 6, and has backed away from releasing its prestige games on PC, the Sony of 1996 was in a very different…