Gamer Fridge

I still remember the long ritual of installing World of Warcraft to my parents’ laptop as a young’un, mystified by the sheer number of discs it took to squeeze the game onto a hard drive. The more discs a game took to install, the better it must be, I figured—child me would be aghast at…

If you feel like you don’t read enough books—which is entirely possible with the many other distractions clamouring for our collective attention—there are various ways to boost your literary consumption. Pick a book that really excites you, rather than something you feel you should read. Choose something short that you’re less likely to get bogged…

One aspect of Helldivers 2 I’ve repeatedly lamented is how many of its new toys are locked away inside Warbonds, with too few new weapons, equipment and stratagems unlockable through regular play. Hence, it’s worth giving Arrowhead credit when they do let you unlock a new toy through spending requisition slips and nothing else. Such…

Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 was not the series’ finest hour, but one aspect of the sequel that has gone down well with players is its experiments with matchmaking. For years, players have complained about the effects of skill-based matchmaking (SBMM), which is intended to level the playing field by sorting players into groups…

(Image credit: Dovetail Games) I’ve taken the train from Bath to London hundreds of times in my life, usually to visit game developers in the capital. And while I enjoy that part of the job, the journey itself is a dispiriting chore. Rail travel in the United Kingdom is a chaos of delays, overcrowding and…

H. R. Giger’s biomechanical nightmares have inspired plenty of videogames. If we go way back, his work was repurposed for baffling puzzle adventure Dark Seed, and more recently there was the fleshy horror of Scorn. Tormentum: Dark Sorrow was more in the vein of the former than the latter, a point-and-click adventure that took Giger’s…