Almost all of the team converge for the final episode of the PC Gamer UK podcast. Chris, Graham, Rich, Tom and Phil discuss a great many indie games, Company of Heroes 2, Sleeping Dogs, and answer your questions from Twitter. Join us for one last wild tangent.

Our US team will continue to produce their podcast, so this isn't the end of PC Gamer in audio form - but it is goodbye from us. As I say at the end of the episode, I've loved doing this and I've appreciated hearing from everybody who enjoyed the cast over the year I've been running it. We're looking into alternatives, and if you follow us on Twitter we'll hopefully have something for you soon.

Graham - @Gonnas
Chris - @CThursten
Rich - @richmcc
Tom - @pcgludo
Phil - @octaeder

You can download the MP3 directly if you like, and find all of our prior episodes on iTunes. Here's the YouTube version.

Show notes

Rich's moustache is briefly visible in this Vine.
Rich's Company of Heroes 2 review.
Chris has been playing Imscared, and also recommends Hide.
That Creepypasta Morrowind story. Warning! It's spooooooky.
Zafehouse Diaries, a game that - to be fair - should have been called Zafehouze DiarZ.
Nope, I've still got no idea where Rich's Wagner metaphor was going.
I got the URL for our new Planetside 2 website entirely wrong. It's pcgps2.enjin.com.
Slave of God, Increpare's clubbing sim.
My open letter to the internet regarding the Half-Life 3 joke.
The Saints Row 4 E3 trailer.
...and that's that. Thanks for listening, for sending us questions, and for sticking with us over 93 episodes. I've had the time of my life. Nobody puts podcat in the corner.

The weekend is so near I can almost taste it. Here in Britland the sky is a blank grey texture, devoid of depth - a rubbish skybox. Beholden to the circadian law of Fridays, we'll no doubt retreat from that sky to the soft, warm glow of a pub and then run home to play some videogames. But which ones? The sky will no doubt have opened by then, drumming summer rain into our window panes. A cup of tea and an adventure game might suit, or a round or two of Civilization, perhaps. Here's a round-up of the games we're planning to install, and a question: what will you play this weekend? Let's chat.

Graham has just moved flat, which means learning how to play games without an internet connection to download/activate them. It's surprisingly difficult these days. His solution - put Open Transport Tycoon Deluxe onto a memory stick and spend the weekend weaving roads and railways into beautiful, efficient tapestries of traffic. It's free, so if you fancy doing something similar you can grab the latest build from the Open TTD site.



Phil is going to try Zafehouse: Diaries, a game about managing a group of survivors through an apocalypse via the interface of a grimy, bloodstained logbook. Your team have a degree of autonomy, which means they'll wander around your infested stronghold, chatting to each other, tinkering with things and almost certainly splitting up and getting eaten a lot. Zafehouse promises detailed simulation without relentless micromanagement, something that plays like a work of interactive fiction but with a more complex engine behind it. Hopefully Phil will discover exactly what a "Zafehouse" is so he can tell us on Monday.



Rich has spent the afternoon dipping into Rogue Legacy, a side-scrolling dynastic roguelike that lets you take charge of the next tier of your hero's family tree when they die. Your offspring have various genetic conditions that can dramatically alter their perception of the dungeon. A warrior afflicted with chronic vertigo will have to play the whole game upside down, for example. I imagine Rich will have clocked up hundreds of deaths by the time we return on Monday.



Chris is determined to play something that isn't Dota 2 this weekend. Will he succeed? Well, he's got Sleeping Dogs to finish and Receiver to experiment with. The first is an entertaining, gung-ho crime adventure set in Hong Kong, the second is an exciting little shooter born out of a seven-day game jam. Considering that we've been shooting things in games since games were invented, very few have played with the idea of the gun as a complex piece of machinery. In Receiver you must manually attend to your firearm, using different button presses to free the clip and plop round in one by one. The result is a tense shooter that turns the FPS into a tactile challenge of your memory and finger dexterity. Highly recommended.



I can't buy a win in Company of Heroes 2 at the moment, so I'll spend the weekend scowling over cold cups of tea learning to play, and then probably giving up and replaying the first two chapters of Kentucky Route Zero, a serene, surreal and beautiful episodic game that I'd describe as a "redneck Murakami adventure" if I had to cram the experience into a reductive three-word phrase. And I do, because it's so very nearly the weekend, and somewhere out there there's a Company of Heroes 2 trampling with my name on it.



You can catch up with our writers' progress, and their many tangential observations via Twitter. That's us, but what about you? Catching up on blockbusters past? Playing experimental indie games, or dipping into the latest releases?

In this bumper-length episode Graham, Rich and Chris discuss E3, the Oculus Rift, new Wolfenstein, The Evil Within and your questions from Twitter. If you like tangents, this episode is basically Christmas.

You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes as well as downloading the MP3 directly. There's also a YouTube version.

To ask a question in a future episode, follow PC Gamer on Twitter. On the day of recording we'll invite people to ping us their quandries.

You can also follow us as individuals:

Chris - @cthursten
Graham - @gonnas
Rich - @richmcc

Show notes

All of our E3 coverage can be found on the relevent tag page.
Episode 90, in which Tom Senior breaks free of the bonds of decency in order to describe EVR.
Tom's Sleeping Dogs review.
That horror game we totally forgot the name of is Darkwood.
Rich Cobbett on the Doom novels.
Football Manager Ruined My Life, a book.

After a disastrous financial year, in which Square Enix not only failed to make their expected profits, but were hit instead with by massive financial loss, the company's senior executive managing director Yosuke Matsuda has been looking at Kickstarter as a possible guide to improving "asset turnover". Which isn't to say they'll attempt to raise $100,000,000 for a Tomb Raider sequel via the crowd-funding site. ($110,000,000 stretch goal: add some proper tombs.) Instead, Matsuda wants Square Enix to interact with its customers at an earlier stage.

"One could go as far as to say that in today's times, making customers wait for years with little to no information is being dishonest to them," Matsuda said, in an earnings call two weeks ago. "We're no longer in an age where customers are left in the dark until a product is completed. We need to shift to a business model where we frequently interact with our customers for our products that are in‐development and/or prior to being sold, have our customers understand games under development, and finally make sure we develop games that meet their expectations."

"There is a crowdfunding website called 'Kickstarter,'" he continued, "which does not only serve as a method of financing for developers, but I believe should also be seen as a way to unite marketing and development together by allowing us to interact with customers while a game is in development."

Matsuda also pointed to Steam's Greenlight and Early Access initiatives as ways in which game makers are communicating with their community:

"Valve's Steam Greenlight and Early Access, are also very interesting, in that they raise the frequency by which we interact with customers, increasing their engagement and reflecting customer needs. We are also looking at what initiatives are possible from this perspective. What should we present to our customers before a game is finished, how can our customers enjoy this, and how do we connect this to profitability, is something we are thinking about implementing, and which can improve our asset turnover in the process."

Traditionally these services have been used by smaller developers, with smaller communities, making direct engagement a more manageable prospect. How Square Enix would scale these ideas out onto a much larger scale remains to be seen. But more openness and interaction from the publisher surely can't be a bad thing.

Thanks, GamesIndustry.

Square Enix's incoming president, Yosuke Matsuda, has started sharpening the axe of financial viability after the "extraordinary loss" of this last financial year. In a Square Enix Holdings briefing session, translated by Siliconera, Matsuda announces plans to review all elements of the business, with a view to focusing its direction on "what makes us successful".

"After having succeeded the important role as the president, I plan on reviewing all Square Enix duties, business and assets on a zero-based budgeting standpoint," Matsuda says. "Due to the radical change of environment, I’d like to fundamentally review what works and what doesn't work for our company, then cast all of our resources towards extending what makes us successful and thoroughly squeezing out what doesn't.

"As far as a concrete plan on what to expect from us, I will further explain it on another briefing session in the near future, so I kindly ask for your patience. Thank you for your support."

While Matsuda isn't due to step into the role until June, Square Enix have already begun to restructure. In a statement to Polygon, senior director of PR Reilly Brennan announced, "We can confirm that Square Enix's Los Angeles office has eliminated a number of positions as part of the corporate restructuring announced last week. This is an unfortunate situation and we are offering assistance and severance packages to any employees affected by this, we want to thank them for their hard work and sincerely wish them well in the future." This is in addition to the LA office lay-offs made back in December.

How SE's development studios will be affected by Matsuda's review is unclear, but sales figures suggest a change may be due. Tomb Raider, Hitman: Absolution and Sleeping Dogs all failed to meet expectations, despite Tomb Raider experiencing a record launch week for the series.

Square Enix have announced the resignation of their CEO, Yoichi Wada, following an earnings forecast that predicts the company will experience "extraordinary loss" this financial year. According to their consolidated results report, the company had expected to make profits of 3.5 billion yen (approx. £24.5 million) before the end of the financial year, this March 31st. That didn't happen. Instead, Square Enix is now expected to report a loss of 13 billion yen (approx. £91 million).

According to the report, "The Company forecasts that actual business results from its Digital Entertainment Segment substantially fall below its plan primarily due to slow sales of major console game titles in North American and European markets." Detailed sales breakdowns aren't available, but while some of the low earnings will be from the Japanese console-only side of the business, no doubt their Western studios, recently responsible for Hitman: Absolution, Sleeping Dogs and Tomb Raider, have also underperformed.

In addition to Wada's resignation, to be replaced by former company president Yosuke Matsuda, Square Enix are also planning a major restructure in "development policy, organizational structure, some business models, and others." What the means in real terms - especially for upcoming projects like Eidos Montreal's Thief - remains to be seen.

Thanks, Polygon.

As it typically does for a major game launch, Nvidia has updated its GeForce card drivers to 314.22 for boosts in performance and stability. It claims recent titans BioShock Infinite and Tomb Raider both get a significant bump in frames-per-second, with the former increasing by 41 percent and the latter by an astonishing 71 percent.

Nvidia's article provides benchmark results and pretty green graph bars to scrutinize. Though the company's test hardware was an Intel i7-3960X and a GTX 680—a beefy setup most definitely on the high-end of priciness—Nvidia says the improvements apply to most other cards in the GTX family.

Other frame gains include an extra 30 percent for Civilization 5, 22 percent for Sniper Elite V2, and 12 percent for Sleeping Dogs. Smaller boosts are given to Batman: Arkham City, Battlefield 3, Borderlands 2, Black Ops 2, and Skyrim. Really, if you're playing nearly any graphics-heavy game from the past few years, and you're a GeForce user, pick up the drivers on the official website or through the useful GeForce Experience tool. It's green across the board.