Despite founding the series in 1994, X-Com mastermind Julian Gollop has admitted his current project Phoenix Point wouldn't exist if it weren't for Firaxis' 2012 Enemy Unknown reboot . 

In 1994, Julian Gollop, alongside his Mythos Games team, redefined the turn-based strategy genre with the creation of UFO: Enemy Unknown—otherwise known as X-COM UFO Defense. A direct sequel—X-COM: Terror from the Deep—followed, before the series changed scope and jumped genres with Gollop and his team no longer on board. 

Two cancelled games in the early '00s effectively buried the series, before it was revived and rebooted by Firaxis in 2012. XCOM has since went from strength to strength, with Gollop's original creation becoming its own sub-genre. 

"I think it's fantastic," Gollops tells PC Gamer. "When you think that for so long I was trying to make this kind of game and no publisher was even interested, what it proves that there's now an audience for this style of game. It may not be absolutely massive, but it's a pretty solid, dedicated audience. 

"People have been asking me to remake X-Com, or Laser Squad, or anything forever. They've always asked me to do it. It's just getting commercial interest from a publisher to actually do it has been very difficult."

Gollop suggests MOBAs have in many ways overshadowed RTS games in recent years, but he admires how Firaxis has "managed to resurrect" X-Com, in turn finding critical and commercial success. Despite being responsible for the foundations of the X-Com as we know it today, Gollop reckons its current guise champions a new genre—one that his latest venture Phoenix Point is happily part of.  

"It just goes to show that maybe I was right to pursue this kind of game," Gollop continues. "But what the new XCOM game has allowed me to do is make Phoenix Point, because without it, I doubt I even would've attempted it. God knows what I'd be doing. I think it's fair to say it's now a new genre of game. It's now established, and there are people who are actively looking for this style of game, and there will be more like them, which is really cool. It's brilliant. From my point of view, it's great.

"When you think about it, all the X-Com games, going back to the ones I worked on, the strategic layer is the thing that's changed the most. So the original was set on a globe, Terror From The Deep sort of copied that, but X-Com Apocalypse was radically different. XCOM: Enemy Unknown is reminiscent of the original but is actually quite different, because it's a much more scripted sequence of stuff. It's more like a min/maxing management sim. With XCOM 2, they changed it quite radically again. So this seems to be the area of the X-Com genre-style game that's changing the most."

Gollops continues, suggesting Phoenix Point—said to be a spiritual successor of the '94 X-Com—will do something different again, while retaining "this core tactical turn-based gameplay which is more familiar across all the X-Com games."

Look out for our full interview with Julian Gollop—wherein he discusses Phoenix Point, X-Com and more—later today.  

Every year PC Gamer's editors and contributors vote on a list of the 100 best PC games to play right now, and every year our Top 100 list is contentious. A game is always too low, and another too high, and another unbelievably missing. Such is the inevitable fate of any List Of Things In A Certain Order.

But this year, we decided it would be fun to transform the heated comment threads under our list into a list of their own—the Readers' Top 100. Last week, I asked you to pick your top two games from our Top 100 list, and suggest two games to add. I then compiled the votes (1,445 of them), weighing the write-ins more highly than the picks from our list, given that it's much more likely that 50 people would chose the same game from a list of 100 than all write in the same game.

My totally unscientific method does cause a few problems, namely: how much more do you weigh the write-in votes? A multiplier of three produced the most interesting list in this case, though next year I may ditch that tactic all together and take write-ins only. The danger is that a write-in-only list might be more easily swayed by organized campaigns (though that certainly happened anyway), and for this first attempt, I wanted to include a baseline to build off of just in case the suggestions were too scattered, or too homogeneous.

It worked out pretty well despite the uneven, improvised methodology—but do think of it as a fun exercise and not a perfect representation of PC gamers' tastes. Caveats out of the way, check out the list below. (Games that aren't on our Top 100 list are in bold.)

The PC Gamer Readers' Top 100

1. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
2. Half-Life 2 
3. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim 
4. Dark Souls 
5. Borderlands 2 
6. Fallout: New Vegas 
7. Mass Effect 2  
8. Doom (2016) 
9. BioShock 
10. Doom 2 
11. Fallout 2 
12. Deus Ex 
13. Portal 2 
14. Life is Strange 
15. Starcraft 
16. Baldur's Gate 2: Shadows of Amn 
17. Grand Theft Auto 5 
18. League of Legends 
19. Diablo 2 
20. XCOM 2 
21. Fallout 4 
22. Dragon Age: Origins 
23. The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind 
24. PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds 
25. Bioshock Infinite 
26. Overwatch 
27. Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 
28. World of Warcraft 
29. Rimworld 
30. Path of Exile 
31. Planescape: Torment
32. Fallout 
33. Dishonored 2 
34. Crysis 
35. Stellaris 
36. Crusader Kings 2 
37. Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain 
38. Dishonored 
39. Half-Life 
40. Warcraft 3 
41. Quake 
42. Factorio 
43. Prey 
44. SOMA 
45. Fallout 3
46. TIE Fighter 
47. Elite Dangerous 
48. Rocket League 
49. Civilization 5 
50. Heroes of Might and Magic 3 
51. Starcraft 2 
52. Nier: Automata 
53. Stalker: Call of Pripyat 
54. Wolfenstein: The New Order 
55. Minecraft 
56. System Shock 2 
57. The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion 
58. Psychonauts 
59. Divinity: Original Sin Enhanced Edition 
60. Knights of the Old Republic 
61. Age of Empires 2 
62. Thief 2 
63. Endless Legend 
64. Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 
65. Titanfall 2 
66. Warframe 
67. The Secret of Monkey Island  
68. Kerbal Space Program 
69. Europa Universalis IV 
70. Hotline Miami  
71. Payday 2 
72. Battlefield 1 
73. Dota 2 
74. Total War: Warhammer 
75. Mass Effect 3 
76. Batman Arkham City 
77. Rainbow Six Siege 
78. FTL 
79. Stardew Valley 
80. Counter-Strike: Global Offensive 
81. The Talos Principle 
82. Tyranny 
83. Civilization 6 
84. Undertale 
85. Knights of the Old Republic 2 
86. Team Fortress 2 
87. The Witness 
88. Thief Gold 
89. Arma 3 
90. Dying Light 
91. Alien: Isolation 
92. Hyper Light Drifter 
93. Planet Coaster 
94. Jagged Alliance 2 
95. Call of Duty 2 
96. Transistor
97. Mass Effect 
98. Freespace 2 
99. 7 Days to Die 
100. Ultima Online

For reference, the top 10 games on our list this year were: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Dark Souls, Dishonored 2, XCOM 2, Portal 2, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, Mass Effect 2, Alien: Isolation, Doom (2016), and Spelunky. If you want a condensed sense of how our tastes differ from those surveyed, here are a few observations:

We like Spelunky a lot more than everyone else. It was in our top 10, but didn't even make it into the Readers' Top 100.

While Half-Life 2 has lost some stock in our minds, it hasn't in everyone's. It was 11th on our list, but 2nd on the Readers' list.

Everyone agrees that The Witcher 3 is great. It was first on both of our lists.

Skyrim is still chugging along. It was 26th on our list, but came in third in reader voting.

Borderlands 2 wasn't on our list, but came in 5th. Did Borderlands fans came out en masse, or are we just weird for not putting it on our list?

14th place is pretty impressive for Life is Strange. Rimworld ranked pretty high, too. Either these games are more popular than we realized, or the survey happened to be circulated among their biggest fans. Probably a mix of both.

League of Legends fans showed up to challenge our preference for Dota 2. It came in at 18, while Dota 2 was knocked down to 73. Justice?

If you'd like to compare the lists directly, I've put them side by side in a spreadsheet. Thank you to all 1,445 people who responded to the survey! Feel free to suggest new ways to compile this list in the comments, and I'll take them into consideration next year. My skill with Excel spreadsheet formulas is at least double what it was last week, a cursed power that will only have grown by next year.

Damage dealing is the most selfish of gaming roles. It's not about mending the wounds of your buddies or taunting off the bullies attempting to harm them in the first place; it's about the ecstasy of climbing to the peaks of damage meters and watching ever-larger numbers splash the screen. If gaming in general is a power fantasy, a strong DPS build is the wet dream.

And sometimes they gets out of hand. Some builds are so powerful that developers pull the plug, worried that they're damaging the game itself. This is a celebration of those builds that have achieved or come near those marks: the most famous, powerful, interesting builds that disrupt a game's conventions as violently as the power chords of an Amon Amarth riff at a Chopin recital.

We know we've barely scratched the list of great builds here—almost every game has one! If there's one you think we should have included, tell us about it! 

Skyrim: Sneak Archer with Slow Time (2011)

Subtlety isn't really the first thing that comes to mind upon a first glance at Skyrim—after all, it's largely a game about some rando shouting dragons to death. But for years nothing struck fear into the hearts of giant flying reptiles and creepy Reachmen quite like Skyrim's Sneaky Archer build. It's still quite beastly, but YouTuber ESO describes it in its most broken form.

The build's cornerstone was the Slow Time shout, which you could extend by 20 percent with an Amulet of Talos and up to 40 percent by visiting a Shrine of Talos. Slap some Fortify Alteration enchantments on your ring and swig a Fortify Alteration potion, and you could push that over a minute. That's longer than the shout's cooldown. Pick up the Quiet Casting perk in the Illusion line, and you could wipe out a whole band of Stormcloaks before they even knew you were there.

Combine that with plenty of points in the Sneak line, Fortify Archery enchantments on every bit of gear, and paralysis or fear enchantments on your weapons, and you might be tempted to ask the fur-clad denizens to worship you in place of Talos. Unfortunately, Bethesda killed the fun with last year's Special Edition. Slow Time now slows down time for you as well. But even without it a Sneak Archer remains a force to be reckoned with.

The Witcher 3: Alchemy and Combat build

Most crazy damage builds feel as though they're breaking with the lore of their parent games, but The Witcher 3's combination alchemy and combat builds tap into the very essence of what it's mean to work in Geralt's profession. You're a badass swordsman thanks to 36 points in Combat, and 38 points in the Alchemy line see you chugging potions and decoctions along with making sure you're using the right oil for the right monster.

YouTuber Ditronus detailed the best incarnation of this monster setup, which focuses on stacking everything that gives you both critical hit chance and critical hit damage. Ditronus claims he can get hits that strike for 120,000 damage for the build at Level 80 and on New Game+. 

The tools? Pick up the steel Belhaven Blade for its crit potential and the Excalibur-like Aerondight silver sword for its damage multiplier. Use some other crit-focused gear along with two key pieces of the Blood and Wine expansion's alchemy-focused Manticore set and use consumables such as the Ekhidna Decoction. Toss in a few key mutagens and frequently use the "Whirl" sword technique, and Geralt becomes the spinning avatar of Death herself. It's bewitching.

World of Warcraft: Paladin Reckoning Bomb (2005) 

World of Warcraft has seen some crazy damage builds over the course of its 13-year history, but none has reached the legendary status of the Paladin class' "Reckoning bomb" of WoW's first "vanilla" years. It wasn't officially a damage setup, but rather an exploit of the Reckoning talent from the tank line that some Retribution (damage) Paladins would pick up. Originally, Reckoning gave you a charge for a free attack whenever you were the victim of a critical hit, and in 2005, you could stack this to infinity and unleash them all at once for your next attack. Build enough stacks, and you could one-shot other players in PvP.So how imba was this? In May 2005 a Paladin named Karmerr from the guild PiaS (Poop in a Shoe, if you must know) got his rogue friend Sindri to attack him for three whole hours while he was sitting down, guaranteeing critical hits, until the stacks reached a staggering 1,816. Their mission? The Alliance server first kill of Lord Kazzak, one of WoW's first 40-man raid bosses. Knowing their plan was controversial, PiaS asked a Blizzard Game Master for permission, and the GM claimed it couldn't be done. But Karmerr popped his invincibility bubble and, boom, killed Kazzak in a single shot. Alone. The devastation was so intense that it locked up Karmerr's PC for 10 seconds and the system was so unprepared by the 1,816 attacks it could only register the blow in second-long ticks until Kazzak died. PiaS posted a video, and within 24 hours Blizzard nerfed Reckoning from a 100 percent chance to a mere 10 percent chance and limited the stacks to five.

Diablo 2: Hammerdin 

Overpowered Paladins are something of a Blizzard tradition. One of the most infamous overpowered DPS builds of all time is the so-called "Hammerdin" from Diablo 2. The Blessed Hammer skill was the heart of the build, which shot out a spinning floating hammer that smacked any monsters foolish enough to get near. 

Hammerdins had been around in various incarnations for months, but the build came into its own in 2003 with the introduction of synergies. With Blessed Aim, Paladins could increase their attack rating; and with Vigor, they could boost their speed, stamina, and recovery. Damage, too, got a boost with Concentration Aura. But nothing made the build so broken as the Enigma Runeword, which sent the Paladin immediately teleporting into huddles of nearby enemies and clobbering them for up to 20,000 points of damage each. Watching it in action looks a little like watching a bugged game.

The catch? Almost everything needed to complete the build was outrageously expensive. But as the obscene number of Hammerdins dominating Diablo 2 came to show, that was never much of a deterrent.

Borderlands 2: Salvador

Forget specific builds for a second: Borderlands 2's Salvador is kind of broken by default. His class ability—"Gunzerking"—lets him fire off two weapons and reap their benefits at once, all while taking less damage and constantly regenerating ammo. Nor does this kind of destructive divinity come with any real challenge. If you've got the right weapons equipped, all you really need to do is sit still and fire away. Dragon's Dogma had the right of it: divinity can get kind of boring.

The right weapons push this already preposterous setup to absurdity. Pick up the Grog Nozzle pistol from the Tiny Tina's Assault on Dragon's Keep DLC, which heals Salvador for 65 percent of all the damage he deals out. In the other hand, equip a double-penetrating Unkempt Harold pistol, which hits enemies as though seven bullets had hit them twice. Then pick up the Yippie Ki Yay talent that extends Gunzerking's duration for 3 seconds for each kill and "Get Some," which reduces Gunzerking's cooldown after each kill, and you'll always be firing, always be healing, all the time.

Elder Scrolls Online: Magicka Dragonknight Vampire (2014)

Ever wanted to be a raid boss in an MMORPG? You could in 2014, not long after the launch of Elder Scrolls Online, if you were a magicka-focused Dragonknight who'd become a vampire. You were both DPS and tank, able to take on dozens of players in PvP at once and kill most of them as well.

The root of the problem was the vampire tree's morphed "ultimate" ability, Devouring Swarm, which sent a swarm of bats down on everyone else in melee range while also healing you for everyone hit. But every class who became a vampire had access to that.

Dragonknights, though, could also use their Dark Talons skill to root all those players in melee range while roasting them with fire damage at the same time. A huge magicka pool made it even deadlier. Then a passive ability called Battle Roar factored in, allowing the Dragonknight to replenish health, magicka, and stamina based on the cost of casting Devouring Swarm. And it gets crazier. If you were wearing the Akaviri Dragonguard Set, you enjoyed a 15 percent deduction in ultimate ability costs, essentially allowing you to spam Devouring Swarm.

This was already hellish with regular Dragonknights, but players who earned the "Emperor" title in PvP might as well have been Daedric lords. Being the current emperor granted buffs like 200 percent ultimate and resource generation, leading to situations like the one in the video above. 

The easy way to stop this nonsense was always just to stay out of range (although the DK's charge ability from the Sword and Shield line complicated that). Within a month, though, ZeniMax Online nerfed it to hell.

Diablo 3: Inarius Necromancer 

How do you bring interest in your four-year-old dungeon crawler back from the dead? With a Necromancer class, obviously! At least that's what Blizzard Entertainment was apparently thinking when it introduced the class to Diablo 3 in June 2017.

That makes the Necromancer the "youngest" entry on this list, but it's no less deserving of the honor. The damage Necromancers have been dishing out this summer is so crazy that the "best" broken builds change every few weeks. Not long ago the top dog was the Bones of Rathma build, which basically let the Necromancer kick back while an army of skeletons and undead mages did all the hard work. 

Nowadays it's the Grace of Inarius build (which YouTuber Rhykker calls the "Bonestorm" build), which centers on the set's six-piece "Bone Armor" bonus that smacks enemies who get too close with 750 percent weapon damage and boosts the damage they take from the Necro by 2,750 percent. Then the Necro goes around whacking everything with his Cursed Scythe skill with the help of another bonus that reduces his damage taken. Choose the right complementary skills and weapons, you'll soon be tromping through Level 107 Greater Rifts as easily as a katana slicing through yarn. Getting the set pieces will take a bit of grinding, of course, but it's worth it for the payoff. Until, you know, Blizzard nerfs it.

Rarely does a week go by when some publisher or retailer isn't giving away a game for free. Spending nothing in exchange for something is great, and this is an especially nice offer: the Humble Store is giving away X-COM: UFO Defense, or for those outside of North America, UFO: Enemy Unknown.

It's the first instalment in the XCOM series, of course, and be forewarned that as far as I can remember it was the first game to make me incredibly angry. The offer is valid for another day and a half, so you'd best go and grab it now before you forget. 

It s one thing to pull a still from a movie that accurately represents how the final cut will look and feel, but videogames are another matter. Trailers and screenshots are put out well before the game is complete, which means they re inevitably going to need visual band-aids here and there, and communicating everything the game is trying to achieve systems, story, style in a single frame is difficult. Enter the bullshot.To make their games look as good as can be, some publishers pose characters and snap screenshots with a free camera, sometimes even downsampling from high resolutions to reduce aliasing, or using Photoshop to make them pop just a little more. While these marketing screens convey key information and look nice, they can be misleading . We ve gathered a few of the worst offenders in recent years in part because they re funny, but also because it s a practice that should be called out. We d much rather see what a game actually looks like to play, especially when these screenshots appear on a store page. Leave it to us to take the unrealistic screenshots after release, because we love doing it.

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Even our favorite games aren t excused from bullshot shame. The Witcher 3 is a damn good-looking game, but to get shots resembling this quality we had to take them at 3840x2160 which we doubt many players can do at a playable framerate using a mod to enable a free camera and console commands. Also, who the hell is that horse because it sure isn t Roach. Impostor resolution, impostor horse get out of my computer.

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This screen wouldn t be a huge offender if not for the clearly posed gang of pirates. Each has their own stance. I like pointing guy on the far left. What s he trying to do? Buddy, you re at the rear of the pirate pack and all your dudes already know where the assassin you somehow just spotted is. But maybe he s just a stickler for photo balance, a guy who can t help but obey the rule of threes. That s some good AI.

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Racing games tend to be the biggest bullshot culprits. Take Split Second for instance. It s a great looking game most racing games nowadays are but this shot looks like someone just discovered Instagram filters. I love a good filter, but this one turns up the warm colors and vignettes with reckless abandon. Look both ways before you cross the street because it s blurred to hell.

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Gearbox tends to eliminate aliasing by taking the shots at a super high resolution, but to really make their images pop, contrast is turned way up. It makes the comic book stylings much more apparent, especially because detailed textures are used throughout the entire image, no matter how far objects are in the distance. With everything in such clear focus, it makes the image look flat.

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I m not sure what kind of holy light exists just offscreen in every other bullshot, but it s not working well to bring out this central locust s best features. It makes even less sense when you notice that the blinding light is coming from the hole in the ground at the bottom right. Besides the awkward blur and focus muddying half the picture, I can t figure out what s going through that locust s head. Is Marcus holding it up with a light grip on the shoulder? Impressive. Is that shock or rage or is that just how their jaws always are? These are the questions Gears of War 4 needs to answer.

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This one s a toughie. This shot from No Man s Sky isn t touched up, but it uses assets that aren t representative of what the final game produces. In my experience, the creatures look like remixes of a handful of variables and characteristics after 10 or so hours in, and vegetation can t grow that tall without the use of mods. It s not entirely surprising that No Man s Sky is under investigation by the Advertising Standards Authority in the UK, even if players are still enjoying it for what it is.

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The biggest giveaway here (not that you need one) is what I ve dubbed the Holy Mammoth. Before the rise of modern religion, there was the One True Mammoth, from which all bloom lighting emitted. It seems to have blessed the screen with an abundance of golden light, impossibly smooth edges, and perfectly posed figures.

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It s rare to find a racing game screenshot that wasn t taken at some forbidden, transcendent resolution, so I have to hand it to The Crew with this one. That said, this shot is posed beyond reprieve. Four cars, perfectly aligned to frame up nicely and balance out the shot with a lovely airplane cherry up top.

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I won t be too harsh with Crysis since it s still the go-to for good-looking PC games in some respects, but the soldier getting lasered is impossible to ignore. It looks like he s waving hello to the tentacled aliens above, though I suppose his pose is meant to imply he s flying backwards due to the force of the white hot laser blasting a hole in his chest. Either way, Crysis isn t capable of such a believable ragdoll animation, but I suppose a twitching bundle of human appendages doesn t look so good in still life.

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I think future soldiers will be smarter than this. I figured future war would entail guns that can fire from far away and not meeting in the middle of a short corridor for shootouts. Instead, we have two soldiers firing into a stoic mechanical man and another presumably about to kick their head in. My favorite detail? That explosion in the background lost in the shallow focus. While the Black Ops 3 might look this good, it s rarely this nonsensically positioned.

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Here we have another checklist shot trying to show off as many systems and features as possible while still looking pretty. We ve got destructible walls, a shielded player, a shotgun firing, a grenade, some barbed wire in the bottom right, and some pretty detailed textures. Problem is, the final game doesn't look nearly as nice, and while the destruction is fairly granular, it s not to the level of detail expressed in this screen. Look at all those tiny individual perforations. If only.

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I played this scene just over a week ago and it looked great, but not like this. The scene glows an icy blue and the blacks are super deep. Someone turned up the contrast. Also, who s kicking up all that damn dust? It doesn t look natural, like it s being used to balance out the color and weight of the shot.

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There s so much going on in this shot it feels like one of those hidden object pages from Highlights magazine. Let s see, we ve got a three-wheeled buggy thing, a dude with an easily readable expression shooting out the vehicle s side, we can see two bullets in the act of ricocheting off the soldier, a truck in the far right, a building on fire above, some gorgeous snowy mountains in the background, a remote detonator in the player character s hand and it s all in perfect focus. No jagged edges, some nice airbrush effects on the wheels to imply motion. This is an ascendant bullshot. This is art.

As you might ve spied last month, the 34th edition of the Golden Joystick Awards is open to the public for the first time in the ceremony s 33 year history. As always, winners are voted for by the public, and doing so this year will net you a Golden Bundle from Green Man Gaming for just 1/$1/1 .

That ll get you three games including Spec Ops: The Line, the remake of Sid Meier s Pirates! and a Mystery Game . Exciting. Furthermore, you ll even be able to claim your quid back in Green Man Gaming credit by playing Spec Ops: The Line.

So how do you get all that? Simple: vote on your favourite games of 2015/2016 across the 21 public voted categories be heading this-a-way. Step by step instructions on how to claim your games will be communicated to voters by Green Man Gaming in October.

The 34th Golden Joystick Awards take place November 18 at the Indig02 at London s O2 Arena. Tickets cost 10 each on sale here and are sold on a first come first serve basis.

Did you wear the Colovian Fur Helm? If you played Morrowind you probably did. The Colovian Fur Helm is a piece of armor you can easily get at the start of the game it literally falls out of the sky for you, being worn by a wizard whose spell doesn't work as intended and you'll probably keep it for a while. At the start of Morrowind decent helmets are hard to come by, especially if you're cheap. The downside is that the Colovian Fur Helm looks like a big hairy nipple. No matter how badass the rest of your armor is, topping it off with a hat that makes you look like one of the Coneheads will ruin your ensemble.

I thought about that hat recently when I was watching Hearthstone designer Ben Brode answer criticisms about the recently added Purify spell, which players have called a bad card. Actually they've called it worse things than that, but let's stick with bad. Some players actually like winning with bad cards, Brode explained, before going on to discuss its potential for use in a non-competitive fun deck . Long past the point where it was a liability, I wore that silly Colovian Fur Helm because I'd started thinking it was funny defeating ghosts and monsters while wearing a conical nipplehat. It was bad, but that's what made it perfect for me.

Plenty of games have items in them that prove unpopular with players. Maybe they're equipment in an RPG, cards in a digital card game, guns in a first-person shooter, or power-ups in an arcade game. They could be ugly. Their stats could be terrible. Most players may shun them, but they still serve a purpose.

Guns & ammo 

James Lopez, producer on the Borderlands series, provides me with the excellent names of several guns from Borderlands 2 that players considered bad: Flakker, Bane, Fibber, and Crit. They all had their moments to shine, however, as there was an ebb and flow to the popularity of guns in the games some were popular right off the bat but some were 'undiscovered' for a while until the community found things that made them special , he says.

The Flakker for instance is a shotgun that shoots multiple explosive projectiles. They detonate at medium range, making it almost worthless against distant or nearby enemies. Plus, it fires very slowly. While the Flakker seems underwhelming for a weapon of 'legendary' rarity, it does have its uses. The sniper character Zer0 can combine it effectively with his Rising Sh0t ability, which lets him earn bonus damage for a short duration after every successful attack. The amount of bonus damage increases every time you hurt an enemy, so a single good shot with the Flakker can max out that bonus, after which you switch to a better gun to make use of it.

The Bane on the other hand is a submachine gun that drops your movement to a crawl and constantly shouts at you. When you shoot it screeches like Jim Carrey in Dumb & Dumber making the most annoying sound in the world, and it announces every reload by bellowing Reloading! Even taking it out it will make it announce Swapping weapons! Dropping the in-game volume to zero won't prevent it from ruining your eardrums, either. And yet there are people on YouTube using The Bane to defeat Borderlands 2's endgame raid boss Terramorphous the Invincible.

Borderlands is an unusual case in that most of its guns aren't unique like the Flakker and Bane, but procedurally generated. They combine effects in randomized ways so you might end up with a sniper rifle that reloads almost instantly or a pistol that shoots burning bullets. It creates variety and depth, Lopez explains, as well as the possibility of the user getting a one of a kind gun that nobody else will have. You might pick up two Maliwan fire SMGs of the same level but they re not going to be the same. And it might turn out that one is more your play style than the other, and the one you don t like might be perfect for someone else in your party.

When you do find a unique gun in a Borderlands game, something with a name like Good Touch or Teapot, you know it's special. That inspires players to figure out why a seemingly bad gun exists instead of chucking it aside like the disposable randomized weapons Borderlands games are full of. As Lopez puts it, Giving them names creates a theme about the gun, a connection to how you got it, and can also inspire the community to learn more about it through forums, videos, wikis, etc.

The drone & the skullcap 

At the other end of the spectrum from Borderlands and its millions of guns is Assault Android Cactus, a twin-stick shooter in which each of its playable android characters only has two weapons. Some are regular fare like a flamethrower or a beam laser, but the android named Aubergine wields something different: an indestructible drone called Helo that causes damage in a circle and controls like a fishing rod. Hold down fire and the drone moves further away from her; release and it's reeled back in.

Aubergine is the most divisive character in the game, says developer Tim Dawson, some people dig her, but a lot of players couldn't get their head around controlling her Helo drone while moving. She was meant to be an out-there character and push the envelope in terms of twin-stick shooter mechanics, but because she takes so much more work to get good at, plenty of people never did.

The drone has advantages, like being able to cause damage to enemies while you hide behind a wall, but it's tricky to get used to compared to more straightforward tools like the shotgun or the drill. Not many players bother getting to grips with Aubergine and her drone.

Even so, I'm glad she's in the game, Dawson says, she came about from realising our weapon designs were stagnating mid-development and sitting down to brainstorm something off the map. She's not only a good character for players who stick with her, but her existence in the game challenged us to make later weapons like the Railgun and Giga Drill more distinctive.

Assault Android Cactus also has power-ups that appear regularly throughout each level. Each power-up initially appears as a red Firepower boost (adding hovering guns to your arsenal), but if it's not picked up immediately will transform into a yellow Accelerate boost (adding movement speed as well as slurping pick-ups toward you), and finally a blue Shutdown (sending enemies to sleep). The fact that players can choose which of the three power-ups to collect by timing it right inspired a vigorous debate on the game's forum over which was best.

Accelerate came off worst of the three by a fair margin. Despite boosting speed, decreasing damage taken and pulling battery and weapon orbs in, some players began actively avoiding Accelerate, says Dawson, seeing it as a wasted opportunity to grab one of the other two power-ups, both of which had more overt offensive potential.

In the choose-your-own-adventure card game Hand of Fate, each of the player's items is represented by a card that becomes that piece of equipment and appears on your avatar when combat begins. They fall down on you like rain, if rain was made of helmets and axes. Though Hand of Fate is a very different game, just like Assault Android Cactus and its Accelerate power-up, players prefer equipment that has overt offensive potential .

According to its creative director Morgan Jaffit, Something we notice a lot is that people generally prefer items with direct effects, rather than those that act on another system. A good example there is Skullcap of Prophecy, which reduces your cooldowns if you kill an enemy with a weapon ability. There's a lot going on there for a player to think about how often do they kill enemies, how often do they get to use weapon abilities, how does reducing cooldowns help them, etc.

The Skullcap of Prophecy can be part of a powerful combo when used with weapon abilities capable of finishing enemies off, reducing the cooldown on the ability that triggered the Skullcap in the first place in a repeatable loop. Most players don't bother with it, however, preferring to use gear that increases damage directly or doesn't require a decent weapon to synergize with.

Likewise, gear that has negatives as well as positives generally gets picked less than items that are a straight benefit, says Jaffit. Forbidden Armor give you bonus damage resistance, but stops you being able to heal. People tended to just wear slower, less effective armour instead of dealing with the downside.

And that's up to you. Choosing not to use items that handicap you whether they provide some balancing advantage or exist simply to let you challenge yourself or fit a specific theme you're roleplaying is a choice that's yours to make. But even if you do make that choice, the bad items you avoid still serve a purpose. As Jaffit says, you always need contrast. No single item is 'good' in the abstract, you need other items to compare them to.

If every card in Hand of Fate or Hearthstone was perfectly balanced for use with every playstyle, there would be no thrill to finding ones that suit you. If the power-ups in Assault Android Cactus were the same you'd never race dramatically across the level to grab the one you like, and if every gun in Borderlands was useful at every range and in every situation you'd never switch between them and find the perfect moment to bombard some bad guys with a shotgun that shoots exploding swords.

Even beyond stats, items with no value can be imbued with purpose by passionate fans. In Dark Souls, one of the starting gifts, a pendant, does absolutely nothing. Why would anyone pick it over a key that unlocks doors throughout the game? Fans of Dark Souls labyrinthine lore speculated on how the pendant might fit into the mythos until director Hidetaki Miyazaki revealed that it was basically a prank. But by then it had served its purpose, making Dark Souls just a little bit more mysterious.

That Colovian Fur Helm served a purpose too. When I finally sold it in favor of wearing something made of enchanted green glass, I felt like a proper hero for the first time, not that joker straight off the boat with the pointy head.

I would have missed the Colovian Fur Helm, but fortunately the shopkeeper I sold it to was so impressed he put it on immediately and continued wearing it for the rest of the game. Everybody's bad item is valuable to someone.

Uncharted is voice-and-mo-cap actor Nolan North s most famous work, casting him as Whedonesque, likeable treasure hunter Nathan Drake. One common criticism of that PlayStation hero is that he s presented as a positive, empathetic protagonist who experiences no trauma from his actions, despite gunning down hundreds of baddies. That s now a very tired point, but it s also why his casting as Captain Walker in 2012 s Spec Ops: The Line was such a smart call.

Walker starts that game as an action hero too, sent into sandstorm-ravaged Dubai to find out what s happened to former brother-in-arms John Konrad and his battalion, the Damned 33rd. That s all the mission is supposed to be: reconnaissance. But under your control and against orders, Walker engages with the conflict playing what he thinks is the role of the hero, despite never being fully aware of the facts. It s soon apparent that the 33rd s methods aren t sound, and that at the very least they re torturing CIA agents and firing on other soldiers. Stopping them is not your job, but Walker and his gung-ho pals decide it is, for the greater good. No wonder this game seems to have generated more think pieces than copies sold.

It was the noisy release of the PlayStation s Uncharted 4 that got me thinking about Spec Ops again. Nolan North was a subversive casting choice who better to portray a protagonist who kills as many people as a typical videogame hero, but exists in a context where those actions finally have consequences? This meta commentary was not deliberate: North worked on the game for four years, right from the pre-production stage, which may explain why Walker s increasingly weathered rage and gradual disassociation with reality is so convincingly played. What accidental good fortune, that the actor behind one of gaming s most well-known icons plays someone who tries to be a hero, but comprehensively fails.

Spec Ops is essentially an adaptation of Heart of Darkness, as the name John Konrad suggests. Heavier inspiration comes from Apocalypse Now, itself an adaptation of the same work. In all versions of this story, the protagonist is sent to track down a colleague who has gone off the reservation. That journey takes them through a strange land, where the circumstances and environment become stranger the closer the hero gets to their target, a process represented perfectly by the river in both the book and Apocalypse Now. The quarry in each story is found to be playing god over their new domain, succumbed to a form of madness created by the circumstances of their surroundings.

I think Spec Ops is as valid and interesting an adaptation of this story as Apocalypse Now. It lacks the river as a metaphor for the journey, but it s cleverly molded around the tropes of third-person shooters, leaving just enough control to make you feel complicit. It plays on your desire to press the trigger at any opportunity, and even breaks the fourth wall during a turret section to comment on repetition in these games. But more so than Apocalypse Now where Willard s journey to Kurtz morphs him from the army s reluctant assassin into a man who no longer associates himself with the army at all Spec Ops is Walker s journey into becoming Kurtz.

Do you feel like a hero yet? Konrad asks in the game s finale, after hours of wearying, increasingly violent firefights against the 33rd and everyone else in Dubai. You spend the game thinking you re chasing the warlord of Dubai down, but you re turning into him. With every reckless action, with every disobeyed order, with every instance you pull the trigger even when the game doesn t make you do it you re accelerating that transformation. The ending underlines that notion in a pointed, metaphorical way, explaining the horrific reality of what Walker has brought upon Dubai, and finally detaching him from the selfdelusional sense of heroism that s powered him through to this final moment. The ending offers choices that result in four possible outcomes, but it s hard to believe there s anything left of Walker, no matter which path you pick. I chose an ending where he simply walks away from the chaos, as close to a good ending as this bleak finale allows.

Spec Ops left me emotionally exhausted. I think the first thing I played after finishing it was Sonic 2, just to cleanse my palate a bit, since it s a little lighter on the dehumanising effects of war. The carnage deliberately goes on for slightly too long in Spec Ops. It beats you down, tires you out, in an effort to make your own state of mind align with Walker s. No other game has tried anything like it, and as a result it s one of the only cover shooters I d recommend without question.

Last September, I went to the Firaxis offices when they were in the fairly late stages of polishing XCOM 2. I met Jake Solomon there and showed him what XCOM: Enemy Unknown modding looked like. He wondered aloud if I had closets full of chains and leather.

John Lumpkin, otherwise known as JohnnyLump, is the co-creator of XCOM: Enemy Unknown s ultra-difficult Long War a mod that adds a slew of surplus stats, extra weapons, more campaign missions, more challenges, more squad members and, inevitably, more death to the original game. To those those uninitiated, Jake Solomon Enemy Unknown s creative director once described Firaxis official top-selling reimagining of Julian Gollop s 1994 turn-based classic as a 20-hour tutorial for Long War, which gives a sense of how comprehensive Lumpkin and partner Rachel Norman s hobbyist modification is.

Lumpkin tells me that he in fact doesn t keep a cupboard-full of S&M accessories at home not that there s anything wrong with that but that Solomon s tongue-in-cheek reference points to how inaccessible Enemy Unknown is to would-be modders. First you re required to essentially hack into the game s files to make it read INI files, Lumpkin says. Then you need to review the game s code, translate it into hexadecimal, before making changes to functions and classes so as to ensure your alterations don t crash the game. Lumpkin pauses, as if suddenly aware of how confusing this might sound to those unfamiliar with programming jargon.

It s strange, he says. I had 12 hours of computer science in college, my training was primarily as a journalist, but it gets to the point where you know the scene in The Matrix where Neo is looking at the code falling? You get to that point where you can start reading the code and you can see the Unreal script that it makes. It s a weird place for your head to get to but it can get there.

Getting there saw Lumpkin sinking two to three hours a day into his pet project as a distraction from studying at grad school media studies with a side of political science and international relations back in 2012. He d often have to force himself to pursue his dissertation, and admits partner Norman, when away from her job working in the US defence industry, almost certainly spent more time on the coding side of things as the project s engineer.

Although inspired by UFO: Enemy Unknown (XCOM: UFO Defense in the US) at 43 and 42 respectively, both Lumpkin and Norman are self-proclaimed veterans of the old days the idea for Long War was born from the simple fact that Lumpkin had finished the 2012 remake, wanted more, but couldn t find anything user-made in the game s small but growing community. He took matters into his own hands and, with the help of Norman, began to push the envelope on what was possible.

It kind of grew organically but as we figured out how to do something like how to add new weapons or how to have aliens upgrade themselves, we d add these new capabilities and release a new version, says Lumpkin. The Enemy Unknown campaign was 35 or 40 missions and I had a great time playing it and then it was over. I wanted more of the feel of warfare in terms of these great victories but also reversals that you have to address.

If you think of American sports we have NFL football here, where it s a 16-game season and every game is a big deal that have huge effects on your season. I wanted to switch that to make it a bit more like baseball, which has 160-odd games in a season and is much more about performance over the long term and statistics. I always thought of what we did to XCOM a little like that Enemy Unknown was the football season and we made it more like the baseball season with ups and downs and variety of challenges.

Before long, the ever-burgeoning Enemy Unknown community began to take notice of Long War. A healthy body of brave players had started playing, offering feedback and in essence became Lumpkin and Norman s QA team. Beta versions received tens of thousands of Nexus downloads courtesy of its barrel-load of new stuff, and it was discussed favourably by the games press. One of my real pleasures from all of this was going on Reddit or the Nexus feedback and watching people debate strategy in a real productive way, adds Lumpkin. There was nothing toxic about it, these were people having these really interesting discussions and it was so fun to read.

About mid-way through development, Jake Solomon started tweeting about his enjoyment of Long War. Julian Gollop praised the unofficial expansion during presentations. Eventually, first contact was made with Firaxis by way of its community manager Kevin Schultz. One of the things players wanted was soldiers not to sound like they re from Iowa, says Lumpkin, before explaining Jonathan Emmett, the mod s sound editor, had just figured out how to implement new voice packs.

They had enlisted volunteer voice actors from the UK, Australia, and the US, and had turned character Peter Van Doorn who appears briefly in Enemy Unknown with a great gung-ho delivery of his lines into a soldier that could be added to the game. Schultz reached out and said: hey, we ve got some leftover lines from that voice actor, do you want them? We said, you bet, and were able to make a custom voice pack for this particular character.

By early 2015, the Long War team had grown to a small core group of four, as well as four senior contributors, and, behind the scenes, Firaxis had begun work on XCOM 2 a direct follow-up to 2012 s Enemy Unknown that would make modding a priority by boasting day one mods and Steam Workshop support from launch. It was looking for help in this area, therefore publisher 2K reached out to Lumpkin, put him and his team under NDA and asked that they take the helm of three day one mods.

While working towards Long War 1.0, Lumpkin had also begun flirting with the idea of creating his own game Terra Invicta: another alien invasion-inspired game on a strategic level, that he planned to crowdfund down the line. He was, however, delighted to receive official recognition. What s more, this was immediate paying work. It was a chance to see all the procedures and processes involved in how a game is made, and to learn about proper QA and all of the different roles. In short: this was the Long War team s education.

In August 2015, Long War Studios was formed, it brought on an artist adding art to Enemy Unknown was very difficult, Lumpkin recalls and set about crafting the agreed XCOM 2 day one mods, while working on Long War s final release in the background. The latter launched its version 1.0 last December, while Long War s first batch of XCOM 2 mods went live on launch day; with a second and third lot releasing in April and July too.

We had this big list of ideas and had a bit of a back and forth with them, explains Lumpkin when I ask if Long War s creative freedom was sacrificed in this new, non-hobbyist setup. We asked what they wanted and they suggested the kind of things they were after for these day one mods. We threw some specifics at them and they thought it sounded great. If there was any freedom sacrificed on the creative side it was more to do with things like deadlines than it was us being told what to do.

They wanted to show off these modding tools, and we were conscious of that therefore came up with things that showed off different kinds of things you could do within the time frame that we had. There s an approval process, of course and a bit of further back and forth.

To this day, there are still but a few hundred mods available for XCOM: Enemy Unknown, not to mention no Steam Workshop support. XCOM 2 s Steam Workshop, however, boasts 1,994 at the time of writing testament to how more accessible this game is to prospective modders of all levels. Long War Studios still plans to pursue Terra Invicta down the line, something which seems a certainty now off the back of the Long War mod s reception, and what the team has learned from its work on XCOM 2.

I therefore ask Lumpkin if we can expect a Long War 2 mod for XCOM 2 at any point in the future.

We certainly know how we d do it, he says before pausing. And that s probably the most I can say right now.

GOG's  Take On 2K sale sees 11 of the publisher's classics debut on the distribution platform. Running until April 5, the sale bundles games from the X-COM, Freedom Force and Railroad Tycoon series—and Sid Meier's Pirates—into groups as follows:

• Sid Meier's Railroads
• Railroad Tycoon II
• Railroad Tycoon III

X-COM Classic Bundle: 5.45/$7.45 (-75%, 50% off individually)

• X-COM: UFO Defense
• X-COM: Terror from the Deep
• X-COM: Apocalypse
• X-COM: Interceptor
• X-COM: Enforcer

Freedom Force Pack: 2.78/$3.98 (-66%, 50% off individually)

• Freedom Force
• Freedom Force vs. The Third Reich

Sid Meier's Pirates!: 3.49/$4.99 (-50%)

"Ruthless strategic warfare? Check. Weirdo superheroes? You bet. Hilarious dancing sequences? Naturally," reads a post on  GOG.com. "And once again, the satisfaction of checking off a couple dozen thousand of your wishlist votes for some seriously good old games. So join us on the choo-choo train through battlefields riddled with alien corpses and swashbuckling superheroes—because we're taking on 2K!"

If that tickles your fancy, you've got until 2pm BST/6am PDT/9 AM EDT to grab the discounts before the Take On 2K sale expires.