With the announcement of City Of Brass [official site] today, I was intrigued to learn what this group of Irrational veterans – key players on so many well-loved games like SWAT 4, Tribes: Vengeance, Freedom Force and of course, BioShock – had planned for their first-person Arabian Nights-themed roguelite. I got in touch with team lead Ed Orman to find out more about how Uppercut Games formed, and how their experience on so many big games plays a part in creating something quite so different.> … [visit site to read more]

When a collection of former Irrational devs, who worked on BioShock, Freedom Force, Tribes: Vengeance and more, tell you they’ve got a first-person roguelite for you to play, it’s well worth paying attention. City Of Brass [official site] is an Arabian Nights-themed procedurally generated FPS, arming you with a whip and a scimitar, and challenging you to see just how far you can get through its permadeath streets. The first footage and more details lie below. … [visit site to read more]

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So often the bleeding edge of games tech, yet so often fundamentally the same underneath: there’s a reason we can’t get enough of pretend shooting pretend people in their pretend faces. It is a pure test of skill and reflex, a game about movement at least as much as it is about violence, and done right it is absolutely delightful>. And hey, sometimes you get a decent gimmick or story thrown into the mix.

These are our favourite 50 first-person shooters on PC, from 1993-2017. Your favourite is at number 51.

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There’s always a lighthouse, there’s always a man, there’s always a GOOOOAAAALLLL!

Perhaps misunderstanding the phrase “back of the net”, Rocket League [official site] developers Psyonix have announced an oceanic haul for their bumper-to-ball sports ’em up. Next month will bring a free carfootie pitch set in a BioShock-ish undersea sportworld, named AquaDome. I always thought Andrew Ryan was more into golf (or golf was in him) but here we go. Two submersible-ish cars are coming as paid DLC too.

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BioShock: The Collection [official site] on PC is good-lookin’ but, it’s fair to say, A Bit Dicky, pulling off the impressively bungled trick of both recreating some of BioShock’s original issues and throwing a clutch of new ones into the mix too. Take yer pick from enforced mouse-smoothing, no 5.1 sound, messed-up 21:9 support, limited FOV, no graphics settings outside of antialiasing, anistropic filtering, resolution, vysnc and a clutch of crashes. Many of these, though not the crashes, can be resolved via ini file editing (a guide to that is here), but in this, the third consecutive Year Of Luigi, we should not be expected to dirty our hands so.

The good news is that 2K are planning to grab a five-iron and bludgeon most of the major problems into submission. The bad news is that it doesn’t look like we can expect a full settings menu any time soon.

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Almost ten years after our first trip to Rapture, the BioShock trilogy has been re-released and (in some cases) remastered. The Collection [official site] looks lovely but it’s far from perfect.

Today, we’re looking back though – a lot has happened since the first game s arrival, including the departure of director Ken Levine from the studio that made two of the three games, and a resurgence of the first-person immersive sim as a genre. Here, we consider all things Bioshock and decide, among other things, which of the games is >actually> the best.

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Almost ten years after we first daddied and kindlied and golfed, BioShock has today returned in an apparently fancy-panted remastered version, aka Bioshock: The Collection [official site]. Sadly it s not in the best of shape, in terms of what we PC folk tend to demand from our settings menus and whatnot, but perhaps a more overriding question is but how does it look?>

I shall show you, in thirty different ways. A few thoughts of my own just beneath the cut too.

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Bioshock: The Collection [official site] is out today (and free to owners of the originals), which from a PC point of view is most exciting because it gives a big old spit’n’polish to the first two games in the series (Infinite is unaffected on PC, being relatively contemporaneous as it is). Unfortunately it seems that BioShock 1 Remastered particularly has not been as well-loved on PC as it perhaps should have been. It has only the barest-boned of graphical settings, it’s saddled with particularly nasty mouse-smoothing that can only be turned off via ini file hacking, and there are various minor screwy graphical boo-boos too. History is repeating itself: remember the FOV and DRM drama of 2007?

Details – and some fixes – below.

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Bioshock: The Collection [official site] is out next week, and as such you’ll be able to play the first two Bioshock games and all of the single-player DLC in renewed detail. Bioshock Infinite is thrown in there for good measure, but it already looks so pretty on PC they’re leaving it as is. 2K Games also plan to give the updated versions free to people who own the originals. How? What’s the catch? I checked, and it turns out it is surprisingly painless. Read on!

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