If it’s not baroque, don’t fix it. Little architecture joke for you there, just to kick off a dry topic with a giggle. You see, appreciating architecture is for people in beige cardigans. Folks who subscribe to magazines printed on paper so thick you can still calculate the tree s age. You know the type I mean. Spectacled couples with non-Ikea coffee tables. Thirty-year-olds. People like you! Here are 11 examples of very satisfying architecture in PC games.

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It doesn’t have anything to match the first game’s memorable twist, but in all other ways BioShock 2 is the best of the three BioShock games. It returned you to the underwater city of Rapture as a prototype Big Daddy, one of the drill-handed protectors you spend the first game hunting. It had better fights, better or equally as memorable world design, and never hits any of the low lows of its predecessor or sequel. (E.g. it doesn’t end with you fighting a big blue man.) We rightly champion games which undertake the heavy work of creating something new, as the first BioShock did, but moment to moment, BioShock 2 is simply more fun.

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I have spent the winter holidays making a list, checking it twice, trying to find who is naughty on ice. But unlike the popular red-clad demon of the north, my list is reserved for terrors, demons and critters larger than 4 feet tall. I m talking about cold monsters. They re very chic this week. You see, while Nic has been battering majestic species of endangered giganto-moose in our Monster Hunter World: Iceborne review, I have been working hard to catalogue the frostiest freaks this side of video gaming. Here you go, the 8 coldest monsters in PC games.

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There are only five days left to furtively flick through your cousin s Facebook page in a desperate attempt to understand them as a person. But you do know one thing: they love to play those videogames. That s enough to go on, surely. You can just type gamer gifts into the cybervoid and see what comes out!

No. Do not do that.

Here are the 8 worst gifts for PC gamers, and if any other list goblin tells you otherwise they are a scurrilous crook and they want your money.

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What is the true hallmark of a BioShock game? According to the press release about the new 2K-founded studio Cloud Chamber, wot is making a brand new BioShock, it’s “iconic, first-person shooter gameplay”. Before Binfinite came out, original series lead Ken Levine said in an interview that it’s the “incredibly detailed world” each game lets you explore. Or maybe it’s the PoLiTiCs? BioShock, famously, includes a pretty basic critique of the wet fart that is Objectivism, causing people either to argue it was a searing work of political genius, or be furious that it wasn’t> a work of searing political genius. Perhaps it’s the settings? BioShock and BioShock 2 were set in an underwater city, and Infinite was set in a floating one. I can only assume the new one will just be about a normal city. But run on centrist principles>. The most dystopian system of them all!

But of course, none of these things are really the hallmark of a BioShock game. What truly makes the series stand out is that you can shoot flying animals out of your hand, because of DNA. And I think we all know what that animal should be used as ammunition in the new BioShock.

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Pretty pop-philosophy FPS series BioShock is to return, 2K announced today, with a new game coming from a new studio. 2K don’t reveal even the name of the new game, let alone in which sort of strange city it’ll (surely?) be set, but it’s official: BioShock is back, baby. 2K have muttered about resurrecting it several times in the years since the release of BioShock Infinite and demise of creators Irrational Games, and this time it seems to be real. The new BioShock is being made by Cloud Chamber, a new studio who’ll be working on the game “for the next several years.” Don’t hold your breath. Unless you’re underwater. In which case, do.

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Minigames are the coffee Revel of videogames. They are harmless, infrequent and unpleasant to think about. We accept their presence, yet no one has ever eaten a pack of Revels and wished for more coffee nuggets. Nobody completed Final Fantasy X and thought: Needs more Blitzball . That minigames exist as a mild distraction inside the glowing guts of other games is itself ridiculous. Imagine you were on a golf course, and hole 12 turned out to be its own 8-hole pitch n putt. This is stupid, you d think, and then you would play pitch n putt for the rest of the day in a mindless stupor.

Here are the 7 most gratuitous minigames – but do they all deserve to be here?

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The best shooters endure. While other genres warp beyond recognition, there is something solid about the first-person shooter that makes it as dependable as a nice big AK-47. Maybe it s the gung-ho simplicity – look down a barrel and pull the trigger. It’s as fun to fire a double-barrelled shotgun from an early 90s FPS as the slick shotties of today. For that reason, this list runs the gamut from genre classics to those released in the last year. There’s bound to be something for you in this, our list of the best 50 FPS games on PC. Let s lock and/or load.

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In Vectorpark s Sandcastles, you build fantastic towers and watch the waves erase your work every 10 seconds. It s a very direct metaphor for the global climate crisis that threatens to flood coastal cities and exacerbate natural disasters. Sandcastles confronts us with our totally predictable watery doom, but we also find fun and expression in our totally foreseeable destruction. When the planet dies, at least we ll be entertained.

Before you commit to starving and drowning, you should probably understand how and why it ll happen. To imagine this nightmarish hellworld, readers can flip through climate fiction novels ( cli-fi ) and movie-goers can watch a big unprofitable climate disaster blockbuster every few years. But us mouse-clickers, we obviously don t read books or watch movies. Instead, we play with climate. Behold, the climate crisis game.

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I say watch because this week’s podcast takes place in a real room in front of a real audience (don t worry, there s an audio version too). At Rezzed in London this month, we thought it d be fun to re-enact three of the most memorable scenes of PC gaming, exactly as you remember them. So strap on your eye-wideners and prepare for some wonderful acting. Including a 100% faithful adaptation of the most notorious moment in any Final Fantasy game: the death of… Aerosmith?

Alice! Alice, what have you done to these scripts!?

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