Right now, there s a room in Buffalo Grove, Illinois that’s as quiet as a grave. The power is off, the robotic limbs are becalmed, and the once thumping presses are depressed. The Steam Controller assembly room is assembling no more, and with the recent Steam sale clearing out all the stock, the grand experiment is over.

It s the final part of Valve s great Steam Machines undertaking to be shut down. They d hoped to convince you to have a PC in the living room, or a small box for you to stream your library from your main PC. The Steam Machines never took off, the Steam Link box was discontinued a year ago, and now the Steam Controller will no longer be made. Gone, but not forgotten.

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Despite the return of trusty companion Dogmeat, Fallout 4 didn’t ship with the ability to handle any hounds. Shocking, I know. In a world where dog-rating Twitter accounts are tangibly changing the shape of games, who can afford to take any chances?

Like so many things in Fallout, mods have arrived to fix this injustice.

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Usually after the Steam summer sale horror show, the Steam Charts offer us some respite in the lull between AAA releases and allow us to celebrate the successful release of a bunch of indie games. But as you’ll have noticed if you’ve looked at 2019, nothing follows the rules of sense and decorum any longer. So it is that last week and this, we’ve had charts that feature only a single recently released game.

So this week we’re taking a trip!

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It’s never a good sign when Skyrim’s back in the Charts. It means mischief is afoot. And not the good kind. In this case, it’s Bethesda’s Quakecon sale, meaning a whole bunch of the dreariest of usual suspects return to droop our eyelids and weary our souls. And Nier and Flibble Glibble Pants are both on sale yet again. In fact, this week’s top 10 features precisely one game released in the last TWO YEARS>.

So this week I think I shall describe to you the feelings I feel when I see these games appearing once more.

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Sometimes a skeleton is just a skeleton. They’re bloody everywhere> in the Fallout games, so you could easily overlook just one more. Sometimes, however — like in the Fallout 4 instance above — it’s a clever multi-layered nod to a friend. Earlier today, former Bethesda level designer Joel Burgess shared a few of his stories and favourite hidden creations via Twitter. It’s some good insight, good advice for level designers, and highlights a few things you might have otherwise missed.

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You don’t need to play Fallout 4 for a vision of the USA as a post-apocalyptic wasteland filled with wacky characters and deadly critters; you can experience it for real with a visit to Florida. But a vision of post-apocalyptic Florida, oh boy, are you sure you can handle that? Best you ease yourself in slowly, perhaps with the newly-released early slice of the mod Fallout: Miami. It’s a wee walking simulator at the moment, with no quests or NPCs, but do you really think you’re ready to meet a post-apocalyptic Floridian? Take it slow, hit the beach, enjoy the palms, then see how you feel about confronting an irradiated Florida Man.

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To this day, the jaunty static of the opening jingle to Harvest Moon: More Friends of Mineral Town brings me back to a simpler time. Summer evenings spent hunched over my Game Boy SP, a pane of glass between me and nature s suburban bounty as I tilled my little squares of land, pet my happy little chickens, and bribed a town s worth of reticent heartthrobs into falling for my little blonde avatar, Pepper, with an onslaught of ores, animal products, and various culinary delights (but never cucumbers, ya gummy-mouthed fish-man).

Harvest Moon was about as wholesome as wholesome gets, my first videogame love, but as the days turned to years, we grew apart. Since then, I ve filled the hole in my heart with the usual suspects, (Stardew Valley, Rune Factory, and so on) until there was only one thing left to do: make my own Harvest Moon. And so began my ongoing personal quest to turn every game I own that is unfortunate enough to not be Harvest Moon into the farming simulation game they were always meant to be. Here, in true naturalist fashion, I present my field notes in the hope that we may go on to tame this new frontier together.

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Way back in the forgotten times of glossy paper games magazines, I remember my first exposure to what would become Fallout: A Post Nuclear Role Playing Game. Early previews said Fallout was going to be a PC showcase of the GURPS pen-and-paper RPG system, but it grew into its own thing. Now, tabletop studio Modiphius have announced the Fallout: Wasteland Warfare Roleplaying Game, a freeform RPG expansion for their tabletop miniature tactics game. Curiously, there’s yet another, more traditionally pen-and-paper version based on Modiphus’s 2d20 RPG rule-set due next year.

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I’m not big into numberwang. Vast numbers of people playing a game might indicate that it’s fun, or it might indicate that it’s Ark: Survival Evolved. (I haven’t played Ark and it could be amazing, this is irresponsible journalism and I will hand in my badge and gun shortly.) Point being, it’s more interesting to write about what has made a game popular than the fact that it is so.

Right. Now I have to convince you this animated graph of the most played Steam games from the past four years is fascinating.

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Obisdian’s Fallout: New Vegas might be the best of the Bethesda-era Fallout games, but it still got dragged through the ugly hedge backwards a dozen times over. There’s no higher resolution, sharpened texture pack or post-process filter in the world that can save this pudding-faced monstrosity from its blobby brown fate.

Time for extreme measures. E.g. getting a neural net to re-texture the entire game with feverish new auto-generated assets, devised by insane software after it was fed a broad selection of real-world paintings. I have never wanted to play a latter-day Fallout game more than this.

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