Ultrawide gaming monitors are the kind of hardware that might seem too excessive, maybe even a bit too gamer> to bother with for playing games on PC, especially when their demanding resolutions often require powerful graphics cards to make the most of them. Once you try one, though, there’s no going back. I’ve been a big fan of ultrawide gaming monitors for years now, mostly because supported PC games just look fantastic on them. And that’s why I’ve put together this list of the best ultrawide games on PC – to show you exactly what they look like in the flesh, complete with GIFs and photos of them running on an ultrawide monitor so you can see them in motion with your own peepers.

(more…)

Grow Home is probably one of the sweetest games of all time. It tells the story of a small botanical utility droid called BUD who’s been tasked by his MOM (also his mothership) to go down to a newly discovered planet, grow a big plant and harvest some seeds to bring back home with him. It’s lovely, and it makes you a lovelier person for having played it, I promise.

(more…)

There’s an old saying in gaming monitor circles that once you’ve gone ultrawide, there’s no going back. Indeed, having had the vast Samsung CRG9 hogging my desk for a bit last month, I’m inclined to agree. But what do games actually look like on a screen this wide? It’s one thing looking at lovely wallpapers, but another thing entirely to have a game occupy your entire field of vision.

To find out, and more importantly show you>, I’ve rounded up all the very best ultrawide PC games, complete with pictures of what they actually look like in the flesh, plus oodles of lovely GIFs so you can see how it works in action. If you thought playing Red Dead Redemption 2 in 5120×1440 was impressive, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

(more…)

The biggest names in platforming used to live only on console, but it’s on PC now that the genre is thriving. Indies have taken the simple ingredients and spun them off in umpteen directions (but still normally from left to right). Below you’ll find a collection of the very best platform games on PC – including puzzle platformers, physics platformers, platformers with roguelike elements, and platformers about absolutely nothing but pixel-perfect jumping.

(more…)

Perhaps ~~you re~~ the robot? Did you ever think of that, huh? No, it s fine, you re a human, a human who likes the RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show. This week, we’re chatting about our favourite mechanoids, cyberfolk and rust-buckets. Alec likes the robo-ostrich from World of Warcraft, a bird capable of great speed (and good for showing off). Brendan is fond of the abandoned bots of Hackmud, and their tragicomic existence on a humanless earth. Meanwhile, John loves little BUD of Grow Home and his wobbly walking animations.

Speaking of large, bi-pedal machines, we’ve also been playing strategy mech-em-up Battletech. Well, Alec has. He’s been stomping around, slowly firing missiles. But is it any good? (more…)

Welcome to the freshly relaunched RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show! You might think this is episode 31, but actually it s episode 1 again. We re rebooting it, even though we just did that last year. We ve started by making it more accessible. Instead of three of us chatting about videogames between snippets of jaunty music, there s just a sad man saying Sonic the Hedgehog over and over. We re confident you ll like it. (more…)

My nerves have been sufficiently jangled and my trigger-finger sufficiently itched by the glut of action games which landed in the closing months of last year. I crave an altogether more sedate beginning to 2018, and so my mind turns to games in which violence, reflex or any other kind of unblinking attentiveness takes a back seat.

Primarily we’re talking violence-free games here, but I wanted to drill a little deeper than that – so nothing that generally requires a competitive streak. I’m chasing a certain feel rather than a certain category. Flying, walking, puzzling, driving, building, dreaming, climbing, stretching, swinging (not like that), swimming, wondering: these are just a few of the ways in which flashing pixels can make you feel a very different sort of accomplishment.

And, of course, these are not even slightly the be-all and end-all of non-violent games on PC – please do nominate more in comments below. (more…)

This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the inner workings of their games. This time, colourful procedural climbing game Grow Home [official site].>

Put simply, BUD is a box suspended over legs and is held together by springs. In practice, BUD is an ungainly robot child, staggering and tripping his way around a low-poly world. BUD is the star of Ubisoft Reflections Grow Home and Grow Up, all grinning face-grille and gangly limbs. He s a kind of super-ambulant WALL-E, able to run, scale walls, leap and fly, in a stumbling and toppling off things kind of way.

It s hard to begrudge BUD for his drunken awkwardnesses, though, because as you attempt to control him they form a sense of a delightfully clumsy personality: BUD s drunken awkwardnesses are> BUD. But he s not carefully hand-animated. BUD is a bunch of maths, or more precisely:

THE MECHANIC: Procedural animation

… [visit site to read more]

Grow Home was born of an experiment in procedural animation, almost accidentally creating a lovely game to support it. Grow Up [official site] was born of a desire to make a sequel to Grow Home. I think this captures the key differences between the two games. Here’s wot I think:>

… [visit site to read more]

Two words for you, reader, you and your video games: Grow Up [official site]. That’s a joke really undone by capitalisation and our standardised linking, isn’t it. Otherwise it’d be hilarious, wouldn’t it. You’d be like “Whaaat! How dare you! And on a video games site!” then I’d reveal that really I was talking about the sequel to Ubisoft’s splendid physics-o-platformer Grow Home and you’d be like “Oh gosh! I thought…!” and we’d laugh and laugh. Well, so much for that. The point is, Grow Up is now out and that’s good news, isn’t it.

… [visit site to read more]