There are more wonderful games being released on PC each month than ever before. In such a time of plenty, it’s important that you spend your time as wisely as possible. Thankfully, we’re here to help. What follows are our picks for the best PC games ever made. (more…)

One of the best things about Doom is that there’s a version of it for everybody. If you like your weapons a little more old-school and your Westerns thoroughly Weird, then High Noon Drifter might just be what you’re looking for in a retro FPS.

It’s High Noon (or was when I was writing this), so dust off your hat and slip into the well-worn cowboy boots of ghostly drifter Corzo for your regularly scheduled fix of demon-slaughter across a thousand worlds with an arsenal of chunky revolvers, lever-action shotguns and a vicious whip.

(more…)

Skeleton Appreciation Month has been, gone and shuffled back off to its grave, but I figure we can afford to extend the spooky festivities just a little> while longer, especially with gems like this having snuck out in the final hours of October.

Castlevania: Simon’s Destiny was released on Halloween day, and is a genuinely impressive fan-game, remaking the entirety of the original NES game in first-person perspective, all built on the open-source (and increasingly flexible) GZDoom engine. Well worth a play, if you feel you could do with a little more Dracula in your life.

(more…)

Brutal Doom in a nutshell: Doom 2‘s familiar (iconic?) Icon Of Sin battle re-purposed into the very image of heavy metal excess; No longer just a wall texture, the monster bobs and sways, protruding out from a wall of giant intestines surrounded by torrents of blood pouring into the arena, all whilst the player gracefully extends a middle finger on each hand.

It’s been nearly two years since this juggernaut of Doom modding saw a major release, with its creator taking some time off to remake Doom 64 in the interim. Missing Halloween by just one day, this week saw the release of version 21 (albeit in beta form) and it feels like a milestone in its transformation into something almost entirely new, and distinct from both Doom of 1993, and Doom of 2016.

(more…)

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day, perhaps for all time.>

I wrote about this stonkingly beautiful and enormous mega-mod for the original Quake last year, recommending that y’all should play it, but it didn’t quite turn out as planned when fans and creators alike (politely) argued that the screenshots I’d used did not suitably sell the game. So, here are some screenshots of Arcane Dimension which hopefully will> convince you to give it a try. You really should, because it’s the next best (or maybe even better?) thing to getting a whole new Quake.

(more…)

This is Doom. You know> this. The rhythms have been burnt into your DNA by this point: Gun, demons, maze, exit. Now add a ticking time limit forcing careful target prioritisation and precise movement and a level full of floating tokens which require collection (most of them, at least) before the exit will reveal itself. This> is Skulldash: Expanded Edition, a massive mod re-released for the GZDoom engine today, and it’s really quite brilliant so long as you don’t mind being a little hurried.

(more…)

My wishlist for first-person shooters is simple:

• A pump-action shotgun
• A revolver that’s longer than my forearm and chunkier than a fridge
• A slow but deadly and ch-chank-chik bolt-action rifle
• Skillful movement
• A grappling hook
• A slide move (ideally with a kick)

Well, campers, I’m delighted to see that last one in Quake with new mod Qore [official site]. It’s still early days for Qore, which is trying to bring Brutal Doom-style over-the-top megamurder to Quake, but the point is: I slidekicked soldiers and demons in Quake this morning and I’m delighted. (more…)

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day, perhaps for all time.>

I went to the games shop and stared at the box several times a week for the best part of a year. It was the 90s, I read X-Men comics and watched the X-Men Saturday morning cartoon and> there was a PC in my house. An X-Men FPS was beyond my wildest imaginings. Yet I could not play X-Men: Ravages Of Apocalypse. In fact, I have never> played X-Men: Ravages Of Apocalypse, and because of that it still remains, in my mind, The Greatest Videogame There Ever Was. (more…)

Here they are then – the best games to play in virtual reality…and those games are “watching football,” “drinking”, “a nice cup of tea”, “fleeting emotional connection to another human being” and all those other everyday activities you believe to be real, as opposed than a simulation you have been experiencing since you first plugged your frail, mollusc-like form into a headset 19 years ago. SPOOKS!

But, should you persist in maintaining this fantasy, let’s go one level deeper and talk about the entertaining, satisfying or otherwise nifty games available for what is the current VR state-of-the-art in your imagined world: the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift. The rival headsets are getting on for a couple of years old now, and in that time there’s been what can feel like a ceaseless storm of new games for them. How to choose, how to choose? Well, start here. These are not the only> good’uns, please understand – but they are our favourite virtual realities right now.

(more…)

The thrills of gibbing demons and sitting still watching numbers go up combine in Idle Doom, a mod turning id Software’s seminal face-paced FPS into an idle game where you watch a machine kill monsters so you can upgrade to a bigger monster-killing machine. It is exactly what it sounds like: a Doom idle game. It’s just the ticket for people who want to feel like they still strafe rough and frag hard but, really, they’re quite tired so it would be grand if they could put their feet up with a cuppa and let someone else handle things for a bit and oh please turn the light off on your way out, ta. (more…)