Twitch's monthly games giveaway to Prime members started in March, and since then subscribers have been treated to the likes of Psychonauts, Gone Home and Tales from the Borderlands. This month, five games are on offer, including excellent story-driven turn-based strategy game The Banner Saga and its even better sequel.

If you pay for Twitch Prime—which is included as part of Amazon Prime membership—you'll also get solid roguelike FPS Strafe, action puzzler Tumblestone and Early Access vehicle combat game Treadnauts, which looks like the kind of game you'd play when you have friends over. All of the games are available now when you log into your Twitch account. You'll need the Twitch desktop app to play them.

If you haven't played The Banner Saga and you're a Twitch Prime member, then grab it right away. It's bleak and beautiful, and the choices you make in it will carry over into The Banner Saga 2. 

The cost of Amazon Prime went up by $20 last month, to $119, which is bound to stop some people renewing or joining. But if you still like the package—and I reckon it's still decent value—then you can link your Amazon and Twitch accounts together here for ad-free viewing, in-game loot (like Fortnite freebies) and a free channel subscription every month.

The Banner Saga wiki describes its bearded Varl race as "warlike" with a "fondness for mead and brawling". If you've ever braved last orders in a Glasgow pub, you'll be familiar with their kind. If not, you might be interested in a video short that highlights one of The Banner Saga 3's most influential characters.

The following marks the first of a planned series. It stars Fasolt, The Loyalist:

As you may already know, The Banner Saga 3 marks the closing chapter of Stoic's painterly tactical role-playing series. It was successfully crowdfunded to the tune of $416,986 (of its $200,000 goal) last year, however hasn't given us much to write about since. If it follows the standard set by its first and second outings, though, I imagine we'll be onto a winner. 

I particularly enjoyed this excerpt from Chris Schilling's The Banner Saga 2 review:

You’ll forgive the occasions where the narrative and mechanics don’t always dovetail perfectly for the moments in which they do—spectacularly so during one story beat, as Stoic somehow generates nerve-fraying tension from a sequence conducted at walking pace. Yes, there’s still room for improvement, but this is a smart, worthy sequel: denser, richer, more complex and yet more intimate. Even if you’ll feel in dire need of a stiff drink once this second act draws to its devastating close. 

Alongside the above moving pictures, publisher Versus Evil says The Banner Saga 3 is "coming summer 2018". 

‘Metal as fuck’ is a modern colloquialism used to indicate whether an object, idea, or action is verifiably rad. But calling something metal means much more than ‘cool, but edgy’. It’s a phrase that should be reserved for only the raddest and the saddest of shit, to be wielded precisely—break glass in case of impossible geometry. 

Which is why I want to avoid easy picks for our professional take on which PC games are the most metal. Any game can have skulls and Satan, and sport cool hats that say “Metal” on them. But a true metal designation comes from something beneath the surface. 

True metal is emotion that swells infinitely into a dead signal, a raw, sustained wall of noise that blots out everything else. Metal can also the the total inverse, a complete lack of emotion and the struggle or fascination that results from wrestling with the meaning of existence. Metal can be triumphant and transcendent, a screaming chorus against oblivion. Metal is also sometimes just some people screaming passages from Moby Dick, which I endorse. With that in mind, here are our picks for the most metal PC games, and some companion albums to get you into a similar headspace. Mute the trailers and play their song to hear and see for yourself. 

Neverending Nightmares 

Companion album: Moonlover by Ghost Bath

While the art looks right out of children's storybook, Neverending Nightmares is a blunt exploration of depression and suicidal thoughts. Designer Matt Gilgenbach would know—the game was inspired by his personal experiences with mental illness. Ultimately, it’s a hopeful tale, but finding that light requires tip-toeing through one eerie location after another, while getting harassed by monsters and extremely graphic visions—like, some seriously awful stuff. You’ve been warned. But it’s this plain, honest approach to mental illness that makes Neverending Nightmares so metal. Metal as fuck. It’s a game that addresses something very real and personal without flinching, taking a long soak in darkness to exfoliate the soul. 

VVVVVV + MMMMMM 

Companion album: Epicloud by Devin Townsend Project

VVVVVV’s vanilla form isn’t quite metal. It brushes against psychedelic rock with such bright coloring, but there’s something transcendent in overcoming its difficult platforming challenges. It’s not quite metal on its own, but a second, officially sanctioned soundtrack by the original composer SoulEye just pushes it over the edge. MMMMMM is a metal version of the VVVVVV score created as a collaboration between SoulEye and guitarist FamilyJules7x. After seeing a metal cover medley of VVVVVV’s tunes on YouTube, SoulEye reached out and immediately went to work on a louder, brasher, more triumphant recreation of his original songs. Even better, with every download, he included a mod file that inserts the MMMMMM compositions into the game. It’s the only way I can play it anymore.

Yankai’s Triangle 

Companion album: The Direction of Last Things by Intronaut

Yankai’s Triangle is an eerie, psychedelic puzzle game about spinning triangles to form triangles so you can keep making triangles. Some of them have eyes. Some make squishy sounds. Some of them whisper. 100 puzzles in and little has changed, but I’m still going, hypnotized by the rote act of spinning shapes. If I didn’t need to eat or sleep and didn’t need to work, I might be content spinning shapes forever. A pointless existence? Nah, we’re talking triangles here.

The Cat Lady 

Companion album: Commitment to Complications by Youth Code

I’ve never played a game as bleak as The Cat Lady. You play as Susan, a woman who commits suicide and is transported to a strange nether world where the ‘Queen of Maggots’ makes her immortal until she rids the world of five psychopaths. It’s one hell of an opener, but nothing about the game is pleasant. Susan is severely depressed, and interfacing with a character that wants nothing more than to die, while tasked with murdering murderers—well, it’s an uncomfortable journey through terrifying, true aspects of human experience. The Cat Lady reflects some of the darkest metal out there, trashed up in the slightest by a scribbly, industrial aesthetic that prevents it from being too dour to play. It’s still sad as hell, offers little in the way of hope, and doesn’t care much about how much fun you’re having. In other words, it’s metal.

American Truck Simulator 

Companion album: Four Phantoms by Bell Witch

Peak solitude is best experienced on dead silent freeway in rural Nevada. I know the mountains are out there, but I can’t see them. Tiny lights flicker on and off in the distance, either the occasional porch light or a blinking LED on some strange power station. If I tell myself I’m driving on a highway through the ocean, or nothing at all, I’m there. The experience isn’t painful or aggressive—it’s wonderful, and a bit overwhelming. Look at all that darkness. Look at everything we can’t see. Just make sure to stay under the speed limit. Fee notices crowding the screen take me out of it.

Devil Daggers 

Companion album: All the Waters of the Earth Turn to Blood by The Body

The game is set in an abyss and you shoot daggers out of your fingertips against an endless stream of flying skulls and abyssal centipedes. Devil Daggers is PC gaming’s cursed arcade cabinet, so oppressive and indifferent to the player it feels evil. It’s an FPS that feels dangerous to play and impossible to conquer. There’s nihilism in throwing yourself against the demonic horde time and time again, only to gain a few more seconds or inch up the leaderboard. To what end? None. Just more demons, more darkness, and infinite, guaranteed failure. But buried beneath all the failure is a graceful, entertaining shooter. Hold onto the fun. Never let go.

Dark Souls 2 

Companion album: NO by Old Man Gloom

Every Souls game is metal, but Dark Souls 2 puts on a clinic. Some of its set pieces feel more tongue in cheek than the other games (see the ghost ship in No-man’s Wharf), but if that means we get to fall hundreds of feed through a tear in time and space onto a throne room suspended in a chaos realm before taking on an ancient king and his cronies with a litany of soldier friends at our back—it’s straight up Paradise Lost fan-fiction—then I don’t mind some cheese on occasion.

Darkest Dungeon 

Companion album: 777 - The Desanctification by Blut Aus Nord

Fill out the soundscape with metal instrumentation and Darkest Dungeon’s narrator will fit right in. He’s already the vocalist to your dungeoneers’ inevitable demise, commenting on the impurity of the land and describing enemies with sticky, odorous prose—so why not? He’s right though, about how awful everything is. Darkest Dungeon’s unforgiving turn-based combat will build a pile of corpses to heaven in no time. Go ahead, climb it. There’s nothing up there.

The Banner Saga 

Companion album: Times of Grace by Neurosis

Darkest Dungeon doesn’t give a damn about the player, but The Banner Saga sets up interesting, sympathetic characters and then proceeds to not give a damn about them. You just get to their lives get progressively worse through the medium of grid-based combat. Congratulations, you just beat the level—oh, and by the way, you’re starving and everyone you know is dead, including the gods. So where do you want to allocate those stat points?

Doom 

Companion album: Koloss by Meshuggah

Chugga-lugga-lug. No, I’m not drinking chocolate milk, I’m drinking blood. Hell yeah! It’s the sound Doom makes, chugga-lugga-lug, both in the soundtrack and the sound of demons turning to gristle beneath DoomGuy’s fist or a light red mist from direct super shotgun buckshot to the general face area. Doom is a self-aware montage of blood and pulpy demonic imagery, an ode to angsty trapper keeper doodles and a reminder that, damn, church is boring. Instead, go to hell. Doom is loud and fun and dumb in the first five minutes and all the reading is optional. You’re going to have the insides of a demon splashed all over your mug—and into your mug, if you have one handy like I always do. Drinking blood is metal. Do it. Drink blood.

“Drinking blood is metal. Do it. Drink blood.” — James Davenport, 2017

Night in the Woods 

Companion album: Grind your bones to dust by Exoskelett

Night in the Woods contains and addresses: witches, rural decay, the failures of capitalism, existentialism, and pizza. It’s metal. If you’ve ever seen your favorite food place’s windows boarded up with a sign that says ‘Going out of business!’ hanging from the front door, then you’ve experienced metal. Metal is sad, but true. Metal kind of sucks, really. So why play or listen to anything intended to be such a bummer? For some, it’s a helpful exercise that helps them overcome feelings of listlessness in tough times. Everything is slowly weathering away, including ourselves. Might as well hang out with our friends, break shit, eat some hot pies, and chip away at the man. There might be a happier ending somewhere down the line, but this isn’t it. Not yet.

Second Life 

Companion album: Monoliths and Dimensions by Sunn O)))

Metal often addresses transcendence, a means to escape our plane of existence, though not always literally. At the very least, good metal is a temporary vessel through which you can perceive the world in a new light, from above or far below. And Second Life has it right there in the name, a new world, a new life. But what truly makes it the most metal MMO is that upon shedding this mortal coil and Logging In, you’re not necessarily granted a clean slate. You’re bombarded with everything that every was and ever could be rendered in 3D engine from 2003. 

Second Life is a better life for many and a horrifying mirror for others. If you want to be a tall rabbit who fucks, you can. If you want to be a beauty blogger, you can. If you want to be a Chad and raise your seven sons in a quiet suburb, you can. It’s the time stream continuum compressed to exist on server farm. It contains the most primitive forms of good and evil, the big bang happening all at once, history remixed, terror, love, joy, unicorns with boobs—Second Life is more metal than we can comprehend.

Thumper 

Companion album: Teethed Glory and Injury by Altar of Plagues

I’ve already written at length about how much I love Thumper’s insistence on feeling awful: “I’ve been waiting for a game to bend my arm past my elbow for years now. That’s Thumper’s specialty, using the familiarity of a traditional music game ‘note highway’ to make the player feel anything but groovy.” If it wasn’t obvious, ‘awful’ is a compliment. Thumper is sustained discomfort in music game form, condensing the sense of tumbling down a hillside and barely staying fully conscious into a small metal scarab flying down an cosmic highway. It leaves me feeling exhausted and tense, but better prepared to face the pain again. 

Bundle Stars is running a Versus Evil publisher sale today, containing plenty of RPGs and dungeon crawling. The main highlight here though is The Banner Saga, which has a healthy 75 percent discount. 

There have been two Banner Saga games so far, and which it has a good deal of turn based strategy, it's the characters and the consequences of your choices along the way that'll keep you going. Chris' review of the first game back in 2014 said "there are deeper strategy games, but few where you'll feel quite so invested in the outcome."

The price after the big 75 percent off is the cheapest you'll find this game today. Everywhere else it's up at full price. 

Some online stores give us a small cut if you buy something through one of our links. Read our affiliate policy for more info. 

It took The Banner Saga 3—the third and supposed final chapter of Stoic Studio's gorgeous Viking-themed tactical role-player—just one week to hit its $200,000 crowdfunding goal. At the time of writing, its Kickstarter campaign has accrued over $250k, and with 27 days left on the clock there's plenty of time to add more to that again as the project now targets its stretch goals. 

During a Reddit AMA, Stoic admitted to having some "exciting news" regarding voiceovers—a feature which hasn't appeared in the series thus far—in line with the current Kickstarter. 

"We hope to have exciting news about this goal. It is an expensive thing to get in the game for a small studio like ours, but it's something we'd love to offer the community," says the developer. "Can't say much more about it, but if you want to see this someday, please support the Kickstarter that we're currently running."

Reddit users were quick to suggest voicing their own interpretations of The Banner Saga's whimsical cast is central to their enjoyment, and that introducing professional voiceovers could risk belittling its charm.  

"We have a lot of debate internally about that," adds Stoic. "Some folks definitely like that feeling you get from a novel that the voices are acted in your imagination. If it comes to pass, I'm excited to do some experimentation to figure out how to get it right. I love the voices we've worked with thus far, and want to maintain that level of Nordic grit."

Beyond the imminent third chapter of the saga, Stoic says it would also love to explore new stories within the series' universe—such as tales set in the Dalalond, the land of the valleys, or perhaps even beyond The Vast's waters to the west.  

"Are there going to be more stories in this world?" Stoic asks somewhat rhetorically. "We sure hope so. Oddly it's only kind-of up to us. We've stated regularly that we'd love to do more, the story we're telling is only the tip of the iceberg, but it's up to the community really. Are people buying the game and telling their friends? That's all we need. Even a small team needs to make enough money to continue the journey. We'll see how Banner Saga 3 is received."

As per its Kickstarter page, The Banner Saga 3's Kickstarter pledges are due to be delivered by 2018. The release date of The Banner Saga 3 is yet to be announced.

Less than one week after it began, the Kickstarter campaign for The Banner Saga 3 has achieved its $200,000 goal. That leaves well over a month—36 days, to be exact—to take aim at an interesting stretch goal. 

For $250,000, Stoic will add the Dredge,  which are "humanoid beings supposedly made of stone," as a playable race. In the original Banner Saga, the Dredge were the primary antagonists, and so only appeared as enemy units. As playable units, they'll be available in three classes: Stoneguard, Hurler, and Stonesinger.   

"The Dredge are the colossal, armor clad ancestral enemies of the Varls since the beginning. They are hostile on sight to all other intelligent life," the Banner Saga Wiki explains. "They were formed when one of the gods, jealous of his peers, took their creations and twisted them into something bizarre and unnatural and then set them free to wreak havoc on the land. After some long and bloody wars the Dredge were thought to be extinct, but they started to slowly reappear and no one knows why." 

Stoic said that more information about the lore and history of the Dredge will be revealed in a future update. "This is just the beginning, though! This is when the fun starts and from here on out it’s cherries on top for everyone!" the studio wrote in a Kickstarter update announcing the good news. "We have lots of great stuff planned that we simply didn’t think we’d get a chance to put in the game. Let’s do it together, shall we?" 

The Banner Saga 3 Kickstarter runs until March 7.

Two weeks ago, Stoic Studio's John Watson admitted he and his colleagues "dropped the ball" by neglecting its community during the development of The Banner Saga 2. This was in reference to the fact Stoic had crowdfunded the series' first game and made the false assumption its sequel would not require the same level of community investment. In turn, sales suffered which may be why Stoic is once again turning to Kickstarter—The Banner Saga 3 has just kicked off a new campaign.   

With 42 days left on the clock, the project's funding is rising fast which—at the time of writing—stands at over $13,000 of a $200,000 goal. 

"Banner Saga 3 is the highly anticipated final game of an award winning trilogy," so reads the Kickstarter blurb. "It's a role-playing game merged with turn-based strategy, wrapped into an adventure mini-series about Vikings. Many modern games play it safe – you are the chosen one who always saves the day. Our game is different, you can’t take anything for granted in Banner Saga. 

"Picture the classic tactical strategy games of your childhood but refined for the modern age. It's not about grinding to get past the next fight. Every encounter, every decision you make has heavy and sometimes far-reaching consequences. It throws you into the end of the world and asks,'how do you deal with this'? Banner Saga 3 is aimed at people who appreciate art, story and strategy."

As per its Kickstarter page, The Banner Saga 3's Kickstarter pledges are due to be delivered by 2018. The release date of The Banner Saga 3 is yet to be announced.

The Banner Saga was a very beautiful game, in no small part due to its soundtrack. Composed by Grammy award nominated Austin Wintory, it's full of atmospheric, ye olde European folk music, the likes of which would probably sound very good on vinyl. As the image above suggests, you'll soon have the opportunity to hear it that way.

Thanks to iam8bit, Wintory's score will release on double, coloured vinyl later this year. It'll set you back $40, but that comes with a digital version of the album, too. Pre-orders are open tomorrow, and these things tend to sell out pretty quickly, so if you're interested in this I'd suggest snapping it up pronto. 

Wintory's work on The Banner Saga didn't please everyone: the American Federation of Musicians union wanted to fine him $50,000 for using musicians not affiliated with the union. The organisation later changed that fine to $2,500, which Wintory wasn't eager to pay, either. You can read a bit more about that spat over here.

In more positive news: The Banner Saga 2 is probably going to happen. 

Here's the soundtrack for your listening pleasure:

In the tutorial dungeon during the first act of Pillars of Eternity you meet a xaurip—one of the game s reptilian kobold creatures. It s feebly waving a spear (see the video above) but obviously isn t much of a threat. In another RPG you might be tempted to heroically slaughter this sickly three-foot specimen because, hey, level two ain t gonna hit itself. But in Pillars of Eternity you don t earn experience points for every single thing you kill. It ties its biggest XP rewards to quest completion instead, theoretically allowing you to pursue non-violent solutions without feeling like you re holding yourself back, without having to worry that you re weakening your future self by not beating up every single wheezing geckoman you meet. You could talk to him instead.

The tabletop RPGs Pillars of Eternity draws heavily on for inspiration have gone down similar paths, with the last few editions of Dungeons & Dragons all suggesting heroes who sneak past an ogre deserve the same amount of experience as those who murder it, while other RPGs hand out points for making in-character decisions or even making other players laugh. What a game chooses to reward says a lot about the kind of play the creators want to encourage.

One of the things Pillars of Eternity gives experience points for is finding new maps, and that pushes you toward exploration. You want to barge into every building in town, and when you do you inevitably find quest-givers waiting in them. It saves its big rewards for completing those quests, which means you re less likely to wander off and fill your journal with more tasks you ll never get around to. In other games it s easy to stop seeing them as heroic deeds you ve vowed to accomplish and instead think of them more like suggestions. Yeah, sure, I will almost definitely find your missing husband, but I also have to become head of the Thieves Guild and have a drinking competition with a guy down the pub. Here, you re motivated to actually tie up those loose ends in your questlog.

Knowledge is murder

Pillars of Eternity also gives experience points for adding to the bestiary that explains the backstory of each new kind of opponent and what their weaknesses are. (It s worth reading the entry for wichts just to see how messed up that particular bit of lore is.) To add to those entries, however, you have to kill a certain amount of that enemy. While taking away experience rewards for killing with one hand, it noncommittally slides a few of them back with the other. And of course there s the other kind of reward—every enemy drops loot, whether it s craftable lumps of gross animal flesh or an assortment of box-fresh weapons, armor, and clothing to be sold at the next shop. ¹

The reason Pillars of Eternity goes back on the promise of a game that doesn t give XP for combat is because there s so much of that combat. You earn the Relative Pacifism achievement for killing less than 175 of the Dyrwood s creatures and NPCs on your way to the endgame, because that is genuinely a difficult thing to do. Think about that: it s hard to only snuff out the lives of 175 beings in a playthrough. There are times when you can sneak past enemies, but you need the right skill. You can take shortcuts past them in some dungeons, though you might need a grappling hook or the ability to find a secret door. And there are several times where you can talk your way out of a fight, though you need to kill a batch of enemies to get to the point where you re allowed to talk to one.

The spider-headed vithrack people are encountered in two dungeons and in both cases it s possible to engage in dialogue with their leaders, realize they re just protecting their nests, and come to an understanding that s mutually beneficial. In both cases you have to hack your way through a room full of the giant spiders they use as pets and guards first. You re basically engaging in diplomatic negotiation with someone while covered in their pet dogs blood and viscera. The pattern repeats in other locations—removing incentives for combat and providing alternative solutions, then adding some of those incentives back in and creating unavoidable battles. It s a confused approach to game design, but not one that s unique to Pillars of Eternity.

Grindstone

Take The Banner Saga, for instance. A survival epic about leading a caravan of weary refugees across endless snowfields, it s full of hard choices and the struggle to ration supplies. It s also full of turn-based tactical combat that has some interesting twists, like the way turns alternate meaning smaller groups act faster, and the way it uses the same stat for health and damage output, modeling injury with admirable bluntness. But unavoidable battles are jammed into every possible gap like donuts into Homer Simpson, because even though risking lives in open warfare is a bad idea on the game s narrative level, it s the main way to earn Renown. In The Banner Saga, Renown is both XP and cash, and you need it to buy supplies. Frequent combat becomes essential, which ruins the pacing. It doesn t feel like a slog because you re marching for miles to the next settlement but because you ll have a dozen identical skirmishes along the way.²

In the 1990s you could market a game entirely on a combination of attack animations that were satisfying to unleash and some basic leveling up. When I was a kid, I was wowed by that stuff like everybody else. We all gasped as hobgoblins exploded into bouncing lumps of meat in Baldur s Gate and then argued about when it was best to dual-class Imoen from Thief into Mage. It seems ridiculous now but we sat around our monitors in awe at this new paradigm, as if we were hearing silent film suddenly transition into sound.

But Al Jolson s voice booming out of The Jazz Singer in 1927 didn t lead immediately to a golden age of talkies. Everyone was so taken by the singing that Hollywood just churned out more musicals at an astonishing rate, banking on the fact that people were impressed enough by song-and-dance routines to forgive all the fluffed lines and awkward pauses in a movie like The Broadway Melody. (They did: it was the first sound film to win the Oscar for Best Picture.) In 1930 Hollywood released over 100 musicals, but in 1931 they only released 14. Audiences eventually got bored of every movie featuring two tapdance scenes unrelated to the plot.

This era of gaming is going to look a lot like the musical glut of the late 1920s someday.

In an arcade brawler or shoot-em-up all you need is a solid set of combat mechanics repeated at smoothly escalating levels of difficulty, but narrative games, the ambitious kind that expend effort making us interested in their locations and the people in them, do themselves no favors by awkwardly marrying the two with the promise of experience points as a dowry. This era of gaming—when we re so easily swayed by a game promising us 50 hours that we ll repeat the same actions for half that run-time because somewhere a number is going up—is going to look a lot like the musical glut of the late 1920s someday. Of course musicals didn t go away entirely and fights will always be a part of the kind of narrative games based on adventure fiction, but hard-wiring combat into a game s mechanics in ways that force it to be a regular necessity is something we ll look back on as an inexplicable artifact of the time.

There was a review of Doom in the April 1994 issue of Edge that infamously declared, If only you could talk to these creatures, then perhaps you could try and make friends with them, form alliances... Now, that would be interesting. Obviously, that s ludicrous. What s fun about Doom is that you can round a corner and open fire on a bunch of imps without thinking, sliding from shootout to shootout without slowing down to talk to anyone. (Except maybe to say, That s your spinal cord, baby or Now I m radioactive. That can t be good! )³ Shoehorning in dialogue options wouldn t have improved Doom, but by the same token a hundred killing sprees don t improve games where the appeal is in agonising over the right conversation choice.

I would have liked to put my sword and blunderbuss away and talk to a few more of the creatures in Pillars of Eternity. I wouldn t even have minded if some of them burst into musical numbers, just for variety s sake.

¹ Which raises some questions of its own. Why does the village innkeeper have an endless supply of copper coins to pay for chainmail looted from the dead? Why are suits of armor covered in blood and dents still valuable? If I fireball a bandit to death, who is going to pay for his singed hat, even if it has a jaunty feather in it? And so on. The real answer to all these questions is unfortunately, Because otherwise you wouldn t be able to afford all the upgrades in the stronghold that was promised as part of an unlockable bonus tier on Kickstarter.

² Even a first-person shooter like BioShock Infinite can have so much shootybang action it feels at odds with the story and the world-building. Remember the wonder of that floating city the first time you saw it, a barbershop quartet flying past in a zeppelin and every plaza making you want to screenshot like a tourist? About 20 hours later those plazas makes you sigh instead because you know everyone will turn into another deathmatch arena and a zeppelin is just a place for the drawn-out final battle to take place. Without all those enemies to loot I d never have been able to afford to buy all those upgrades, sure, but I d have kept my sense of wonder.

³ Those are quotes from the official Doom comic book published in 1996 as a giveaway at cons. It s a perfect representation of the bloodthirsty state of mind you find yourself in playing Doom, by which I mean it s entirely demented. One of the scene transitions is covered with the caption Wow! Now I m in a completely different place! It s the most honest adaptation of a video game into another medium there s ever been.

Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor came away from last night's 15th annual Game Developers Choice Awards ceremony having nabbed the top honor of Game of the Year. Monolith Production's open-world action RPG won out over Bayonetta 2, Destiny, Hearthstone, and Alien: Isolation.

A few of those games still took away awards, however. Blizzard Entertainment's digital card game Hearthstone received the Best Design Award, and stealth horror game Alien: Isolation, from developer The Creative Assembly, came away with the Best Audio Award. Best Narrative was given to indie adventure game Kentucky Route Zero, Act 3. The Audience Award went to space simulation Elite: Dangerous from Frontier Developments.

Game designer Brenda Romero received The Ambassador Award for her continued work, now three decades worth, in the games industry. The Pioneer Award was given to David Braben for his work on the Elite series, and Hironobu Sakaguchi, creator of the Final Fantasy series, was given a Lifetime Achievement Award.

You can see a full list of the award-winners here.