The greasy realm of the videogame is not always the best place to look for good writing. For every Disco Elysium there are roughly 800 Detroit: Beyond Humans. But it is a good place to look for wondrous, over-the-top nonsense. I m talking about character dialogue so flamboyant and exaggerated, you could insert some line breaks and it would instantly become a verse in a glam rock anthem. Here are the 12 most extravagant, exuberant, and intense lines of dialogue. In games, subtext is just whatever s written on the side of the nuclear submarine.

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After disabling the option to buy Grand Theft Auto IV in January, Rockstar now say 2008’s open-world murder simulator will return to sale in March with a few changes. Microsoft’s awful Games For Windows Live technogubbins is being removed because it caused the trouble in the first place, and that’s great news. It seems some folks will also receive the expansions or base game for free too. Unfortunately, Rockstar are also removing GTA IV’s multiplayer mode and will temporarily disable several radio stations. A mixed crimebag.

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Everyone loves a good action game. It’s the driving force behind so many of our favourite PC games, but only a few can lay claim to being the best action games of all time. That’s why we’ve compiled this list – to sort the pulled punches from the bestest biffs that PC has to offer. Whether it’s the joy of pulling off a perfect combo, riding the wave of an explosive set-piece or the hair-raising thrill of dodging enemy attacks in slow-motion that gets you going, there’s an action game here for you.

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After 21 years as a Rockstar Games big cheese, Dan Houser will leave the company in March. He’s co-written almost every Rockstar game since 1999, including Grand Theft Auto from London through to V, Bully, Max Payne 3, and the Red Dead Redemptions. That’s made him a big influence on the tone of Rockstar’s games. I wonder how that might change once he’s moved on. Where he’s going and what he’ll do next, we don’t know. He can probably afford to eat pizza while watching Heat on loop the rest of his life, to be honest.

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Just in time to launch Red Dead Redemption 2 on PC, Rockstar announced their own game launcher for desktop. Despite having both Grand Theft Auto V and San Andreas available on the new digital storefront, Grand Theft Auto IV is still notably absent. Now it’s been delisted from Steam as well, though it doesn’t actually seem to be related to any grand plans Rockstar have for their own launcher.

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There’s always a man, a lighthouse, and a city. Sometimes, those cities are sucked from 2002 and splatted into modern videogames, like the Vice Cry: Remastered mod that takes the Grand Theft Auto: Vice City map and plops it into Grand Theft Auto V. Bet Ayn Rand didn’t see that one coming.

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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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Rockstar get a lot of praise for their big creaking flagships, Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption. But I ll be honest, y all: neither series really grabbed me. I toyed with many a GTA, and I dabbled a bit in the rootin tootin wild west of RDR. But I didn t finish any of them, eventually growing bored every time. A Rockstar game I did finish, however, was Bully.

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I felt the rise of that old familiar feeling. I hated it. I welcomed it. We’re going back to Max Payne 2. With Control out now and putting Remedy back on the map, we’re diving into their 2003 hit, and back into a world of slow-motion gunplay, over-the-top twirling reloads and mods absolutely obsessed with The Matrix and early 2000s action movie soundtracks. In fairness, the Max Payne 2 mod scene has been largely stagnant for the past few years, but that doesn’t mean dead. Let’s take a look at some of the more interesting scrapes Max and pals have shot themselves out of.

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I have enormous respect (and a fair amount of adoration) for the people who make unofficial patches for ageing games. With each generation of hardware and each new operating system, we lose a few more games, and these dedicated folks are working hard to keep that number as low as possible.

One of these long-running update projects is SilentPatch, a combination patch for Grand Theft Auto 3, Vice City and San Andreas, three games that share an engine. It updated again just yesterday, and while the change-log isn’t especially huge, some of the tweaks made are quite interesting.

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