Titan Quest Anniversary Edition and the Jagged Alliance 1: Gold Edition are free to download right now on PC.

Publisher THQ Nordic has made both games available to download and keep forever on Steam as part of its 10th anniversary. The offer ends at 6pm on 23rd September.

Titan Quest Anniversary Edition combines 2006 action role-playing game Titan Quest and its 2007 expansion Titan Quest Immortal Throne in one game. Donlan wrote about Titan Quest for our The Double-A Team series last year.

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Celebrated Saints Row modder Mike "IdolNinja" Watson has died.

Watson, who led the Saints Row 2 patch project at Volition, died yesterday after a long battle with cancer.

In May, Watson's illness caused him to step down from his position as Volition community manager, although he continued to work on the Saints Row 2 patch project.

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Following a succession over-the-top adventures that folded in alien invasions and superpowers with Saints Row 4 and its subsequent follow-ups, Volition is bringing its open world crime series back to its roots with the next year's Saints Row - a reboot that reintroduces a more grounded contemporary fictional setting while still looking to hold onto the humour and possibilities that Saints Row has become beloved for.

Titled simply Saints Row, the new game will be a cross-generational affair that's coming as soon as next February, and sees a player-created character heading up a gang of four as they go on to establish a criminal empire. Among that group is Eli, a nerdy planner with an MBA, Neenah, who provides the driving talent and Kevin, who, er, has some lovely abs? Then there's the player character themselves, defined by the player using some of the same deep customisation options seen previously in the series - and the group's make-up promises to play into the co-op that is also at the heart of this Saints Row reboot.

Providing the playground this time out is Santo Ileso, which draws heavily upon the American south west. It's broken down into nine distinct districts, including the downbeat Rancho Providencio, Las Vegas analogue El Dorado and the secluded suburban Monte Vista. In the heart of the city there's an extended emphasis on verticality (and the promise of some tools to make the most of all that, with wingsuits and ziplines that catapult players into the air).

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Saints Row: The Third Remastered is getting some improvements on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series next week, with a free upgrade that will bring these console versions to the same standard as the "PC edition at high settings".

Arriving on 25th May, the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S upgrade will allow the game's engine to "run at a much higher performance, bringing improvements to lighting, texture resolution, and other visual effects thanks to the powerful hardware." The press release from Deep Silver explains this will bring framerates up to 60fps with dynamic 4k resolution.

Xbox Series S users will be able to choose between two modes depending on how they want the game to run. There's Performance Mode, in which gameplay is locked at 60fps with 1080p resolution, or Beauty Mode, which provides an upscaled 4k resolution but a framerate of 30fps. PlayStation 5 users, meanwhile, get Activities support and a "subtle signature Saints purple glow on the DualSense controller". I guess you'd have to get the new black DualSense controller if you wanted the full Saints Row colour scheme.

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Saints Row The Third Remastered hits Steam on 22nd May.

Confirmation comes from the official Saints Row Twitter account.

The Saints Row The Third remaster came out in May 2020 on console and PC via the Epic Games Store. Now Epic's standard one year of PC exclusivity is up, Volition's game can hit Steam.

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Five of the Best is a weekly series about the parts of games we overlook. We've discussed a diverse bunch: crowds, hubs, potions, mountains, hands... They're the things we take for granted while we play but then, years later, find lodged in our brains. It's only then we begin to appreciate how important they were. So let's celebrate them.

Today...

Character creators! How long do you spend in them? Do you pick a premade face and just breeze through? Do you pick a template, tinker a bit and then settle? Or do you adjust absolutely everything, take all evening and it still doesn't look right? I feel your pain.

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Developer Volition has pledged to fix the notoriously broken PC version of Saints Row 2 over a decade after its original release, having found the game's long thought lost source code.

Speaking during a special announcement livestream (which also marked Saints Row 2's 11th birthday in the US), Volition's general manager Mike Kulas explained that the studio, when faced with having to create three versions of the game for its original 2008 release, opted to outsource the PC port. And as both Volition, and countless users on the game's Steam page will attest, the results were less than stellar.

For a long time, the only way to enjoy Saints Row 2 on PC in anything like a satisfactory manner has been to rely on community created mods. Volition's Mike Watson, himself a modder and now senior community manager at the company, has lead the charge to improve the game internally for years, but plans were scuppered when the studio was unable to find the original PC source code. Now however, after much searching, that code has been found.

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Everything is currently free on the Epic Games Store! But wait; before you go indiscriminately loading up your shopping cart (haha, just kidding), I should probably clarify: Everything the game is currently free on the Epic Store, as is Metro 2033 Redux. So if you're in the mood to expand that already insurmountable backlog still further, you know where to go.

Everything, if it passed you by previously, is the acclaimed second game from David OReilly, the Irish artist and filmmaker responsible for strange, serene desktop experience Mountain (and, I just learned two minutes ago, the Adventure Time episode A Glitch is a Glitch).

It's a somewhat unclassifiable experience, in which players are able to catalogue the universe - a goal achieved simply by inhabiting objects within Everything's procedurally generated world. And it's here that Everything gets its name, with players able to take on the form of a dazzling array of items, from caterpillars and rocks to French horns and fax machines, moving all the way down to an atom and all the way out to entire galaxies.

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There are two different ways to look at the Switch port of Saints Row: The Third'. From a glass half full perspective, what you're getting an exceptionally close conversion of the PS3 original, closer still if you play in handheld mode. But viewed in a glass half empty way, all of the failings of the last-gen console versions remain in full effect on this new release: let's make no bones about it, performance is poor and the controls have severe input lag issues.

Let's focus initially on the positives. Playing Saints Row: The Third in Switch's handheld mode is definitely the best way to experience the game. It renders at a full 720p - making it a pin-sharp native experience on Switch's six-inch screen, while performance seems to be more consistent than the docked mode. As usual, the smaller screen does a good job of hiding some of the cut-backs and compromises and to all intents and purposes, it is indeed the PS3 version in the palm of your hand. And to be clear, this game has always been hilarious fun - and this was the main reason why we were so looking forward to the Switch port, and most likely why we've had so many requests to look at it.

Much of the charm wears off when playing docked, as despite migrating Saints Row: The Third to full 1080p resolution, it feels like a step too far for the Switch's mobile hardware. Blown up on a big living room display, the extra resolution is welcome, but just about any major use of alpha transparency effects clearly reveals ugly sawtooth edges - a sign of lower resolution buffers in play. These were already cut back on the last-gen consoles versions, but the compromise is even more pronounced on Switch with even lower resolution artefacts. There's also an impact to performance: the frame-rate lows feel worse than they do in handheld mode - making the experience feel even more uneven.

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The mid-nineties was an era when PC gaming began in earnest, kick-started by the mighty Doom's release in 1993. First-person shooters burgeoned as a result, and their combination with the real-time strategy genre conspired to make the humble home personal computer a powerful commercial gaming platform. And when it came to RTSs, the one name on most people's lips was Command & Conquer. Except for those in the know. They namechecked Cavedog's futuristic adventure, Total Annihilation as a far superior game thanks to its huge battles, terrain-based tactics and imaginative units.

I interviewed its designer and coder, Chris Taylor, a few years ago to discuss this trailblazing game; now we're chatting again, only this time to celebrate Total Annihilation's spiritual follow-up, Supreme Commander, released just over ten years ago.

"I'd been thinking about another RTS since leaving Cavedog and starting Gas Powered Games," he begins, "but it wasn't until I was completely wrapped on Dungeon Siege that I began to really think deeply about what would become Supreme Commander." Gas Powered had enjoyed reasonable success with the technically-ambitious Dungeon Siege games, and these to a certain extent influenced Taylor's next project - but more on that shortly.

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