The last ten years have brought us many joys. We’ve already celebrated the best games of the past decade, but with such scattergun nomination comes neglect. Only three of the fifty games we picked had grappling hooks, so clearly the entire endeavour was pointless and you will need an alternative resource.

Here’s my definitive guide to the swinging tenties. I haven’t mentioned Worms, because they get everywhere and I don’t want to spend my whole day talking about helminths.

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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.

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I love a spin-off. Angel? Great stuff! Count Duckula? The Better Call Saul of cartoons. Kourtney and Khlo Take Miami? Take me, I m yours! I could go on and on cutting-and-pasting from this Wikipedia page, but I ll get to the point. Games also have spin-offs. Often they ll be forgotten about. Sometimes they re even disowned. On a few occasions, they ll take on a life of their own and exist apart from the game that spawned them, never calling, never visiting, only sending a multipack Christmas card. Below are a few stories of surprising spin-offs. The 2D Half-Life 2, the Fortnite that failed, the single-player Counter-Strike that no-one asked for, and more.

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It’s been an eventful decade for PC games, and it would be hard for you to summarise everything that’s happened in the medium across the past ten years. Hard for you>, but a day’s work for us. Below you’ll find our picks for the 50 best games released on PC across the past decade.

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A lizard-riding auntie with a shotgun and an incarnation of aether today arrived in Dota 2 and Dota Underlords in matching Outlanders Updates. Snapfire and Void Spirit are the two new heroes announced at The International in August, and here they are in both games now. They’re accompanied by big updates for each, with Dota 2 adding new buildings and dozens of new items and Underlords adding a new quick-paced mode plus the other Spirit heroes. These patch notes sure are a lot to take in. Damn, Dota.

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Algorithms aren’t the answer to everything, but they can help you catch Counter-Strike: Global Offensive cheaters. A teenager going by “2Eggs” has apparently identified 14,000 of the buggers, knocking together an AI that can analyse reports of potential cheaters in a fraction of the time it would take a human. He’s called it HestiaNet, after the Greek goddess “of hearth and fire”. I’m happy enough for the over-performing bedroom AI to have a grandiose name, even though that number might have more to do with Valve’s own software than Eggs’es.

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Valve today formally announced Half-Life: Alyx, a “full-length” game exclusively for VR. Half-Life is returning after 12 years, though Gordon Freeman seemingly is not and this isn’t Half-Life 3. Set between the events of Half-Life and Half-Life 2, this one stars future sidekick Alyx Vance in the years before Gordo’s return when she and her dad were building the resistance. And yes, this really is only for VR. Come watch the announcement trailer.

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I’ve always been drawn to competitive videogames. It’s not hard to see why. They’re the best kind. Competition can be exciting, rich, varied. It gets you interacting with people, pitting your abilities against thinking, improvising, engaged and pivotally human opponents. A competitive context can be both a wonderful generator of interesting decisions, and a platform for genuine connection. I believe in and value these things wholeheartedly, because I’ve extensive experience with both.

I also believe competition has a dark side. It can be the kindling to incendiary ego, stoking a way of looking at the world that leads to, or is at least bound up with, insecurity and distress. I’ve experienced this, too.

Let’s start with me thrashing my Dad at Need For Speed 2.

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Counter-Strike: Global Offensive has never been all that interested in world-building. It’s an esport: the pro players are the real characters, inhabiting faceless Terrorists and Counter-Terrorists in high stakes matches where every bullet counts. Operation Shattered Web mixes things up, bringing a host of new player skins with CS:GO’s first-ever battle pass. Now, you can stride through time-worn battlefields as a gruff n’ tough special-force veteran or notorious global criminal of your choosing.

Unless you want to be a woman. There’s only one of those.

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The nicest thing I can say about Terminator: Resistance is that if a Terminator were sent back in time to wipe out its code, the timeline of gaming in general would almost certainly proceed unchanged. Confused by the apparent failure, Skynet would keep on sending Arnies back to delete it, unaware that the job was already done, and that its agents were just piling up awkwardly in the offices of developer Teyon. The killer AI would squander all its resources on needlessly ferrying metal strongmen into the past, spiral into logistical collapse, and leave humanity to be declared the winners by default. Hooray – Terminator: Resistance saved us all.

That’s about it, however. Although I started out with a mind to write a Wot I Think about it, the truth is there s barely any Wot to Think about in Resistance. Everything it does has existed in games since the advent of the mouse, and its particular format was perfected 15 years ago with Half-Life 2. They’re remarkably similar in a lot of ways, but where Half-Life 2 offers everything with pace and precision, Terminator: Resistance is about as lively as that eye-ball Arnie scrapes out of his head in the first movie. As such, this isn’t so much Wot I Think, but Wot Might Have Been: a glimpse into the alternate timelines where Terminator: Resistance was something fresh and fascinating.

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