Rock, Paper, Shotgun - contact@rockpapershotgun.com (Jamie Wallace)
Once more, we’ve made it to the very middle section of the week – right there in between a weekend and another weekend. What better time to indulge in some digital video game niceness? Incidentally, this also happens to be the week before the international commerce festival that is Black Friday 2017. We’ve already got a guide to the best PC gaming Black Friday stuff on the site, take a look at that and maybe bookmark it, why don’t you.
Before that all unfolds, there is already a batch of fairly nice deals on digital downloads available right here on the good ship Internet. So, consider this another convenient mid-week digital deals roundup if you like. Let’s get to it, shall we?
In a week in which Assassin’s Creed Origins has managed to break the charts to such a degree that it somehow not only appears three> times, but also stopped Feedly from being able to display the rest of the games in the correct order, we also see a few other new entries. But absolutely no new names. (more…)
People, people of Earth, for the second week in a row GTA V isn’t in the Steam Charts! And for the first time in human history, this week nor is Counter-Strike: Global Offensive! What’s happened? I’ll tell you what’s happened. Everyone’s got a copy now. Phew.
So instead, here are eight other games and Plunkbat, and one plastic box, in ascending order of dollar-eyes. (more…)
The voting for the Golden Joystick Awards presented with Omen by HP closes in just under three weeks (November 3rd), and before that happens, we want to see our favourites from the last 12 months get the recognition they deserve. Not to manipulate the process because we want all the PC games to win in every category, or anything, but because there are so many amazing projects nominated that we want to celebrate.
If you vote, too, you get a free digital copy of The Best PC Games Ever, which we published earlier this year. Take a look here for more information on what's inside, but it contains a great making of feature on the All Ghillied Up mission from Call of Duty 4, retrospectives on classics like Red Alert 2, Deus Ex, Max Payne 2 and tons more. All you have to do is vote, enter your email, then you'll receive instructions on claiming this lovely-looking digital book.
There's a bunch of great PC games up for awards at the Golden Joysticks this year. Rock-hard modern classic Cuphead is up for best visual design, for example, and offbeat horror platformer Little Nightmares is deservedly nominated for best audio. The best indie game category is full of great PC titles, of course: Dream Daddy, Everything, Friday the 13th, Night In The Woods, Pyre, Slime Rancher, Stories Untold, Tacoma, Thimbleweed Park and What Remains of Edith Finch. And that's just a few of the categories. There are three eSports categories, and the best PC games category has the likes Total War: Warhammer 2, Endless Space 2, West of Loathing, PUBG, Rising Storm 2: Vietnam and a bunch more—check out the voting page and pick your favourites.
Wotcha gang. Your old chum Alice here for this week’s charts, as everyone else has been fired. Out of a cannon. Blown into a jillion little pieces. Hence the Apocalyptic yellow tone to the skies today. Hold your breath when outside, and hold your breath while we count down last week’s top ten of the top-selling games on Steam.
The old-fashioned platformer Cuphead is pretty great: "A nails-hard 2D shooter where you fight outlandish bosses, interspersed with palate-cleansing run-and-gun sections," as we put it in our very positive review. That high degree of difficulty is well known, and but it doesn't seem to be overly off-putting.
"Cuphead has only been out for two weeks and we never could have dreamed of the reception we’ve received from our amazing fans! Today, we wanted to take a moment to thank each and every one of you for your support and we’re excited to share that Cupheadhas gone platinum with over 1 million units sold!" Chad and Jared Moldenhauer of Studio MDHR said. Although the platforms weren't specified, I'm confident they mean the sum across Xbox and PC.
"We have worked tirelessly over the past few years to deliver a game that remained true to our vision and we are both humbled and excited that so many people from around the world are playing Cuphead—it truly makes it all worth it. From all of us at StudioMDHR, thanks again for your support!"
Cuphead is out for the PC and Xbox One, and by all appearances the bulk of players are actually on PC: More than 575,000 people own it on Steam, according to Steam Spy, and it's also available on GOG and the Microsoft Store.
Are you strong enough to read the Steam Charts? Do you have what it takes to read all the way to the end? Can you defeat the Plunkbat final boss? NO! NO YOU ARE TOO WEAK! (more…)
Every week, we ask our panel of PC Gamer writers a question about PC gaming. This week: what's your favourite game soundtrack? We also welcome your answers in the comments.
Evan Lahti: Cuphead
I'll go with the best soundtrack right now, and surely of the year: Cuphead. The ragtime, '30s jazz looks to Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway as big influences, but it's so much more than an attempt to put a period-authentic sound into a game inspired by the animation of that era. Cuphead's music is inseparable in its style and tempo, and the big band/jazz sound enhances the calamity of its boss fights and platforming, where you're meant to feel off-balance and improvise to stay alive.
This great Paste interview with composer Kris Maddigan (who'd never written game music or this style of music before), highlights one unique approach they took to recording, too: "... [I]n most of the big band tunes you'll have some ensemble piece which is written out and then you'll have a section where someone takes a solo and then you'll have another ensemble section, and what we did with all the solo stuff is we recorded all of that separately," Maddigan says in the interview. "Once we had completed all the big band sessions we brought in half a dozen soloists and we recorded them playing over top of a lot of the solo sections on the charts. So that's why you might have one tune but six different versions of it. So each tune, you can have the same tune but it's going to have different solos on it, just to keep things interesting in the game. So if you die at a boss, if you leave and you come back to that tune, it's going to be the same tune but it's going to have somebody else soloing over it. We were conscious of it that way, too, trying to maintain a certain amount of interest on repetition like that."
Obviously the correct answer is a Command & Conquer soundtrack. But which one? Clearly not Tiberian Sun. Its brand of dark, ambient electro is pleasantly late-'90s, but I played that game for tens of hours and I can't remember a single one of its tunes. Red Alert 2 is strong—Grinder is arguably the best bit of menu music in PC gaming. But HM2 is just a touch overproduced, and I'll be damned if I'm calling a soundtrack with the second best version of Hell March my favourite.
It's between the original Command & Conquer and Red Alert then. I have a lot of love for the former, mostly because of how weird and experimental it is. Act On Instinct is a legit good industrial pop song, soundtrack or not. And Just Do It Up is just amazing. Yes. But, if I'm honest with myself, there's something that feels slightly off kilter and embarrassing about it all, sort of like that time in Nine Inch Nails' Pretty Hate Machine where Trent Reznor—for no particular reason—recited the nursery rhyme “rain, rain, go away” and it felt inherently silly but we all collectively agreed to pretend it didn't happen for 28 years. So: Red Alert, the Broken to Command & Conquer's Pretty Hate Machine. It's full of driving, churning aggression trapped inside a harrowing machine, which is probably a metaphor or something. Also, it's got Hell March, so obviously it's the best.
Jody Macgregor: Bastion
Darren Korb calls the soundtrack for Bastion "acoustic frontier trip-hop", because he's a musician and they say things like that. It's a mix of folksy guitar, sampled beats, and instruments from all over the world that sounds unique to its fantasy setting. It's excellent enough on its own, but even better in context.
You're exploring and rebuilding fragments of a broken city, and one of the vocal tracks, Zia's Song, has an entire level built around it. You walk across rusted train tracks, cross wooden beams connecting floating islands, and as you do the music gets louder. Vocalist Ashley Barrett's singing gets clearer too, cutting through the reverb. And then you realize why—this isn't just a soundtrack you the player are listening to. It's being sung by another survivor, a lament both sad and hopeful, and at the level's end you meet its singer.
Bastion's music isn't just good stuff to listen to while you smack monsters with a hammer or shoot them with a bombard cannon. It's a part of the game that matters to its characters the way great music matters to us, that allows them to remember their past and look forward to a better future even while their world's in ruins. The soundtrack is available at Bandcamp.
Wes Fenlon: Neotokyo
Here's a bit of an odd one: Ed Harrison's soundtrack for Neotokyo, a years-old multiplayer shooter mod for Half-Life 2. It's not that the music is odd—it's just a slightly strange pick for me, because I've never actually played Neotokyo. I once went hunting for moody electronic music that evoked cyberpunk, and I came across Neotokyo. It's the more menacing alternative to Deus Ex's peppier score, and for years one of my go-to soundtracks to write to. I could put it on, lean back into it, and enter a cyberpunk trance.
You can listen to it for free on Bandcamp, and I especially like disc one of the double album. It all blends together for me—I can't call out any particular tracks—but if cyberpunk to you is more ominous than Vangelis, you won't be disappointed.
Austin Wood: Nier: Automata
I love Nier: Automata's soundtrack for its quaking, operatic ancientness, but I'm highlighting it here because, like the game itself, it gets better with age. Automata's layered endings gain poignancy with each subsequent play through, and the music piles on verve in kind. Composer Keeichi Okabe did a fabulous job of not only keeping pace with Automata's replay value and preventing the music from getting repetitive, but also leveraging that design with a truly dynamic OST. On top of orchestral and vocal variants, there are low, medium and high intensity versions of most tracks—which add up to roughly six hours of music altogether. There are some real bangers tucked away in the song list, and the way versions build on each other is a tidy echo of Automata's central themes.
Andy Chalk: Machinarium
The one soundtrack I always seem to come back to is Machinarium, by Czech artist Tomáš Dvořák, also known as Floex. All of Amanita's games are beautifully musical, but this is the one that that's stuck with me. A lot of it is mechanically percussive, and some of the songs are really upbeat—the Robot Band Tune comes to mind—but what I particularly enjoy is the distant dreaminess of the ambient electronica in tracks like The Glass House With Butterfly or By the Wall. Wonderful game, wonderful music.
MMO soundtracks are massive, messy beasts meant to accompany an entire world's worth of themes and flavors. But Final Fantasy XIV's soundtrack deftly explores new sounds and styles while still feeling true to Final Fantasy composer Nobuo Uematsu's original work. There's a stunning breadth of genres on display, but each becomes a piece of a mosaic that colours in the wider world of Eorzea. And like the best Final Fantasy scores, each composition becomes a part of the area it accompanies. I love the quiet, comforting piano that plays as I walk the streets of Ul'Dah at night.
One other aspect that deserves being recognized is how incredible the boss fight music is. It turns every raid fight into a WWE match, where the boss steps into the area accompanied by a theme that becomes inextricably linked with their persona. That music sets the tone and makes each raid fight feel climactic. Again, there's an amazing breadth of musical flavor on display, from the raging tempest of guitars that accompanies Garuda to the rousing and catchy Lakshmi theme.
Samuel Roberts: Silent Hill 2
If I had to pick a single entry from Konami's once-great series, it'd be Silent Hill 2. Akira Yamaoka's score is somehow extremely chilled out despite being the soundtrack for one of the best horror games ever made. The highlight is probably The Theme of Laura, as embedded above, but there are tons more great instrumental tracks that make for perfect working music. Heaven's Night, for example, or Restless Dreams.
The series has fantastic music across the board, particularly the title tracks. A special shoutout for the grunge-infused and deeply mid-'00s Cradle of Forest from Silent Hill 4: The Room, which is a personal favourite, and obviously You're Not Here from Silent Hill 3. I saw Yamaoka and his band play a bunch of these live two years ago, and it was an amazing experience.
My only gripe: Konami appears to have pulled Silent Hill 2's soundtrack from iTunes in the UK (you can still get it in the US), so even though I've bought Theme of Laura to listen to on my phone, I can no longer redownload it because they stopped listing the album, which is...shit. Ah, the digital future. The music's amazing, though.
What's your favourite game soundtrack? Let us know in the comments.
In my review of Cuphead [official site], I praised the inclusion of a much easier simple mode that also strips out some of the game s content. It s true that Cuphead could have just had a single difficulty setting, and the game is better for simple mode s inclusion. But what would have been lost if simple mode included everything, and just made the game easier?
Cuphead[official site] first appeared way back at E3 2014, where it wowed everyone with its gorgeous 1930s style cartoon aesthetic and promise of tough as nails platforming action. It finally came out last Friday and boy, does it deliver on that promise.
