I don’t know what a ‘meme’ is anymore. First they used them for science, then memes escaped a lab as a virus in a monkey, then Internet turned the viruses into jokes, and then the virus infected every other form of joke. (I think, at this point, we’re either safe or have ourselves become memes?)

All I know for certain is that delightful recreations of video game box art using cheery stock art have recently filled my corner of the Internet, and I think you might like them.

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A run-down of the previous week’s top-selling Steam titles is something I used to do regularly, but a combination of it tending to be fairly unchanging week-to-week and being a feckless human being who can’t stand to do the same thing for long meant I fell out the habit. These are changed times, though: with indiepocalypses here and flash sales there, the Steam charts are now wildly changeable, so I like to look in from time to time, like an old aunt raising a withered eyebrow at reports of what her nephews are up to at university. This week: a whole lot of Ubisoft, not a lot of XCOM and an unofficial Hunger Games (or an unofficial Running Man, if you prefer the awful classics). … [visit site to read more]

Jonathan Morcom has spent almost two hundred hours with a single Fallout 4 [official site] character. Thanks to the settlement construction system, he hoped to find a home in the ruins of the old world, and as the game’s expansions draw closer, these reflections on the game’s building and management features capture a world on the verge of another dramatic shift.>

I swear, if Minutemen stalwart Preston Garvey gives me one more unsolicited quest to go and rescue one of the dopey bastards from Abernathy Farm who s managed to get themselves kidnapped again, I m going to punch a hole clean through my monitor and send the repair bill to Bethesda. I ve just fast travelled back to Sanctuary Hills, my home of choice in Fallout 4, and after storing my junk in the workshop I accidentally bump into Preston who s pretending to do something useful to a tato plant.

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“Fallout 4 is best enjoyed as a survival game,” our Alec said as Michael Radiatin’ set out to explore the post-apocalypse in his charminly inept but enthusiastic way. The ‘Survival’ difficulty level of Fallout 4 [official site] isn’t much of a survival game, though. So Bethesda are busy revisiting and overhauling it, and now we have a peek at their plans. Expect diseases from dirty monsters, no manual saving, fatigue and adrenaline levels to manage, and plenty more dangers and delights.

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Fallout 4 [official site] players have made oodles of cracking mods for the post-apocalyptic RPG since it launched in November, and developers Bethesda haven’t even released official mod tools yet. Just imagine the wonders we might see when they do! I’m imagining a mod which adds a collectible range of mugs with humourous workplace slogans. Not up to much today, the old imagination. Bethesda had said before that ‘Creation Kit’ mod tools would come early in 2016, and now we have a mirror specific timeframe: April.

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Bethesda have just announced the first three expansions for Fallout 4 [official site]. They’re not far enough, coming March, April and May, and they include new adventures, new settlement customisation options, new quests facilities to capture and train creatures, and “the largest landmass for an add-on that we’ve ever created”. First out will be Automatron, which will allow you to build customised robot companions, then there’s the Wasteland Workshop in April which concentrates on settlements and creature taming, and finally Far Harbor will include an entirely new island area. Beyond these, Bethesda have expanded their DLC plans enough to raise the season pass price.

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Fallout 4 has been out for a few months now, which means a few months for the community to produce hundreds of excellent, essential and silly mods to enhance the game. We’ve sifted through all of them to select the current best mods for Fallout 4.

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I’ve spent a lot of work time playing Fallout 4, what with its being the biggest release of the year. It gave me the chance to write a couple of super-helpful guides, and a three-part diary about trying to approach the game different from that of most reviewers. So I’m left with a whole bunch of opinions about it, which it makes sense to collate into my own little WIT. It’s worth noting I’ve nowhere near completed the game, approached it strangely, and not put in nearly as much work and effort as Alec did for his official RPS review. These are just my thoughts based on what I’ve experienced so far, as spoiler free as I can get it.

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1) Passivity makes me fidgety. Even in a film, TV show, gig or novel I’m hugely enjoying, my mind will at some point drift to the clock, wondering how soon until it ends, how soon until I can stand up or talk or check something or eat something or go somewhere. Awful, I know. Games, broadly, need me to be doing something most of the time, and that is the greatest weapon I have against a propensity to boredom that I am not at all proud of. This is also why I start to go spare in something like StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void, as it spends so much of its duration pummelling me with particularly low-grade passive storytelling, and my frustration that I have to watch this nonsense instead of do things for myself goes through the roof.

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I confess to an ever-so-slightly heavy heart when I began writing a diary series about Fallout 4. I’d only just finished the review, which had involved over 50 hours of play, and on top of generally wanting a change felt that I’d exhausted the game’s possibilities. As I wrote in said review, my key gripe with the game is that almost every problem is now solved by banal violence, which closes the door on its potential as a source of anecdotes.

I was wrong to be wary about going back. My complaints about Fallout 4 stand, but I’m enjoying it much more playing second time around, entirely avoiding story, entirely avoiding safety and instead imposing my own set of rules.

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