Having spent a long time using 4K monitors I ve become a bit jaded about next-gen gaming resolutions. They don't tangibly deliver anything above what you can get from a beautiful 27-inch IPS 1440p screen. The problem is, while 4K does deliver a huge upgrade in terms of pixel count, it doesn t make a huge difference in games where the texture resolution hasn t changed. All you re really doing is shanking your frame rate in return for the possibility of being able to knock your anti-aliasing settings down a notch. If you want a dramatic upgrade of your gaming monitor you should have a good think about the new ultrawide 34-inch 21:9 screens trickling out of all good monitor manufacturers factories at the moment.

4K enthusiasts might talk up the benefits of increased desktop real estate, and that would be a valid stance if it weren t for the fact the affordable 4K screens are all 28-inch and at 100% scaling it s real hard to read anything without your nose touching the panel. Advances in desktop and browser scaling mean you can increase the size of fonts, icons and web pages, but then you ve got to say bye-bye to that extra space.

The extra width of a 21:9 screen provides an extra dimension to your games that 4K simply can t. The impact is dramatic, and something that really does need to be experienced to get the full effect.

The yummy 21:9 aspect ratio has more drama than boring ol' 16:9...

I've had 4K panels on my desk in the office and that barely raised a flicker of interest, but as soon as I fired up the LG 34UM95, a crowd swarmed the testing desk not seen since we last had the Oculus Rift out. Mac Format and Imagine FX watched enraptured as we blazed through asteroid fields in Elite: Dangerous, swapped hot lead with internet people in Battlefield 4 and sat slack-jawed at the superwide HD trailer for Chris Nolan s Interstellar.

You may not spend much time, if any, looking at the far edges of the ultrawide display, but the extra visual cues you get from the extra peripheral vision makes a huge difference in-game. We have seen 21:9 panels before, but the 29-inch 2560x1080 screens just felt too cramped in the vertical space to use on a Windows desktop. This 3440x1440 resolution however looks fantastic even when you re not in-game.

AOC's 21:9 monitor should be cheaper and comes with a more versatile stand

Another bonus: you re not crushing your poor GPU shifting up to this ultrawide res. There s just under 40% more pixels in this 21:9 panel than there is in a standard 2560x1440 screen. With 4K resolutions you re looking at more than a 120% increase in pixels for your graphics card to have to cope with.

The only problem right now is price. At around 800 / $1300 this LG 34UM95 is simply too expensive to be a realistic option, but there will be other companies releasing cheaper versions which will essentially have the same screen. AOC and Philips are bringing out similar spec panels for the same price as their affordable 4K screens those are going to be the real tempters in this new range of gaming display.

Crusader Kings II is the perfect game for creating alternate history, and full conversion mods (like those for Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones) are great for creating alternate fictional history. Are you ready for some alternate future history? After the End is a mod for CKII set in North America in the year 2666, after an unspecified cataclysmic event has shattered the planet and humankind is desperately trying to pick up the pieces, regain control, and understand its own murky past.

Behold New England, Crusader Kings-ified!

After the End is still very early on in its development, but there's already lot to be excited about. While the western two-thirds of the map have yet to be populated, the east coast of North America, as far north as Canada and as far south as Cuba, is playable. The "Event", whatever it was, clearly wiped out most of the population and destroyed a great deal of human knowledge and written history. The world is essentially back in medieval times, and while some ideas, borders, cultures, traditions, and religions survive, they're distorted and half-remembered through the dark lens of the cataclysm.

Even after the apocalypse, Disney owns a lot.

Take Florida, for example. Much of it is dominated by Tribe of the Mouse, which makes a lot of sense: people wandering around in the post-apocalypse of Orlando with little knowledge of history couldn't be blamed for thinking Mickey was some sort of mighty king (he did have a huge castle) or religious figure to be worshiped.

Just don't hire the Chicago Cubs. They'll never win.

In the game I played, I had to hire mercenaries at one point, and found, fittingly, that they were named after sports teams and other ancient organizations. It makes sense peering back through time with only fragments of evidence, future generations might assume that the Philadelphia Eagles or the Buckeyes of Ohio were mighty warriors, revered and celebrated for their combat prowess and who clashed in massive, now-decaying stadiums. Poking around some of the characters in the game can yield a few fun surprises as well.

Thom and Martha of Wayne. Thomas and Martha Wayne. Hm. Sounds familiar.

Religions and cultures, naturally, have held on or sprung up, many based on whatever traditions survived the Event. You'll still find pockets of Catholicism and Protestantism, some Lovecraft-style Occultists and Pagans, a huge swath of Evangelicals in the south, naturally, and there are some heretical groups as well. There are Americanist groups, who worship the founding fathers, and a cult called the Consumerists, who treat materialism as a religion (The Almighty Dollar is their actual deity) and are convinced the world fell apart because people didn't worship money enough. We certainly don't seem to be in any danger of that at the present.

History is written by the spenders.

Just because the game takes place in North America doesn't mean there isn't an entire world out there, slowly rebuilding, expanding, and threatening to impose itself on your game. The British will get themselves together and do what they used to do best: invade and take over as much of the world as possible, so you can expect the return of the Redcoats at some point. There are also plans to add other invading hordes in the future, possibly from the remnants of Russia, China, or South America.

The Brits are a little confused, but they're back to their roots.

In terms of technology, it's just as you'd expect: there's a lot of remnants of the old world (our world) left lying around, though it's not fully understood. Future plans for the mod include adding exploration activities into old army bases, subway systems, and other forgotten tech-troves as the rising civilizations attempt to reverse engineer the secrets it once knew and use them to their advantage.

Get rid of New Yorker traders? Shoulda done it long ago.

It's especially great to see a CK II mod set in North America, and it's been fun to play on my home turf (I grew up in New York). In my game I fought desperate wars over Hudson Valley, Albany, Woodstock, and one especially bloody and extended battle in Poughkeepsie. I even fabricated a claim on Long Island, where I was actually born, and marched my troops in to conquer it. In keeping with the theme of remaining reverent to the past without entirely understanding it, I named my three children Pepsi, iPhone, and DotA, figuring there would surely be some puzzling artifacts demonstrating that these things were treasured in the long-ago.

Shoulda named her Mountain Dew. She'd have been more X-TREME

I look forward to watching this mod develop: it's packed full of interesting ideas. The modders drew some inspiration from post-apocalyptic science fiction novel The Canticle for Leibowitz (which was also an influence on the Fallout games), and they've begun to paint an interesting portrait of a shattered world trying to forge ahead while struggling to understand its own past.

Installation: The mod isn't on Steam Workshop yet, though I'm told it will be soon. In the meantime you can grab it from this Mediafire link. Once you've got it, unzip the contents to My Documents/Paradox Interactive/Crusader Kings II/mod. Then, in the game launcher, just tick the box for the mod.

The new King's Quest game will not be a point-and-click adventure game, but it will be an adventure game, according to Activision's MacLean Marshall. Newly announced at Gamescom last week, King's Quest will release under the Sierra mantle, which Activision last week resuscitated for its digital, indie-leaning titles. While some no doubt hoped for a revamped point-and-click adventure in the vein of older King's Quest titles, that is not what we're going to get.

"There's not much I can say about King's Quest," Marshall told Game Informer. "All I can say is that I've seen it, and it's not a point-and-click game. But it looks awesome."

Marshall went on to describe some of the projects which may potentially come to fruition under the rebooted Sierra name. "It could be HD remakes of original Sierra content. It could be contemporary reimaginings of the old Sierra IPs. It could be stuff that's new, kick-arse, awesome IP that has nothing to do with the old Sierra brand, but will be a Sierra thing when it launches."

On the topic of why Activision exhumed the Sierra name at all, Marshall cites the rise of independent development and the need for the publisher to have an outlet for digital-only titles. "It's been dormant and there wasn't a place for it, and we didn't know what we were going to do with it," he said.

"Then, over the however many years, everyone's been watching this indie movement. There was that angle, where we had this really nostalgic brand that most gamers to varying degrees by age know. We wanted to find a way to expand our digital portfolio."

The new King's Quest is currently in development by The Odd Gentlemen, with a vague 2015 release expected. Geometry Wars 3: Dimensions will also release under the Sierra name later this year.

You've just got to have a MOBA nowadays. Crytek is aware of this, so Arena of Fate is the studio's entry into the extremely popular genre. Our first glimpse at the game in action arrived at Gamescom 2014, and here finally is the full video for your viewing pleasure. Watch as Red Riding Hood explains the rules in her (rather overdone, let's face it) regional British accent, and then watch as Alice (of Alice in Wonderland fame) helps slay her enemies.

It appears to be pretty standard fare operationally, though Red Riding Hood does advise of a 20 minute limit to each match. A player can win before that if they outscore their opponent, and if there's no emphatic winner by the end of the 20 minute limit, the team with the higher score wins.

It'll be interesting to see how Arena of Fate fares against the giants of the genre, namely Dota 2 and League of Legends. Crytek isn't the only studio to try their luck at a MOBA of late: there's even gonna be a Dead Island MOBA, which is weird.

Roberts Space Industries has teased Star Citizen racing and first-person shooting during its Gamescom livestream on Saturday. Embedded below, the racing video is generous enough, providing a pretty solid idea of where the team is headed. Meanwhile the first-person shooting module remains a bit of a mystery, with the fairly unhelpful video below revealing little except that more will be shown at PAX Australia in November.

Nexuiz studio Illfonic will work on the first-person shooting module. Originally limited to scenarios on board enemy ships, planet-side FPS combat has also been confirmed as part of a stretch goal, though it may roll out considerably later than the game proper. On that topic, planet-side exploration has also been teased in a trailer below, with landing and land vehicle deployment demonstrated.

Racing will be added during the v 0.9 update and looks like an arcade-y respite from Star Citizen's otherwise serious simulator aspirations. Check out all the videos below.

Racing:



Planet exploration:



FPS teaser:

Survival simulators tend to generate a lot of awesome stories, but most of the time when I play DayZ I spend hours just... walking. Eventually I starve to death. It looks like Sony Online Entertainment are devising ways to get players together and interacting in H1Z1, as the airdrop reveal video below demonstrates.

Released at the weekend during SOE Live in Vegas, the video shows three separate survivors in the proximity of an airdrop. Each is understandably eager to find out what's inside, this being a wasteland and all. Tensions flare immediately when each character seizes on the box at once. Axes are wielded, blood is shed, and nary a peace brokering word is spoken.

SOE did not detail the frequency of the airdrops, nor what is inside, but this being a survival game there's no doubt food, water, ammunition and all manner of other essential wasteland provisions. H1Z1 will release on Early Access some time in the unspecified future, and a PlayStation 4 version was also confirmed at the weekend. The game will boast "more zombies than you can kill in a lifetime", which is a positive thing.

Check out the airdrop trailer below:

Project CARS is looking very beautiful indeed, but you won't appreciate the full extent of its beauty until you've seen the above Gamescom 2014 trailer. With its plaintive piano accompaniment, it really captures the inherent melancholy of driving expensive cars around in circles for fun.

Seriously though, the racer is looking good and Slightly Mad is not at all reluctant to parade the game around. PC Gamer's Ben Griffin caught some 4K screenshots with the beta recently and they're impressive, to say the least. Project Cars releases November 14. Double check that your system can handle the rather demanding sim.

Every Sunday, Tyler publishes a classic PC Gamer review from the '90s or early 2000s, with his context and commentary followed by the full, original text from the archived issue. More classic reviews here.

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is coming to PC! The last Metal Gear game to release on PC was Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance over 10 years ago (unless you count Revengeance), and before that, Metal Gear Solid, which was published on PC by Microsoft a couple years after its PlayStation release.

That delay is largely to blame for MGS' sub-80% score (imagine a PS3 game releasing on PC now without any upgrade), but as our original review makes clear, it's a great game. I think Li C. Kuo was right to call Metal Gear the PlayStation's Half-Life.

Speaking of which, Metal Gear Solid 3 cruelly released just a day after Half-Life 2, and became my favorite PS2 game (after I was through HL2, of course). I'm excited that MGSV may become one of my favorite PC games. Let's just, uh, play down the 'distracting guards with swimsuit models' thing. That's dumb. How are the guards so dumb? More flying goats, please.

Metal Gear Solid review
This console port suffers from PlayStationitis, but it may be worth your time if you haven't played it before

Required: PII 266, 32MB RAM, 300 MB hard-drive space
We recommend: PII 300, 64MB RAM, 3D accelerator card, gamepad

As a devout PlayStation guy back in my college days, I loved Metal Gear Solid. It was a great interactive cinematic experience, with incredible in-engine cutscenes, and a storyline head and shoulders above typical videogame fluff. Some would even say that Metal Gear Solid is to the PlayStation what Half-Life is to the PC.

In Metal Gear Solid, you take on the role of Solid Snake, a special forces operative brought out of retirement to resolve a terrorist situation in Alaska. It appears that an elite group of "Next Generation Special Forces" has taken over a nuclear weapons depot and plan on popping off nukes if the U.S. doesn't give in to their demands. These soldiers-gone-bad are a collection of eccentric and specialized commandos, each with their own weird name. There's Sniper Wolf, a deadly and beautiful sharp shooter; Vulcan Raven, a guy who carries a massive vulcan mini-cannon strapped to his back; Revolver Ocelot, master of the quick draw, and many more. Your job is to infiltrate the facility and take them down.



The story unfolds through a mix of in-engine cutscenes brimming with Hollywood production values, audio dialogue through your Codec (a communicator built into your character's ear), and full-motion video.

Most of the game is played from an overhead perspective (with the exceptions of when you're using binoculars, using the Look button to scope out an area, or sniping). Control is best with a gamepad, though is a bit sensitive in first-person mode, making aiming cumbersome.

Metal Gear Solid is a sneaker at heart. While you will find yourself in wild firefights, most of your time is spent avoiding the enemy. To make things easier, a personal radar system tells you where the guards are and what their cone of vision is. You'll need it, because these guards are smart. They follow footprints, hear you when you step in puddles, and see your breath in the cold.

However, there will be times when detection is unavoidable. In these situations, Snake can punch out guards or even grab them and break their necks. As you get further in the game, you'll eventually scrounge up an impressive arsenal, including remote-controlled missiles, assault rifles, and even claymore landmines. Trust me, you'll need every bit of it.



About 99 percent of the PlayStation game is intact, and a few extras have been thrown in. FIrst off, if you start a game on the "very easy" setting, you'll have the silenced MP5 with unlimited ammo in your inventory right off the bat. You'll also be able to play in high-res mode. Sadly, Microsoft didn't add any more polygons, or bump up the texture resolution (at least not in any noticeable way). As a result, some characters are blocky, and the textures look stretched out. There's no force feedback support, either.

Thankfully, some great console touches have been recreated. For example, there's a certain boss who can read your mind. In the PlayStation version, to beat him you had to unplug your controller and put it into the second slot. Then you were able to hurt the boss because he could no longer "read your mind." This was translated perfectly to the PC without the need to unplug your controller. I won't give away the secret, but I must applaud Microsoft on a job well done.

In all, this is an excellent port. But what kind of score does an aging PlayStation blockbuster deserve on PC? It's hard to say. Personally, I enjoyed it very much, but then again, I'm a console owner so I know what to expect. I can easily see hardcore PC owners scoffing at Metal Gear Solid, but if anyone is willing to put up with console-style gameplay (floating power-ups and all) in return for a fun and entertaining ride, Metal Gear Solid is worth the time. Li C. Kuo

 

Shadowrun Returns' Dragonfall expansion was a huge improvement over the main campaign, so it was a little frustrating that you were required to fork out for Returns in order to play it, particularly when it only shared a setting with the original game. As mentioned last month, the situation is thankfully about to change, with a new standalone version of Dragonfall that will be available for free to existing owners (and Kickstarter backers). A few more details have just come to light about what the new version entails, and it sounds like there will be a fair bit of additional content on offer, plus changes to the combat system and interface. There is also a release date: 18th September.

New missions, new music, a revamped interface and combat system, and swisher visual effects are the order of the day here, along with a new armour system that will be detailed in a developer diary before release. You can see the new interface below, complete with sexy, sexy toolbars that no longer require you to click through to access your other weapons or abilities.



Another interesting titbit: the original, expansiony version of Dragonfall will be removed from sale (but not from your game library) when this new version releases, for the same price of $14.99. As such, there will also be a new Steam Workshop page to go along with it. Devs Harebrained Schemes will provide details on how to change your mods so they'll be compatible with the new editing tools the Kickstarter's updates bit is likely where that info'll be posted.

Ta, Blue's News.

Bioware's pitch for Shadow Realms sounds like a Telltale series on turbo. Romance, moral decisions and regular cliffhangers are in; quick-time action scenes are out. Instead, episodes are built around dungeon runs that pit a four-player squad of modern wizards, rogues and warriors against a D&D-esque game master figure called The Shadowlord. This invisible agitator flies around casting spells, placing traps, summoning creatures in an effort to troll the team to death. I played a pre-alpha combat section at Gamescom, and it's already fun.

The wizard is a chiseled office worker with a wand tucked into his belt. This Hogwarts alumnus turned male model can teleport around the battlefield with his right-click dodge and toss spells with the number keys. His lingering wall of fire makes short work of slow-moving undead warriors (though could use a template, or some indication of where the spell will appear). Tap the "3" key and the wizard thrusts his palm to the ground, summoning a glowing white glyph that erupts and scatters enemies caught in its radius. Teleport in, smash, teleport out, drop a fire wall to cover your back and harass with wand-zaps at range. It's good wizarding.

I spent a lot of time escaping melee encounters to let our close combat specialists take the damage. A woman wielding hand-scythes seemed particularly adept at taking out the huge wolf creatures that the Shadowlord summoned. Our tank equivalent was a leather-jacketed punk with a baseball bat and a buckler. The blend of modern fashion and old-school D&D creature encounters is novel. This is a really good chance for Bioware to do something with the ideas that The Secret World squandered.



The Shadowlord graduated from an irritation to a real menace as we progressed through the three-stage dungeon. Like the heroes he's controlled from a close third-person perspective, and his abilities are restricted by cooldowns. He summons bombs and spike traps to scatter the party dodge if you hear the metallic clink cue. If you see a monster surrounded by a dark aura then it's under the Shadowlord's direct control, which means it's stronger, tougher and (hopefully) smarter than its kin. The Shadowlord can pop out of a possessed form at will to cause mischief elsewhere.

There's plenty of room to use these abilities creatively. Drop a trap on a wizard after a few consecutive dodges, and he's unlikely to have the mana to escape. Our team rushed to rescue a downed enemy at the end of a fight, only to flee in the face of a sudden firebomb. In the disarray the Shadow Lord used its scariest ability, and inhabited a summoned doppelg nger of Ms. Sickles to try and slash us up. We quickly took the clone down, but it provided a surprising impromptu mini-boss fight at the end of an encounter we thought we'd ended.

The torch-lit tomb we explored looked a little plain in its pre-alpha form, but culminated in a challenging boss fight on a rocky arena hovering inside a swirling maelstrom. There we fought a Bat-winged ogre boss, and eventually fell to hordes of undead summoned by the beast and the Shadowlord. We didn't have a dedicated healing class, so we relied on our limited supply of medpacks, shared by the entire party. These replenish at checkpoint monuments that need to be activated by all part members simultaneously. Bioware fans will enjoy the "gather your party before venturing forth" prompt you get for hitting a checkpoint ahead of your allies.



Early testing is set to start next month. If you get in you'll find an interesting proof-of-concept. Bioware promises plenty of character customisation and ability progression that'll span Shadow Realms' episodes, but specifics regarding the story, and the Shadowlord's narrative role within it, aren't settled. It's an interesting attempt to port tabletop D&D encounter design into fast-paced online scenarios, but the pleasure of GMing a campaign stems as much from narrative control as combat design, and there's an important philosophical difference between the motivations of a GM who plays to entertain the party, and those of a Shadow Lord incentivised to destroy them.

Nonetheless, I love seeing developers experiment with this stuff, whether in Jason Rohrer's Sleep Is Death or, more recently, Arma 3's excellent Zeus mode. There are a few sticking points: what if your group gets lumped with a bad Shadowlord? For RPG fans used to roleplaying a single hero, will there be incentives to pick up the Shadowlord role from time to time? As a victim of the Shadowlord's machinations, I hope his abilities evolve over the course of the campaign, and that he constantly gets fresh level-specific ways to mess with the team. The unpredictable doppelg nger summon was the best moment of the demo.

For an account of what it's like to play the Shadow Lord and break a squad of humans, check out Dave's thoughts over on GamesRadar.