Let's play some games, shall we? This week: a boy goes to space, a dead-and-alive cat stays in a box, a wonderfully weird game gets expanded, Legends return, things are shot at, and other things are separated by a dimensional membrane. Enjoy!

Gingiva by myformerselves Download it here



We don't appear to have mentioned Gingiva before now, or indeed Middens, myformerselves' equally fringe collage-style roleplaying adventure. Imagine Terry Gilliam's Monty Python animations in game form and you're about halfway there. Exploration, odd conversations and characters, and turn-based battles make up the other half. The art is extraordinary in both titles, and reason enough to play them even if turn-based combat isn't typically your bag. Middens follow-up Gingiva originally came out around a year ago, but it's just been updated to celebrate its anniversary with an expansion featuring "two more playable characters, new music, a rebalanced battle system, smarter enemies, new attacks, added detail to endings, a dating minigame, a deeper drollery system, new areas and a myriad of minor fixes far and wide". Now's the perfect time to get stuck into either, or both, of these hugely original games.

Here's the original trailer for Gingiva, to give a brief idea of what you're in for:



Boy Goes to Space by Ryan Loader Play it online here



A lovely, short game about a boy who, erm, goes to space. He does this with the aid of a swing, which soon catapults him into the atmosphere and into a couple of interactive little moments involving clouds and colours and noise. It's a stray daydream turned into a game, and a great way to spend 5-10 minutes after an awful day at work.

Mega Man Legends 3 2D version Download it here (type 'dash3' into the text box)



The same fans unofficially remaking the cancelled prologue to Mega Man Legends 3 have made a retro, 2D version of the game and, aside from a few quirks and a ridiculously high difficulty level, they've done a bang-up job. I'm not a fan of the jumping, which feels a bit gravity-heavy, but there's some nice combat, sprites, chiptunes and tricky platforming on offer here. As you can see from the following trailer, it looks a lot like one of the NES Mega Men, albeit one that's borrowed a few tricks from a cancelled spin-off from the future. (My head hurts thinking about that.) Don't let the Japanese text put you off there's an English version included in the download. (Via Destructoid)



What Could Possibly Go Wrong? by Andrew Shouldice Play it online here



The theme of Ludum Dare 30 was 'Connected Worlds', and as usual it's resulted in a buncha cool-looking games I haven't had time to go through properly. Via IndieGames and Warp Door, here are a few that caught my attention and proved a lot of fun to play. What Could Possibly Go Wrong? is a wave-based survival shooter with a tough-but-fair difficulty level, excellent spritework, a great chunky feel to the movement and guns, and lots of satisfying gut-splosions after you do an enemy in.

Our Worlds by Davi Santos Play it online here



Our Worlds, meanwhile, is a 2D platformer featuring a robust, well-implemented central gimmick. You play as two characters, separated by dimensions and the middle of the screen, switching between them occasionally to, for example, activate a moving platform, or to draw a magic platform to help the other across a gap. It's a little scrappy, yes, but considering the short development time, Our Worlds is a surprisingly fully featured platform game.

Schrodinghost by looPing, Valmont de Ragondas, Carduus Play it online here



The beautifully named Schrodinghost begins with the notion that its feline protagonist Maru is both alive and dead inside Schrodinger's famous box, and goes from there. It's a stealth game, essentially: if ol' Schrodes sees you move inside the box, you become "quanticly dead", i.e. dead-for-reals. In order to scamper about while remaining half-alive, you have to release your spectral cat form to operate switches, or travel through the electrics to bypass his gaze. A wonderfully smart, original stealth game, featuring art and music to not-quite-die for.

Sherlock Holmes was the original cosplayer, and when he wasn't walking around bat-and-ball expos dressed as Amelia Earhart, he liked nothing better than pretending to be a butler or vagabond to dig up clues in places the regal Holmes wouldn't quite fit in. This disguise element is finally in one of his games, and based on a new trailer, there are quite a few different tops and hats and trousers and facial hair and spectacles you can wear in Crimes and Punishments. Select a particular outfit in this case, that befitting of a sailor and Holmes will adopt the relevant accent when chatting with suspects and the like. A terrible Irish accent and an arm-wrestling minigame await you after the break.



Crimes and Punishments might be a game about murder and that, but it seems a bit of a silly one with it, and I'm deeply thankful for that. I'm also enjoying Holmes' lavishly decorated flat the more times I see it, which puts my own, rather sparsely decorated abode to shame. Frogwares' latest Holmes-'em-up is due out September 30th, and here's a longer look at it if you're not too worried about spoiling one of the six cases a wee bit.

NetherRealm's incredi-gory Mortal Kombat X is all about (slight) environmental interaction, picking different character 'variants', and, yes, ripping your opponent's spine out or punching a hole through their chest or, I don't know, plucking out their eyeballs or something. It's all a bit brutal for me, but I appreciate the fast-paced combat, the lovely backgrounds, and their integration with the side-on scraps, as shown off in a recent PAX stream. If MK10 seems like your kind of fighting game, you'll be pleased to hear that it's not too far out from release, as a date of April 14th has just been announced.

Miserably, to play as Goro the four-armed dude one of Mortal Kombat's more memorable characters and bosses you'll need to pre-order the game. It's likely he'll turn up as regular DLC later, but it's still a rubbish situation for long-time fans of the character, who has featured in several games in the series before now, often in playable form, and always without buyers having to fork out additional cash.

Other returning characters include Raiden, Scorpion, Sub-Zero and Kano, all of which seem to be included in the main release.

We got our first significant look at Firewatch last weekend at PAX. I spoke to Jake Rodkin and Chris Remo shortly after Campo Santo's panel.

Every week, Richard Cobbett rolls the dice to bring you an obscure slice of gaming history, from lost gems to weapons grade atrocities. This week, a handful of much requested games get their turn in the spotlight. Or firing line. One of the two. Whichever.

Yes, as part of our dives into the obscure, we've looked at over 200 games that people have probably never heard of, and a few that it's a surprise so many people have. (Goodness, was I not expecting so many people to be aware of Tongue Of The Fatman...) Some games however are, while not the kind of thing you're likely to see on GOG or anywhere any time soon, so famous or well-explored in their relative obscurity that devoting a whole week's column to them seemed a little excessive. But every dog has its day. And so too does every dog's dinner. Today, by popular request, is that day.



You know you're dealing with a true shooter classic when you fire up a game called "Extreme Paintbrawl" and see the developer logo is a switchblade next to the bleeding words "Creative Carnage". Truly, there has been no finer synergy twixt company and its product since Atari announced that the new Alone In The Dark game would be called "Illumination", and also a co-op shooter. However, if there is a fault here, perhaps it is our own. Genius can be difficult for regular people to understand, and Extreme Paintbrawl is nothing if not an example of that. I mean that literally, of course. For instance, what conventionally sane mind would create a DOS game that uses a Windows launcher and configuration tool, both of them buggier than a go-kart track in the middle of the school holidays? You'd think only an idiot. But wait...

For perhaps there is more to the tale of this, considered the worst shooter of all time in a world where games like Doom 3 and also some other rubbish ones exist. Could it be that the developers were so shamed that they sought to keep their creation from the world, locked forever behind a protective shield of shit programming that even the combined force of multiple virtual machines cannot penetrate? Were they perhaps the digital versions of those people who make the tombs that Indiana Jones explores, full of death traps and skulls placed there to say "Seriously. It's not worth it. Turn back!"



I can think of no good argument against. Oh, except that they made three sequels. And also that the creator infamously wrote to PC Gamer US to explain that minor issues like "no AI" were not in fact a crime worthy of six percentage points, but merely an inevitable consequence of having thrown this together in two weeks and the publisher just shipping in it in a state so unfinished, it's a wonder it wasn't just a copy of the Build engine, a Starbucks card, and a little note on the disc saying "Game Goes Here".

Even so, it could definitely have been worse! It could, for instance, have formatted players' hard drives, like a bug in Pool of Radiance. That would have been bad. It could have come printed not on a CD, but a solid chunk of ebola with a label. Possibly worst of all, it could have worked, stealing from its players that most precious of things that is hope - hope that when their mother bought them a copy for their birthday rather than that nasty Duke Nukem game with the strippers, that they could show her the broken screen and get something with boobs in it instead. Or at least Lemmings Paintball from 1996, which was surprisingly not crap at all. More than you can say for the other spin-offs...

Really though, I think what we should take from Extreme Paintbrawl is its indie spirit and truly inspiring lesson; that it's possible to get an engine, and two weeks later, have a completed game ready to hit the shelves. Not necessarily one that should be, but what do you want? Blood?

Because if so, I'm fairly sure that one took quite a while longer...



Honestly, I don't see the problem. Big Rigs does just about everything you could possibly want in a PC game, and indeed, pioneered vast amounts of what so-called 'better' games have done since. When Saints Row IV presented us with a glitchy virtual world full of crazy physics and super-powers, everyone leapt at it! But when Big Rigs gave us a world where you can drive through things like Shadowcat, drive faster than The Flash can think, and therefore drive the only truck badass enough to make Optimus Prime look like Shittimax Loser, everyone just laughed. Gamers!

Really, Big Rigs' only crime was giving us everything we wanted, and in doing so show off how sad and meaningless our desires are. Like being shipwrecked on a chocolate island by a cove of candyfloss, we consume, yet still we grow contemptuous and a little bit sick. Is the point of games not to win? Well, in Big Rigs, that moment of elation was the entire experience. Yes, because the other drivers it offered to race against couldn't move, but come on! If you've ever complained about rubber-banding in racing games, here was the one that dared to be different - to not only give the opposition absolutely no cheap advantages, but no petrol. This was innovation! Like Infogrames!

And it was even educational! Would any player ever again have trouble with apostrophe's after seeing...

And let nobody dare tell you otherwise!

Besides, people are too critical of this classic. They say for instance that with all the clipping errors and ability to drive vertically up roads, you can't crash. Nonsense! Just try loading the later tracks. Right back to Windows, faster than you can say "Ingracious cur!" They complain that games like Dota 2 take too much time to learn, despite shunning a game so considerate of your time that sometimes you could drive over the start-line and think you'd just finished the race. And that's before we talk about the sheer size of the world. You can drive for hours and hours and hours through Big Rigs, at close to the speed of light if you go in reverse, and never see the end. True, it's mostly an empty grey void. Still, more character than most of The Elder Scrolls Online. Ahead of its time, was Big Rigs. Truly ahead of its time.



Look, I'm not going to pretend that Plumbers Don't Wear Ties is the greatest comedy romance photostory about a plumber, even amongst the many released back in 1994. But let's not merely concern ourself with whether the game itself was good, or bad, or a true obscenity whose existence proves that while the devil has the best tunes, he has terrible taste in games. Let's instead ponder the good times. How much entertainment has Plumbers Don't Wear Ties given the world since it was released, both casually, in sentences like "It's bad, but it's not Plumbers Don't Wear Ties!" and those who played it simply enjoying the look on their friends faces as they tell them of this game that exists and is real in which halfway through a narrator in a chicken mask is beaten up and replaced by a kung-fu lady who wants to more tastefully guide the story of plumber John and not-plumber Jane getting it on like Donkey Kong. Donkey Kong and a very resilient furry, anyway.

Just pondering these moments I can't help but feel just a little better about the world we live in; both as a place of wonder where such things can happen and develop a life beyond anyone's dreams, and also not so bad about about its inevitable doom and destruction. That may not be much, but it's more than I can say for anything that happened in, say, Farscape: The Game. There's more to it as an experience though, which also deserves a moment. Looked at in a certain way, Plumbers Don't Wear Ties is in many ways a Dada-ist masterpiece. Specifically, that way is not in terms of the art style as the sound a baby makes when bashing a keyboarder, but still. And there's a raw charm to its charmlessness; a confidence in its insanity. It knows exactly what it is, and while what it is is a game that entirely exists because its creator was willing to ask a girl to be chased through town in her bra and a skirt while he took pictures, at least it's clear that someone was having a good time in the seven minutes and twenty seconds it took to conceive of, design, film, and release - primarily on 3DO, but a very rare PC version does occasionally surface.

Hell, you can even play it online! Except for a couple of decisions, which have been pulled.



Or if you just want to witness the amazing story in all its... glory... here's a recorded version.

But I know what you're thinking. I have magic powers. Unrelated, I know what you're probably also thinking - while this game is absolutely the classic that it so obviously is and totally isn't at all, what about the games that aren't up to its level. Are there any other games that on the surface seem as lazy as an unfinished comparison, but on closer inspection

There are. There are indeed. And here's just one of them that makes Plumbers Don't Wear Ties look like Day Of The Tentacle. Meet Slaughtered Roomates. Not a snuff game, but it kinda feels like one...

"14 different murders!" promises the advert. Which says it all, really...

Truly, a demonstration of minimalism in action. Slaughtered Roommates is the tale of three young ladies being murdered by a drug addict. And absolutely nothing else. The entire game consists of little more than choosing options like "STRIP" and "GET SHOT" as the three very quickly naked victims make gamers everywhere that Jack Thompson never stumbled across this little slice of horribleness. So, if you want a game where you can watch a helpless damsel suffocated and otherwise repeatedly murdered by a killer for your amusement.... uh... please just take the money and leave, okay? Okay.

Next to this, the silly naughtiness of Plumbers Don't Wear Ties just doesn't seem so bad, does it? There's even some nice wholesome nudity in it as Jane takes a shower, just as long as you don't mind also seeing John towelling himself down. Or vice versa. Your preference! You choose! Unless you're playing the YouTube version, because that doesn't offer it, obviously. Not arty enough for those philistines.



Come on, people! Look, if Blizzard came out tomorrow and announced that they'd spent fifteen years creating a game that was going to combine, amongst others, The Elder Scrolls, World of Warcraft, Thief, Diablo, Unreal Tournament, Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines and Beetlejuice, you'd be excited. And that's what Limbo Of The Lost did! Okay, it did it by shamelessly stealing assets from all of them as if nobody was going to notice, and then stitching them together into an adventure so boring that you could stick it on the end of a drill and punch through a glacier made of diamond, but still!

Quite deservingly, Limbo of the Lost got more attention than just about any other indie game of its time, proving that there's no such thing as bad publicity, unless you want your game to be pulled off the shelves and companies like Disney to turn around and go "They stole WHAT?!" Certainly, it created a unique experience unlike anything we're ever going to see again, as well as truly fine babble that will go down in industry legend. Like, for instance:

"The backgrounds are created in 3D GAMESTUDIO A6, they are textured, lit and then I place a camera at a certain position and grab a still. This becomes the initial background plate."

And then after being caught, blaming outsourcing. On a project that it was later demonstrated was, well, not exactly new at borrowing from people. That version of the demo incidentally is also one of the only games ever to seemingly draw inspiration from the original Knightmare games. There is a reason that people didn't do that very often. It can best be summed up as "They played them."



But come on, let's cut the game some slack here. It did at least give us the greatest ending ever...



As well as so many fond memories, it would take a full forum playthrough to fully document them. Say what you want about Limbo of the Lost, the tale of the captain of the Marie Celeste finding himself in a hellish underworld in which he is compelled to go up to people chained against the wall and being tortured for unspoken sins and ask them if they know where the exit is, it's an ambitious game!

What really stands out beyond the asset theft is its sense of scale and scope, bouncing from exploration to solving murder mysteries to battles to somehow save humanity to dealing with truly terrifying children to doing puzzles we have to assume exist solely because there was a model available on a 3D props store that made someone go "Aha!", all presented with a certain childlike innocence. The kind of child who looks at pure undriven snow and thinks "Ash from a furnace where they burn people and rend their flesh!" So, both creepy, and a little bit stupid. A crap Antichrist, perhaps. And should you believe in the Antichrist, clearly, a crap one is what we should hope for. Even in a world protected by Bibleman.

Limbo of the Lost. It was on sale so briefly, yet its flatulence burned so burning bright that its legend shall live on forever. How many so-called 'better' games can claim as much? Not many. Not many at all.



Myst is still shit.

Each week PC Gamer s opinion scryers emerge from their blackened temple to hold forth on the most significant moments of the past seven days. They usually bring biscuits too.

Phil Savage: Gatological humour
Gat is back! Actually, I don't care about Gat, but I do care about more Saints Row. SR4 was one of my personal favourites from last year. It was funny, silly and surprisingly sweet at least, as sweet as a game about a Presidential psychopath Puckish rogue can be.

Yes, I'm disappointed that Gat's the main character (or, to put it another way, "Gat don't impress me much.") A big draw of the previous games was the absurd character creation, something that's not going to happen with an already defined character. But a Saints Row vision of hell where Shakespeare is one of the four demon lords is a thing I'm eager to be set loose in.

Tim Clark: GTA V is still a thing
One of the troubling and confusing moments in a week that was often troubling and confusing was the vague sense that despite all logical expectations to the contrary Rockstar might have cancelled GTA V. But they haven t. We know this because someone was so worried that they decided to ask. Anyway, I wouldn t normally even mention it, (and in fact we rightly ignored the rumour in the first instance), but for the fact that on the drive home from a meeting at Nvidia s Santa Clara office I got to thinking just how strong the game is potentially going to look on PC. As the parched California countryside scudded past the window of Evan s car (which certainly looks stolen), I mused that with mod support, killer res and framerate, plus the now mature multiplayer, we re looking at the definitive version of a wonderful game. Can t wait. And not just because hearing gunshots outside my apartment last night made me feel like I m already living this particular dream.



Samuel Roberts: Titanic changes
This week Titanfall added the Titan-less (and fall-less, come to think of it) Pilot Skirmish mode as part of another update. I m delighted by the idea of this, though I haven t had the chance to give it a go yet. Theoretically, without titans or minions, Titanfall essentially transforms into an entirely different game an almost Mirror s Edge-like shooter of precision jumps across the maps. Seamless movement suddenly becomes your only reliable tool in both staying alive and finding a way to take an advantage in battle. There are parts of the map you simply don t hang around in with Titanfall due to the justified fear of being trampled by a big monkey robot, but now that restriction doesn't apply. As a free aside, Pilot Skirmish mode is a welcome addition to Titanfall's steadily growing feature set. I love this game.

Tom Marks: Welcome to my humble commode
I m not kidding when I say making giant gnomes was the most fun I've had in The Sims 4. This is absurd and I love it. With the simple press of two keys (Shift and ]) you can grow almost any item in The Sims 4 infinitely large. And I do mean infinitely as I made a gnome so big it blocked out the screen, and then kept growing until the camera was inside and I would be hard pressed to tell you if I were inside a giant gnome at all. Maybe Oasis Springs has always been contained within a giant gnome, who knows? I don t.

It definitely feels like a glitch as too many things go wrong with it to make it seem intentional but, crazy as it sounds, Maxis has confirmed that this was left in the game intentionally, massive problems and all. (Insert your own Sim City launch joke here.) I highly recommend you go try it out as it's incredibly simple to execute, just make sure you don't accidentally sell everything in your house like I did.

(Thanks to Steve Nahra for the title who posted that commode joke to our Facebook page.)



Wes Fenlon: Rome 2's free campaign expansion is a beautiful thing
Creative Assembly and Sega are really doing right by Total War fans. I played Rome 2 last year, before it was released, and was excited by the game's potential. But Rome 2 had a really rough launch, hampered by performance issues, bugs, and some seriously broken AI. But Creative Assembly patched it, and patched it, and kept on patching it for a whole year. Now Creative Assembly is releasing the "Emperor Edition" of Rome 2 which includes a whole new campaign, bundles all the game's free DLC, and is a free upgrade for all current Rome 2 owners.

Rome 2's free campaign expansion, a year's worth of patches, and great mod support represent the best of PC gaming. Other developers and publishers should pay attention. This is how you engender goodwill: it's okay to sell DLC if you're going to keep supporting your game a year after launch, making it better for everyone for free.

Andy Chalk: Book of Unwritten Tales 2 drops a glorious gameplay trailer
I knew Book of Unwritten Tales 2 was coming, but the "Gameplay Presentation" trailer that turned up this week still managed to be a wonderful surprise. The art and animation are nothing short of gorgeous, and the voice work so important to a game like this sounds very strong; the free-fall sequence at the 7:50 mark of the trailer is laugh-out-loud funny, thanks almost entirely to Nate's delivery. A great trailer is a long way from a great game, but I'm willing to bet on it anyway: Book of Unwritten Tales 2 is going to be great.





THE LOWS

Phil Savage: Going, going, GOG
Last weekend, GOG held a last chance sale a final hurrah for 35 games that are leaving the store's catalogue. The reason for their retirement is pretty distressing. We're starting to use our own pricing scheme that brings the value of non-US Dollar prices as close to their actual equivalents as we can help it, wrote a GOG representative. Unfortunately, some of our developer and publisher friends had other obligations that made it impossible to reach a common ground.

It's possible these obligations were contractual, and therefore unavoidable, but it's still a worrying step from the publishers involved. Theoretically, the PC offers decades of backwards compatibility, but that means little without easy access to a digital library. Our history shouldn't be held to ransom over a pro-consumer policy.

Tim Clark: The Blizzcon bundle
Hmmm. I ve never actually been to Blizzcon. I definitely want to go to Blizzcon. But in the absence of being able to make it to Anaheim, California this November, would I be willing to shell out $39.99 for the privilege of watching the panels, competitions and all that other Blizzjazz live? Maybe, I guess. At the start of the year I never would have believed I d have spent whole weekends watching Hearthstone tournaments on Twitch instead of World Cup games. (Nor would I have envisaged dropping over $100 on card packs, but that s a different low.) Oh who am I kidding? The world s very best players battling it out for a $250,000 prize pool, especially with spectator mode hopefully in place? I m throwing coins out like a Gadgetzan Auctioneer here. But I do think the price of entry ought to be much lower, or at least should be modular so fans can pick and choose which stuff they want to pay to see.



Samuel Roberts: The horror!
The Evil Within s release date has been bumped up to 14 October (unless you re Australian, in which case you have to wait another week). Alien: Isolation is out on 7 October. Two big survival horror games from major publishers, out within a week of each other. I should be clear: I m enormously excited for both, and there is little doubt they will offer two very different interpretations of a genre that s mostly been dormant among major publishers for the last decade (Amnesia and the excellent Lone Survivor picking up the slack on the smaller development front in recent years). I just wouldn t want either to overshadow the other and getting a horror-hungry audience to spend $120/ 75 over the course of two weeks is a pretty big ask. I think a month gap between them might ve been a smart idea.

Tom Marks: League of Legends no longer about a League of Legends
I have loved the lore and story of League of Legends since season one, and as of late it has only gotten better in both quality and presentation. I read all of the Journals of Justice and League Judgments as soon as they were released and could genuinely see the world Riot was crafting, so it is disheartening to hear that it has decided to scrap all of that. Riot has done an incredible job with the stories behind its latest champions, but I wish they had been able to create those stories without turning its back on what was already there. Why not create a lore event about the destruction of the summoners and the league instead of a blog post explaining that neither actually existed in the first place? I am excited for the new lore Riot can come up with, but I will mourn the loss of the lore that has been abandoned.



Wes Fenlon: Destiny, where art thou?
Bungie's Destiny is out next week, but not on PC. In fact, Bungie and Activision still haven't said whether the game will ever show up on PC. This makes me sad for a couple reasons. One, I love Bungie's games. I've put more hours of my life into Halo than any other game series, and I think Bungie has a feel for first-person shooter design that no other developer has quite matched. Two, Destiny is an MMO. It may not follow the WoW formula to a T, but it's an MMO, and there's no question it would shine on PC, where there's a larger playerbase and a simpler infrastructure for rolling out game patches. Do the right thing, Activision. Bring Destiny home to the PC where it belongs.

Andy Chalk: Aliens: Colonial Marines lawsuit drags on
The legal brawl between Sega and Gearbox is getting uglier with every new filing, as demonstrated by Sega's claim that Gearbox was essentially a loose cannon during the Aliens: Colonial Marines marketing campaign, leaking secrets, making promises and driving Sega to distraction. Internal emails revealed in the filing make the relationship between the two sound contentious even before the game's release; in one, Matt Eyre of Sega complains that Gearbox boss Randy Pitchford is "doing whatever the fuck he likes," even after Sega specifically asked him to knock it off.

Sega has agreed to settle the Aliens: Colonial Marines class action suit but Gearbox, worried that it will be left hanging in future litigation, wants that agreement tossed out. At this point, the question comes down to who was responsible for what; Gearbox claims it was an innocent bystander in the whole thing, while Sega insists it was an active sometimes overactive participant. Neither side appears willing to back down at this point, and the way things are going I expect it's a mess that's going to drag on for awhile yet.

Project Cars may not be a great name for a videogame, but there's no denying it's awfully pretty. And now, a little shy of three years after it was first revealed to the world, a North American launch date has finally been revealed.

Oddly enough, the UK release date of November 21 was made public a couple of days ago, but now publisher Bandai Namco has also unveiled the North American launch date: The hammer drops on this side of the pond on November 18.
Project CARS is coming 11/18 in the Americas - Pre-order to get your Modified Car Pack! http://t.co/j9UHmADO0d | pic.twitter.com/AThTeWfZQA

Bandai Namco Games (@BandaiNamcoUS) September 5, 2014
Preordering Project Cars from "participating retailers" will will also net you the Modified Car Pack, a collection of three ridiculous supercars: The 330 km/h Ruf CTR3 SMS-R, the open-top Pagani Zonda Cinque Roadster, and the Ariel Atom 3 Mugen, which can hit 60 MPH in less than three seconds.

Serious driving sim fans may also opt to indulge themselves with the Limited Edition release, which features a Steelbook case, the "Project Cars: By Racers 4 Racers" behind-the-scenes book, and five "legendary machines" the BMW M1 Procar, the Sauber Mercedes C9, the McLaren F1, the 1967 Ford Mk IV, and the Mercedes-AMG C-Class Coupe DTM.

More information, including links to those aforementioned participating retailers, can be found at projectcarsgame.com.

It's The PC Gamer Show! In episode five, Evan and Tyler dive into the mayhem of PAX Prime to to talk to some of our favorite developers (Chris Roberts! Tim Schafer!) and play some of the PC's most exciting games.

In this episode...

Act I: Tyler and Evan chat about the history of PAX and what they're looking forward to at the show, including Star Citizen, Dragon Age: Inquisition, and the Indie Megabooth.
Act II: Tyler and Evan play Evolve. Turns out, Evan's a real monster!
Act III: Tyler chats with Chris Roberts about the state of Star Citizen and the upcoming multi-crew ship combat.
Act IV: Evan chats with Tim Schafer about Gang Beasts, Double Fine Presents, and what it means to be indie in 2014.

The PC Gamer Show is a new and evolving project for us, and we want your feedback to help make it better. What kind of segments do you want to see? What games should we play and talk about? Who should we have on as guests? What's coming up next?

Shout at us in the comments below, or shoot us an email directly at letters@pcgamer.com. We're listening. And we'll see you in two weeks.

Remember Camelot Unchained? It's an MMO being developed by City State Entertainment, a studio founded by Mark Jacobs, who also happens to be a co-founder of Dark Age of Camelot developer Mythic Entertainment. It rang up more than $2.2 millon on Kickstarter in May 2013, and has presumably been going quietly about its business ever since. But the studio revealed recently that things are running behind schedule, and the alpha test it hoped to have ready for August won't actually get rolling until next year.

The problems stem from the studio's inability to meet its need for engineers until May of this year, which forced it to focus "the vast majority of our programming resources only on tech foundations of the engine," Jacobs wrote in an update. That led to a slowdown in the hiring of artists and the creation of in-game assets, and also meant that studio executives spent a significant amount of time on hiring new employees rather than on the actual game.

The good news, Jacobs said, is that even though it's behind schedule, the development of Camelot Unchained is going very well. Newly-hired engineers are "meeting or exceeding" expectations, and the slowed hiring process actually allowed the studio to save some money. He also announced what he called "the Alpha Guarantee": If the alpha test doesn't launch by the end of February 2015, all backers will be rewarded with Founder's Points, CSE points and free subscription days.

"While we know we don t have to promise this, we think it is the right thing to do," he wrote. "Delays happen, but if we are delayed again, well, that means we aren t doing our job properly."

Mark your calendar.

It's not quite ready for prime time yet, but The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth now has a launch date that's not too far down the road. A "release date trailer" has also made its way to the tubes, and I'm not exaggerating when I say that it can generously be described as quite possibly the weirdest thing you'll see all day.

I don't know what to tell you. I thought the Voyeur For September trailer was weird, but this is clearly a whole new dimension of strange. There are some gameplay bits in there, which is nice, but then there's the... other stuff. Is it art? Maybe. Whatever you want to call it, it's way over my head. Feel free to explain if you have insights to offer.

The important part is this: The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth, a remake of the 2011 release built on an new and more efficient engine with updated art, effects, music, and "hundreds upon hundreds of designs, redesigns and re-tuned enhancements," will launch on November 4. Find out more and lay down your preorders at Steam.