Retrogaming, or for us older folks, ‘replaying modern classics’, has never been bigger. Part of the joy of being a PC gamer is that no matter how many years tick past and new games fight for attention, we can always go back in our virtual time machine and re-explore the games that made gaming, like Doom, and the ones that have arguably yet to be beaten, like Monkey Island.

There are many revival projects out there, from DOSBox to single-game engines like Exult for Ultima VII. One of the biggest and oldest is ScummVM, launched in 2001 and named for the classic SCUMM engine—Script Creation Utility For Maniac Mansion—which gave us all of Lucasarts’ classic adventure games. 

Since then the project has widely opened its remit to support FMV games like Gabriel Knight 2, obscure games like Full Pipe, and for reasons that must have made sense at the time, Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties (one of the worst PC games of all time). If you want to run Day of the Tentacle on a Raspberry Pi, chances are it’ll be ScummVM doing the heavy lifting.

ScummVM hit a big milestone on December 17 with a 2.0 release that added even more supported games, along with some of the most lovingly anal release notes around. You know you’re dealing with serious perfectionists when tweaks include stuff as specific as "Fixed nightclub arcade sequence speed for Manhunter Apple IIgs version" and "Fixed subtitle speed setting in the Hebrew version of Simon the Sorcerer 1."

Just never call it an emulator.

"ScummVM is not an emulator," confirms Eugene Sandulenko, current Project Lead. "It has been confused a number of times with one, and actually it does contain several, though mostly for sound cards. When it comes to the games though, we don't emulate the originals—we rewrite them. The pioneers, such as Ron Gilbert of Maniac Mansion, figured out that instead of writing their game logic in assembly or Pascal or whatever, they would create a separate language tailored to the game, and which would be easy enough even for the artists to make use of. SCUMM for instance has op-codes for moving an actor from Room A to Room B or around the screen, while the implementation also covers playing walking animations and so on—it's pretty high level. This then ran in a virtual machine so that it would play on multiple platforms without everything having to be reimplemented. ScummVM does that again, this time in C. Currently we have 64 supported engines and growing."

Many as one

This hand-crafted approach has given ScummVM a well-deserved reputation for quality. It does however mean development can look quite slow on the outside, especially since these days you can drop more or less anything into DOSBox and have it at least run acceptably.

"Well, the key words are ‘these days’!" Sandulenko points out. "ScummVM started in 2001 and some of the platforms we were running on were only 25... 30Mhz. This is the major difference between emulators, like DOSBox and reimplementation, like ScummVM. Something like Monkey Island was written in the CPC era, on slow machines, and our requirements for it are about the same. Something like DOSBox, you'd need about a gigahertz to run it. Secondly of course, not all games were written for DOS or Windows. We have games based on SCUMM engines for Atari and Macintosh and Apple 2c and Amiga... even NES. You want to run the Macintosh version of Indiana Jones, which was in black and white? We can do that in ScummVM. Not in DOSBox."

This, unsurprisingly, is a lot of work.

"We take the original binary, and if you know the process of compilation, you'll know that turns high level programming code into assembly and then binary code. Along the way you lose all the function names, all the variable names... all you're left with is taking an address from memory location X and use it as a pointer to another byte, and so on. You have no clue what's happening. We call the process of figuring it out 'mapping.'"

That mapping can take months, and then the ScummVM team has to convert the code into C or another language. There's a lot of trial-and-error, and it's not a one time process. Those different game versions each require more work. Sometimes all this takes years, not months.

Sandulenko demonstrates with a look at his last implementation, an obscure adventure called Full Pipe. "I started on it in I believe 2013. It took ten months to implement it and start bug fixing, but it was only in 2016 I was able to pick it up again and finish it this year. So, that's a year and a half on one game."

It’s hard to imagine taking on this amount of work in the name of a completely forgotten Russian adventure game notable for little but being an early-ish Steam release. However, there is method to the madness—even the madness of devoting time to resurrecting Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties.

"Ha. Well, in short, because we had a crazy developer willing to invest the time, maybe because of the... childhood memories? Maybe not. But it's funny. Full Pipe, that’s about 31,000 lines of code. Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties… 485. There’s versions of Hello World longer than that! So it was pretty easy. We originally announced it as an April Fool’s joke, but… why not? Go play it!"

Back to the source

The two most common ways a game or engine gets into ScummVM are: 

•  One of the developers being particularly passionate about it
•  The group being given the source code 

"If we have source code and right, we'll try and implement it, even if it's something like this freeware 'Drascula' game. It's awful, but we got source and support... and I can say it's awful because they told us they were 14 or 15 or so and learning programming while doing it!" Sandulenko says.

Often the ScummVM team avoids using much original code. It primarily serves as a reference. But there are exceptions, like Mission Supernova. "Because it's written in assembly, it's a pretty tough one. If the source is in C or whatever and the author is okay with us just stripping out their comments and stuff, that's much easier."

The project hasn’t always had the easiest relationship with developers and publishers, though that has slowly changed over time. It got a big boost when Revolution Software re-released Beneath A Steel Sky as freeware, with Dreamweb, Lure of the Temptress, and Flight of the Amazon Queen joining a couple of smaller games as free to download demos. ScummVM has also been instrumental in getting games back on sale, either with or without the help (or appropriate credit) of the team.

In particular, Sandulenko recalls working on the game Tony Tough, whose IP owners wanted to return to shelves. "They told us they'd give us the source for reimplementation because they wanted to put it back in stores. Of course, we're volunteers, so we couldn't make any promises, but they patiently waited and then we helped them bundle it with ScummVM for distribution." 

One of the stranger success stories involves the animal-themed fantasy Inherit The Earth. Due to a glitch in development, one of the intro sequence dialogue files was lost, leaving players suddenly wincing at a low-quality sample desperately ripped from the floppy version. "Luckily I have seventeen copies of Inherit the Earth!" laughs Sandulenko. And one of them, the Australian version, had the sound-clip. We were able to supply it, and now the intro is restored."

Down in the trenches

Even with a familiar game, getting a good port can be harder than expected. Sierra for instance primarily used two graphic adventure engines, AGI (King’s Quest I, Police Quest 1, Manhunter: New York etc) and SCI (King’s Quest 5, Quest For Glory 4, and so on). But that doesn’t mean the ScummVM team only had to implement each once and call the job finished. Far from it.

"Sierra’s code is a horrible mess. Our implementation is much better than the original engines. Every game they made, they were doing a fork of their source code, so even games released in the same year aren't typically compatible. That means every change we do, we have to do game checks, make sure later versions of the engine aren't broken, etc."

Luckily, ScummVM’s namesake is somewhat easier. "Oh, that's much more advanced and the games much better tested. There are seven major versions of the engine, and games running on the same one just work. Then of course later Ron Gilbert left Lucasarts to make edutainment games at Humungous Entertainment, and those games are also SCUMM. The crown of the engine though is this game Moonbase Commander—in my opinion, one of the most underrated strategy games—and that's built in SCUMM as well, using the same scripting as those classic adventures. GOG helped connect us with the rights owners to get the source for that one."

It’s not always as easy as wanting to support a game or engine. For starters, ScummVM sticks specifically to 2D games. The complexity of moving to 3D is exponential, as seen by the fact that after years of work, 3D spin-off project ResidualVM runs just Grim Fandango, Myst III Exile and Escape From Monkey Island. "if you look at the number of lines of source code, we're talking hundreds of thousands. Usually the games are all different too. We're lucky with ScummVM that we have engines like SCI that were used and re-used, so we don't have to start afresh with every new game."

The most notable omission though has to be AGS—Adventure Game Studio. This is the software behind 99 percent of freeware and indie adventures this side of the millennium, ranging from the Chzo Mythos and Larry Vales to the Blackwell series and next year’s Unavowed. Early versions are a pain, to put it mildly, as anyone who’s ever tried getting something like Quest For Glory IV 1/2: So You Thought You Were A Hero to run can attest. (Top tip: don’t!) The audience and features seem perfect for ScummVM. Yet still, no support.

"AGS is... unfortunate for us," admits Sandulenko. "Once the original author published the source code, we were pretty excited and we started working on it. We really had high hopes. But then when we mentioned it in the AGS forums, where the game authors are, there was a huge uproar. They didn't want it. They disliked the idea. They jumped on our poor developer so hard that they left in disgust, not wanting to touch it any more. I don't know why there was such opposition. We wanted to do it in the proper way, in the ScummVM spirit, and keep it updated as AGS was upgraded and improved over time. Later there was some talk of 'letting' us handle old game compatibility and so on, but... well, yeah... thanks? That’s not really in the spirit of our project."

Future Scummery

While that dispute will hopefully be settled one day, for the moment the ScummVM team has more than enough to be getting on with—and interest in their software is booming. "We used to joke amongst ourselves that before we released support for a new engine, every developer should quietly snag a cheap copy of its games on eBay, because that price was going to skyrocket."

On top of simply getting the games to work, of course, much of the project involves experimentation and building in new features. Sandulenko for instance recently implemented 4-colour CGA and Hercules (an ancient monochrome graphics standard) support for Monkey Island 1, allowing players to get the full 80s vibe of a bright magenta version of Melee Island. 

But what’s the current holy grail of support?

"Blade Runner," he answers immediately. And the challenge is obvious. Not only was the raw logic of much of that game held together with sticky tape, it uses lots of technologies that rarely saw play in adventures, including voxel characters and full-screen background animations segueing seamlessly into the blocky action. "We're working on it, and it's 60-70% done. A few years ago, I said my top ones were that, the Neverhood and Full Pipe. Now those are done!"

Sandulenko is also slowly working on Macromedia Director, an authoring tool used by many-mid 90s games, but is rewriting it from scratch instead of reverse-engineering it. "I'm even working with the original creators on that one," he says. "It's a big project though."

The more engines that ScummVM can support, the more games can be dusted off and re-released for a second chance without needing a full remaster project like Grim Fandango and Full Throttle. 

Legally speaking, it couldn’t be a much more generous deal. If you’re the rights holder of an old game—or given the state of the industry at the moment, the insurance company or whatever that bought up the assets after the last insurance company that bought its assets folded—you can just bundle ScummVM with it in exchange for a credit, and releasing the source of the version of ScummVM you’re using and any tweaks made to it. 

"Not their game data or engine code or anything like that," assures Sandulenko. "Just our code, and any changes that they've made to it. Just like Carmack's games. He releases the engine, but you need the assets to play it. It's pretty easy. Don't be like Atari, which used our code and removed our copyright. Just give us a little recognition for our hard work—that's all we ask." 

If this week is any indication, more publishers will start using the team's free preservation work to start selling their old games. Disney just released Maniac Mansion on Steam running on, you guessed it, ScummVM.

Download the latest ScummVM here. Need some legal games to play on it? Click on the Games link. Beneath A Steel Sky is especially good. 

Our Best Story award goes to the brilliant What Remains of Edith Finch. Our GOTY awards are determined by the PCG global team, and you can find the rest here.

Samuel Roberts: I went into this expecting another first-person narrative game along the lines of Firewatch or Dear Esther: that I'd be gently moved, and occasionally wowed by pretty things, while nice music played underneath as I explored this big old family home. It's more than that. Without spoiling its secrets, each member of the doomed Finch family has their own story presented in dazzlingly inventive fashion. Edith Finch keeps surprising you, and to me feels like the last word on this kind of game.

Each family member's story is presented in a kind of light minigame format ("narrative Warioware", as coined by Her Story developer Sam Barlow), and this means there's much more in store than just walking and looking. Each room is a total mystery: the colour palette, the imagery and the story waiting inside kept amazing me. 

Philippa Warr: The thing about Edith Finch is that what remained after I played isn't the story as a whole, it's all these electric jolts of wonder. I remember the fantastical childhood bedroom I'd have given anything for when I was a kid (or a 33-year-old adult), the strangely joyous Fantasia-style bathtime tragedy, the phrases hovering in air, the use of chopping up fish to tell a story about mental health and imagination… Not every vignette is golden, but its high notes are nothing less than virtuosic. 

Andy Kelly: I went into Edith Finch not knowing a thing about it, and by the time the credits were rolling I knew I’d played something really special. The wild, wonderful stories of the eccentric Finch clan are beautifully told, and the anthology structure is perfect for illustrating the distinct personalities of each family member. I found one scene in particular so emotionally destroying that I doubt I could ever bring myself to play it again, but anything that has that kind of impact, game or not, should be celebrated.

Tom Senior: An accomplished, beautifully placed flight of imagination that raises the bar for linear story games. It has been fun to watch this sort of game flourish and grow in the last five years and for me What Remains of Edith Finch represents a peak for the genre. It uses the first-person perspective to move you between bodies, into different mediums, always returning to Edith as she explores her old family home.

Joe Donnelly: Sam's view that Edith Finch feels like the last word on its type is bang on—to the point where I wish it'd launched sooner. The way it relays its wonderfully incongruous mechanics and stories is masterful, and while inspired by a multitude of genre similars it'd surely have been a bigger deal in years gone by. In any event, it's brilliant. 

For more coverage of What Remains of Edith Finch, check out our review from earlier this year. 

Snow is falling. All around. Stealing cars and shooting guns. It's the season of snow in Los Santos. Merry Christmas, GTA Online. 

Okay, so that's not quite as catchy as Shakin' Stevens' esteemed Christmas banger, but GTA Online is nevertheless feeling the spirit with snowfall, a new vehicle fit for fighting the elements, and a complimentary Albany Hermes Muscle Car. 

Available to all players who sign into GTA Online this Monday, Christmas Day, the latter looks like this:

Moreover, the "sophisticated 4x4" Benefactor Streiter is now available at Southern San Andreas Super Autos, and should come in handy while braving the snow. 

That looks like this:

Rockstar also notes a number of seasonal discounts running now through the festive period: 

Properties

Arcadius Business Center—30% off

Fort Zancudo Hangar 3499—30% off

Luxury Vehicles 

Yachts—30% off (All models)

Pegassi Zentorno—30% off

Assault Vehicles

Armored Karin Kuruma—30% off (both Buy It Now & Trade price)

Nagasaki Buzzard—30% off

HVY Insurgent—30% off (both Buy It Now & Trade price)

Premium Race and Time Trial Schedule:

Push the throttle to the max to earn big payouts in this week’s scheduled Premium Race and Time Trial events.

December 19th—25th

Premium Stunt Race—“H200” (Locked to Sports)

Time Trial—“Sawmill”

December 26th—January 1st

Premium Stunt Race—“Double Loop” (Locked to Super)

Time Trial—“Cypress Flats”

GTA Online's Festive Surprise event has grown in scope since its inception a few years back. The amount of effort that goes into transforming the map really is impressive, and the option to fight other players with snowballs in lieu of guns is a nice touch. 

Here's a still of the snow as it appears today, courtesy of our Samuel: 

Rumu felt very low-key at first. It's a game about being a sentient vacuum cleaner, a robot whose job is to trundle across floors dealing with little household accidents. But as the household AI Sabrina fills you in on more and more of the details beyond your tiny world, as you start to learn about your absent owners David and Cecily, a sense of guilt and dread builds up. Something's wrong here, and it's not the toast on the floor.

Rumu might not have been on your radar, but it’s definitely worth checking out. This is the first feature-length title developed by Sydney studio Robot House,  one that caught our eye at PAX Australia this year. I checked in with gamerunner Ally McLean and game director Dane Maddams to ask them about the launch and their future plans.

PC Gamer: How's it feel for both of you now that Rumu has finally released? 

Ally McLean: It's been a real rollercoaster for us. Rumu has been such a passion project for everyone on the team—from the executive level down to the contractors who worked on some of the 2D art. It's been such a labor of love and so we weren’t quite sure what to expect when we released it. We knew we had a lot of support. We knew a lot of people responded really well to it when we announced it. But I don't think we were prepared for just the outpouring of emotion that people had for it. Watching people stream it on launch day and seeing people cry...

Dane Maddams: Yeah, a lot of people cried. Ugly cried too. It was something that we knew because we kinda did when we played it, but we didn't expect the level of emotion in the response. It’s our baby and we're so closely tied to it so that’s expected for us, but when it happened like that it was all the more special. 

What were the main goals you wanted to achieve with Rumu?

DM: Structurally, we initially discussed the idea from the outset of it being influenced by a lot of the games that we’ve played that we were passionate about—from the point-and-click adventures of the early days, all the way through to recent indie successes that are very narrative-driven.

AM: Kind of like Gone Home and Firewatch.

DM: We started to realize that Rumu set out its own destiny in front of us as a story-driven, narrative game. Initially, we knew how we wanted to tell the story but we didn't know how to best experiment with a lot of different structural mechanisms like puzzles or push-and-pull mechanics. At a certain point through finalizing the story, it told us what it wanted to be.

AM: That's a huge testament as well to Dan McMahon. His script was really so beautiful and he really crafted the characters in collaboration with the whole team. He came in house and worked with us all one-on-one to create something that gelled really cohesively with the way we wanted to tell the story.

Did it change much from the original vision? Did feedback from PAX Aus or other events shape how the game ended up looking?

AM: Not so much with the story. The vision of the story was quite clear by the time we announced it and showed it at PAX. But we definitely really benefited from playtest sessions and PAX was incredibly valuable for us. Being able to see an audience of people drawn to indie sections and are really passionate about the same things as us come and play the game and go in blind, we learned a lot about the way people approach the game. We learned where they might need a little more or a little less prompting.

A big part of the design thought for us was believing your audience is smart, believing that players are smart and that they’ll figure things out. You don’t need to specifically tell them what’s going on. Shows like PAX were really encouraging for that. We found a lot of people were figuring out the gameplay things out themselves but also came away from it with their own theories and guessing what the story could be.

DM: One thing I think Ally and Adam [Matthews, design lead] did an incredible job of presenting at PAX as well was having thoughtful and considerate conversations with people that played the game and finding what boxes are ticked, how it spoke to them and where they encountered issues. A lot of that initial playtesting and responses has been directly implemented into the game.

Were you wanting to make a branching storyline with varied opportunities for players or was it more about maintaining momentum?

AM: When we first pitched Rumu, it had a huge, sprawling, branching narrative. I think—as all indie pitches are when they first pitch something—we were overly ambitious. But when we brought Dan on, he really convinced us that the most important thing was to tell the best version of the story. That’s really what I think we’ve strived to do in the choices that you make in the game as it is. 

It all reveals the same narrative to you but it can be revealed in many different ways and through many different lenses depending on your playstyle. If you’re more suspicious and inquisitive, then you might inspect every item. You might get more insight early on to David and Cecily’s relationship. You might trigger some responses from Sabrina that you usually might not get until later in the game. Ultimately, it’s the same narrative, but it will be revealed to you in different ways. 

DM: We did a lot of playthroughs and one of the things that we focused on was having individual playstyles and potentially different areas of exploration that you may not follow if you answer a certain thing in a certain way. The decision was made that we’d follow one storyline and branches of it, within reason, but do it really well versus spreading ourselves across many different narratives and not be able to focus and give it the love and attention that each of them deserve.

Now that Rumu has released, is the studio likely to work on additional content updates and tweaks for support post-release or do you feel it is out in its entirety now?

AM: One of the things we’ve been really blown away by is the sense of community around the game. It’s just a positive, supportive community. We want to be here to support those players in the best way that we can. The reality is that we are a small team and what we get to do in the future really depends on how well the game is received right now. In an ideal world, we would love to be able to create more content or something new within the same realm. But it does depend on the reality of how the game performs, and it is performing well.

As far as Robot House goes, has working on Rumu influenced what the studio wants to work on? What direction do you think you’re heading in the coming months and years?

AM: Not that I can speak on behalf of everyone that works at the studio, but I think Rumu was really the spirit of what Robot House wants to create, distilled right down. This is something that looks different, plays different, it surprises people and it has a lot of heart. I think that is the trajectory we want to stay on.

Rumu is available now on Steam.

"Some people mod because they like to give others joy with their creation. Others [mod] because they just fuckin' feel like it. I'm the latter." I'm chatting over Discord with Reaperrz, a Romanian college student and creator of the Witcher 3 Enhanced Edition, an overhaul mod that completely guts the vanilla game and replaces its systems with new approaches to combat, leveling, magic, and alchemy.

Reaperrz (whose full pseudonym is actually "Sir Reaperrz ‘Custard' McButtfuck, Esq") is one of very few people in the world who are ambitious enough to make an "overhaul mod." Rather than adding the mask from Predator into Witcher's Polish folklore-inspired world, overhaul mods are dramatic, sweeping, and huge amounts of work. There are about 2,100 mods for Witcher 3 listed on Mod Nexus; only about 20 of them are considered overhauls.

I talked to the creators of two of the most popular overhaul mods, Witcher 3 Enhanced Edition and Ghost Mode, to find out how and why they go about remaking one of the most ambitious and celebrated games in recent memory. The answer? Mostly boredom.

Ghost Mode

Anna, a scientist living in Samara, Russia, usually goes by the handle "Wasteland Ghost," shortened to wghost81 in most of her modding projects. She's careful, deliberate, and organized, so it makes sense that she uses her PhD in telecommunications to teach programming at the local university.

That methodical approach has made her mod, Ghost Mode, one of the most endorsed and most downloaded overhaul mods. It started small and grew over the years into a vast and comprehensive clean-up of Witcher 3's many bugs and quirks. "I was trying to fix sign skills… because half of them were not working," Anna says. "Then I realized that there are many other skills that are not working. And when I started fixing them I realized that I [was] making Geralt even more OP than he already is. So I started thinking on damage formula and on leveling system, how to improve them. And then I understood why armor was not working. So yeah, modding is a fun thing: you never know where [you'll] end up."

Anna's approach to her overhaul mod was born out of love for the game. After beating it three times, going through New Game+ mode and playing through on Death March, the hardest difficulty, she still wanted to play it but had run out of things to do. When she tried to experiment with other builds, she realized that many of the less-popular skills and signs didn't work at all. Instead of moving on to a new game, she started making changes.

As her project grew, she started fixing bugs and cleaning up inconsistencies. Did you know that fire elementals can be killed by Igni, the fire sign? I didn't, because I'd be a damn fool if I tried to cast Igni with a fire demon trying to eat my face. But it can be done., which doesn't make much sense. Though most of the monsters in the game look different, they have the same stats under the hood. When she realized that, she spent a year balancing and polishing all of the enemy and armor details. "I still have the spreadsheets," she says, calling it a "nightmare."

I spent some time with Ghost Mode and a few other favorite mods, and it reignited my love for the game in an instant. I remember being disappointed in my first play-through when I upgraded my Axii into the "puppet" mind-control spell, only to find it didn't work. Checking online, I learned it was a known bug. Bummer.

Thanks to Anna, Axii now works beautifully, and I've been tricking bandits into shanking each other for ages. Everything's the same as I remember it, but better: item descriptions don't have typos anymore and merchants don't charge an arm and a leg for a basic sword. I did cast Igni on a fire elemental, just to check, and it burned me alive as punishment. Exactly as advertised.

Enemies of all levels are also savvier. I was feeling confident in a one-on-one with a bandit holding a club, so I was shocked when he dodged my counterattack and planted a hit across my jaw. I don't think I've ever been hit by a lone bandit on a road before.

Ghost Mode is very modular, and one of my favorite options is to simply goose enemy damage by 200% or so. Everything more or less feels the same, but when you get hit you really feel it. Even much lower-level bandits and wolves felt dangerous. Should wolves feel dangerous to a master witcher? That depends on the player, but personally I love it.

After almost three years, Anna has spent more than 1,200 hours inside CD Projekt's magnum opus. She's still regularly updating Ghost Mode. She loves the Witcher 3, and just wants it to be even better. "[I]f the game is bad and boring at its core, no amount of modding support can make me play it and fall in love with it," she says. "And falling in love with the game is the first step, at least for me."

The Witcher 3 Enhanced Edition

"Yeah, I hated the game," Reaperrz says. "I still do, really." After Witcher 2, Reaperrz got as far as White Orchard before he felt like Witcher 3 was a disappointment. The way the combat camera auto-aims, the way nuisance creatures like nekkers level up with you to always pose a (slight) challenge; Witcher 3 felt like too much handholding and not enough freedom to learn new skills.

"I think a game is more fun if you need to get a feel for the mechanics, find out small ways things interact with each other," he says. "I wanted to drop the game after White Orchard because I grew to hate it so much. I noticed you [could] fumble around in there a bit and change some stuff, so with my then sub-par knowledge I started changing stuff around until it sort of worked differently."

The Witcher 3 Enhanced Edition, unlike most of the mods on the Nexus, hasn't been around since Witcher 3 launched in 2015. Reaperrz just posted the project in the summer of 2017, and it's already one of the most popular overhaul mods, just behind Ghost Mode by number of downloads. Reaperrz has posted videos showing how the new combat system works by eliminating the auto-targeting camera; now all of Geralt's acrobatic swordplay and backflips can be aimed manually, letting players flip around an enemy's shield or slip inside their guard.

"I just started looking at stuff more, learning. People asked different questions in the comments, pitched ideas, [and I] slowly branched out to other stuff I disliked about [the game]." By this time, Reaperzz began his degree in programming and math ("though I don't have a predisposition for either," he says). "At one point I stopped working on it for maybe a year and then came back and rewrote most of it from scratch, it kinda went on from there. It was boredom plus community drive—mostly boredom, though."

The Enhanced Edition makes the Northern Realms feel more like a real place and less like a game world. There's a brutal logic working behind Reaperrz's mod. All levels have been removed, even from Geralt himself. "A nekker is always a nekker," Reaperrz says, and he means it. Getting better at skills and unlocking new talents only come from experience using those skills; players become better at alchemy by making potions, not by killing monsters and deciding to spend their experience points in alchemy.

The mod puts much more emphasis on a player's individual skill and dexterity aiming Geralt's attacks. Anything that feels "gamey"—like automatically refilling potions or limiting players to only three bombs—has been stripped away. Carry as many bombs as you want, as long as you can haul the weight.

I really enjoyed my time with the Enhanced Edition, but it doesn't feel as much like a Witcher game. If anything it feels a little like Dark Souls or perhaps the "hardcore" and "survival" genre of mods popular for Fallout 4 or Skyrim. In my experience, these mods are more logically satisfying than "fun," though that word almost sounds like a pejorative here. Killing monsters for coin is not "fun," and Geralt is not often jolly fellow. This mod fits that dour, grim outlook in a realistic and almost off-putting way.

Combat is the biggest difference. Without the auto-targeting camera I found myself flailing and missing enemies until I calmed down and started to aim. Fights in Enhanced Edition feel faster, and I love that head wounds or crippled limbs can happen at any time, and they dramatically change how enemies behave. I also had to unlearn my habit of spamming health potions or food during a fight, as Geralt now has to stop, put away his sword, and slowly chew an apple before it starts to heal him.

Reaperrz is still regularly updating the Enhanced Edition, and he and Anna have collaborated on a few things here and there. Reaperrz asked permission to use bug fixes and other changes Anna included in her mod. Reaperrz acknowledges that the two of them are "polar opposites." "She really loved it and modded it because of that," he says. "I hated it and had free time. The mods themselves reflect that pretty well."

In what you might call a study in contrasts, last's week announcement of the upcoming addition of the Netherlands to Civilization 6, led by the Mary Poppins-esque Queen Wilhelmina, has been followed up by word today that the rapacious Mongol horde is on the way too, headed up by the mighty Genghis Khan. 

Genghis Khan united the tribes of northeast Asia, ushering in an era of unified law, religious tolerance, and relative peace between the tribes. But he's better remembered for the brutality of his campaigns: Following his victory over the Tatars, who had assassinated his father some years earlier, he ordered the killing of every Tatar male over three feet tall; after defeating the Taichi'ut, he had its leaders boiled alive. His grave has never been found, according to legend because his funeral party killed everything it saw on the way to his final resting place, so nobody would know where was buried. 

Harsh, but fair. 

The Mongolian unique unit is the Keshig, fast-riding horse archers with the ability to make civilian and support units move at a faster-than-normal rate. Its unique improvement is the Ordu, a "palace tent," which grants a movement bonus to light and heavy cavalry, and its unique Civilization ability is the Örtoo, a sort of "combat-focused trading route" that confers bonuses to Combat Strength and Diplomatic Visibility.   

Genghis Khan himself boasts the unique Mongol Horde ability, which gives a combat bonus to all Mongol cavalry-class units, as well as a chance to increase the size of his army by capturing enemy cavalry units. 

The Mongolians will join Civilization 6 in the Rise and Fall expansion, scheduled to come out on February 8.   

In 1983, the Soviet Union shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007, killing 269 people headed to Seoul from New York. After stopping to refuel in Alaska, crew error put the airliner on a flightpath hundreds of miles off course that crossed into restricted Soviet airspace, where an American military plane had been poking around earlier that day. Mistakes and Cold War tension resulted in a tragic loss of life, stoking further paranoia. But as anyone with an uncle who’s in one too many doomsday prepper Facebook groups knows, not everyone is ready to believe the official story. 

Phantom Doctrine is an XCOM-style, turn-based strategy game that pins the Cold War not on the struggle between the USA and USSR, but on a malevolent, shadowy organization pulling the strings behind the scenes and above everyone’s head. It’s a fantastical alternate history brimming with conspiracy and (actually functional) MK Ultra mind-control. “There are no contradictions with actual history. We just give it a different spin,” lead designer Kacper Szymczak explains. Phantom Doctrine starts you as a CIA or KGB agent, but after you catch onto the conspiracy, you go rogue, forming your own agency in opposition to the global conspiracy. 

Your work is distilled down to two main pillars: planning operations from your outfit’s secret hideout and actually running turn-based tactical ops. There’s a lot to do at the hideout, most of which I didn’t even get to see in a two hour demo, but one cool bit involves assigning new identities and documents to your agents once their heat level gets too high. 

Otherwise, the conspiracy can discover your operatives and potentially kidnap them before sending them back to you as a double agent (without your knowledge), or assassinate them outright. While these new passports and character portraits are more of an aesthetic choice currently, Szymczak is “on the fence” about an agent's’ identity or nationality having additional gameplay implications. It’s “not that we don’t have enough features,” Szymczak said. “Everyone’s like, ‘why do we have so much fucking stuff.’” 

He has a point. I barely got a grasp of all the options available in the MK Ultra facility—from interrogating captured agents to gain intel to programming them to flip sides with the utterance of a code word—and it’s just one facet of the homebase operation. You can also train your agents, or augment them with 30 different compounds (drugs), some of which block the others. There’s a secret sequence of 11 compounds that will lead to the ideal super soldier; Szymczak has it written on a post-in note on his desk. “If I lose it, good luck, internet.” 

You can also sift through collected intel at the hideout, going through redacted documents and pinning evidence to a cork board, clicking and dragging to string it together like Charlie’s mailroom conspiracy in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. While you can assign an agent to solve these clues for you, doing it yourself frees up vital resources, and makes you feel like a detective.  

From the world map screen, you can advance time as red blips start littering the screen. Say a blip pops up in Stockholm. You can send out an agent to passively investigate it, factoring in travel time from wherever your hideout is located. You can stake it out to identify enemy agents, or try and infiltrate the cell to gain intel. Once an enemy cell is up and running, it can raise the threat level to your agency, or throttle the amount of money you have coming in. At that point you can pack up and move your hideout, or attack the enemy's. 

What you choose to do will depend a lot on your funds, available operatives, and playstyle. If you have spare time, for example, you can send an agent in first for recon, which will grant you some benefit when you assault the enemy facility. In the demo I played, this meant being able to disguise one of my four infiltrating agents, allowing them unfettered access to buildings that my other agents would be caught trespassing in. Surveillance cameras, too, were no longer an issue, and my disguised agent was able to find the CCTV room and shut the cameras down, allowing my other agents to more easily sneak through out-of-bounds areas. But having a disguised agent slinking around could also abet a more ruthless series of enemy executions with silenced weapons, rather than non-lethal stealth.

As I snuck to the evacuation site—you have a limited number of turns before your ride home is compromised and you have to wait for a new one—I entered combat just to give it a shot and felt at home with the XCOM-style emphasis on cover, and was thankful that Phantom Doctrine skips the RNG lets you put a shotgun in an alien’s face and miss. The game is designed to let you go in guns blazing, if that’s your speed. If you can spare the agents, you can also add support units like snipers and grenadiers waiting to bail you out of disastrous situations.  

As Szymczak eloquently put it, there’s “so much fucking stuff” to Phantom Doctrine that it’s tough to guess if it will all work out after just a couple hours of what is an ambitious, 60-hour game. Its two core phases of gameplay might not click, the tactical phase could give way to monotony bereft of ever-increasing alien types and chunky armored soldiers, or it could get mired in its own complexity. But its coupling of the best bits of XCOM and Klei’s underrated Invisible Inc. with a pulpy, ripped-from-the-headlines alt history should at least be on your radar when it launches in 2018. 

Our Best Comedy Game 2017 is West of Loathing, as voted for by the PC Gamer global team. Below, the writers who enjoyed it this year share their thoughts. Check out the rest of our GOTY awards and personal picks.

Chris Livingston: Some worlds you explore for loot or collectibles, some for secrets or bits of story, some for beautiful scenery. Open world stick figure RPG West of Loathing will have your scouring the world for jokes (there's plenty of loot, too). Even with the main and side quests complete, it's a world to linger in until you feel certain you've uncovered every last scrap of humor, read every last item description, absorbed every last line of dialogue. The writing is clever and fun, packed with both referential humor and big, broad laughs—even the options menu has a few jokes in it. Truly funny games are exceedingly rare and hard to come by, and West of Loathing is the best comedy I've played in years.

Jody Macgregor: West of Loathing is such a well-written game, and those are so rare, that it's easy to underestimate how funny its stick figure wild west can look. Dynamite Dan is surrounded by craters and covered in soot, but has a huge grin on his smiley-button face. My crazy horse, named Crazy Horse, has ridiculous googly eyes, and having unlocked the Stupid Walking skill I get around by doing the worm, imitating John Cleese, and dragging my butt like a dog. There are dopey gags squeezed into the RPG systems too—my Beanslinger has a collection of campfire cookout abilities like setting enemies on fire or summoning a Bean Golem to be my friend, and every now and then I get a powerful, and powerfully dumb-looking, new hat. Other games throw in some funny banter, West of Loathing is a riot from top to bottom.

Phil Savage: If you're not into Kingdom of Loathing-style irreverence, I imagine this sounds interminable. It clicked for me, though, mostly because the writing feels so earnestly good natured. West of Loathing invites you into its surreal, silly world, and does everything it can to make you feel like your its best friend—welcome, entertained and, at times, imaginatively mocked.

It's reminiscent of classic adventure games, where every click promises a new joke. But adventure games used comedy to mask the frustration of being stuck—a carrot to make arbitrary puzzle design less of a chore. West of Loathing's jokes are the very point of the game. It's an RPG, yes, but one light enough that combat never feels like a challenge, and the puzzles are open ended enough that even failure leads to a valid and funny outcome.

It's the best comedy game not because it's a funny RPG, but because it's an RPG that's designed around comedy. The rewards for success are jokes. The punishments for failure are other, different jokes. The sidequests are jokes. The NPCs are jokes. Random bits of scenery... you get the point. If you stripped away the funny out of most comedy games, you'd be left with a functional but bland game. But the comedy is so integral to West of Loathing that I'm not sure it would even work without it.

For more West of Loathing words, check out Chris Livingston's review. 

Last night, we started playing the first act (of three) of GTA Online's new Doomsday Heist, with the intention of offering some thoughts on it before the holiday break. Unfortunately, we were hit by server trouble while on the final setup mission, so that'll have to wait until next year, when we'll write a more comprehensive piece about the whole thing. We did have a good time, though, and one particular mission was among the best that we'd played in any GTA. Below, we share some thoughts on what we experienced. 

Samuel: Tom, I think it's fair to say our crew in GTA Online (which includes PCG's Phil Savage and contributor Tom Hatfield) is made up of semi-regular players. I've sampled mission types from all the expansions, for example, but it's only this year that I really started putting more hours into GTA. We've all completed the first five heists, though, and were excited about jumping into a new one. What did you make of the first few missions we ran?

Tom: It was the smoothest experience we’ve had with GTA Online so far. I mean, the servers went down at the end, but up to that point we managed to bash out a few missions in quick succession. Checkpointed missions, which didn’t just throw us all the way back to the start if we messed up. The game is so much more fun when you’re doing a lot of different short tasks that don’t make you drive all the way across the city multiple times. 

It’s some of the most fun I’ve had heisting in GTA Online, and I can’t believe it’s a free update to be honest (though I guess you have to buy a facility with in-game money before you can launch the missions?). We infiltrated military bases, stole ambulances, had a shootout in a hospital, and pursued a massive jet while piloting a squadron of flying cars, all in a couple of hours.

Samuel: I thought the checkpointing was pretty good in the final heist of the original set, but there were definitely moments in those first four where I felt like I was being made to repeat a bit too much of the game. The checkpointing is great in these missions, though. I don't think I was frustrated by them at all. One thing I'm still not sure about is the decision to preface all the setup missions with a public server vehicle theft mission—the actual objectives are fun, but the idea of other players being able to spoil that is a bit annoying in a game that's already bad for griefing. I think Rockstar hopes mandatory public server missions will instill tension in what you're doing, but all it really does is reward griefers and frustrate people trying to have a good time. Luckily, we found ourselves on a server with just one other player and were left well alone, so we breezed through those bits.

And yes, it is a free update. You do have to buy a facility, which costs $1.25 million at a minimum—that's exactly one £12/$20 Shark card, but the truth is, this is a heist for advanced players, and anyone but a complete newbie will find that pretty reasonable. After the original heists, you've got $2 million in your account, for example, so you could've bought one no problem. GTA gets a lot of heat for its vehicle and property prices—which are sometimes bafflingly high—but you don't need to own much to have a good time in GTA, really, unless you're serious about collecting everything. 

Out of the missions you list, Tom, the obvious breakout is the flying car mission. The steady escalation of that mission from ordinary GTA fare—follow vans, hack them, blow them up—to chasing an airplane through the sky in a flying DeLorean felt like something I'd never seen in GTA before. When the choppers turned up and you were dogfighting with them, it looked like something out of Star Wars. Meanwhile, I hacked the airplane, then took the thing down with rockets afterwards. It was thrilling, and hopefully points at the future direction for the series' campaigns. Much like some of the mission types in Smuggler's Run, it showed how much potential there is in more air-based GTA set pieces.

Tom: That mission embraced GTA’s sillier side, which I have always enjoyed. That mission turns the city into a huge playground, and the way it sends each of you after individual targets and then brings you back together for the finale is very satisfying—and all of it is a race against the clock. It reminded me of the madder co-op shenanigans I loved in the Saints Row series, but GTA 5 has far better driving and flying models, and the city is just spectacular when you’re dogfighting miles above. 

Heist missions create loads of little action movie moments when you’re playing them with friends. At one point I was chasing a boat in DeLorean hovercraft mode when it turned into the sewers. I skidded after it only for a rocket to fly overhead and blow up my target. Turned out Phil had let off a homing missile that followed us both inside. In another mission we had to shoot our way out of a hospital while two of the team piloted a chopper to the rescue—the mad dash across the courtyard under police fire was peak GTA Online.

The Doomsday Heist makes me really excited about the potential for more quality multiplayer modes from Rockstar. If Red Dead 2 has a similar online component and comes to PC at some point, it could be the best thing ever. To me GTA Online feels like it’s built on slightly unstable foundations. Server outages and disconnections are pretty common, and it’s still sluggish when you’re trying to get a game going, but this was a free mode that came with the massive singleplayer campaign. It’s impressive that Online has grown into this since.

Samuel: Remember when we started spinning the hover cars around in the airport, Tom? It was like we found a way to make vehicles emote in GTA. It was amazing.

That escape from the hospital was so exciting, especially as you got left behind for some reason, which always happens to one guy in a heist movie. And these are just the setup missions! I'm sure players who have already beaten all three new heists are thinking, 'you wait, pal'. But even as setup missions, I'd say these are up there with the best stuff in the original heists, like stealing the Hydras from an aircraft carrier. Why do you have to go away for Christmas, Tom? Can't we just finish this damned thing? 

And yes, GTA just needs to load faster, ban cheaters and deter griefing next time, then it'll be my perfect online game. Watching GTA grow has been fascinating, though—what's nice about Doomsday Heist is that it makes the missions the point again, rather than the money. Red Dead 2 has enormous potential. And the treasure hunt they added this week was another cool extra thrown into the game by Rockstar. I'd love more little mystery-based sidequests like that in future.

For an ageing game, then, this is a hell of a nice surprise, even if not all of the prior expansions have been winners. I can't wait to get stuck into more of The Doomsday Heist. Finally, Tom, do you want to explain what happened when I took you for a ride in the Vigilante, GTA's version of the Batmobile?

Tom: We thought we’d race to the objective ahead of Phil and Tom in their pathetic slow ordinary human car, but wow that Batmobile has one hell of a boost.

Samuel: $3.75 million of in-game cash and I fly it into the fucking sea. Embarrassing. 

With the right ensemble of mods, Fallout: New Vegas can look stunning. Instead of relying on a hotchpotch of player-made creations, though, one mod team is recreating Obsidian's Mojave-set interpretation of the post-apocalypse in Fallout 4's Creation Engine. 

Fallout 4: New Vegas is a project comprised of around 100 contributors from various backgrounds, and aims to reimagine Sin City with all of the 2010 original's "quests story and content, with additional gameplay elements and systems from the new and improved engine." 

Announced in August this year, here's a brief pre-alpha short:

Looks pretty neat, huh? The mod's latest ModDB devlog shows off how Fallout 4's dynamic weather system affects New Vegas with varied lighting and ever-changing atmospheric detail.Here's some screens to this end:

Fallout 4: New Vegas is without a hard release date, however its creators note that they're always interested in new recruits. If that's you, head in this direction for the mod team's application form. 

And since we're talking New Vegas, let me point you in the direction of Andy's recent reinstall.