The beginning of a round of Fractured Lands is like that itchy accelerator feeling you get before the green light in Mario Kart, combined with the knowledge that every other driver wants to shoot you dead. Add in some oil fields spewing smog, a deadly storm slowly irising in from the edges of the map, and enough leather and mohawks to make you feel like you’ve wandered into the cover of an '80s tabletop roleplaying sourcebook, and you’ve got a battle royale that doesn’t feel necessarily revolutionary, but definitely brings its own attitude to the table.

Many Battle Royale games include vehicles. In Fractured Lands, the difference is that everyone spawn in one, together at the center of the map. The opening seconds are often a several-way demolition derby as some players angle for early kills courtesy of a well-aimed ram, while others floor it off into the dusty desert to try to lock down the best drops and sniper spots. Leave the melee too early and you may be tailed by someone looking to splatter you across the road before you can grab a gun. Leave too late and you may arrive at the motel to find there’s already an opponent dug in on the roof with that light machine gun you were trying to snag.

Cars can be upgraded over the course of a match with components you’ll find alongside guns and ammo. Off road tires help out a lot when free-wheeling out in the boonies, as the standard ones don’t handle very well at all off of the asphalt. Armored doors and windshields leave far less of a target area for anyone looking to snipe you right out of the driver’s seat, which can keep your vehicle viable much longer into a match. An un-upgraded car can actually be more of a liability once the surviving players have gathered up some accurate automatic weapons, while a beefier one could be your ticket to victory. I liked the uncertainty this brought, as I was never sure at the start of a round if I was going to find the upgrades needed to keep my ride relevant. 

Beyond durability buffs, strapping a nice big ram to your front bumper will help you deal more damage than you take when ramming other cars. This really makes a big difference in automotive jousting, a hectic and exciting type of duel I often found myself in around the mid game. Guns have a similar array of lootable upgrades, from high-powered scopes to whisper-quiet silencers for getting kills without giving away your location.

The other major tactical consideration cars bring is when to ditch your ride—if you choose to do so at all. This decision is largely based on the fact that the cars are really loud, so hanging onto one as the map shrinks means you’ll always be easy to find and you’re not likely to be able to sneak up on anyone. Hoofing it has its own risks, though. While it makes it much easier to hide, you’ll have to spend more time on the run from the wall of death closing in on you and less time looting, upgrading, and identifying enemies.

There’s a very tense, asymmetrical, predator-prey relationship that develops deeper into a match between players on foot and players that are still behind the wheel of a claptrap death machine. If you’re caught on foot at ground level by a skilled driver, you’re most likely going to end the round as a hood ornament unless you can quickly duck into a doorway too narrow for your pursuer to follow. I had some memorable moments when the shrinking map forced me to cover a lot of open ground to find a new safehouse and I could hear the exhaust-belching land sharks circling nearby. The flipside, though, is that a gunner with a great perch can take pot-shots at passing motorists with relative impunity, daring them to bail out and engage in urban combat to unseat them from the high ground.

Since the areas of the map designated as safe zones are selected randomly, there were definitely some matches that favored either cars or snipers by the end. Squaring off in a field doesn’t do pedestrians any favors, nor does having a climactic clash in a dense industrial park favor those who spent a lot of time pimping their rides. I ultimately didn’t mind that fact much, though. Dodging bullets from above through narrow roadways as the storm closed in was a fun experience even if I knew I probably wouldn’t make it out alive. It can suck a bit more to get caught out with no good cover as a foot player going up against a skilled driver, but the David vs Goliath aspect of it at least provides some enjoyable desperation in the last few moments.

Beyond that, it’s a pretty familiar battle royale experience. The gunplay feels good, whether you’re wielding a roaring, take-no-prisoners heavy machine gun to tear a few holes in the open wasteland or a deft, semiautomatic pistol for close-quarters duels in mini marts that have seen better days. Melee is a bit of a pain, as the hitboxes are strict to the point that it’s difficult to even connect with an enemy dodging and strafing around you, but guns are plentiful enough that you won’t be stuck whacking away with a bat for long.

The scarcity of ammo makes the endgame harrowing if you’re not careful, though. I often found if I survived to the final five, my best guns were almost all running dry and I had to adapt my tactics to win with what I had left. I could feel like the king of the world if I nabbed a really nice rifle early on that let me ride a kill streak to the ultimate showdown, only to realize I hadn’t been conservative enough with my bullets and was going to have to figure out how to take out the other four most dangerous people in the wasteland with only a .22 and some tape.

Fractured Lands isn’t the prettiest road warrior at the apocalypse in its current state. Lots of the textures look dull, flat, and repetitive. I experienced some chugging on a machine that exceeds most of the recommended specs during the first beta weekend (though not nearly as much during the second), and a couple times I loaded into a round already dead for some reason. With a little wax on, wax off, it could certainly take its place among the growing smorgasbord of battle royale options with the interesting dynamics added by its signature roadsters. The full Early Access launch is set for later this summer.

Last year, I met Christopher Obritsch, the indie developer whose boss is his 7-year-old daughter Maddie. Under the banner of Causal Bit Games, the pair's debut venture Battle Princess Madelyn is a Ghosts' N Ghouls-inspired retro sidescroller. It's got a new trailer, and a new Kickstarter backer update. 

First, here's the former:

The latter explains Battle Princess Madelyn is "nearing the final month of testing and corrections", and that its final boss has gone through five complete overhauls. A different boss has been wiped completely, says Chris, and while Maddie has drawn all of the game's bosses to date, this one took a different approach. 

"The two bosses that changed were pretty heavy—the last boss in particular," explains Chris. "Instead of having Maddi draw them, I had her sit with me to speed up the process and tell me what needed to be done. The boss for Germany, which I don’t think we’ve ever shown, ended up getting trashed completely. 

"This was because I felt that it just wasn’t epic enough, it felt smaller than a mid-boss. So, the writer and I dug out an older idea and rewrote the dialog for that part of the script. The boss ended up being a humorous take on the original idea, but also Maddi meeting a younger, hard-headed version of herself in a way."

Chris continues: "The final boss was redrawn and redesigned a few times. Nothing was feeling epic enough. Following the story too close wasn’t cutting it, it started as a rival sorceress girl the same age and size as Maddi, but the first half of the fight felt too plain and samey. I worked with Maddi a few times on how the last boss should look overall. There was a giant zombie woman head [and] dragon snake things."

Elsewhere, Chris explains how the game's inventory system and blacksmith tie into its story—more on which can be read here. 

Battle Princess Madelyn is without a hard release date, but is "coming soon". Here's its Steam page.  

In its vanilla state, Fallout 4's irradiated Boston Commonwealth looks lovely. With Mystirious Dawn's Visceral ENB graphics mod installed, it's one of the most gorgeous playgrounds I've ever wandered around/murdered ghouls within. We may need to update our list of the best Fallout 4 mods.

Compatible with other Fallout 4 visual enhancers such as True Storms, Vivid Weathers, NAC—and, as its creator explains here, Extreme Particles Overhaul—Visceral ENB is a lovely preset. It's subtle tweaks provide a realistic and natural slant on the game's base landscapes. But enough from me, here it is in motion:

It was my plan to select a handful of my favourite stills from the mod's Nexus Mods page below, but I've wound up with 20. 

Och well, I think they're each worth a gander anyway. Please do so here:

If you missed the link above, Mystirious Dawn's Visceral ENB can be downloaded from Nexus Mods. There you'll find installation instructions and optional versions, relevant to your PC's system specs. 

PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds' latest PC update makes visual improvements to its Sanhok map, adds a new PGI theme, and makes adjustments to its UI during matchmaking. 

Tweaks to its Thailand-inspired 4x4 tropical map include the addition of cracked bells, mossy rubble piles and a new cap on the central palace. That looks like this:

Likewise, cliff faces and rock formations have been given a makeover map-wide. They now look like this:

All of PC update #17's nips and tucks currently apply to its test server, which also include terrain collision fixes and a PGI-themed lobby, BGM and loading screen. Here's that:

"When matchmaking, the game will now display an estimated wait time for finding a match," reads this Steam Community post, before detailing a number of bug fixes. 

The most relevant of those, I'd say, is crossbow reticles are no longer misaligned. As always, the latest PC update will be applied to live servers in the coming days.In the meantime, I thought this was amusing:

VIDEO: A closer look at the new items for IQ, Lesion, and Dokkaebi.

Ubisoft added 12 special summer skins to Rainbow Six Siege as part of a limited "Sunsplash Collection." Every player should see two packs waiting for them when they log into the game next. 

The skin can otherwise only be purchased with Siege's real-money currency, cannot be earned through the normal drop system, and are only available until July 17. This is the second such temporary cosmetic pack, following the Outbreak packs we saw earlier this year. 

Siege's art department continues to grapple with how irreverent they can be with themed cosmetics. There are a few truly ridiculous skins in the game—clown ballistic masks, Luchador headgear, bits of medieval armor flare... but mostly the look of Siege's cosmetics is restrained and tactical. Would this stuff be better if it was more cartoony, like Overwatch, or should Ubisoft keep it more sleek and serious? In any case, Dokkaebi's "Scuba Six" wetsuit is the standout for me.

As a Lesion main on defense, I'm happy to see him get any new cosmetic options but also disappointed that they double-down on his Cargo Shorts Dad persona, which I'm desperate to shed. 

The whole collection is 2700 R6 Credits, which translates to about $23, depending on how you purchase Siege's cash currency.

Australia turned the thumbs-down on We Happy Few in May, citing the game's incentivized drug use—players take a faux-narcotic called "Joy" in order to blend in with society and avoid being murdered—as too far over the line for approval. Last week, however, the Classification Board announced that it would reconsider the ruling, and today it revealed that the appeal has been successful. 

"A three-member panel of the Classification Review Board has unanimously determined that the computer game We Happy Few is classified R18+ (Restricted) with the consumer advice 'Fantasy violence and interactive drug use,'" the Classification Review Board said in its decision.   

"In the Classification Review Board’s opinion We Happy Few warrants an R 18+ classification because the interactive drug use is high in impact. The overall impact of the classifiable elements in the computer game was no greater than high." 

"We are extremely pleased with the decision of the board and excited that our Australian fans and new players will be able to experience We Happy Few without modification," Compulsion said in its own announcement. "We want to thank everybody who got involved in the discussion, contacted the board and sent us countless messages of support. Your involvement made a huge difference." 

The R18+ rating means that adults will be legally allowed to purchase the game without having to horse around with proxy servers, overseas shipping, or whatever other trickery gamers down under are forced to fall back on when confronted with this kind of nonsense. We Happy Few is slated to come out on August 10. 

Grand Theft Auto 6's 'announcement' is a hoax, Rockstar confirmed today—but GTA Online's rolling update schedule carries on regardless. This week, San Andreas celebrates American Independence Day with a 40 percent discount on its "infamously star spangled" range of Fourth of July-inspired weapons, facepaints, outfits, and that useless firework launcher. 

If you followed last week's Guest List bonus instructions, your complimentary GTA$300,000 should now be in your Maze Bank account. If not, it's available to claim alongside an Orange Wireframe Bodysuit between now and July 9. Moreover, Guest List signees can grab a Pink Wireframe Bodysuit and an additional GTA$100,000 free-of-charge by signing in between July 10 and 16. 

Smuggler's Run, Special Cargo and Biker Sell Missions are again extended double payouts this week, as are 50 percent discounts on Hangars, Executive Offices, Special Cargo Warehouses, and Biker Clubhouses and Businesses. At 40 percent off, Facilities are going cheap and provide access to GTA Online's Doomsday Heist missions.The Avenger is again this week's best vehicle deal. With 30 percent off, it costs $3,351,250, which is still a big chunk of change. 

More on all of the above lives this-a-way. 

How easy it is to forget the intensity of a good Lumines session. How quick it is to remember. This puzzle classic, which blends block-dropping action with beat-dropping rhythm, is still enthralling nearly 15 years after its original release on the PlayStation Portable, and 10 years after it first emerged on PC. Now it reemerges, this time properly built for PC, pin-sharp and remastered and feeling just as fresh to play, even if its tunes maybe don’t sound that way.

Lumines (that’s LOO-MIN-NEZ) has a simple basic premise. You rotate and drop two-colour configurations of 2x2 blocks into a wide Tetris-style well. When you form squares of same-coloured blocks in the well, they’ll clear. When the well fills up, it’s game over. But just as Rez is rather more than just an on-rails shooter, Lumines is more than just a simple puzzle action game. Like Rez, which was also developed by Tetsuya Mizuguchi, it uses music to add new layers to the experience. 

On one level, you hear feedback on every drop and clear in time with the rhythm, pulling you into its mid-'00s-style euphoric house and jazzy hip hop-inflected electronica. You don’t feel like you’re playing along so much as simply part of the music. On another level, the music provides the meat of Lumines’ mechanics. 

The tempo of tracks affects how fast blocks move down the well before you drop them, so a fast track might well be a harder one, forcing you to make quick decisions that spell your downfall. It also affects how blocks clear. As you play, a line sweeps from left to right across the well in time with the music, and matching blocks are only cleared from the well when the line passes over them. You get big combo score bonuses from making multiple matches in a single sweep, so you’re constantly trying to make matches ahead of the line, taking risks on creating large expanses of colour before it passes. If you’re too slow, it might only clear part of your match, leaving cluttered blocks behind.

And then the track changes. In Challenge mode, you progress through a set sequence of music tracks, or ‘skins’, as the game calls them. It starts with the shimmering summer of Shinin’ by Mondo Grosso (Shinichi Osawa, who created most of Lumines’ music), with white and orange blocks against imagery of a planet and a disco telescope-thing. Then it mixes into Urbanization, beats-driven electronica that completely changes the mood to serious, almost sombre. The blocks change from translucent gems to flat white and green, making you have to adapt to identifying new visual patterns fast.

The game constantly refreshes its feel as you progress through Challenge mode. Later on, the drop-rate of the red and white pill-shaped blocks in the jazzy Just… will threaten to fill your well, followed later by the slow passage of the line in the balearic The Music in my Soul. Before you know it, 20 minutes will have gone by, a mark of Lumines’ immersive power and also the length of its play sessions: a mediocre run will be 30 minutes, a happy half-hour, sure, but a long time to invest in failing to beat a score on the online scoreboards.

As you play through Challenge modes you’ll unlock skins in the unfortunately named Skin Edit, in which you can make up playlists. There are 40 skins in total, each with its own visual style and sound. You’ll unlock other skins in VS CPU mode, such as my personal fave Japanese Form. It’s so hard I don’t quite believe it’s possible to win all VS CPU’s 10 matches, but the two-player battle version of Lumines is excellent. It divides the well into two sides, one for each player. At the start the sides are of equal width, but as you combo the dividing line moves into the other player’s territory, squeezing the space in which they can stack blocks. Sadly, its fun is proportional to the shame that it only supports local play.

Then there are Mission and Puzzle modes, in which you have to drop blocks to achieve certain objectives (erase all in two steps or clear a column) or to build little pictograms of dogs and alligators. With Time Attack, too, which mitigates some of Challenge’s issues with session lengths, the original’s full suite of modes is here.

Lumines wasn’t served awfully well on its first appearance on PC, which didn’t support modern resolutions. Now it does, and its remastered music also sounds pristine. But I personally can’t quite shake the sense that Lumines was originally designed for PSP, for train journeys and lying sprawling on the sofa, because that’s where I cut my formative experiences with it. Lumines Remastered’s lack of online multiplayer is regrettable, its session length still demanding and, frankly, it’s probably a better match on Nintendo Switch, but it does the important thing: it brings a puzzle classic back into focus and proves that Lumines can still shake ya body down to the ground.

Great moments in PC gaming are short, bite-sized celebrations of some of our favorite gaming memories.  

Can a man's face be a moment? This one can. It's a photograph wrapped around a low-poly head to represent the angst-ridden gunslinger Max Payne. It's a picture of Remedy writer and designer Sam Lake, who chose to represent the character's deep pain at the loss of his family by scrunching up all the parts of his face at the same time.

Should we do another take, maybe more brooding and serious? No, Sam. This is it, the expression Max Payne players will be looking at for 12 hours. Nailed it.

It is the face of a man so cross his eyebrows have gone to war over the middle of his face. It is the face of a man engaged in a deep internal conflict with a bad curry that won't quit. It makes me unreasonably happy whenever I see it, and I have played a lot of Max Payne.

I'm convinced it would have been a lesser game if the studio had used a more conventional look. It's part of Max Payne's oddball personality. It also reflects the make-do-and-mend nature of the first game's development. Faced with limited resources, the devs at Remedy just put themselves in the game to save money.

Max Payne 2 dropped the Sam Lake grimace for a new head based on the actor Timothy Gibbs. Lake still continues to appear in the surreal video skits you can find on televisions in Max Payne 2 and Alan Wake. It's not quite the same.

It's a stretch to say that Max Payne was ahead of its time for giving its hero a real human face—among others, Bowie gave his likeness to Nomad Soul a few years before—but I think it's a rare example of a game character being memorable purely because of their demeanour. Max eventually evolved into a generic thug over time, but I'll always remember him as this goofy hardboiled hero, narrating his own revenge tale in overwrought Raymond Chandler-eque monologues.

It's a damn crime that no game ripped off Red Faction: Guerrilla's Geo-mod destruction feature. You take a hammer, and you use it to smash out a panel of a wall and break through a pillar. Smash out a few more walls, and maybe the building creaks. A few more whacks of the hammer later, and the whole thing comes down, perhaps with you inside. And hey, maybe it knocks through another building on the way down. It's still amazing to watch.

Guerrilla does this one thing really well. It's an otherwise uninspired open world game, with okay driving, unimpressive shooting and a boring story. Hell, Mars doesn't even look that nice, because it's Mars. But knocking down buildings in an open world is more than enough to carry this game. You'll crash a jeep through a base. You'll detonate mines and blow up a bridge, which will then collapse on top of an enemy settlement. You'll melt the beams of a tower and watch it fall over. This destruction felt great in 2009, and it still feels good now. 

That's partly because no big studio or publisher has really imitated what it does in the same way. Which, to be clear, is this:

In this Re-Mars-tered edition, which is free for owners of the Steam version as of today, THQ Nordic touts heavily reworked textures among other visual improvements, along with better shadows, lighting, a shader and postprocessing rework and native 4K support. The new version is a 24.3GB download, while the existing Steam edition is 6.7GB. For a freebie, it seems pretty good after four hours or so. I can't say I really notice vast visual improvements on my strange 1050p work monitor, but environmental textures like rocks and the ground look a little sharper up close. The lighting is nice by today's standards, too, but it's not a vast upgrade.

With my work PC (Intel I5 3570K@3.40GHz, 8GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce GTX 970), I'm getting around 90-120FPS depending on how busy the situation is, which is fine for a new version of an almost decade-old game. This edition may just give you a reason to play it again, which is fine by me. It costs $20. If it's not in your Steam library already after years of deep discounting and bundling, you should probably wait for a future sale. 

Tower fall

To anyone picking this up for the first time, I recommend focusing on the campaign. That's where the biggest destructive opportunities are, like a huge bridge and a massive tower, which take meticulous use of the object-melting nano rifle and rocket launcher to bring down. You'll wait a while to unlock all the really good toys, but the singleplayer will give you plenty to blow up along the way, as well as a dull story about miners rebelling against an army that's a bit like a boring version of Firefly. The big destructive opportunities in this campaign need to be seen, though—I still talk about them with friends years later. 

I'm not really in the mood for finishing the campaign these days after doing it twice before, but that's where the game's Wrecking Crew mode comes in. It's basically a score attack that gives you a quick dose of the game's destructive physics in a variety of settings. You pick a loadout, set the parameters like time limits and how easily the buildings fall, then knock them down as quickly as possible. It makes a great pass-the-pad party game, and there's a challenge mode with leaderboards, too. I have played this mode every year for nine years, and I will never stop.  

Sadly for me, all of the leaderboards have been reset from the Steam version, meaning I'm no longer 12th best in the world on the Abandoned map. Oh well. Wrecking Crew is where it's at: it's all the good bits of Guerrilla with none of the waiting around for the best weapons or opportunities. Over the years, I've probably played it more than the campaign. 

No imitators 

It's weird that no one else made a game like Guerrilla after its release. Destruction features in everything from Battlefield to Minecraft to Just Cause, but Volition's game still offers something that no other game does. It's the idea of blowing each building up like it's a physics puzzle, efficiently using your arsenal so it collapses in the most satisfying way possible. 

It might've been Red Faction's sparse Mars setting that made Guerrilla work in the first place. It's noticeable that all the biggest and best buildings are far away from each other, and it probably wouldn't have been possible for Volition to replicate the Geo-mod system in the vast cities of Saints Row. But that is the type of open world game I've always wanted to play, where you can manipulate the environment and feel like you've left a mark on it. We're instead in an age of open world games packed with busywork and towers to climb. I like those too, but Guerrilla shows open worlds and destructible buildings are a perfect match. 

Even old THQ didn't seem to know why Guerrilla was good. Volition followed this up with Armageddon in 2011, a bad sequel that kept the destruction, but took us away from big open set pieces to the tedious, more linear underground. It just squandered everything this game was good at—and seemingly killed the series. What a waste. It was the most disappointed I've ever been by a sequel, and was once described to me ahead of release as being like Dead Space, which couldn't have been less accurate.

Still, if THQ Nordic is bringing Darksiders back for another shot, perhaps Red Faction will get its chance again too. I just wish its influence, and its collapsing buildings, had carried a little further.