With games becoming an increasingly important distraction in these strange times, you might be thinking it’s time to upgrade your PC with one of today’s best graphics cards. It’s a good time to buy one, too, as Nvidia have finally released all their next-gen GTX 16-series and [cms-block] 20-series cards now, and we’ve also had most of the new [cms-block] GPUs as well – all we’re really waiting for is AMD’s ‘Big Navi’ 4K graphics cards.

We should also see some new graphics cards from Intel this year, too, which could use quite an upset to my current best graphics card list. Their upcoming Intel Xe graphics cards won’t be here until later this year, though, so for now it’s still a two-horse race between Nvidia and AMD. Regardless of whether you’re looking for a graphics card for playing games at 1080p, 1440p or 4K, my best graphics card list has got you covered.

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Thatgamecompany’s lovely desert wandering game is floating through another barrier. It first arrived on PC via the Epic Store last summer and, as many games are wont to do when that exclusivity period is up, Journey will land on Steam in June. It’s a personal favorite of mine, so I’ll gladly cheer it on to its new destination as I did when it finally made it to PC last year. (more…)

Sure, Kojima’s experimental horror hallway was creepy when it first graced our screens in 2014, but PT looks even creepier if you push it further into the past. Developer Ryan Trawick, who’s made some other odd things wot we’ve liked, has recreated the spooky groundhog day in the antique application HyperCard. It looks quite moody in old black and white.

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We’ve dug far enough into the depths at last. Terraria‘s big final update, Journey’s End, has been planned for quite a while, bringing a whole slew of new items, bosses, and baddies to the world. It’s been a bit longer in coming than originally planned, but Re-Logic have now announced that the 1.4 update is coming on May 16th.

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After a long sleep, Crysis appears to be waking up. Crytek have been busy in the meantime with the likes of Hunt: Showdown while Crysis took something of a cold-storage nap. The  super serious super soldier FPS series added Crysis 3 to the stables back in 2013. Seven years later, the official Crysis Twitter account is broadcasting signs of life.

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Times are strange and frightening. But one point of great solace for me has been hearing people celebrating things in their lives. It feels especially important right now to hold on to what makes us all proud about what we do and who we are. And what I really love is people showing off things they’re proud of making.

So I’ve been asking a bunch of developers to pick out something they’ve created that brings them pleasure to look back on. And here they are, including Harvey Smith remembering his input on Deus Ex and Dishonored, Derek Yu on one of his first-ever games. There’s pride in doing something for someone else’s game, in the power of details and in little inventions, and ah gosh, shut up, let’s just tuck into a big slice of escapist positivity. (more…)

It was only a matter of time. Shortly after Half-Life: Alyx‘s release, modders were already tinkering with ways to play Alyx without VR. Now there’s a mod that will actually let you complete the game entirely with a regular display, though it sounds like a slightly finicky experience. This likely won’t be the end of the road for VR-less Alyx, but it’s certainly a milestone.

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I find Starship Titanic such a sad thing. It was Douglas Adams’s last work of fiction, and it was a truly terrible one. This masterful creator, the man who brought us The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy in all its forms, spent what would turn out to be his last few years working on a fundamentally broken videogame. Not for lack of ambition, certainly. In fact, almost entirely because of ambition. Starship Titanic was never going to work. It would have been a miracle if it had. Adams wouldn’t have approved of a miracle.

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Renowned children’s TV presenter Mister Rogers once said, “when I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would tell me to look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.” The red-cardigan-rocking moral compass of a nation offered this small succour in the face of tragedy: that whenever disaster struck you would also find the irrepressible compassion of humanity not far behind.

That generous spirit is a little harder to spot in Disaster Report 4: Summer Memories, a bizarre soap opera in which you careen about a disaster-struck city pawning bento boxes and first aid kits, grifting injured strangers out of their last thousand yen and generally acting like a roving sex pest, combing the rubble for downed hotties. Had Mrs Rogers witnessed this kind of aberrant behaviour, she’d have guided her son towards a successful career in the prison sector. (more…)

Maybe I imagined it, but there seems to have been a bit of a thing> about games noticing the economy in the past little while. Whether it’s bigger, open world games adding it in as an optional cash earner on the side, or smaller indies like Night Call calling upon you to balance not starving or losing your job with solving a murder. But my favourite example of what I’m deciding to describe as a craze is Neo Cab.

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