I wrote a different introduction to this one. One about how odd it is that Titan Quest should be a game I so frequently return to given its being the antithesis of much of why I play games. But while I’ll get to that, I need to begin with the real introduction:>

I’m really struggling. This situation, this lockdown, it’s triggering my mental health issues in so many directions, and I’m really having trouble holding it together. I feel like I’m a really weakly version of Spider-Man in that moment where he’s trying to hold a collapsing building with webs in all directions, as gravity tries to tear it down around me. And that’s why I returned to Titan Quest. Because it felt like it was going to be a familiar, simple place. And it turns out it’s just what I needed.

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Aliens are terrorising the streets of Los Santos, bursting out of vans to beat players to death with baseball bats, pool cues, and their little green fists then fleeing the scene. This isn’t a new GTA Online expansion, it’s the hot new craze amongst players. Over the past fortnight, as videos of alien van gangs have spread online, more and more players have bought the silly green alien suit and joined up with other pranksters for old-fashioned beatdowns. I’ve not yet encountered the visitors myself but am enjoying watching everyone’s close encounters.

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Cloudpunk could have been a lot of things, many of them disappointing. It could have taken itself far too seriously. It could have been far too lightweight or by-the-numbers. It could have been a miserably realistic sisyphean chore. If I wanted to be cruel, I’d say it could have been a lot more than it is, too. But that’s not because I think it’s not good enough. It’s because Cloudpunk is such an enjoyable place to visit that the idea of more of it is very tempting.

The city is the star. Again, that’s not to criticise the characters or story. You play as Rania, a young woman who’s just arrived in Nivalis, the one megacity in a far, far future, to work as a delivery driver for an illicit organisation called Cloudpunk. You’ll drive your flying car around the city, taking orders remotely from a man referred to as Control. It’s really as simple as driving from A to B for the most part. You’ll park your cab and head off on foot to collect each package, then head back, and fly off to your destination. (more…)

I took my Chevy to the levee, but the levee wasn’t dry. That’s the problem all over Black River, actually: a recent flood has rendered the soil sodden enough to swallow a car whole. Days of rain have closed the north road out of an already-sleepy Michigan town with rockslides. Power lines are down, too – although that might have more to do with stubborn truck drivers like me attaching winches to them, using their deep roots to pull heavy-duty vehicles from the mud rather than call for recovery.

There’s something about this trade, captured in its most extreme form by SnowRunner, that encourages dogged persistence past the usual bounds of sense, beyond the normal stopping point of patience, toward a zen-like state of obstinance. It’s like a logic-defying twist on the classic children’s book, We’re Going On A Bear Hunt. Can’t go through it? We’ll have to go through it anyway. (more…)

Buying a new gaming CPU is often one of the biggest and most time-consuming upgrades you can do on your PC, as you’ll probably have to re-build the entire thing from scratch if your PC’s more than a couple of years old. However, upgrading to one of today’s best gaming CPUs can make a surprising difference to your PC’s overall gaming performance, particularly if you tend to play games at a resolution of 1920×1080. The question, of course, is which gaming CPU you should go for, as there are now loads of AMD Ryzen CPUs and even more Intel Coffee Lake ones as well. A lot of your decision making will be determined by what kind of motherboard you have, but to help make things nice and easy for you I’ve listed all my best gaming CPU recommendations from AMD and Intel below across a range of different price categories. Whether you’re building a budget PC or a high-powered mega machine, here are my best gaming CPU recommendations for 2020.

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Playne is a meditation tool. You’re supposed to open it up once a day, meditate for at least ten minutes, and watch as a forest grows around you over the weeks and months that you manage to keep up the habit. I don’t use it anymore, but it was the springboard to me meditating a few times a week.

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Patrick’s Parabox is too smart for me. Granted, regular Sokoban is often too smart for me, but thanks to a very simple concept, Patrick Traynor’s recursive boxes are creating mazes within mazes – tiles that transcend dimensions as my headache turns into a full-blown migraine. While he’s not ready to unleash his Paraboxes onto the public, you can catch his puzzles in a new trailer posted this week.

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Screenshot Saturday Sundays! The sun is shining, the breeze is light, and we’re all locked indoors, so why not kick back and flip through some lovely videogame shots with me? This week: Vertigo-inducing campsites, architectural fantasies, the cult of kickflips and some pants-free gymnastics.

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A tough stance on cheaters, bots and key-resellers. In-depth training modes. For a traditionally inaccessible genre, Valorant seems to be trying its hardest to be as welcoming as possible – and now, that means making sure people can play nice on their battlefields. After one of their own was hit with sexual harassment, Riot have promised to find a lasting solution against bad actors in their fledgeling hero shooter.

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Regretfully, Tropico 6 has become extremely online. “Big mood”, as the kids say. “Same”. This week’s Spitter DLC adds the faux-social network of the same name to Tropico’s banana republic management sim, letting your despotic leader post their way into fame, fortune, followers, and the lingering resentment of a population that wishes their state figurehead could just, for once, log off.

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