On paper, Nvidia’s new GeForce RTX 3080 lays claim to a lot of sexy headlines. Its 4K gaming performance is significantly faster than its immediate and identically priced predecessor, the RTX 2080, and it even beats Nvidia’s previous flagship, the RTX 2080 Ti, offering 4K 60fps speeds on max settings in almost all of today’s top games for almost half the money – at least in theory, anyway, as current stock shortages have sent prices skyrocketing since it came out on September 17th.

Still, provided Nvidia eventually get their stock situation under control, the RTX 3080’s official starting price of £649 / $699 also makes it a tempting proposition for current GTX 1080 owners. It not only doubles your PC’s 4K gaming chops, but it also brings a substantial speed boost to playing games at 2560×1440, with my benchmark figures showing improvements of at least 70-80% across a spread of today’s big blockbusters. Add in all its ray tracing and DLSS gubbins and PCIe 4.0 support, and it appears to be a very solid foundation on which to build your “next-gen” gaming PC.

(more…)

In the run-up to the release of Amnesia: Rebirth, Frictional Games are continuing to show love to their first Amnesia game for its tenth anniversary. Paying tribute to the modding community that’s played no small part in Amnesia’s longevity, Frictional have now released the source code for Amnesia: The Dark Descent and Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs freely online.

(more…)

If you fancy taking over large swathes of land in Crusader Kings 3 you’ll need to have vassals under your control. This is all well and good if they’re all doing their jobs and paying taxes and levies to their rightful liege, but what if they start petty infighting for seemingly no reason? Well, here’s how to stop your vassals from fighting each other in Crusader Kings 3.

In 2013, No Man’s Sky released a trailer that showed some big beefy sandworms. But, when the game released in 2016, there was not a sandworm in sight. Hello Games decided the glory of the sandworms was too much for us mere mortals. But today, it all changes. The sandworms cometh in No Man’s Sky’s massive 3.0 Origins update, which also adds billions of planets, loads of flora and fauna, weather systems and so, so much more.

(more…)

Good news, Metal Gear fans. It looks like the first two Metal Gear Solid games could be making a return to PC, after new age classification ratings have appeared on the Taiwan Digital Game Rating Committee website.

Gematsu spotted the ratings for Metal Gear, Metal Gear Solid, Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance, and the Konami Collector’s Series: Castlevania and Contra. If these games truly are on their way, it’ll be the first time the original Metal Gear is playable on PC.

(more…)

After making Thomas Was Alone and John Wick Hex, intense cyberpunk solitaire wasn’t exactly what I was expecting from Bithell Games. Yesterday, the studio announced The Solitaire Conspiracy, a new game in the developers’ experimental “Shorts” series, which previously brought us the sci-fi adventures Subsurface Circular and Quarantine Circular. This new Short is a step away from those, though, placing you in the shoes of a Spymaster tasked with taking down a supervillain… with playing cards.

“So… what if Solitaire, but extra, with powers and a full FMV storied campaign, time attack and skirmish modes!” Bithell tweeted.

(more…)

Crusader Kings 3 is a pretty demanding game specs-wise. With about a thousand things going on at all times, CK3 can be taxing on your machine. With that in mind, here’s how good your PC or Mac will need to be to run it.

Never let it be said I don’t write about weird indie games, because I do. Monday was the asobu indie showcase, a delightful stream that highlighted a bunch of cool indie games from Japanese developers, as well as international indie games coming to Japan. It’s a pretty new community that, in its own words, aims to be “the ‘lighthouse’ for indie game creators in Japan”, supporting the indie dev process in that country as well as getting the word about Japanese indies out and about internationally.

It worked on me, right? The stream introduced me to a load of games I hitherto knew nothing about but am now interested in. Whomst among us could not find something to intrigue us in the line-up, which includes a game where you play in-game versions of 80s Japanese PC games, or one where a lone girl lands her airship to explore a mysteriously empty town, or a game about making low-fi music beats in the proximity of a nice cat.

(more…)

Gears Of War

is a third-person shooter in which you take control of a giant man wearing a bandana and chainsaw equally giant alien creatures in half. Somehow it manages to make this an emotional, and at times, frightening affair.

The game bounces between explosive set pieces, unsettling, almost survival horror exploration, and tear jerking bro moments.

(more…)

Crysis

was always about more than its graphics. Crysis was and is a first-person stealth playground, with destructible buildings, clever enemies, and a set of flexible superpowers with which to make one collide with the other.

Crysis Remastered is that game again, with new graphical bells and whistles you probably can’t use, and a substantially higher price than the original game costs now.

(more…)