Wallpaper Engine is one of the most popular utilities available via Steam. It's a tool that lets you run animated or interactive desktop wallpapers, and download those made by the community from the Steam Workshop. I bought it at the weekend because I was bored.
One of the first community-made wallpapers I found? Shrek, the movie, in its entirety.
I grew up in the late '80s and the '90s and, without access to streaming services, would do nearly anything to be able to watch more cartoons. For example, I suffered through awkward skits between a middle-aged man and a lamp in Glen Michael's Cartoon Cavalcade, begging for the next proper animated bit to, please, just start.
It's in this spirit that the Kingdom Hearts series seems to have been made: lure in children with the promise of Olaf from Frozen and other beloved Disney and Pixar characters, but then make them work for those appearances by having them sit through dozens of hours of spiky-haired JRPG characters with too many belts and zips.
The Kingdom Hearts series is out on PC now via the Epic Games Store - and it costs too much, too.
In a company strategy video released today, CD Projekt Red have outlined changes they plan to make to the development studio's structure and focus. Chief among the changes is the news that their next project will no longer be a standalone multiplayer Cyberpunk game.
Instead, they're going to focus on developing fundamental technology that will eventually bring multiplayer components to all of their games. This was explained alongside a shift towards "parallel AAA game development", which will allow them to simultaneously work on both Cyberpunk 2077 and The Witcher series.
Dr. Hakim gives books a bad name, and the story is quite muddled in places, but It Takes Two is easily one of the best co-op games of the last few years. Probably the last ever years, really.
Fascinating detective RPG Disco Elysium today becomes bigger and fancier with its Final Cut, released as a free update. The Final Cut adds voice acting (one million spoken words, they claim) as well as new quests and heaps more newness. A fine time to return to Revachol.
As a big stupid baby who is compelled to play horror games I know will freak my nut out, I am grateful to see Frictional Games add a less-spooky mode to another of their games. Today they blessed Amnesia: Rebirth with an 'Adventure Mode', an optional difficulty level which stops monsters murdering you while throwing in some extra puzzles for folks who just wanna explore somewhere strange and awful. That's nice, that. The game has a big discount to celebration the launch too.
With Easter coming up, and Discount Easter egg Day soon after, I'm curious: what's your favourite Easter egg in video games? I suppose this world must house some edutainment game which would let you answer this literally, but I'm more interested in those hidden jokes, references, and oddities which surprise and delight. Tell me your favourite and who knows, maybe I'll eat a Cadbury Buttons egg in your honour. Next Tuesday, once they're cheap.
After spending a year in your own lair working on your own ploys and plans to fend off the outside, surely you'll be a whizz at Evil Genius 2: World Domination. Released today, it's the surprise sequel to 2004's villainous lair-building management game. Once again, we're put into the executive chair of a Bond-esque villain to build a base and team able to execute our dastardly plans while fending off would-be heroes. Except your in-game fortress will be built of concrete and muscle, not Argos boxes.
When AMD launched their Ryzen 5000 series last year, it quickly became apparent that throwing more cores and threads at a game didn't necessarily result in significantly faster frame rates. Indeed, unless you regularly use your gaming PC for other intensive desktop tasks such as editing videos, running virtual machines or you're a full-time streamer, you're usually much better off opting for a mid-range CPU like AMD's Ryzen 5 5600X than spending loads of cash on something more upmarket like their Ryzen 9 5900X. The same can be said for Intel's new Core i9-11900K, their latest flagship CPU in their 11th Gen Rocket Lake family.
After their 10th Gen Comet Lake CPUs got well and truly whomped by AMD's Ryzen 5000 series at the end of last year, Intel have come back fighting with the launch of their 11th Gen Rocket Lake CPUs. With proper PCIe 4.0 support across the board, memory overclocking available on more motherboard chipsets than ever before, as well as some welcome improvements to its instructions per clock performance, Rocket Lake finally feels like an Intel platform that's worth upgrading to - especially when the ongoing hardware shortages have put quite the premium on their Ryzen rivals. Indeed, with Ryzen 5 5600X prices currently hovering around the £350 / $375 mark, the £250 / $270 Intel Core i5-11600K certainly looks a heck of a lot more attractive by comparison for new PC builders at the moment.