It's good to make words work hard for you, the lazy little ingrates, and Road 96's title is grafting pretty hard. It's referencing both the name of the road leading to the northern border of fictional USA-alike Petria - against which you will fling successive desperate teenagers in a procedurally generated hitchhike-athon - and the year it's all set. Yes, it's 1996, and everyone is sharing tapes, blithely getting lifts with strangers, and very concerned with the oil industry.

It's also nearing the ten year anniversary of a terrorist attack at that same border, which exploded the side of a mountain and killed hundreds of bystanders. In a move that only makes sense when tidy plotting demands your seven intertwining personal and political stories need to come to a head all at once, the totalitarian government of Petria have decided they will hold the upcoming election on the same day as the big anniversary event. A big pre-emptive whoopsie-doodle to them.

Read more

Sundays are for walking past a pack of teenagers playing football and being mortified when their ball comes bounding towards you. Before you awkwardly prepare to kick it back, let's read this week's best writing about games.

Read more

F.E.A.R. was the kind of shooter where, even after all the enemies were dead, you'd keep firing your gun anyway just to watch the world around you pop, ping and crumble.

Like Craig, I was skeptical that the F.E.A.R.-inspired Selaco could recreate that kind of destruction in the GZDoom engine, but no, I was wrong. A new 3 minute trailer shows a world falling to pieces from its very first moments.

Read more

The Anacrusis showed its first trailer at E3, and it left me a little worried. It's a four player co-operative shooter from Chet Faliszek's new studio Stray Bombay, but in a swarm of in-development Left 4 Deadlikes, it looked the most shambling.

I still have hope though, and the game's first dev blog offers plenty of encouragement by going into detail about the team's process of adapting to feedback and playtesting.

Read more

After a month of information dribbling out of IGN, Valve have uploaded a trailer of their own for the Steam Deck. They describe their new hardware as "the most powerful gaming handheld in the world," and "powerful, portable PC gaming." It's a strong pitch video, honestly, as I continue to debate whether I want to buy one.

Read more

Having Forza Horizon 5 on the way is like having the noise of a warm bath running within earshot. I already know I'm going to enjoy everything about the experience that's coming, and the 12 minutes of footage released this week which show a drive around Mexico only confirms it.

Read more

The A500 Mini is on the way. From the makers of the C64 Mini, it's a retro console that emulates the ancient home computer and allows you to play Amiga 500, 600 and 1200 games. It's coming in early 2022, and there's a trailer and preliminary games list below.

Read more

Today I got a box of fruit and veg that included cherries, blueberries, red cabbage, a huge marrow and a cucumber of a thoroughly indecent shape. It seems this weekend will bring an unholy salad of some description. But you know what else it will bring? That's right, my friends: video games!

Read more

The LG 27GL850 is an iconoclast, a monitor that broke the mould by daring to combine the colours and viewing angles of IPS monitors with the blazing fast pixel response times you'd normally only find on TN panels. The result is what LG call 'Nano IPS' and what I call 'Fast IPS', a new class of monitors that offer incredible all-around performance, from gaming to content creation. The 27GL850 was the first such monitor to hit the scene, and a couple years on it remains an incredible value choice for anyone with a mid-range PC.

Today, Overclockers in the UK have reduced the monitor to £298, beating by a hair the best price we've ever recorded for this model. Here's why this monitor is worth the pennies and pounds!

Read more

With QuakeCon 2021 set to take place in a virtual fashion next week - and already being in the headlines thanks to an errant schedule listed a 'revitalized' Quake - GOG are offering some deep discounts on some of the best-known ZeniMax franchises including Fallout, Dishonored, The Elder Scrolls, Doom, Quake and Wolfenstein.

It's a great chance to pick up some fantastic shooters and roleplaying games at bargain basement prices, from recent releases to all-time classics. Here are my personal highlights, plus a big link to the sale itself.

Read more