Look outside. Is it snowing? Well, it's snowing in video games, where it matters. The winter months are here to lay frosty waste to the Northern hemisphere, which is where list goblins like me originate.
To celebrate the first flakes of glimmering ice wafting out of the sky like God's own sub-zero dandruff, here's a list of the best snow in PC games. Put on a hat, for heaven's sake.
They say the best things come in small packages, which is clearly nonsense in a world where giant novelty cheques exist but giant novelty bills don't. When it comes to price tags, however, the smaller the better rings true, especially when it's a full 50% off a quality gaming keyboard like the Corsair K65 RGB Mini.
Let me slap you with the caveat up front. Halo Infinite's best place is its open world, through which you can swing like a honking metal Tarzan and do sweet Warthog jumps from cliffs. But its best level>, the most satisfying A-to-B gun boulevard, comes late in the campaign (spoilers ahead). The House Of Reckoning is a series of rooms where contrived artificial battlefields have been constructed inside an alien fortress. They are abstractly human structures surrounded by sand, as if your extraterrestrial enemies have been playing house but believe a homo sapiens' house looked exactly like a chunk of Normandy beach circa 1944. The narrative reasoning behind this level is absurd. But the fights that occur within are excellent.
God rest ye merry listener, let nothing you dismay - for today, for one night only, EWS stands for Electronic Wrestling Show. Yes, our podcast's wrestling promotion has rolled into your town for a showstopping tag team match. Each of your pod hosts fields a three-game tag team of our favourite games of the year, and fields them in a spectacular(ly described) ladder match. The victor will claim the GOTY In The Bank briefcase and win the chance to compete next year as well.
Before we get to that, though, we must first discuss (at length) whether 200 t-shirts is a lot of t-shirts, what Nate is having for his Christmas dinner, what kind of cop duo would be named Halloumi & Date, and also what our favourite Christmas songs are. Nate also does a really good Mankind pun. Plus: which wrestler would be the best hugger?
If your PC's drive space is fuller than Mr. Creosote, it might be time to call in some external backup. You can currently grab the WD Black P10 external hard drive in its vast 5TB configuration for a very reasonable £97 - it won't be able to hold any wafer thin mints, but 5TB makes room for an awful lot of game installs.
I’m beginning to think I need a dreamcatcher. The Lynx Africa on my bedroom shelf simply doesn’t have the same level of nightmare suction. In fact, I bet it attracts bad sleeps. Anyway, I’m considering the installation of a feathery net because DokeV’s music video from the latest Geoff Awards has infiltrated the darkest recesses of my brain again. I thought I’d shaken off the trailer song, but it’s back with full force and haunts me more than ever.
Roll7 have announced that their next skating game OlliOlli World comes out on February 8th, 2022. This latest OlliOlli game swaps out the 2D style for a cel-shaded 3D world that looks absolutely lovely. Or radical. Or sick. Or other skater words. The action-platformer's plot sounds great too, it drops you into Radlandia on a search for the skate gods. Skate gods! Don't anger them, kiddos, they'll break your collarbones.
Let's not sugar-coat it: you recognise this door of the Advent Calendar. You've been through it before. In fact it's possible you've been through it many times, now you think about it.
Final Fantasy XIV is suffering from success, thanks, in part, to its recently released Endwalker expansion. Despite updates to ease server errors and long queue times, players are still struggling to log into the game. So, Square Enix have only gone and done it. They've temporarily suspended sales of the game, as well as new registrations for the free trial version. Even adverts are being stopped for now.
It's not often those Nintendo Directs have PC-related news for us, but today's announceathon had a little treat. Loco Motive is a train-based detective game published by Chucklefish (who also pubbed Stardew Valley and Starmancer), and is the debut game from developers Robust Games. There's been a murder! And it's your job to figure out who committed the crime. Classic whodunnit stuff that we'll get to play next summer.