Ubisoft have opened up the pandora's box of mid-2000s shooters and deployed Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow onto Steam, rendering its PC version easy to grab for the first time in ages. It's not a remaster, so don't get too excited, as you might still have fun getting things to run as smoothly as your covert ops.
Given how quickly older games can be delisted or end up near impossible to run properly without tinkering nowadays, efforts like GOG.com's preservation program are always nice to see. There's obviously a money-making motive behind it for the storefront, but keeping retro works in working order's a noble way to earn that cash. As it turns out, though, the folks behind the CD Projekt-owned site underestimated just how difficult an undertaking the program would be.
That's not to suggest they're giving up though, just that they've had to re-evaluate some of their ambitious early goals.
I can't remember much about Battlefield 1942, two decades on, but I'm pretty sure I never thought "by golly, what if this + enormous sad stone monsters" while storming the beaches of Wake Island. It's one of many things that separate me from Fumito Ueda, director of melancholy PS2 titan-feller Shadow Of The Colossus, first released in 2005. In a new interview, he and other staff at Team Ico and Sony explore the game's development from start to finish, including some early dabblings with multiplayer.
Sometimes the simple life is the one I crave when I fire up The Witcher 3. Go away, warring rulers, meddling mages, and otherworldly elven harbingers of the apocalypse, let me concentrate on being medieval pest control. A modder's seemingly heard my protestations, having just released a standalone monster hunting mode for the game, which comes with an optional extraction shootery twist if you fancy an extra challenge.
Shortly after you finish celebrating the arrival of next year, a plague will rock up. Well, the full version of Pathologic 3, a game in which you play a doctor tasked with saving a town from a mysterious contagion will rock up. I'm sure that if you turn off all of the lights and pay someone to sit in the next room coughing every two minutes, the difference'll be negligible.