Crysis is legendary, seared into the mind of a PC generation - but one chapter of the saga is at best neglected, at worst all but forgotten. Crysis Warhead is a PC exclusive standalone, released just under a year after the original, unclouded by the change of ambition and setting brought about by the multi-platform orientated Crysis 2. With Crysis Remastered looming on the horizon, we wanted to look back at the game, to get a handle on its successes and failures and to answer the question: why is Crysis Warhead so often overlooked?

Warhead is both a continuation and an expansion for the original release but also a response to its many criticisms. Firstly, in terms of design, it attempts to address core criticisms to the gameplay of Crysis itself. While I may personally look back at the original game in its entirety rather fondly, a number of players and reviewers disliked the last third of the game, where you engage the alien threat in a more linear fashion. The freeform 'wide linear' gameplay Crysis was feted for was all but forgotten, while the aliens themselves were perhaps rather one-note.

Then there were the technical challenges in running the game that became the series' hallmark. Beyond gameplay critiques, Crysis' lofty system requirements and ultra-high end graphics didn't go down well with users and reviewers of the time, to the point where even one of the best cards of the era - the GeForce 8800 GT - could struggle. Indeed, even turning up graphics to very high didn't deliver a playable experience on any but the most powerful 8800 GTX or SLI set-ups back in 2007. Even then, a number of levels strained the CPU due to Crysis being a very single-threaded game - even with overclocks, CPUs like the Q6600 would struggle to do much on the highest settings in levels like Ascension. Indeed, as we've demonstrated in the past, even modern PCs with top-tier processors have a hard time delivering consistent performance.

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OK, so I know Eurogamer's actual birthday was two days ago, but as is our style, the Eurogamer video team is once again Late to the (birthday) Party.

Over the past three years, we've been introducing each other to our favourite (and/or least favourite) games from yesteryear as part of our Late to the Party series. During that time we've shared our love (and/or hatred) for over one hundred and fifty different games and thanks to this, we've been able to make a compilation episode of LTTP that features one game from every year that Eurogamer has been alive.

In this video, Aoife, Zoe and I are joined by some friendly video team faces from the past (who?!) as we play our way through the 20 years worth of games, including 1999's Dino Crisis, 2006's Gears of War and 2017's PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds. Basically, if you want a healthy dose of nostalgia (or just want to feel rather old) this is the video for you!

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The arrival of Nvidia's RTX line of graphics cards may not have immediately ushered in a new era of games built around the concept of ray traced rendering but it has put the technique on the map, with results impressive enough to inspire developers to add ray traced effects to existing games - several of which do not actually require Nvidia hardware acceleration. We recently looked at a stunning path traced version of Minecraft, but what if RT techniques could be applied to all DirectX9 and DirectX11 games? And what happens if we apply that new technology to classic PC mangler, Crysis? Watch the video embedded on this page and you'll see that it works to a transformative degree - albeit with limitations.

It's all because of a new extension currently in development for the powerful post-process injection tool, Reshade, created by modding veteran and Nvidia Ancel contributor, Pascal Gilcher. Reshade works by hooking into DirectX, accessing the data contained in the depth and colour buffers to accomplish a range of post-process effects, including SMAA anti-aliasing, screen-space reflections, depth of field and colour tints to name but a few. A new ray tracing feature is now available in alpha builds - and strictly speaking, this adds a new layer of global illumination derived from path tracing. It's not a full fat implementation as we saw in Minecraft, but it can have a transformative effect - particularly on titles like the original Crysis, created at a time when the way games were lit was somewhat na ve compared to modern day implementations.

Crysis was a pioneer for screen-space ambient occlusion (SSAO) which uses data from the depth buffer to add shade to the nooks and crannies on-screen. The technique has evolved constantly over the last decade, but path traced global illumination can take this to the next level: Reshade beams out three rays per pixel in calculating shade and light bounce - giving a new layer of accuracy and depth to the way the scene is lit. Take a look at the video below and you'll see a number of A to B comparisons that reveal a stark difference.

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Dead Space is 10-years-old today.

EA Redwood Shores' (later known as Visceral Games) sci-fi horror came out on 13th October 2008 for the PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, and was praised for its stunning visuals, tense atmosphere and alien design.

In Dead Space you played Isaac Clarke, an engineer who found himself fighting for survival on the Ishimura, a spaceship infested with horrible aliens called Necromorphs.

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When it comes to Dead Space, what dies doesn't stay dead for long. Dead Space 3 launched in February 2013 and EA has said nothing since to indicate it's ready to revive the science fiction horror series. We've already explored the Dead Space 3 the developers wanted to make, but what about Dead Space 4? It turns out Visceral had ideas - some properly exciting - for a fourth game in the series. Unfortunately, Visceral never got the chance to turn them into reality. After Dead Space 3 flopped, EA put the studio on the Battlefield series with spin-off Hardline before assigning it a Star Wars game that was eventually cancelled. Now, Visceral is no more.

Visceral is dead, but those early ideas for Dead Space 4 live on in the mind of Ben Wanat, who was creative director of Dead Space and is now creative director at Crystal Dynamics. We spoke with Wanat to find out more.

By the end of Dead Space 3, humanity is facing its doom. It's in this hopeless situation that Dead Space 4 was to be set. The idea came from the flotilla section in Dead Space 3, and had the player scavenge supplies in order to survive. "The notion was you were trying to survive day to day against infested ships, searching for a glimmer of life, scavenging supplies to keep your own little ship going, trying to find survivors," Wanat explained.

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EA's classic sci-fi horror game Dead Space is currently free on PC via Origin.

For those poor souls unfamiliar with Dead Space (no judgement - it did come out ten years ago, after all), it's an honest-to-goodness big-budget, single-player horror yarn - the kind that pretty much never gets made any more. It follows the exploits of unfortunate space engineer Isaac Clarke on the stricken USG Ishimura - a vessel with a rather serious... infestation.

What transpires is a genuinely nerve-wracking third-person horror escapade, which tonally lands somewhere between the straight-up terror of Ridley Scott's Alien and the gleefully gruesome haunted-house-in-space hijinks of Event Horizon.

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The makers of Star Citizen - Cloud Imperium Games and Roberts Space Industries - are being sued by Crytek over misuse of CryEngine.

Cloud Imperium Games has dismissed - in a statement on Polygon - the claims as "meritless" and said it will "defend vigorously" against them, but they may prove hard to wash away.

It boils down to what was agreed upon in a General Licensing Agreement between the two parties in 2012, back before nearly 2 million people pledged a combined $174m towards development of the game.

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The environments of massive open-world games, particularly in recent years, have been rightly praised for their representation, scale and design accuracy. However, there are some gems at the other end of the spectrum - environments that make you feel cramped, tense and desperate for a break. This is an approach to environment design utilised in our real-world, from gardens to architecture, and is mirrored excellently in some game environments, creating areas that trap us in cramped, claustrophobic conditions.

The underground tunnel network of the Metro series, adapted for human life but traversed with trepidation and tension, nailed its own post-apocalyptic look and feel, and had claustrophobia, discomfort and fear oozing from its design. These spaces successfully evoke real-world design principles of landscape mazes and labyrinths, such as dead ends, twists and turns to cause doubling back and elevate desperation, fluctuating size and scale of spaces, and a continuous and monotonal finish (a symphony of grey in Metro's case) that makes every surface and area look the same, but also makes for an unrelenting and repressive aesthetic.

Often, the spaces are not only characteristic of uncomfortable mazes and tunnels, but their disrepair and crumbling structure means they have a constant feeling of pressure and weight about them: the feeling that, at any moment, the space could collapse on top of Artyom's head. The tunnels are also powerful spaces as they are a believable and familiar environment to us; adapting a real-world, recognisably claustrophobic environment makes for a powerfully uncomfortable virtual space.

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