PC Gamer (US Edition)

“INZOI LOOKS LIKE IT IS SET TO STEAL THE SIMS’ LIFE SIM CROWN” ROBERT JONES Twitter @rnicholasj This month Discovered that PC Gamer Towers is actually run by a big white fluffy cat called Peeceecat. Was tasked with bringing the boss a meowtini. Shaken, not purred, of course. There’s no doubting that, 25 years after The Sims first graced monitors around the world, it has been the life sim series of choice for millions of PC gamers. Its impact on the genre and PC gaming in general should be celebrated, as few other series have managed to deliver so much fun and escapism for players so consistently. However, the reign of any king eventually comes to an end, and Krafton’s stunning new life sim game, inZOI, looks like it is…

Bloomberg reports that, following EA’s layoffs and restructuring at BioWare, the studio now has fewer than 100 employees, down from more than 200 during the development of Dragon Age: The Veilguard. Meanwhile, at its peak, BioWare consisted of three studios and, conservatively, over 400 employees. Interestingly, Bloomberg’s sources say that the plan to “loan” BioWare developers to other EA studios while the next Mass Effect was in pre-production was put in place shortly after Veilguard launched, but before its sales failure came to light. Solid numbers are hard to come by, but even conservatively, I think we can estimate that peak BioWare was around 400-500 employees strong for much of the last decade, based on reporting from across that period. Even with BioWare’s reported internal struggles with a slapdash crunch…

HIGHS Could and should GOG has resurrected Dini Crisis 1 and 2. Under the sea Retro YouTuber Clint Basinger built 25-year dynasty of aquarium screensavers just because he hated the one in Windows 95. Artificial Stupidity Scalping bots are hoovering up RTX 5090s on eBay, so some sellers are just listing framed pictures gaming, of the GPU for $1,000s to trick them. Suffering Succotash MultiVersus’ game director said of issues: “When there are threats to harm it’s crossing the line.” Flying solo The drone operator who damaged an LA firefighting plane was Peter Akemann, who co-founded Treyarch. Brass balls OpenAI is complaining about DeepSeek scraping its data. The same data it’s been scraping from everyone else. LOWS…

The PC gaming icon that is Half-Life 2 turned 20 last November, and Valve pulled out all the stops to celebrate: a major new update, a commentary track and a documentary absolutely crammed with digressions about the challenge the studio set itself. And one of them was lighting. The development of Half-Life 2 was rooted in what multiple staff describe as “the tech wishlist,” which would take six years to fully realize and was absolutely foundational to what Valve wanted to achieve with the game. “[It] was a main feature that the light felt very, very realistic and intuitive because of the Source engine and the work, the collaboration between artists and engineers,” says Half-Life 2’s lead artist Viktor Antonov, before introducing our hero. “Ken Birdwell, he was a fan…

Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess was one of 2024’s best but, ultimately, underrated games, with its maker Capcom left surprised by its low sales compared to its high quality and breakthrough innovations, the latter for which the game was nominated at the Game Awards 2024 for Best Sim/Strategy Game. But, in good news for PC gamers around the world, Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess is now playable on PC Game Pass, and if you haven’t yet given this little gem some attention, then I feel now is the time, as this is a very high-quality Japanese game that all gamers should play at least once in their life. The game, which is produced by Capcom’s Biohazard/Resident Evil studio and released on the Resident Evil engine, is about a Shintoist sorceress…

Soon after the legendary game designer Tomonobu Itagaki left Tecmo in 2008, Team Ninja gave birth to what is considered the peak of this evergreen IP. Now, Ninja Gaiden 2 Black is a remake of that sequel to the Ninja Gaiden series first released in 2008 but back with a bang. Following its initial release, the game was then ported to Sony’s PlayStation 3 a year later, but rebranded as Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 and also remixed some both technically, such as in the graphics department, where polygon rates were reduced, but also in terms of gameplay, with new characters and missions added, blood color changed, and various other smaller tweaks made. Now, 15 years later, PC gamers get to finally enjoy the best of both worlds, with Ninja Gaiden 2 Black…