PC Gamer

My first experience of Doom was playing a shareware version of the groundbreaking 1993 original release. After playing it at home, I then snuck the floppy disc it came on into my high school and played it on the library computers at lunchtime. Golden moments. And, since then, I’ve never not played a new Doom game released on PC. Simply put, I’m a huge Doom fan, and that’s why Doom: The Dark Ages, is exciting me greatly. This is a game that, in many ways, is returning to its series roots, and doing so in one hell of a bombastically awesome manner. ROBERT JONES Twitter @rnicholasj This month Created PC Gamer’s own version of the Super Shotgun. Wieldable during magazine print deadlines, it fires pints of Guinness into thirsty editors’…

CHRIS LIVINGSTON Bluesky chrislivingston.bsky.social This month Flew the USS PC Gamer to Omicron Persei 8 in order to deliver the latest issue to Emperor Lrrr. Big fan. JODY MCGREGOR Twitter @jodymacgregor This month Protected simple fisher folk by fighting a series of giant crabs in a dark cave. Oh, and in Solasta 2 he… IAN EVENDEN Bluesky @ianev.bsky.social This month Demanded to be hailed as Emperor Evendenius. Started building the almighty Baths of Ian. TED LITCHFIELD Bluesky @dilfpatrol.bsky.social This month Took a week off to go backpacking around the medieval hellscape of Argent D’Nur. Toasty!…

It’s been a truth for ages: console manufacturers have been missing out by not releasing their games on PC. Microsoft long ago gave up on pure Xbox exclusives, and is even releasing games on PlayStation now. Sony, meanwhile, has tacitly acknowledged the fact for years, steadily releasing its PS4 and PS5 back catalogue onto Steam, and then last year, releasing Helldivers 2 on both PS5 and PC to enormous success. Now, former Sony executive Shuhei Yoshida has come out and said it explicitly: releasing its games on PC is a licence for Sony to print money. Speaking to Sacred Symbols+ about his time as head of PlayStation Studios, Yoshida explained he wanted to bring Sony games to PC far earlier than when it eventually happened, but it just wasn’t the…

HIGHS A literal high Steam cracked 40 million concurrent users for the first time. Cold, hard cash A Good Snowman Is Hard To Build has adopted a new pricing strategy: whatever the current temperature in London, that’s its price in US dollars. Hell house freezes Dragon Quest 3 HD-2D Remake sold enough to make execs happy. At the last hurdle After 14 years of operation, indie developer Studio Fizbin is closing. Pilfered Horror game The Backrooms 1998 had a good launch on Steam. So good that someone stole the entire game and uploaded it to the Nintendo eShop without permission. Cookie clicker A 2023 study concluded CAPTCHAs are “a tracking cookie farm for profit masquerading as a security service”. LOWS…

As the Great Wheel turns, The Spy sits with the gods, mulling over the fates of PC gaming throughout the cosmos. “When shall Lord Gaben ascend from his cherished Hall of Knives to join us?” Abydon the forge god asks, “For I grow impatient to question him about the game the mortals call Half-Life 3.” “Yes,” rasps Skaen, god of secret hatred and resentment, “I am sick of his procrastinations. It is clear he has no love for us or the PC gamers who, loyally like rats protecting their brood mother, have followed the story of the Half-Life 3 blind in hope for decades. He dishonours us all with his inaction.” Wael, god of dreams, places down the copy of PC Gamer magazine that the deity is reading with its…

What is a legacy? I’ve struggled with that question as I’ve tried to write about Virtua Fighter 5 REVO, the latest entry in the series that invented 3D fighting games before eventually fading from the public consciousness. REVO, a new version that hit Steam in late January, is a chance for one of the most beloved fighting games ever made to find a new worldwide audience. The first thing you have to understand about Virtua Fighter 5 is that it’s old. The original game released in Japanese arcades in 2006, a year after the Xbox 360 launched; Halo 3 and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare were still a year away, Street Fighter IV was two years out and Apple’s App Store didn’t yet exist. “It’s hard to describe the…