December 2021

Audio player loading… Indie survival game The Planet Crafter looks like a new fix for those who love Subnautica and the like, asking you to survive, explore, build a base on, and eventually terraform an alien world. As you do that, you explore the ruins of prior colonization attempts on this planet to find vital resources and figure out what’s gone wrong before you got there.  The Planet Crafter is made by indie studio Miju Games and is set to release on Steam in the first quarter of 2022. I like the idea of it, changing the planet from hostile…

Final Fantasy 7 Remake has arrived on PC months after its PlayStation release, at a price of $70. The hope was for a definitive version, but at launch, I can’t say this is it. Which is disappointing, because in spite of Square Enix giving it the kind of PC port the publisher is infamous for—not as bad as Nier: Automata, but still underwhelming—Final Fantasy 7 Remake Intergrade is excellent.  After the lacklustre, confused, and unfinished-feeling Final Fantasy 15, this new take on one of the most beloved games in the series feels like it truly has vision. It balances faithfully…

As we bid farewell to the disparate collection of hours, days, and months we’ve come to know as 2021, let us pour out a wee dram and raise a glass in salute to the best PC gaming hardware released this year. In some ways it’s not been a golden year for PC hardware; it’s never been harder to build a new rig than it is right now, for example. But despite the continual horror of the GPU market, and the fact that new budget hardware seems to have vanished in a puff of logic, there are still things to celebrate….

Genshin Impact is not the game I thought it would be. I’d written it off as nothing more than a crappy, money-fuelled attempt to emulate The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. I off-handedly referred to it as “Breath of the Weeb” whenever it came up in conversation. But underneath that Hyrule-dappled exterior is a stupidly fun RPG with a compelling cast of characters and a combat system that easily rivals the one in Nintendo’s game. Though I gave it a quick shot when it was released in 2020, it wasn’t until the 2.0 update landed in July that…

Audio player loading… Rockstar games was developing Bully 2 at their New England studio in 2008, and had six to seven hours of playable game content, before development halted as developers were moved to other projects. This is according to ex-developers at Rockstar New England and outlined in an expose by Game Informer, who say that by the end of 2009 Bully 2 was effectively dead. The original Bully, released in 2006, took Rockstar’s signature sophomoric humor to the setting of a private school. It’s a fondly-remembered cult classic among many, and even got an expanded edition in 2008. The…