PC Gamer

Yeah, the best HDMI cable for gaming. That’s a thing. At least it behoves us to try and stop you spending $100 on a gold-plated cable in the mistaken belief that it’s going to make you a better Call of Duty: Warzone player. But, although HDMI cables might at first glance all be a standard spec, they can actually come rated at different bandwidths—getting a cable that isn’t rated high enough will mean your resolution and refresh rates take a hit.  This is especially true if you’re packing an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090, which comes with the promise of 8K…

Halo Infinite’s latest developer update might’ve focussed on how the spiritual reboot is eschewing Halo 5’s sensibilities for a nostalgic return to Halo’s roots. But 343’s oft-maligned previous entry still snuck its way in, thanks to an easily missed audio log buried in the blog post. The log, inconspicuously placed within a paragraph on Infinite’s throwback sensibilities, appears to directly follow-on from the ending of Halo 5—an ending that (spoiler alert) saw your man John Masterchief reunited with Dr Halsey after Cortana becomes a galactic-scale supervillain.  There aren’t any mind-blowing plot reveals here, but the log does affirm that Infinite…

What I don’t know about American football could fill a book, but I know that Snoop Dogg’s 1993 album Doggystyle is a stone-cold classic and that when I saw the man live in 2014 he killed it. So when he livestreams Madden NFL 2020 on Twitch I am there for the man rather than the game, and have no idea what it was about the particular touchdown that, around 14 minutes into his latest stream, made him swear a bunch of times and ragequit. The stream’s title of “Sit Back, Relax, and Chill its a vibe in here” seemed pretty…

Season 8 of Apex Legends has seen a boost in the two-year-old battle royale’s player population. In February it enjoyed roughly 70,000 more concurrent players on Steam than the month before. As February draws to a close, SteamDB recorded it having a record-breaking peak player count of 198,235.  That’s five days after the two-year anniversary collection event ended too. Season 8 certainly seems to have struck a chord, whether due to Caustic seeing a resurgence and other changes in the Ranked meta, or the arrival of new legend Fuse, or the return of the popular King’s Canyon map (with some…

On an average day, about a dozen new games are released on Steam. And while we think that’s a good thing, it can be understandably hard to keep up with. Potentially exciting gems are sure to be lost in the deluge of new things to play unless you sort through every single game that is released on Steam. So that’s exactly what we’ve done. If nothing catches your fancy this week, we’ve gathered the best PC games you can play right now and a running list of the 2021 games that are launching this year.  Rhythm DoctorSteam‌ ‌page‌ ‌ Release:‌ February 27 Developer:‌ 7th Beat Games…

Not everyone wants their gaming chair to look like it rolled off the set of a straight-to-VHS ‘80s sci-fi film. Some of us have work to do too, especially in this age of the home office. If you want a chair that doesn’t fire on all cylinders in the gamer chic department, MSI isn’t the first brand you’d normally check in with, but the CH 120 I is probably the closest they’re going to get to muted, even if “True Gaming” is embroidered on it. Twice.  It’s a predominantly black PVC leather affair, save for its thick dark grey trimming…

Can’t decide where to place your server’s newest base in Valheim? Furious that your buddy took the last bars of iron to upgrade their axe when you don’t even have iron tools yet? Here’s a way to resolve your dispute: Viking beer pong. Or mead pong, if you haven’t unlocked barleywine yet. Just use something like an amber pearl or a cloudberry and chuck it out of your inventory at the traditional beer pong setup. The idea first popped up a few weeks ago. Here’s an great example, also from Reddit: Some Viking beer pong with the boys from r/valheimTo…

Whispering Hills is a Fallout 4 mod that adds a whole lot of fog and a variety of familiar monsters to the Commonwealth. While an earlier version of it has been around for a while—we’ve been writing about it since Jon said no thanks to the Sirenhead update in 2019—the Episode 1 update brings some significant additions. Chiefly, a questline to follow complete with a voiced NPC. Said questline will introduce you to Midwitch Elementary School (based on the original Silent Hill’s school, Midwich), and part of the town of Whispering Hills. It’s based on Centralia, the town used as…

Documents for an upcoming meeting of the Los Angeles Convention and Tourism Development Board (found by a poster on the Resetera forum) list E3 as a “Cancelled live event in 2021”. E3 2020 was cancelled due to the Covid-19 pandemic, and while the ESA looked for ways to replace it with an “online experience”, in the end nothing came of it. Earlier this year the ESA suggested said that, “we are transforming the E3 experience for 2021 and will soon share exact details on how we’re bringing the global video game community together” and the above document contains the note,…

Cooperative mining and shooting game Deep Rock Galactic is getting more new updates into 2021, including what looks like the largest update in the game’s three year history. The sci-fi dwarves aren’t stopping their bug-killing any time soon, it seems. The first update will be smaller, coming in April, while the second is planned for some time between July and September. The first update is called Bits N’ Pieces, and will include official modding support (on Steam.) It probably won’t include Steam Workshop integration in the first release. There’ll also be a big balance pass on weapons, as well as…

Whether it’s a CS:GO gun skin, set of Second Life clothes, Hearthstone card back, PUBG bandana, or Team Fortress 2 hat, what fancy in-game cosmetic have you acquired? Armor effects in Path of Exile go for a fair bit, but then someone once paid $38,000 for a pink war dog courier in Dota 2, which puts everything else in perspective. What’s the most valuable cosmetic item you own? The Steam Tools item value sorter might help if you don’t know the value of items or aren’t even sure what you own. Here are our answers, plus a few from our forum. (Image credit: EA)Alan Dexter:…

Just a few days after it dropped a new trailer for Dishonored plus Groundhog Day shooter Deathloop, which featured some absolutely slapping music, Arkane has released a lovely explainer of just what’s going on in the game and what it looks like to do that.  The explainer talks about how you’ll play the same day over and over, trying to take down a set of bad assassins in the name of freeing yourself from the loop. Each time you loop you’ll have a better idea of what the bad guys’ schedules are for the day across the island sandbox—eventually allowing…

Map control is power in Valorant, and the newest agent joining the roster has a ton of it. Astra, a cosmic caster hailing from Ghana, brings a boatload of utility and a powerful astral form that allows her to divvy up her abilities wherever she wishes. It’s too early to say how prominent Astra will be, but it’s hard to see why you wouldn’t want her on your team with a skillset like this: C: Gravity WellACTIVATE a Star to form a Gravity Well. Players in the area are pulled toward the center before it explodes, making all players still…

In 2013 I volunteered to play a game design student’s project on an Oculus Rift DK1, a simple maze and a rollercoaster demo. They were just prototypes so it wasn’t a spectacular first impression of virtual reality, but I kept thinking about it for years after, and in 2018, lacking a suitable PC, I invested in a PlayStation VR.  I wish I’d jumped to PC VR sooner. PSVR’s pricing was more accessible for a call centre worker, but it came with trade-offs—wires were everywhere, PlayStation Move controllers weren’t great for VR, and on a sunny day the light-sensitive motion tracking…

From 2010 to 2014 Richard Cobbett wrote Crapshoot, a column about rolling the dice to bring random obscure games back into the light. This week, he begins a bold voyage into all things Trek. One of the most unusual things about at least the official games based on Star Trek: The Original Series is how late they arrived on the scene. That’s excusable of course—games did exist in the 1960s when it first ran, but they were limited to stuff like Spacewar! or versions of Pong played on oscilloscopes. Still, it means they had a certain nostalgia element to them…

Google unveiled Stadia in March 2019 to great fanfare, and with a promise to revolutionize gaming. Streamed gaming was hardly a new idea at the time, but Google had the money and the muscle to make it happen, not to mention a first-party game studio, Stadia Games and Entertainment, headed up by Ubisoft and EA veteran Jade Raymond. Less than two years later, though, that plan to build first-party Stadia games fell apart: Google closed its internal studios before they’d managed to release a game, and Raymond left the company as a result. Stadia will continue to operate as a…

I’m probably being way too optimistic, but Call of Duty: Warzone’s infinite stim glitch, the seemingly unkillable destroyer of fair matches, might actually be dead. Hear me out. Activision has released fixes on four separate occasions to eliminate an exploit that allows players to survive outside the circle indefinitely using the stim tool. Players have found a new pay to pull it off after each fix, but this time may be different. One gameplay change in Warzone’s Season 2 patch notes appears to be laser-targeted at the stim glitch and others like it. (Image credit: Activision)”Players that are continually in…

The best gaming TV is your ticket to big-screen PC gaming, and the best 4K TVs will deliver an experience to rival even the best gaming monitors out there for fidelity. And sometimes even surpass them. At the moment your choices for the glorious OLED panel technology, in PC terms, are limited to high-end gaming laptops or the best gaming TVs. And then you’re only going to get high refresh rates on a television panel. And now that the Nvidia RTX 3080 and AMD RX 6800 XT have launched, if you can find them, they make 4K gaming utterly accessible….

The announcement of Sifu was the surprise highlight of the week for me. It’s a kung-fu brawler coming later this year from Sloclap, the studio behind excellent online fighting game Absolver. In some ways, Sifu looks similar to that game, but the trailer leaves a lot of questions: Is it singleplayer only? How does the combat work? What’s with the aging system? Sifu executive producer Pierre Tarno wouldn’t answer all my questions, but did share several key details this morning, including the identity of a real kung-fu master who’s helping with the game. First of all, Tarno confirmed to PC…

Earlier this month, Terraria co-creator Andrew Spinks pulled the plug on the in-the-works Stadia version of the game. The problem, he said, was that Re-Logic’s YouTube account had been mistakenly disabled, and three weeks of horsing around had failed to get it restored. “I can take this no other way than you deciding to burn this bridge,” Spinks tweeted on February 8. “Consider it burned. Terraria for Google Stadia is canceled. My company will no longer support any of your platforms moving forward.” As the owner of an Android tablet attached to an account for a forever-lost password, I can…