Innholdsfortegnelse for May 2024 i PC Gamer (US Edition)

HIGHS A gutful of Doom MIT researchers have got Doom running on, wait for it, gut bacteria. Survive and thrive Enshrouded grabbed more than a million players in three days, making January a blockbuster month for survival games. StarCraft remade Modders have spent a decade remaking StarCraft in the second game’s engine. LOWS Apology squad Suicide Squad devs had to apologize after its early launch ran into bugs. Player known A Korean man who avoided national service was jailed partly because his PUBG career cast doubt on his ‘conscientious objector’ status. What are the odds? Palworld had an issue with items that increase your chances of catching pals: they seemed to be decreasing them instead.…

Centroid is a giant of the motion capture world, having worked on multiple blockbuster movies, streaming shows and globally successful games. Despite being CEO, Phil Stilgoe’s route into that world wasn’t quite what you might expect; once upon a time, he was working as a chef on cruise liners. “I was interested in photography,” explains Stilgoe, “so I understood cameras. We started as a family business many years ago, and it was just a bit of a passion project to begin with. And we went from strength to strength”. Joe Ells meanwhile, the company’s post production manager, started in the game industry, working on Guitar Hero—which was making use of Centroid’s services at the time. When it comes to games, the fundamental requirements for a motion capture job can vary…

I knew I was in for a stomach-churning time with Divine Frequency’s demo after I finally acquired my first weapon. I came up to a hallway in the game’s vast industrial underbelly and spied an ominous figure looming way down the hall. The light above it cut out, I turned around, and there it was: a horrible faceless mannequin an eyelash’s length away. I panicked, started blasting, and swore so loud my girlfriend heard from down the hall. The mannequin is actually completely harmless, and I just wasted precious ammo and weapon durability on a prank. Divine Frequency punked me. This horror-FPS-RPG launched its first Steam demo during 2023’s Realms Deep event, a former mod project now getting reworked into a full game. It’s built on GZDoom, the ubiquitous source…

The First World War is solid ground for a pacifist narrative. Never has the futility of the whole mess been writ as large as on the Western Front. War Hospital puts you in charge of a failing field hospital on the very edge of the trenches in 1918, balancing morale, resources and staffing to save as many lives as possible. ‘It’s called triage’ is a stock trope for murderous villains in many media, but this simulation comes down to the infamous trolley problem. Do you kill one person if it means saving more? Here, the yawning horror of shuffling the critical cases into the “Denied” file and consigning them to death so that your tired surgeons can save others, is occasionally punctuated with their curses and invective. It’s especially hard…

IF I CARRY ON, MY CHILD WILL BE KILLED BY RAIDERS, OR GET SICK AND I WON’T HAVE MEDICINE This is the poster-child for this kind of game, a creation of such reputation that although I own copies on three different formats, I’ve never played it before. I’ve never felt up to it. In a besieged city in a civil war, the population hides out from the snipers in the daylight hours. Come the night, they venture out for supplies or stay home on guard against raiders. It makes you question your ethics and your values. It makes you question everything. Having children in your care is excruciating. The hard choices you usually make in a household of adults multiply. You’ve been up all night. You have to upgrade your…

A PLAYABLE HISTORY, WITH A WEALTH OF EXTRA MATERIAL TO LOOK THROUGH Director Yoan Fanise made two games bookending the centenary of World War I. The first was Valiant Hearts for Ubisoft Montpellier in 2014. Reminiscent of a LucasArts point-and-click, the game is rendered in a cartoon style used by the satirical illustrations of the day, and this level of comic absurdity totally works with the material. A family is separated and find themselves on opposite sides of the Great War as they suffer its horrors—the trenches, imprisonment, suffering and loss. You do fight, which should exclude this game, but it mostly consists of trying not to die, avoiding shells and gunfire, or clearing obstructions. Its commitment to not killing the enemy just about absolves it. It’s a playable history,…

It’s a well-known axiom among game designers that, given the opportunity, players will remove all the fun from your game. That might sound counterintuitive, but the goal of every game is to successfully inspire desire, to create something the player wants, and then put obstacles in their path as they try to achieve it. The problem is that people will, by nature, pick the most efficient method to reach their goals. In doing so, they may well end up ignoring all the fun you’ve so carefully crafted for them. Take a recent patch in the world’s biggest MMORPG, World of Warcraft. Among the many systems for player progression was the process of gaining renown with a group called the Dream Wardens, earning a powerful magic item. The intention was for…

The Justice League was long dead when Rocksteady’s quirky looter shooter finally clicked. I was 20 hours in, having just reached max level as Deadshot, discovering that Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League’s endgame hunt for Brainiac is no joke—I was ducking and rolling past walls of lasers and getting the most out of a legendary rifle that penetrates pesky armor. It was a blast because I was finally hitting difficult missions. It took a long time (far too long) for Suicide Squad to show its hand, but once it did, I briefly became the Destiny player that I usually can’t relate to—eagerly replaying content I’ve done before, enamored by the possibility of ultra-rare rewards. The problem is that, at launch, Suicide Squad’s endgame is a brief but delicious dessert,…

There’s no doubting the pitch for The Inquisitor catches the attention. You play Mordimer Madderdin, a holy inquisitor of the church whose job it is to hunt out heretics and enforce the faith—even if that means a spot of torture. That faith, by the way, comes courtesy of none other than Jesus himself, who in the world of The Inquisitor did not die on the cross but instead broke free from it and then went on a bloody rampage across the world. The Inquisitor opens with Mordimer being dispatched by the church to investigate rumors of a vampire operating in the 16th-century town of Koenigstein, where he soon discovers a series of bloody ritualistic murders, as well as strands of a far deeper and more sinister plot. You step off…

We’re familiar with the trope by now: a nervous European kid in a flammable-looking black T-shirt with his esports team logo emblazoned across it, arms folded confidently, endorsing a new mouse, keyboard, or gaming chair. Since peripheral manufacturers realized they couldn’t use partially dressed women to sell their gear any more, and slogans alone weren’t shifting units, they turned to professional gamers. And it worked. It’s healthy to have a bit of cynicism about this sales tactic. In our heart of hearts, we all know that buying PC gaming gear endorsed by the pros doesn’t bring us any closer to pro standard any more than cracking an egg into a pan makes us Gordon Ramsay. There’s something implicitly disingenuous about the whole thing. And yet, esports pros might have saved…

“When I was a child I spake as a child,” so it says in the Bible, presumably before the invention of the word ‘spoke’. “But when I became a man, I put away childish things.” It’s true, isn’t it: time passes, new hardware arrives and we box up our former treasures, their VGA leads dangling, pleading with us as we send them up to the loft. We forget about them, sometimes for decades, and then we see a TikTok of someone playing a Windows 95 game, feel an overwhelming urge to do the same, start Googling and realize that the old desktop PC we boxed up and banished in 2001 is worth a thousand bucks now on eBay and there’s a whole community of collectors with alerts set up for…

SONY TRINITRON Once ubiquitous in offices and computer shops everywhere, Trinitrons were always pin-sharp by CRT standards and featured incredible color reproduction. If you see one on eBay: buy it. JVC D SERIES Wheeling out a massive old TV to play on is even less practical than retro gaming on a CRT monitor. You get gorgeous colors and richness of image though, and this one’s famed for console gaming. SONY PVM BROADCAST MONITOR Yet another flavor of CRT goodness, this time distilling Sony’s Trinitron screen tech into a professional broadcast monitor once used on film sets. SONY PVM-4300 A legendary 40-inch model that weighed over 400lb. Like gaming upstairs, do you? Good luck. Still, devotees are always on the hunt for examples of this CRT white whale.…

We all save scummed in Baldur’s Gate III, right? A bad roll, fight’s not going well, time to mash quick load, baby. In stealth games this behavior may manifest as a compulsion to pull the ripcord every time you get spotted, while 4Xs see us setting up a temporal base camp right before declaring a risky war. But what if living with the consequences of your actions could be fun? Usually I’d say I do enough of that in real life, but a recent dalliance with Baldur’s Gate III’s permadeath Honor mode gave me pause. With save scumming at the top of our minds, it was time to get to the bottom of things by asking a professional for their take. Five professionals, in fact: two RPG developers, and three…

Dial of Destiny might have proved that the cinematic franchise is as dead as Archimedes, but videogames could be the new natural home of Indiana Jones. With no need for CGI de-aging or time travel, Great Circle can concentrate on what makes the series great: punching Nazis. There’s likely to be plenty of that, as the game is set in 1943, between the events of Raiders of the Lost Ark, a film in which Nazis were punched, and Last Crusade, a movie that also contained its fair share of fist/nose moments. That sort of thing has to be filed under ‘likely’ for now as we know relatively little about the game beyond the events of the single trailer available and the sparse information released by publisher Bethesda. Hot off the…

I was morally obligated to keep an eye on Palworld. I’ve been playing Pokémon on and off for four fifths of my time on this Earth. I’m a card-carrying Dwarf Fortress weirdo, which Palworld’s lead developer has cited as his favorite game. Ignoring Palworld would’ve been a dereliction of professional duty. Now that I’ve spent a dozen hours with it following the game’s emergence into Early Access, I can comfortably say that duty might have been fine to leave derelict. Palworld is lucky to be arriving in a world where the Switch’s proper Pokémon games are as rough as they’ve ever been, with the open world of Scarlet and Violet visibly tearing itself apart at the seams. Palworld might have me soaring over a generic Unreal 5 landscape on the…

1 HIGH ROAD The optimum routes around New Island are found up above, with purposefully positioned scaffolding, ramps and rails, as opposed to jostling with the traffic found on the roads. 2 BUSINESS BOOMING Ten businesses will appear across all eight levels that will span a campaign that will take approximately 12 hours, with 100% completion expected to stretch to around 20 hours. 3 ON AIR A live-action broadcast will bookend every level, with a newscaster explaining the state of play and the shady ongoings of Rich Villainé, similar to that of the news sequences in 1987’s RoboCop.…

CHARGING AROUND IN YOUR BULLDOZER IS FUN AND CLEARING AN AREA IS VERY SATISFYING I expected a city builder of some kind, balancing Marshall Plan money with a lack of resources in Europe post-WWII, but what I got was a mix of Hardspace: Shipbreaker and House Flipper. Clear away the ruins and detritus of the conflict by hammer, shovel or machine, before renovating and repairing each area. Then, step inside a waiting shadowy figure to witness the world at war. Charging around in your bulldozer is fun, and clearing an area is very satisfying, even if the building itself is a bit underwhelming, and you have the option of continuing the beautification work in a sandbox mode once your tasks are complete. It can be a bit fiddly, especially when…

War drives a great many people over borders to seek shelter, so it would be remiss not to include at least one refugee tale here. Less a game than a visual novel, Bury Me, My love is a series of text conversations between Nour and her partner Majd, as she undertakes the long journey from war-torn Syria to safety. The dialog options have been accused of being too mundane, but the sheer ordinariness of the interaction as life and death choices are made is subtly powerful. Even then, I found that subsequent playthroughs making different choices gave me a much more intense experience, so your mileage may vary. The PC version is less resonant than when played on mobile, whose real-time mode can leave you waiting tense hours for news…

I’m cheating slightly including this, as it begins in 1933 as Hitler takes power in Germany, but defying tyranny is a wargame staple. Here you play as a Berlin resident trying to run a Resistance cell as the Nazis tighten their grip and grow ever more vicious and terrifying. I muddled through, much as an amateur anarchist might, and you don’t have much effect at first. It is insanely difficult to raise funds or support without drawing attention to yourself, and you end up spending all your time and resources busting your team out of jail.…

A game with a launch date and boasting developers with credits on The Witcher 3 and Dying Light, Medic: Pacific War is exactly what I was looking for—a full-on, third-person-not-shooter that marries stealth, action and an active battlefield in a unique challenge. Hypnotic Ants Studio has run a modestly successful Kickstarter campaign, given us a trailer brimming with potential and even a closed playtest. A THIRD-PERSON-NOT SHOOTER THAT MARRIES STEALTH, ACTION AND AN ACTIVE BATTLEFIELD…

Games Designer. Unquestionably a dream job. You get to flex your creative muscles, work at the cutting edge of technology and craft the kind of compelling experiences that thrill players on a daily basis. But it's also an incredibly broad field, taking in everything from coding to storytelling, systems design to audience management, and a huge number of other specialities. As an aspiring game designer you'll have an array of disciplines to choose from and master, as you begin your journey toward that first shipped title. The Princeton Review is your guide to the huge range of game design courses on offer throughout North America and Europe's finest further education institutions, whether you're a recent high school graduate or looking for a career change. Here you'll find a rundown of…

1 UNIVERSITY OF CENTRAL FLORIDA (#1 SOUTH) 2023 Grads Hired: 85 2023 Grads Mean Salary: $80,539 Faculty: Nick Zuccarello (Sony), Jonathan Annand (Disney) Graduates: Carlos Barbosa (WB Games), Brian DeSanti (Blizzard) https://fiea.ucf.edu/industry/alumni-games/ 2 NEW YORK UNIVERSITY (#1 NORTHEAST) 2023 Grads Hired: 51 2023 Grads Mean Salary: $73,003 Faculty: Dr. Mitu Khandaker (Glow Up Games), Shawn Pierre (Philly Game Mechanics, Independent Games Festival) Graduates: Atlas Chen (thatgamecompany, Echostone), Noelle Mazurek (Diablo IV) https://gamecenter.nyu.edu/ 3 UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA (#1 WEST) 2023 Grads Hired: 90 2023 Grads Mean Salary: $85,000 Faculty: Mark Bolas (Fakespace Labs, Microsoft), Danny Bilson (The Rocketeer, The Flash, Da 5 Bloods, The Sims, Homefront) Graduates: Laird Malamed (Oculus VR), Brandon Beck (Riot Games) https://catalogue.usc.edu/content.php 4 UNIVERSITY OF UTAH (#2 WEST) 2023 Grads Hired: 88 2023 Grads Mean Salary:…

Tekken 8 feels like returning home. A bit of a cringe opener, I know, but across my 40 hours spent with this game for this review I couldn’t help but feel like I was being reunited with an old friend; a series I adore so dearly. Tekken is freakin’ back, baby, and I couldn’t be happier. It’s a game so rife with nostalgia transitioning from cinematics to inducing moments yet manages to bundle them together into this incredibly approachable, newbie-friendly package. It’s a far cry from the bare-bones experience that was its predecessor—Tekken 8 is truly the next generation of fighters, a bombastic showdown that you should absolutely witness now matter how long it’s been since you last peeped into a King of Iron Fist Tournament. Tekken 8’s nostalgic vibes…

BioShock 2 is the Shock that time forgot. Nestled between its beloved big brother and infinite discourse generator little si… ah, sibling, it’s a game that seemed to vanish as soon as it appeared when it released all the way back in 2010. So, naturally, with Cyberpunk and Elden Ring loaded up and ready to go on the brand new Steam Deck I brought home for Christmas, I spent the entire time playing this instead. SYSTEMIC RISK Why is it so forgotten? Well, for one, Sofia Lamb—the game’s main villain and, as endless audio logs inform you, a figure of apparently immense presence on Rapture’s political stage who somehow never merited a mention in BioShock 1—just doesn’t have Andrew Ryan’s swagger. She’s part of the game’s desire to do System…

BALDUR’S GATE III baldursgate3.game Larian’s follow-up to the long-dormant Baldur’s Gate series went a little under the radar in 2023, but its lack of critical and commercial success was just criminal if you ask me. Continued additions like a permadeath mode and new endings make it a great time to jump back in. THIEF: THE BLACK PARADE ttlg.com It’s a better time to be a Thief fan than at any point since the year 2000. Arkane’s still doing its thing, Gloomwood and Serpens offer indie alternatives, and now a talented mod team rooted in the TTLG forums has released a ten-mission campaign that rivals the official series. SLAYERS X: TERMINAL AFTERMATH: VENGANCE OF THE SLAYER bit.ly/4aRc3IA Slayers X is a spinoff of Hypnospace Outlaw, presenting as the artistic creation of…

QUAKE III A good spectator sport that hosted some lavish tournaments. John Romero put his Ferrari up as a prize in one of them. COUNTER-STRIKE A more enduring fanbase than the Rolling Stones, and a simple concept with decades of tacticam depth to explore. LEAGUE OF LEGENDS Riot’s MOBA brought in huge numbers with its F2P model, and led the way for broadcast tournaments. FORTNITE It might not have been originally intended to be an esports juggernaut, but that’s what it became.…

Nintendo is a legendarily litigious company—with mods and emulation often falling under the gaze of its burning, all-seeing eye. Nexus Mods, the world’s biggest mod hosting site, has even enacted a ban on Pokémon conversion mods for Palworld, citing Nintendo’s record of “submitting legal challenges”. No one knows that record better than YouTuber Toasted Shoes, who received a DMCA notice after posting a teaser trailer for his Palworld to Pokémon mod that he was going to release for free to the community. But Nintendo got there first. Before the video could accumulate even 100,000 views, the corporation swept in to take it down. But Toasted Shoes wasn’t one to be stopped, and quickly assembled a team of modders to devise an infernal concoction of bootleg Pokémon, from Hades. THIS IS…

RANDOM NUMBER GENERATION Found in Baldur’s Gate III and Disco Elysium: just keep saving and loading until the dice go your way. SNEAKIN’ International super-spy cop guys like the Denton bros of Deus Ex fame don’t get spotted—they smash F9 to load a save. NPC DEATH A hazard of pacifist runs or when an NPC dying doesn’t mean game over. Just this once, everybody lives. GRAND STRATEGY Do I really want to put my civilization at risk by going to war with the Greeks? I’ll quicksave, just in case.…

Avowed has been at the top of my own, personal most wanted list since that first pre-rendered trailer back in 2020. A first-person, more immersive take on the world of Eora I’ve loved so much since first playing Pillars of Eternity always sounded like just the thing for me. While we still have plenty of gaps in our knowledge of this RPG, even as its planned release this fall draws near, a recent developer showcase and conversation with Avowed director Carrie Patel and gameplay director Gabe Paramo have given us a clearer picture than ever before of this RPG. Avowed takes place in Eora’s Living Lands, a northern frontier previously only represented by lore tidbits and potential character backgrounds in the Pillars of Eternity games. You’re cast as an emissary…

Was it a dream? No, it was Parcel Corps!” These were the words uttered by Billy Goat Entertainment studio director Will Barr upon showing me the launch trailer for the indie developer’s new bicycle adventure game. It was here that I had the pleasure of meeting the team and going hands-on with world-exclusive gameplay for its upcoming release. It’s a mild, gray February morning in Belfast, Northern Ireland. The streets are relatively quiet. Appropriately, a transport strike had been in full effect the previous day meaning no buses or trains were operating. As a result, an influx of cyclists are now on the road. About ten minutes from the city center, nestled between a realtor and a deli, Billy Goat Entertainment’s headquarters can be found. If you didn’t know it…

Shoot = 1. Wait = 0. Hit = 1. Miss = 0. The language of videogame technology lends itself to conflict. It’s been part of its DNA since Spacewar! took MIT by storm in 1962, and we’ve been playing war on the tabletop, from Chess to Risk, for thousands of years. But… War is a preoccupation of mine. As a writer of historical fiction, I’m immersed in battle. It’s a dark fascination, especially for a pacifist of sorts, but wars show humanity at its very best and its very, very worst. They are the turning points of history itself. We are defined by them. I’m also a gamer, and love sneaking and sniping, dropping bombs and torpedoing ships. However, that can often provoke moral questions that I struggle to answer.…

Treading some of the same ground, this game concentrates on the triage aspect of your alt-history WWII field hospital, while investigating… something. It’s not immediately clear why you’re looking back at Dr Taylor’s past from the present day, but you flash back to his wartime exploits and you’ve a job to do. The severity of your patients’ injuries isn’t the clearest, and I think you’re supposed to be making judgments based on their bio. As a fictional war, your decisions lack punch, and it suffers from tonal issues.…

Narrative RPGs heavy in dialog choices can live or die by the authenticity and significance of the resulting consequences, but here the most routine decision will come back to bite you. You play as Gerda, a German-Danish nurse in a small, German-occupied Danish town in the dying days of the war. You’ve a Nazi father and a husband neck-deep in the resistance and you’re about to have quite the week. You’re no warrior. Like much of the population, you’ve just kept your head down, but as the war comes to an end, that isn’t an option any more. Every decision you make, from the mundane to the pivotal, affects how others see you, and that can be a dangerous thing, surrounded by those either complicit in the occupation or emboldened…

Fanise then founded DigixArt and, in a collaboration with Aardman Animations, released 11-11 Memories Retold in 2018. A game with a dual narrative, it tells the stories of a Canadian war photographer and a grieving German father whose search for his son turns into a quest for revenge. It’s altogether less effective than Valiant Hearts, managing to feel worthy to the detriment of the narrative. Furthermore, for all the wonders that Aardman Animations has managed in the past, the art style here is a serious distraction. It’s supposed to ape the impressionists but it detracts from both the story and the sense of wonder and dismay that we’re supposed to be feeling. Meanwhile, there’s a lot of awkward walking about, basic puzzling and collecting that doesn’t need to be there.…

Combat medics were often conscientious objectors who went into battle unarmed and in the most perilous circumstances, wherever the fighting was fiercest. Supposedly protected by the Geneva convention, they were frequently fired upon and always at risk. Save One More seeks to replicate this with a twitchy and highly stylized arcade game, where you join your squad through battle, zapping them back to life when they’re hurt. You’re invariably forced to lead the men, which defeats the point a little, and then within two minutes, you see a surrendering enemy shot by a firing squad, who call him a coward.…

1 NEW YORK UNIVERSITY (#1 NORTHEAST) 2023 Grads Hired: 20 2023 Grads Mean Salary: $76,400 Faculty: Eric Zimmerman (founder, GameLab), Dr. Clara Fernandez-Vara (Fiction Control, author of Game Analysis) Graduates: Carol Mertz (PixelPop Festival, Insatiable Cycle), Robert Meyer (God of War: Ragnarok) https://gamecenter.nyu.edu/ 2 UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA (#1WEST) 2023 Grads Hired: 85 2023 Grads Mean Salary: $75,000 Faculty: TreaAndrea Russworm (Author of Gaming Representation: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Video Games), Marianne Krawcyzk (Writer, God of War I, II & III) Graduates: Laird Malamed (COO of Oculus VR), Jenova Chen (Creator of Journey) https://games.usc.edu/facilities 3 CLARK UNIVERSITY (#2 NORTHEAST) 2023 Grads Hired: 65 2023 Grads Mean Salary: $65,600 Faculty: Ezra Cove (3D art for Lord of the Rings Online), Terrasa Ulm (VR/AR/XR, interactive fine art, virtual avatars, interactive theater)…

With more and more games adopting the risky but potentially lucrative live service model, modern titles require an almost endless flow of content – new opponents, new zones to explore and new powers to acquire. This can be challenging from both a systems and storytelling perspective, as designers need to deliver new ways to play, as well as increasingly powerful antagonists for the players to confront. Let’s examine how some of the industry’s longest-running franchises deal with this issue. The Total War franchise, with its unique mix of turn-based campaign play and RTS battlefield simulations, dates back to the year 2000, with several successful historical titles. In 2016, Creative Assembly acquired the rights to Games Workshop’s Warhammer brand. A superb example of the use of existing IP, the massive success…

Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth feels indulgent in a way few games get to be. Enough drama to fill two normal Yakuza games, a Hawaiian city sparkling in the sun and an absurd lineup of minigames including resort management and creature taming. It’s impossible to go five minutes without it excitedly thrusting another glossy distraction in your face, even as stakes escalate. Honestly, it’s better than most vacations I’ve been on. Most of Infinite Wealth’s issues come and go in the first 15 hours of its sprawling narrative as it tries to introduce a cast of dozens, the city of Yokohama, and give a crash course on current protagonist Ichiban Kasuga, former Yakuza grunt turned 40-something hero with a heart of gold. As a longtime Yakuza player I felt more…

The Firaxis formula has been copied but never bettered. It’s the little things, like the way the camera swoops in when you’re aiming or the last trooper hustles into cover at the end of a turn. I feel more connected to my guys if the sensation of being an invisible giant playing soldiers gets broken every now and then. Instead of replaying XCOM 2 for the Nth time, maybe with a mod that makes everyone look like Sisters of Battle, I decided to go back to the previous XCOM. I wanted to remind myself what had changed. XCOM 2 can be overwhelming, it’s a flood of mission types and mechanics, so I thought hopping back a few years would be a return to some kind of purity—just me and my…

This game drives me to drink. It’s a basic Pavlovian response. I started playing FIFA 20 in the darkest days of lockdown, when there was no football, while waiting for my five-year-old to finally fall asleep, knowing that I’d have to try to home-school him in the morning and that tomorrow would be the same as today, and every day for the foreseeable future. I would eventually get to stop and, like most people back then, have a beer. The two became linked. This respondent conditioning is one reason I resisted installing the latest iteration on launch day, as is my wont. Playing gets me all riled up, and then I want alcohol, an urge I find uncomfortable. I play games to relax, after all. Another reason was that I’d…

Picking a processor is a tough decision, but for all the right reasons. It’s a mega-competitive market out there with Intel and AMD delivering new, innovative and affordable processors. Intel’s 14th-gen Core chips have been less innovative and more iterative, but it’s still managing to hold up to AMD’s 3D V-Cache in gaming performance, and that’s keeping both companies a little more honest. The most exciting development in CPUs lately has been on AMD’s side, where you have the breakthrough 3D V-Cache technology. This allows AMD to stick heaps more cache onto its processors, and you know what sort of application adores cache? Games. Ryzen 7 7800X3D AMD $450 Cache, cache baby 1 This is the best gaming processor AMD has ever produced. We don’t say that lightly, as lately…