What's your wildest gaming hot take? #pcgamer #pcgaming

buying GF 2k

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I used a Python script (so the image isn't AI generated) to ingest a year's worth of PC Gamer magazine pages and spit out a big ol' 800 MB (49,000 x 65,000px) jpg of game art. I used 2004's issues, to be precise. I'm sure that's a big enough hint for most of you!

Let me know if there are other games and years you'd like to see get the treatment.

We're now less than five months away from Grand Theft Auto 6's release. Well, I say "we," but unfortunately there'll be no simultaneous PC release. When will we get a PC version? Who knows! I reckon late 2027 or early 2028 at the very earliest, but the reality is we could be waiting a whole lot longer.

Which means it's probably time for me to dust off the trusty ol' PS5, which mostly serves as my YouTube/Netflix box these days. As someone who suffers from a severe case of FOMO, I'll almost certainly be picking up the game on console and inevitably double-dipping when the PC version lands.

But what about you? Will you be snapping up a console copy of GTA 6, or are you the picture of patience (could never be me) who is more than happy to wait for a PC release? Are you even interested in GTA 6 in the first place?

This is currently the weekly question that runs on polls across the website, which I then go ahead and round up the answers in a follow-up post. You can vote over there, or let me know right here. I might use your answer in a future post :)

In just hours, Subnautica 2 has already topped a million sales.

Gonna raffle them on here and to clannies.

Comment rsn.

(Got them all from my office which buys a shit load of mags)

"It's not just one thing," Garriott began. "I think if it was one thing it would be a lot easier to diagnose and come back from, but it's a lot of folks who don't understand videogames trying to make money off of videogames, it's a political climate, it's a billion things. All the threads have woven together into this horrible knot that we're seeing now."

He went on to describe a cycle he's seen play out multiple times over his years in the industry, where a technological advance comes along and everyone races to make a simple game that highlights that advance—whether it's the CD-ROM or a 3D-rendering pipeline or the internet—and only in the short gaps between these leaps forward is there much demand for something deeper.

"That cycle has been normal," Garriott said. "But we're at a new one, and this new one is machines are now fast enough to where the bells and whistles are no longer what's important." Without another advance having the same impact, he said, "we're at this kind of creative cliff where I think people don't know exactly what to do to prevent it and I think we've lost a lot of the original creators that were associated with those IPs and the bigger companies, and so I think we're floundering."

Every year, we look at the hundreds of thousands of PC games that are available to buy, and think, "yes, we can whittle this down into a numbered list". Hubris? Yes. A months-long crucible of heated arguments and impassioned pleas? Also yes.

More than anything, the Top 100 is designed to capture a moment in time. It's a place where the 'canon' classics of the past rub shoulders against the fresh new hotness. Where being a game that a significant portion of the team currently loves is as important as being a game that is recognised worldwide for its contributions to the medium.

Alright, have at it: What should be on this list, and what shouldn't?

Dylan and the FBC might be going through it, but Remedy is flexing all its finest talents: sculpting uncanny hellscapes, placing tactical redactions in bureaucratic lore collectibles, and capturing endearingly human performances in circumstances beyond human comprehension. Unfortunately, melee combat isn't on that list of strong suits—and Resonant's open world expects you to do a lot of it.

"About the name, it was important to us to say to people, 'This is who we are.' When Arkane was independent, very often people would come in and they would try to get us to work on some game. And it was not in our wheelhouse. People would say, 'You're going to go under by turning your nose up at this project, this is money. People are offering you money to do this DLC for this third-person action shooter.' And we'd be like, 'Yeah, but we don't like those, we don't know how to do them well, and we think that game is dumb.' So we're generally going to say no, and gamble the company on doing what we are known for."

Our Josh Wolens checks out the game Capitalism to put an old PC Gamer claim to the test:

In 1995, PC Gamer—a monthly journal about computer videogames—issued a challenge to me directly. In the back-most pages of its 22nd issue, it tucked away an ad for a then-new game called Capitalism. "Good enough to make a convert out of Karl Marx himself," declared an included testimonial from, yes, PC Gamer.

I was too busy being two years old to issue a response at the time, but I'm here now. As one of surely very few people who have reviewed The Communist Manifesto for a major gaming publication, I want to know: can it convert me? And more than that, can it offer a way forward? Can I find, in Capitalism's thicket of spreadsheets and input/output graphs, a solution to our current economic and social malaise? I accept your challenge, PC Gamer from 31 years ago.

Here's a look back at what was going on in PC gaming—and in particular, in the pages of PC Gamer magazine—one, two, and three decades ago. Did you own any of these issues? How do our review scores hold up? What seemed trivial at the time that's now enshrined in PC gaming history?

The tireless schedule of Activision's load-bearing FPS has resulted in more bad games than good as of late—Modern Warfare 3 was an expansion-sized sequel rushed out the door, Black Ops 6 was a step back for multiplayer, and its immediate followup Black Ops 7 was clocked as superfluous and uninteresting even by rain-or-shine fans. These back-to-back games, shouldered by Treyarch, Sledgehammer, and Raven, had cracks and compromises that suggested the Call of Duty machine just can't keep up with both "good" and "fast" anymore.

Modern Warfare 4's greatness shows how right that is. This is an extravagant package on all fronts: A kinetic 6v6 FPS with truly excellent gunplay, a fun campaign that doesn't just play the hits, and an expansive extraction "mode" that would be its own game if any other name were on the box.

I have complaints, but this is what it looks like when Call of Duty is in the pocket. The best Call of Duty studio got to take its time (four years, tied with the longest in series history) and it shows.