Graham Smith

Graham Smith

Graham is a former editorial director of Rock Paper Shotgun and editor-in-chief of PC Gamer. He has now been a games journalist for over twenty years, and retains a bottomless appetite for playing new games and tinkering with old ones.
Brighton, UK

The Lie-In

Our weekly roundup of links worth reading

Good morning, videogames. I'm a few hours late posting this today because, frankly, I was too tired last night to face putting it together. I am doing it now, on Sunday, squeezed between familial appointments. You may be doing similarly as you read this, a collection of fine writing about videogames from across the past week.

Over at Ars Technica, Kyle Orland spoke to some of the players who bought into and lost money on Legacy, Molyneux and 22cans' short-lived web3 game.

In addition to Molyneux’s usual game design bluster, though, was a newfound enthusiasm for the idea of making money from simply playing a game. “And because it’s a blockchain game, you earn,” Molyneux said at Galaverse, leaning on the last word for emphasis. “For a game designer, imagine how exciting it is to know that a game design that you’ve been working on, people will be earning money with it!”

MindsEye developers Build A Rocket Boy said that the game's DLC would contain real "evidence" of sabotage committed against them and their game. For Polygon, Giovanni Colantonio went looking.

Like MindsEye itself, all of this is painfully stupid. Blacklisted is a petty

What you should play this weekend

Tell us what you are playing in the comments

It's another long weekend here in the UK, which means more time than ever for either playing videogames or thinking about how you could have been playing videogames if only you'd made significantly different life choices.

In either case, there remains time for talking about what you're playing this weekend with your fellow commenters, on Jank, the only website that permits such things.

Bus Bound

I have a real soft spot for driving simulators - as distinct from racing sims - that let you pootle around a city while obeying traffic laws and exploring side streets. Bus Bound offers that alongside another weakness of mine: a management layer in which you're setting down the bus routes yourself to efficiently meet the needs of the population. It doesn't look to have the atmosphere of OMSI's 1980s East Berlin (what does), but I'm tempted to board.

Forbidden Solitaire

A "card-slashing horror game about unearthing the contents of a cryptic 1995 CD-ROM that should have never existed." I have no particular nostalgia for '90s CD-based horror games, but I did play a lot of Windows 95 Solitaire, and this is from Grey Alien Games, the

On a long enough timeline, every game is a PC game

If an old game is forgotten, abandoned, unplayable, then it's ours

A few weeks ago, I saw someone, somewhere, mention Scud Race, a Sega racing game I had never played. I hadn't played it because it was one of Sega's Model 3 racers and, unlike Daytona 2 or Sega Rally 2, it was never ported from its origins in an arcade machine to a home console. If I wanted to play it today, I'd have to pay £1600 for a second-hand machine, hire a crane to hoist it into my second floor apartment, and make my child give way by moving his bed into the refuse room downstairs.

Except, not really, obviously, because I could always just emulate it.

Ninety minutes later:

Emulation is a delicate subject, or at least it ought to be. I want developers to be fairly compensated for their work, and that means I want people to support game development by paying for games. I also love games consoles and want manufacturers to be able to produce and experiment with hardware at scale. Yet I also believe that games ought to be played, and this is the only practical way to play Scud Race in 2026.

Supermodel is a long in-development open

Peter Molyneux is a pop star

The developer has constructed a mythic persona, but Masters Of Albion sees him still waiting to embrace it

Back in 2023, Peter Molyneux began talking to press for the first time about his new game, Masters Of Albion, which released into Early Access last week. "The only thing I can say", he told GameReactor, "is that, firstly, this game is the first game really that I've coded, been a coder on since since Black & White." In 2017, Molyneux was talking to press about his previous game, Legacy. "I was in the hotel this morning, I was having breakfast, I was coding Legacy, and I had an idea. Within an hour, I was actually playing with the thing," he told Glixel. The year before, Molyneux was discussing the newly released Godus Wars with Eurogamer, and the fallout of an infamous interview he had done with Rock Paper Shotgun. "After a couple of days I came up with this simple strategy: I would just be a coder and a designer." He lists a few of the things in Godus Wars he personally coded. "I did some coding on The Trail as well," he says at the end of the interview.

So Masters Of Albion is the first game that Molyneux has coded, or been a coder on, since

The Lie-In

Our weekly roundup of links worth reading

Good morning, videogames. Sometimes, especially in the quiet weeks, I'll include articles in The Lie-In that aren't exemplary works of prose, but which I still hope have some broader worthwhile point or which might generate an interesting discussion. All the same, let's see if I can manage to avoid accidentally linking to something AI-generated this week, eh?

Abram Buehner laments people playing Tomodachi Life for the benefit of the algorithm rather than for their friends. I'm not sure I believe there's any wrong way to play Nintendo's madlibs 'em up, but this is about a subculture that otherwise hasn't come across my social media feed.

That didn’t go over well. The breathless replies argued that to put your real friends into the game was to cross a social boundary, to subject them to the vulgar, wild sandbox of Living the Dream. Of course, I’m paraphrasing, since the actual replies were more along the lines of “I’m not putting my IRL friends into the yaoi simulator lmao.” To believe this is to assume Tomodachi Life must be a site of depravity, and that your loved ones are undoubtedly sucked

What you should play this weekend

Tell us what you are playing in the comments

What a pushy, presumptive title this post has. Who are we to tell you what you should play? We are but mere servants, providing a bucket for you to fill with your own independent selections.

Shovel the chum, friends. Fill our bucket for it is empty without you.

"So yeah. As part of my deal, I won't actually be appearing in this game," says a character on the phone. I do not know what else is going on here.
I have no idea what's going on in this screenshot. Art.

Titanium Court

"A surreal strategy game for clowns and criminals." The IGF Grand Prize winner, 2026. This year's Blue Prince or Animal Well. The game your smartest and smuggest game-playing friend will be raving about all year. A game that's brave enough to make jokes out of its Steam screenshots. Doomed to be critically beloved and commercially underperforming. Art.

A pot with green arms and legs emotes on a glowing platform.
Look at that little guy! Simple and coherent and expressive.

Kiln

Double Fine in their silly, frivolous mode, producing a team-based multiplayer brawler in which you sculpt pottery and then, optionally, steer those pots into battle against others. The abilities of your character are determined by how you've crafted your beautiful porcelain bodies - and in the game. I love the art style that fits the pottery with doodled appendages and expressive faces.

A gun is fired at an enemy in a dungeon crawler that looks like a library and has cards at the bottom of the screen.
This game is going

Defence of the clones

From GridWars to Clone Hero, copying software isn't always evil - and can be worth celebrating

I browse the Nintendo eshop from time to time, checking on new releases. The games on there that make me feel the grubbiest aren't the hentai jigsaws; those, at least, are honest. It's the clones. "Peak: The Adventure Begins", for example, seems designed specifically to be mistaken for Peak, the co-op climbing game currently unavailable on the Switch. It feels like a trick, and from the screenshots it looks like a poor imitation.

I don't always feel that way about clones, however. In 2005, the Xbox 360 was released, and with it Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved. It was an unlikely killer app. Originally a minigame playable during loading screens in Bizarre Creations' Project Gotham Racing 2, Retro Evolved turned the twin-stick shooter into a standalone game available via the brand new Xbox Live Arcade, and its rippling neon and frenetic combat sold the promise of HD gaming a lot better than Kameo: Elements Of Power.

At the time, everyone around me was score-chasing in Retro Evolved. I worked on a PC games magazine and we coveted the game.

Enter Canadian developer Marco Incitti, who used game making software Blitz Basic to create GridWars, a

The Lie-In

Our weekly roundup of links worth reading

Good morning, videogames. I read less than normal this past week, which I will pin on my being busy, but I still have several worthy articles for you. And then I reached deep into the recesses of my memory to hoist out something old and forgotten, alongside a little sermon. Read on.

I wrote something recently - here, I guess? - about loving Gamespy's pre-release developer diaries for the original Black & White, which were written by the team themselves. For Eurogamer, Lewis Gordon interviewed some of those original developers about the creation of the game's creature AI. I would not trust Molyneux's self-mythology, and yet I delight in reading anything about this particular game. A conundrum.

The creature, which set Evans on a trajectory from the Lionhead office in Guildford to the rarefied corridors of Google DeepMind in London, began as just a few simple scribblings by Molyneux on a piece of A4 paper. "I thought, let's do a game with an AI agent in it," says Molyneux, toking intermittently on a vape from the office of his current studio, 22Cans. "We wanted to explore the idea of morality, and focus that morality through this