Jon Hicks

Another week has passed. What did we learn? Graham learned that Screamer is not good good but it's interesting and should be encouraged. He and I learned that Brendy should not play extraction shooters or anything involving monetary games of chance via our all-text Let’s Play of Marathon, part of Jank’s innovative media strategy of pivoting from video (although there are some animated GIFs, which are permitted). Bendy debuted his new Living in Sim column, and cherished how the dreamlike weirdness of Lucid Blocks is like Minecraft with the mystery restored. And on Total Playtime, I forgot my microphone which meant the others were left unsupervised and invoked the dread name of MrBeast. 

Out in the PC gaming world at large, it was April Fools Day which of course meant Corporate Fun. IGN has a list of the ”best videogame jokes” which I cannot help but put into quotation marks, although even my black and joyless heart was lifted by the prospect of putting hats on the beetles in Hunt: Showdown, which is currently in the live game and will hopefully endure. 

In more good-ish news Shinji Mikami’s new studio got bought by the Stellar

It's Saturday, and you know what that means: time to look back at what happened in PC gaming this week.

Round these parts the big news was that Brendy doesn’t like Marathon very much, which might not sound like a particularly hot take but sure did attract some Discourse. He also found a job sim about router configuration and your reaction to that description will tell you exactly whether you want to play it or not. Sin Vega modelled a good use of AI, for a specific definition of “good”, and Total Playtime programmed some superior gaming conferences. Here is what you should be playing right now. 

Beyond our hallowed walls, the magic 8-ball of games news remains stuck firmly on LAYOFFS as Epic canned 1,000 staff. The layoff announcements have become so regular and the numbers so huge that it can be challenging to visualise them, but looking at an incomplete list of the freshly-unemployed (which contains less than half of those affected) helps to bring it home: one of those documents so long it’s a physical chore to scroll through, listing lives across the world suddenly cast into a historically terrible job market. 

This weeks’ newsletter arrives late, with apologies: I thought I would be able to write it during my journey back from America, but overestimated the efficacy of in-flight WiFi and my own energy levels after slogging through two airports, three rail lines and a last-mile cab ride. You get the benefit of something written in the fuzzy-head/itchy eyeballs state of jetlag, rather than the exhausted-to-the-point-of-incomprehensibility one, and I hope you’ll be able to tell the difference.

Jank has rudely persisted in my absence. Brendy admitted he was wrong about Slay The Spire 2 and celebrated its co-op mode, Graham reviewed the videos he watched while playing Lost and Found and my podcasting partner/nemesis Alice Bell reviewed Esoteric Ebb. She made do without me for this week’s Total Playtime, which addressed the main issues of the week before pivoting to endorse furry art.

Chief among the former was NVIDIA’s debut of DLSS 5. This tricks out existing games to give “photo-realistic” visuals through the magic of aftermarket gen-AI and was loved by Digital Foundry and hated by almost everybody else, including a number of developers whose work was featured in the announcement. NVIDIA’s CEO said

Another week draws to a close, which means another collection of articles appeared on this fine website. Graham expressed the history of PC gaming in two delivery games, told his son The Parable Of Molyneux and stayed up late coding a dark mode for the website. I got a Warhammer expert to retcon kawaii Space Marines into the Warhammer 40k canon, and Brendy listed the best salesman in PC games, motivated by his disdain for Leon Kennedy’s James Bond-ass product placement. On Total Playtime we chatted a bit about the Next Fest demos we'd played, none of which cracked the top ten so our hipster status endures.

Beyond these delicately yellow-tinted walls, there was some good game news: Marathon is doing well, Slay The Spire 2 is doing amazingly, Resident Evil 9 is doing even better and is also a PC game now, because Capcom is increasingly a PC publisher. Chun-Li, welcome to the resistance. In bad game news Highguard threw in the towel and is shutting down, although the remains of the dev team crunched out a final update for the sendoff. When the lights go out it will have lasted 46 days in total, which is 31