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Featured Articles

Explore a featured selection of my writing work below.
PCGamesN •

The Great War Western Front is a grim mix of RTS and classic wargames

Perhaps the most shocking thing about The Great War Western Front, Petroglyph’s upcoming historical RTS game, is how fast a platoon of men can simply vanish. Dozens of soldiers can be charging across a French battlefield one moment, and in the seconds it takes for a burst of machine gun fire to ring out or an artillery barrage to land, they’re gone.

In a Great War Western Front hands-on preview I joined recently, I had the chance to try out the upcoming PC game‘s tutorial, experiment a little w
PCGamesN •

Wolfenstein 3D runs on a 1979 processor now – yes, seriously

There’s now a version of the groundbreaking FPS game Wolfenstein 3D that runs on a computer processor first produced in 1979. A game developer has created a version of Wolfenstein 3D that works with IBM’s first colour graphics card, and all the processing power it needs is an Intel 8088 chip.

Game developer James Howard, co-founder of Little Cities studio Purple Yonder, has adapted Wolfenstein 3D for CGA-era graphics cards. ‘Wolfenstein 3D CGA’ renders the landmark shooter in video modes availa
PCGamesN •

Why Colossal Cave matters and why Ken and Roberta Williams remade it

Colossal Cave is an adventure game that predates its own genre and arguably everything we know as ‘the rules’ of modern game design. It began life as 700 lines of code on a PDP-10 mainframe computer in the 1970s, eventually making its way to IBM and Apple home computers by the early ’80s as a ‘launch title’ for IBM’s initial line of PCs. Now it’s getting a second life as a fully realised 3D experience thanks to Ken and Roberta Williams, who credit Colossal Cave with inspiring the launch of their
PCGamesN •

What games will we play when we’re old?

I can dimly remember a time before videogames were household fixtures, but only just. I was born in 1980, and the Nintendo Entertainment System showed up in the US about six years later – which is right around the time my dad brought home my family’s first personal computer. So while I recall a time before games were commonplace, I’ll be one of the last people around who does – games have been fixtures in all our lives since then, and it stands to reason that they’ll figure into our lives when w
PCGamesN •

Warhammer 40k Darktide review – Chaos incarnate

The time I’ve put in for our Warhammer 40k Darktide review has been split, roughly evenly, between gleefully scything my way through hordes of shambling Chaos monstrosities shoulder to shoulder with my ragamuffin comrades, and poring over graphics options menus and forum posts, trying to get the co-op game to run. When Darktide is working, it’s brilliant: its action unfolds in the most vivid depiction of the 41st millennium ever seen in a game, and it’s told from a fresh outsider’s perspective.
Three Moves Ahead •

Three Moves Ahead: Victoria 3

November 1, 2022 The long-awaited steel and steam macroeconomics simulator from Paradox has finally graced us with its presence, and we've assembled a League of Extraordinary Lady and Gentlemen to discuss it. Len and Jon are joined by Kotaku's Luke Plunkett, PCGamesN's Ian Boudreau, and our good friend from UNC Chapel Hill, Dr. Bret Devereaux to analyze this absolute behemoth of a game from every angle. Hold on tight and keep your arms and legs completely inside the podcast.
PCGamesN •

Victoria 3 review – A golden tomorrow

When the ‘Game Over’ screen arrived after my century in charge of the United States for our Victoria 3 review, I looked back over a very different hundred years from those familiar to me from history books. There had never been a Civil War – in the version of the story that unfolded in Paradox’s latest grand strategy game, slavery was abolished more or less without incident in the1840s, but we’d come close to a revolution over the abolition of child labour thirty years later. By 1936, we were no
PCGamesN •

No Man’s Sky 4.0 update: why Sean Murray feels your passion

In the six years since No Man’s Sky first launched, the ambitious space game‘s name has morphed from a synonym for hubris to the go-to example of redemption through hard work and dedication. In 2022, ‘pulling a No Man’s Sky’ means saving a troubled game after a botched launch. No Man’s Sky update 4.0 rolls out on October 7, and creator Sean Murray tells us that while there’s not much in the way of spectacle in this patch, it’s full of quality-of-life improvements that continue to make the spacef
PCGamesN •

Rise of the Triad returns, thanks to a boomer shooter super group

A remaster of the cult classic FPS game Rise of the Triad is in the works, slated for release in early 2023, and in one sense, it’s a reunion. The developers working on Rise of the Triad: Ludicrous Edition include some of the leading lights of the recent ‘boomer shooter renaissance’ who first worked together on the 2013 Unreal Engine remake of Rise of the Triad.

The developers creating the Rise of the Triad remaster are a classic FPS supergroup: there’s Apogee Entertainment, which created and p
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