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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
PCGamesN •

Victoria 3 impressions: Building the future

Thinking back on the time I spent forming my Victoria 3 impressions with a preview build of Paradox’s forthcoming grand strategy game about the 19th century, there are some definite highlights: enacting some early voting rights legislation in Sweden, reforming the Brazilian tax code, and abolishing slavery in the United States without triggering a bloody civil war. You set out in Victoria 3 with grand ambitions, but what I found was that in the moment-to-moment play, what I spent most of my time
PCGamesN •

Ex Elder Scrolls, Fallout dev announces new historical RPG Wyrdsong

Former Fallout 76 project lead Jeff Gardiner, who left Bethesda a year ago telling fans to “stay tuned” for what’s next, has now revealed that he’s founded a new games studio and that it’s working on a historical-fantasy RPG game called Wyrdsong. The teaser trailer debuted at Opening Night Live at Gamescom.

Gardiner’s new studio is called Something Wicked, and he’s brought together talent from Bethesda, BioWare, and Obsidian to shape its first game, Wyrdsong.
PCGamesN •

Total War Warhammer 3 Immortal Empires crowns a decade of development

When the Total War: Warhammer 3 Immortal Empires combined campaign is finally introduced to the series of fantasy strategy games, it’s not simply going to double the size of the Mortal Empires sandbox map. Instead, it’s combining everything that Creative Assembly has ever made for the three Warhammer games, a series that began a decade ago when the studio announced its long-term partnership with Warhammer publisher Games Workshop. For the developers who have been with the studio since that day,
PCGamesN •

Why Blade Runner: Enhanced Edition was a mess when it launched

June of this year saw the fortieth anniversary of Blade Runner, Ridley Scott’s genre-defining cyberpunk film. Nightdive Studios had targeted the anniversary for the launch of its remake of the Blade Runner adventure game, a beloved classic developed by Westwood Studios and originally released in 1997. Launch day arrived on June 23, Blade Runner: Enhanced Edition went up for sale, and the reviews began trickling in. They were not good.

“I’ve only played for 15 minutes and immediate impressions a
PCGamesN •

No, Stray is not too short

Cyberpunk cat game Stray is out, and it’s delightful. As Nat Smith writes in our Stray review, it’s “a highly polished narrative-driven experience, with an emotional and thought-provoking core” whose “choice of protagonist feels earnest rather than gimmicky”. Like other titles published by Annapurna Interactive, Stray doesn’t stick around for long – it’s a game you can finish in around five hours, if you don’t spend a lot of time scratching up the carpets.

That relatively brief playtime has mad
PCGamesN •

Warhammer 40K: Darktide adds to Vermintide’s meaty combat formula

One of the first things to learn about living in Warhammer 40k: Darktide’s dangerous hive undercity is that a chainsword works whether or not it’s switched on. Without powering it on, you can use it as a perfectly good cudgel that can also help with pushing back hordes of the Chaos-touched. At the press of a button, however, it’ll chew through armour and bone with an upsettingly satisfying ease. That’s the mode you’ll want for one-on-one encounters with Hive Tertium’s more dangerous elites.

Dev
Wargamer •

Arma Reforger – The rest is yet to come

It’s the middle of the night, and my squad is gathered at the end of a small airfield on the northern tip of Everon. There’s a nervous energy in the air as the distinctive army-issue right-angle flashlights flit back and forth in the darkness. None of us are sure what we have to do or where exactly we’re going, but we know it’s going to be exciting. Someone drives by in a jeep, ploughing through the barbed-wire fence and rolling it into a ditch. It’s just like the real army.

This is Arma Reforg
PCGamesN •

Eve Online’s Excel partnership began in a CCP women’s group

‘Spreadsheets in space’ has been the running gag about Eve Online almost as long as the notoriously information-dense MMORPG has been around, which at this point is going on 20 years. But it was only recently that developer CCP Games and Microsoft made it official, announcing the forthcoming Eve Online-Microsoft Excel integration at this year’s Eve Fanfest in Reykjavik. And like so many lasting friendships, this one began at the pub.

“A few of the CCP women went out for drinks, and one was our
PCGamesN •

Stellaris’ Overlord DLC lets you rule the galactic empire

The next expansion for Stellaris, Overlord, is going to give players the chance to outdo Emperor Palpatine and assume total control of the galaxy. Developer Paradox Interactive has announced that the release date for Overlord has been set for May 12, and we had a chance to talk with Stellaris’ new game director about what the expansion is adding to the 4X game’s impressive suite of interstellar empire management tools.

“With Overlord, we started it with wanting to revamp subject-overlord intera
PCGamesN •

Ultima’s creator is making a new MMO, and it’s built on NFTs

The Ultima series of role-playing games has been foundational for videogames not once, but at least twice. The original series pioneered a path that western RPGs would follow for decades, and Ultima Online was the proving grounds for many of the best ideas and solutions in MMORPGs today. Now the series’ creator is going for the hat trick: Richard Garriott, known to Ultima fans as ‘Lord British,’ is making another MMO – but this time, it’s going to be built using blockchain technology.

Garriott
PCGamesN •

MythForce blends Vermintide with ’80s action cartoons

MythForce makes its intentions clear right from the moment it’s launched: a shining owl sigil gleams as the opening of an upbeat, synth-driven pop theme song kicks in, and you’re transported to the intro sequence of an ’80s action cartoon you’ve never seen before. It’s a co-op game in the vein of Vermintide, but done in a family-friendly style that harkens back to the original runs of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe and She-Ra: Princess of Power.

It’s in the works from Beamdog, a studio
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